cross-posted at
Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad walk into a bar
This is not particularly political, although it got a little bit that way toward the end. This is a musing I have written for one of my law school application essays. Specifically, it's the optional essay I'm writing for Duke Law. I think it has some worthwhile points to be made here about the need to reconcile our liberal impulses to tear down and build anew with our conservative impulses to, well, conserve. They might be a little subtle, but I'd appreciate thoughts on how to make them more obvious.
Tomorrow night, I'll check out this diary (I've got to go to bed - tutoring tomorrow, 8 AM), and I'll ponder your input and repost the new version.
Beginning a new book is always a bit of a challenge for me. Typically, I regret finishing books. I enjoy traveling with the characters and following the story; even in a nonfiction book, I tend to be swept away by the human drama that constitutes my interest in history and politics. When the story ends, I'm somewhat upset, because I've come to identify with the protagonist a little - the mark of enjoying a book, I suppose. I'm forced back to my humdrum everyday life, and the fascinating events I've been watching in my mind are no more. Even nonfiction plays in my head like a movie, leaving me feeling slightly abandoned when it ends.
But I came at my most recent reading with some excitement. Even though I had finished a book just recently, and had enjoyed it a lot, this was one I had been looking forward to for a long time. Jennifer Hecht's Doubt: A History had been on my list of "to buy" books even since I first saw it six months ago. Finally, it was in my hands, and I had an opportunity to read it.
I was, to put it bluntly, blown away. Rather than attempt to make sense of my mishmash of impressions, since the book's a little scattershot, I instead want to talk about a particular chapter - the second one, "Smacking the Temple: Jewish Doubt, 600 BCE-1 CE." As a Jew, I found Hecht's insights to come in a variety of flavors - some being thoughts I'd had and forgotten, some being totally new, and some being a synthesis of my own thoughts with a new viewpoint.
Hecht talks about three major episodes of pre-Roman doubt in Jewish thought - essentially, the Hellenistic period. I suspect I'll only talk about the first, due to space constraints. Hecht discusses the Chanukah story, but she flips it on its head. The heroes of her tale aren't the Maccabees and their pious allies, but the Hellenistic Jews who were willing to move toward the Greek view of religion as something more important as a social vehicle than a personal lifepath. The placement of Greek idols in the Temple, the story of the defiance of Chana's sons, the miracle of the Temple's rededication - running throughout is the seed of Jews who found their faith stifling and sought a new way to define themselves and their relationship with the universe. Without their martyrdom to the need to question, the desire to attack faith's foundations, modern Judaism would be very different - if indeed, it was recognizable as the same faith at all.
The stories we're never told about Chanukah are the interesting ones to me. The Jew who was murdered by Judas Maccabee for bowing to a statue of Zeus, the forcibly circumcised, so reminiscent of the men of Shechem murdered by Levi and Simon in the story of Dinah, remind me that my faith has been as intolerant of the fremder as any other faith - that power in the hands of the pious is dangerous to the irreligious, no matter the language in which the former mouth their prayers. The sadness of this lesson is that Jews have internalized it - but it took fifteen hundred years of persecution, culminating in the single greatest orgy of destruction the world has ever known, for the lesson to sink in.
As a liberal, I cherish multiculturalism. As a Jew, I celebrate the protection of our identity that the Maccabees represent. The two are, in essence, irreconcilable. I find myself wondering whether my cherished intellectual consistency - the belief that everything I believe fits into a grand pattern - is really just a joke. I face the sad possibility that my earnest efforts to be a good Jew and a good liberal cannot both be. I refuse to accept this. I refuse to believe that any G-d worthy of the Name honestly wants society and the world to assume the stasis that fundamentalists of every stripe would impose on it. The G-d I worship wants humanity to improve itself, to move forward, to make of our world a place worth living without His intervention. We are His agents on earth, and we are charged with making of His creation a worthwhile thing.
What does that say about doubters? Do those who ask uncomfortable questions represent a building of G-d's creation or a process of tearing it down? I believe the Maccabees, though they ensured the continued survival of the Jewish people, were working against G-d's will by discouraging the asking of questions. As the Reform siddur says, it is doubt that serves as an acid to eat away falsity. Truth stands up to doubt, leaving lies to crumble into nothingness before the questions of a Socrates or a Gautama. As Jews, we should welcome doubt into our midst. We should stand firm next to those who seek truth, for it is only by truth that we will find justice. "And it is justice, justice that thou shalt pursue," He teaches us.
The problem for the Maccabees and their allies, I think, was not doubt. Doubt had been a tradition of Jewish thought for many years, beginning with Abraham and Sarah's refusal to believe G-d's assurance that they would conceive. The problem they had was denial. Hellenistic Jews, in their minds, violated the most important of the Ten Commandments - to worship only the G-d of the Jews and forsake all others. I have to disagree with that conclusion. I believe that G-d stands with doubters, and upholds their faith in the reason He gave them. I believe martyrs to doubt are all too common in this day and age. I see martyrs to doubt in every public school classroom in the State of Kansas, and in the college campuses that face down David Horowitz and his anti-intellectual claptrap every year. I see the face of G-d in the people who ask why something has to be. I see Bobby Kennedy's vision of the world that never was, and I could wish for just a moment that the one, brief, shining moment had lasted.
But G-d is not present in the absence of thought. The Maccabees made a conscious choice, based on their reason, that the G-d they worshipped did not tolerate assimilation. I can accept that - there are many Jews today who have made the same choice, and I respect their decision not to regard me as a proper Jew. But I believe they have no right to impose the decisions of their reason on me. My choices to live as a Jew are mine, not theirs, and they do not get to argue with me about them. It is my stance that G-d wants us to argue, and they don't want to argue. They want to impose their stance on everyone.
I freely confess: I'm a liberal. I believe in the power of community to build solutions together, and I believe that people should in general be left alone. But too many of these modern-day Maccabees want to deny me that right to choose my own path. The Chabadniks (and yes, the Focus on the Familyites and Wahhabis as well) want to take their life choices, and shove them down my throat. Thankfully, I don't have to listen to them when they tell me that they alone have the right path to G-d. I have Hecht whispering in my ear, reminding me that there are other ways. She points out that Job himself, the most-used picture of patient belief and suffering, was actually a profoundly doubting Socrates; she gives me the despair of the narrator of Ecclesiastes, and suggests that I am not the first Jew to know existential angst. I don't claim to be the smartest guy out there, but like that pot-bellied, big-nosed Greek, I'm willing to admit my ignorance - which is more than most people can claim.