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When we teach about a religion in a university, we do not advocate that religion. We simply place it on display as something interesting and important. One premise in teaching about religion is that religion is something that can be studied and analyzed. A second premise is that religion is an important force in the shaping of the social order and in the conduct of world affairs, so that, to understand the world as it is, any educated person will want to make sense of religion in its worldly expression.a
On the other hand, when teachers of religion, through their teaching, advocate the truths of a specific religion, they are engaged in a very different, though equally important task. But it is not one that the academic curriculum can accommodate in tax-supported higher education, and it is one that those of us who are in the academic study of religion, with all due respect, do not do.
In my university course in Judaism, gentiles and Jews examine Judaism because they want to know what it is about religion that is to be learned from the case of Judaism. Judaism or any other religion, when studied under the auspices of the faithful, will of course be treated in a very different way, and that is right and proper. We in the academy have a particular task to accomplish, one that we believe provides knowledge and insight to everyone, rather than a reason for faith and life to those who believe.
What, in particular, do I claim that we can learn about religion in this world when we study about Judaism?
Practiced through most of recorded history, Judaism has not only exercised a powerful influence on the two most important religions of humanity past or present, Christianity and Islam, but it also shows us how people have worked together, through religion, to meet crises and answer urgent questions. So one reason to study about Judaism is that it stands behind the. principal religious heritage of humanity today. A second reason is that in Judaism we see how religion shapes the life of a single social group, the Jews.
But there is a third reason. Most Americans are Christian, so when they study about Christianity or Western civilization (which is Christian), they study what they regard as their own religion and heritage. When they want to study a religion other than the one in which they grew up and which they know best, however, Judaism is a fine candidate.
Judaism for most Americans is both familiar and somewhat exotic. It is familiar because there are six million Jews in North America, including more than five million in the United States. So a great many people in this country know Jews, and nearly everybody knows about them.
But Judaism is exotic because it is not Christianity. It is both familiar and unfamiliar. It is familiar and, therefore, accessible. Were it as strange to Americans as Buddhism or Islam—of which, until very recently, few of us had any direct knowledge at all—the study of Judaism would present an obstacle course of writings we can scarcely understand and a history involving holy men with unintelligible names, men who fought over religious questions that mean nothing at all to us. But Judaism is based on some of the same writings as Christianity—the Old Testament of Christianity is the written Torah of Judaism.
So if Christian Americans want to study a religion other than their own, the religion that is nearest at hand is Judaism. And if they want to study a religion other than their own that can be readily observed and understood here at home, then the religion that best serves that goal is Judaism. It is like but not like, near at hand but somewhat off-center, an ideal example of a religion for academic study.
How do Jews practice this religion? The answer to that question cannot be a stale catalogue of what the books say: Jews believe this or do that. In fact, much that the books say Jews believe is either irrelevant to the living faith (though authoritative) or implausible or unimportant to those who live by the faith. And many things that books say Jews do, the vast majority 042of American Jews do not do. Therefore in my course on introductory Judaism, instead of turning to descriptions of what Judaism teaches and requires, we first consider what Jewish Americans actually do because they are Jews.
We answer that question in terms of how we define the way in which a religion lives. Religion changes people through its rites, which have the power to transform either a person or a circumstance. Religion tells us that we are something else, something more, than we thought we were. When Jewish Americans engage in a rite of Judaism, it changes and enchants them. So in my course on Judaism we survey some of the more important occasions of transcendence that affect Jewish Americans—at home; in the family, in the synagogue and in the Jewish community.
But knowing how a religion lives tells us only half the story of what that religion is. The other half of the story, in the case of Judaism, is told to us in the holy books that Judaism reveres and calls “the Torah,” meaning the teaching of God’s will for the world. What we learn when we move from the here and now to the holy books is how Judaism took shape as people responded to extraordinary crises in their everyday life—political and religious. We see that these crises presented questions that had to be answered, questions that people answered through responses deemed self-evidently true and immediately relevant. These questions and answers are set forth in holy books—from the Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) to the books of the Prophets, to the Writings, to the Mishnah, the Midrash and the two Talmuds (the Babylonian Talmud and the Talmud of the Land of Israel).
And yet, even when we understand how a religion takes shape, we still do not know why it flourished, as it did, or how it met competition within its own chosen community. So not only the beginning of a religion has to be explained, but also its successes, when it succeeded, and its failures, when it failed.
That, in the end, brings us back to the Judaism we know, the one that thrives today, requiring us to define Judaism in light of both its contemporary expression in this country and its long, remarkably cogent history. The challenge of definition is how to hold the whole of Judaism together, and that is where we end in my course in introductory Judaism.
If my course succeeds—so I promise my students—you will not only know a great deal more about Judaism, you also will have a different, and perhaps richer, conception of what a religion is and what it does. For Judaism should serve as an example of religion.
What do I think that we learn about religion in general from Judaism in particular? Let me specify three propositions about religion that Judaism offers:
1. Religion helps a defeated society endure defeat. The Judaism that has predominated for nearly 2,000 years is the one that took shape after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70; all of Judaism’s canonical writings beyond the Hebrew Scriptures took shape from the second century onward. The power of that Judaism—the self-evident truth that believers have imputed to it—derives from its capacity to answer a very particular question: What next? That is not to suggest that religion is the opiate of the masses, as Marx suggested, or with Nietzsche, that some religions (he spoke of Christianity) really are for slaves. To the contrary, it is to suggest that religion explains the human condition better than any other explanation, because the human condition, if groups live long enough, is more often one of defeat and disappointment than of victory and triumph.
2. Religion explains particularly well the progress of humanity through the cycle of life, from birth to death. Contemporary Judaism in this regard contains a very powerful argument in behalf of that proposition. In a context of diverse commitments, in a society in which all of us are many things, Jews choose to be different only on some very distinctive occasions. And this is what defines them. Judaism is perceived in the world at large as not a strong religion, because Jews do not go to synagogue in the massive proportions that Christians go to church. But when we realize that most marriages between Jews occur within a religious rite, that most Jews who reach puberty celebrate a bar or bat mitzvah, that most Jews celebrate those rites of Judaism that involve the home and family (such as Passover), that most Jews are buried in accord with the rites of Judaism, we have to see Judaism in quite a different way. What we observe is a religion that works its power of enchantment within a framework of the life of the home and the family. And what that means is that although Judaism sets forth dietary laws that some Jews reject altogether and that most Jews, of whatever Judaism, ignore most of the time, it also makes demands that most people obey. The reason, maintain, is that Judaism explains particularly well the life of the individual and of the family, and from that fact I generalize that religion works well when it comes to living in the here and now.
3. Religion never begins this morning, and yet it invariably thrives in the contemporary world. That is to say, what religion accomplishes is the transformation of the past into something memorable and the transformation of the present into an occasion for the celebration of the past. Religion speaks of history but is never historical. Most of the “facts of history” that are supposed to dictate the faith of Judaism either never happened, or did not happen in the way Judaism says they did, or, if they did, did not then mean to everybody who knew about them what they self-evidently meant to Judaism. So the “facts of history” turn out to be the constructs out of which the faith is composed. But the composition of the faith forms an acutely contemporary task, for it happens in the intensely present-tense of this morning.
That is what Judaism says, in so many words, when it speaks of how, at Passover, each person should see himself or herself as redeemed, personally, from Egypt, and that can be only in the here and now. The deepest layers of contemporary Judaic consciousness, bearing the memories of murder and transforming them into “Holocaust,” form the foundations of a conception of today’s world-order, a conception that dictates how people relate to their neighbors and what they want of their nations as well. That, in the end, defines Judaism.
This much then is what Judaism teaches us about religion: (1) Religion is for the losers, who, by religion, are turned into, if not winners, then at least survivors—the ones who get to tell the story later on; (2) religion informs the life of home and family, and, whatever its power in the social order and the life of nations, derives its strength from the intimate and fragile bonds of child to parent; (3) religion turns history into the reality of the moment, reshaping a received past into the materials for a usable future.
When we teach about a religion in a university, we do not advocate that religion. We simply place it on display as something interesting and important. One premise in teaching about religion is that religion is something that can be studied and analyzed. A second premise is that religion is an important force in the shaping of the social order and in the conduct of world affairs, so that, to understand the world as it is, any educated person will want to make sense of religion in its worldly expression.a On the other hand, when teachers of religion, through […]
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