2008 Woodie Awards
A Halakhic Jew
Shimshon Ayzenberg
Issue date: 9/4/07 Section: Kol HaMevaser
- Page 1 of 1
Yeshiva University is an intellectual battlefield. Everyone hears the beating drums. Some endure the battle. Many are meek and hide in indifference. Others quit in self-defeat.
After a year studying in Israel, I came back to United States full of infantile convictions and creedal certainties. However, as I matured and met people who are not hampered by ancient laws, rites, and ideas, I began to ask the fateful question, why do such things hamper me? I will briefly explain why I decided to be an orthodox Jew.
The Lonely
What created my predicament of doubt was the emergence of choice between a religious and a secular life. This choice comes only to the truly “lonely” among us. Every serious religious person is profoundly lonely. As a result of his unique experiences in life, this loneliness cannot be apprehended by others. The lonely person, therefore, has a hard time joining and participating in a "Hashkafic community." This is because a Hashkafic community is demarcated by outer conformity so that no one should ever be internally lonely. Uniformity in clothing and vernacular are made to represent, for individual Jews, an affirmation of their participation in a larger collective. Individuals amalgamate into masses that are characterized by sameness, insipidness, and solipsism. The Hashkafic community’s uniform system of belief narrowly restricts freedom of thought. Belief in G-d, the special teachings, and the grand teacher must be publicly reaffirmed to relatives, friends, and strangers almost daily.
When I was repelled by these tendencies and encountered loneliness for the first time, a daunting question popped into my head: if Orthodox Judaism is so insipid and solipsistic, why do I bother being a Jew? This is when a real and gnawing choice crept in. Standing remorselessly at a forked road of two equal paths, Yiddishkeit or Friekiet, before me was the kind of choice when one has absolutely nothing to lose. Many Jews who were born orthodox and brought up religiously, especially those from a Hashkafic community, would feel guilt for turning their backs on the heritage of their parents. I would feel none. My grandfather was a Jew by birth and a Stalinist to his grave; my father, a Jew by birth and a Christian by faith. Divorced from my own heritage by two generations, I, as a so-called Ba'al Teshuva, would feel no guilt turning back the clock, or perhaps, moving it exponentially forward (depending on one's frame of reference).
The Choice
What did Frederich Nietzsche mean when he made "the madman" declare arrogantly but mournfully, "God is dead"? It seems that before the modern era people had no choice whether they wanted to be dominated by religion. Everyone has that choice now. A dynamic, potent, and fully accepting secular culture wiggles its tail tauntingly in the face of all religions. What exemplifies the Western experience is a powerfully clear and omnipresent freedom of choice, not only in the realm of politics, but in all areas of our public and individual lives. Indeed, some of us who end up lonely, who are confronted by choice and feel virtually no guilt, feel a powerful desire to leave the fold of Torah and Mitzvoth and join the outer secular culture forthwith.
The empty promise of this choice, however, should not delude the thinking person. Secular culture, and society as a whole, is a melting pot plagued by an identity crisis. Due to the radical departure in modern times from the Judeo-Christian framework, the biggest philosophical question today is whether that framework is still valid.
Until the 20th century, the Judeo-Christian culture provided Western Man a cultural identity based on an affiliation with one’s religious persuasion. Christianity was, of course, considered superior to Judaism. Nevertheless, all Europeans felt that their shared Western culture, influenced by a system of values from the Bible, was superior to other values, cultures, and identities.
Then the bloodiest wars in history occurred in the very bosom of the Western world. Moreover, as the world suddenly shrunk because of globalization, whether real or perceived, Western Man came in closer contact with Eastern cultures. This automatically rendered the traditional Eurocentric Judeo-Christian worldview anachronistic. It appeared that no longer was the Westerner the only civilized man. As a result, the steep decline of religion and the preponderance of secularism squelched the remainder of the old and religiously oriented value-based Western identity. Concurrently, many progressive Jews who attempted to base their identity on a Western model, most notably with the ideas of Zionism, undercut the meaning of Jewish identity itself.
More specifically, as American culture constantly stews itself into a melting pot, it prods Jews to assimilate, begging more to succumb to their assimilatory cravings. So as individual Jews face an existential threat, it is a prerogative, more than ever before, to truly understand who we are as Orthodox Jews.
The Hashkafic Jew
Who is an Orthodox Jew in America today? All orthodox Jews, whether they like it or not, or admit it or not, were drastically influenced by the unprecedented social changes of the 19th century and the implosion of the Western identity in the 20th century. As a result, two kinds of Orthodox Jews emerged, (a) the "Hashkafic Jew" and (b) the "Halakhic Jew." They differ in what defines them as Jews.
The paramount feature of the Hashkafic Jew is his elitism. This elitism is the underlying bulwark guarding against any foreign influence from the secular world. More importantly, this elitism causes each Hashkafic community to reject other communities. Hashkafic elitism is rooted in old Judeo-Christian values that denigrated, abhorred, and often dehumanized the peoples of other cultures in order to guard against the stark realization that humanity is kaleidoscopic and deeply complex. Because of humankind’s age-old inclination for elitist tendencies, cultural pluralism has never truly been achieved in the broader sense. The West, by boastfully viewing itself as the “only true civilization,” particularly undermined cultural pluralism. From Europe's exploration of other lands and its colonization of other peoples to the advances in the art and technology of warfare in the modern age, as a sense of morality lagged far behind, the ubiquitous elitism among nations engendered perpetual conflict, culminating in two very bloody world wars. Jewish communities, in turn, living in such an environment incorporated this elitism and developed Hashkafic outlooks that to this day, as if frozen in time, continuously undermine unity within Am Yisroel, and amity between Jews and non-Jews.
Just as there are individuals in the West today who object to the old Judeo-Christian elitist tendencies, there is also a lonely Orthodox Jew who is willfully outside of the Hashkafic community because he does not wish to alienate himself from any person, whether Jew or a non-Jew. Inundated by doubt, he is presented with a raw choice. He may discover a Jewish identity for himself that is not based on a Hashkafa, and remain part of the Jewish people, or he may not, finding religious identity superfluous and outmoded as so many secular people see it, and leave the fold entirely.
When I was presented with this choice, I wondered why some Jews like me choose to become Orthodox? It cannot be that they are attracted to the elitism of their surrogate Hashkafic communities; I was not an elitist until I joined a community and was thought of by my mentors as their success story. Jews become Orthodox, rather, because of practical and utilitarian reasons - because it is convenient for them. They run away from their prior realities and seek a support system where they can live with fewer worries. This system is a Hashkafic community, which, like any organized religion, provides its vouchsafed member with acceptance, education, marriage, and a slew of like-minded friends. As such, some of the strongest advocates of a particular Hashkafa are Ba'alei Teshuva.
I became orthodox because my parents fought and a rabbi took me into his home, cared for me, and provided a safe heaven from my dysfunctional home. As I grew older, Orthodox Judaism proved to be bittersweet. It was an act and a way to get away from my home. As a teenager searching for an identity distinct of my parents, I dropped the act and forgot about the rabbi. I hung around friends who organized trance parties on Friday nights, visited "the village" often, smoked weed on the weekends, and on the side experimented with a few hard drugs. However, before long, I was unable to persist in such conditions and once again joined a Hashkafic community. This time I grew a beard, and enrolled into one of the main Yeshivot in Israel for Ba'alei Teshuva . I felt perfectly comfortable as a Jew. That is, until I came to YU.
The Halakhic Jew
I used to hate YU. But now I see it as a beacon of hope, an island in a vast ocean of confusion upon which stands a modern-day Temple of Delphi. At ancient Delphi there was a plaque inscribed with two words: "Know Thyself." This phrase is a great Socratic battle cry. The battle is within us. Socrates was a heretic in a society that rejected re-assessment, introspection, endless questioning, endless rediscovery, and self-knowledge. Similarly, YU's openness toward self-knowledge is heresy in the mind of a Hashkafic Jew.
After three years in YU I understood that while I became Orthodox to escape from what I thought was a dangerous world, Judaism is not an "opiate of the masses," but hard work, an endless battle. No one achieves tranquility of soul. I was disillusioned by this realization. If life is already not easy, why should I make my life even harder by being Jewish?
Oddly, even with feelings utterly devoid of kavanah, I continued to keep Halakhah. I davened thrice daily, ate only strictly kosher food, and kept Shabbos. I had no emotional connection to Judaism, but I refused to sever my connection to the Jewish people. Rabbi Norman Lamm in his essay "Faith and Doubt" talks about "cognitive faith," one's faith in the Almighty, and "functional faith," one's faithfulness to Halakhah. I believe that the difference between the two faiths is relevant to our Jewish identity today. One may experience doubts in his beliefs in Yiddishkeit and struggle with its demands. In fact, it is quite natural to do so. As long as he does not relinquish his "functional faith," he is unequivocally part of the Jewish people. A Jew who is not defined by Hashkafa, his cognitive faith, but by Halakhah, his functional faith, is a Halakhic Jew.
The Love
In the end, Jewish identity rests on love. As the Tzemach Tzedek writes in Derech Mitzvosea on Ahavas Yisroel, when one loves the Jewish people he also loves G-d. Rabbi Avraham HaKohen Kook taught that if one does not also love humanity he cannot properly love the Jewish people (Midot HaRiyah, Ahavah, 10). Love is characterized by what one is willing to do for another. The Rambam (Hilchos Teshuva 10:3), along with many medieval commentators, states that just as a man should love a woman so should he love G-d, with personal sacrifice. Similarly, love of the Jewish people denotes sacrifice for the Jewish people. Love is to transcend one's being, one's ego. In America's ego-driven culture, where college students selfishly think mostly about getting ahead or swimming in the enticing pleasures of life, one must at certain times, when repelled by the Hashkafic community and confronted by choice, think less of himself and more of the Jewish people.
After a year studying in Israel, I came back to United States full of infantile convictions and creedal certainties. However, as I matured and met people who are not hampered by ancient laws, rites, and ideas, I began to ask the fateful question, why do such things hamper me? I will briefly explain why I decided to be an orthodox Jew.
The Lonely
What created my predicament of doubt was the emergence of choice between a religious and a secular life. This choice comes only to the truly “lonely” among us. Every serious religious person is profoundly lonely. As a result of his unique experiences in life, this loneliness cannot be apprehended by others. The lonely person, therefore, has a hard time joining and participating in a "Hashkafic community." This is because a Hashkafic community is demarcated by outer conformity so that no one should ever be internally lonely. Uniformity in clothing and vernacular are made to represent, for individual Jews, an affirmation of their participation in a larger collective. Individuals amalgamate into masses that are characterized by sameness, insipidness, and solipsism. The Hashkafic community’s uniform system of belief narrowly restricts freedom of thought. Belief in G-d, the special teachings, and the grand teacher must be publicly reaffirmed to relatives, friends, and strangers almost daily.
When I was repelled by these tendencies and encountered loneliness for the first time, a daunting question popped into my head: if Orthodox Judaism is so insipid and solipsistic, why do I bother being a Jew? This is when a real and gnawing choice crept in. Standing remorselessly at a forked road of two equal paths, Yiddishkeit or Friekiet, before me was the kind of choice when one has absolutely nothing to lose. Many Jews who were born orthodox and brought up religiously, especially those from a Hashkafic community, would feel guilt for turning their backs on the heritage of their parents. I would feel none. My grandfather was a Jew by birth and a Stalinist to his grave; my father, a Jew by birth and a Christian by faith. Divorced from my own heritage by two generations, I, as a so-called Ba'al Teshuva, would feel no guilt turning back the clock, or perhaps, moving it exponentially forward (depending on one's frame of reference).
The Choice
What did Frederich Nietzsche mean when he made "the madman" declare arrogantly but mournfully, "God is dead"? It seems that before the modern era people had no choice whether they wanted to be dominated by religion. Everyone has that choice now. A dynamic, potent, and fully accepting secular culture wiggles its tail tauntingly in the face of all religions. What exemplifies the Western experience is a powerfully clear and omnipresent freedom of choice, not only in the realm of politics, but in all areas of our public and individual lives. Indeed, some of us who end up lonely, who are confronted by choice and feel virtually no guilt, feel a powerful desire to leave the fold of Torah and Mitzvoth and join the outer secular culture forthwith.
The empty promise of this choice, however, should not delude the thinking person. Secular culture, and society as a whole, is a melting pot plagued by an identity crisis. Due to the radical departure in modern times from the Judeo-Christian framework, the biggest philosophical question today is whether that framework is still valid.
Until the 20th century, the Judeo-Christian culture provided Western Man a cultural identity based on an affiliation with one’s religious persuasion. Christianity was, of course, considered superior to Judaism. Nevertheless, all Europeans felt that their shared Western culture, influenced by a system of values from the Bible, was superior to other values, cultures, and identities.
Then the bloodiest wars in history occurred in the very bosom of the Western world. Moreover, as the world suddenly shrunk because of globalization, whether real or perceived, Western Man came in closer contact with Eastern cultures. This automatically rendered the traditional Eurocentric Judeo-Christian worldview anachronistic. It appeared that no longer was the Westerner the only civilized man. As a result, the steep decline of religion and the preponderance of secularism squelched the remainder of the old and religiously oriented value-based Western identity. Concurrently, many progressive Jews who attempted to base their identity on a Western model, most notably with the ideas of Zionism, undercut the meaning of Jewish identity itself.
More specifically, as American culture constantly stews itself into a melting pot, it prods Jews to assimilate, begging more to succumb to their assimilatory cravings. So as individual Jews face an existential threat, it is a prerogative, more than ever before, to truly understand who we are as Orthodox Jews.
The Hashkafic Jew
Who is an Orthodox Jew in America today? All orthodox Jews, whether they like it or not, or admit it or not, were drastically influenced by the unprecedented social changes of the 19th century and the implosion of the Western identity in the 20th century. As a result, two kinds of Orthodox Jews emerged, (a) the "Hashkafic Jew" and (b) the "Halakhic Jew." They differ in what defines them as Jews.
The paramount feature of the Hashkafic Jew is his elitism. This elitism is the underlying bulwark guarding against any foreign influence from the secular world. More importantly, this elitism causes each Hashkafic community to reject other communities. Hashkafic elitism is rooted in old Judeo-Christian values that denigrated, abhorred, and often dehumanized the peoples of other cultures in order to guard against the stark realization that humanity is kaleidoscopic and deeply complex. Because of humankind’s age-old inclination for elitist tendencies, cultural pluralism has never truly been achieved in the broader sense. The West, by boastfully viewing itself as the “only true civilization,” particularly undermined cultural pluralism. From Europe's exploration of other lands and its colonization of other peoples to the advances in the art and technology of warfare in the modern age, as a sense of morality lagged far behind, the ubiquitous elitism among nations engendered perpetual conflict, culminating in two very bloody world wars. Jewish communities, in turn, living in such an environment incorporated this elitism and developed Hashkafic outlooks that to this day, as if frozen in time, continuously undermine unity within Am Yisroel, and amity between Jews and non-Jews.
Just as there are individuals in the West today who object to the old Judeo-Christian elitist tendencies, there is also a lonely Orthodox Jew who is willfully outside of the Hashkafic community because he does not wish to alienate himself from any person, whether Jew or a non-Jew. Inundated by doubt, he is presented with a raw choice. He may discover a Jewish identity for himself that is not based on a Hashkafa, and remain part of the Jewish people, or he may not, finding religious identity superfluous and outmoded as so many secular people see it, and leave the fold entirely.
When I was presented with this choice, I wondered why some Jews like me choose to become Orthodox? It cannot be that they are attracted to the elitism of their surrogate Hashkafic communities; I was not an elitist until I joined a community and was thought of by my mentors as their success story. Jews become Orthodox, rather, because of practical and utilitarian reasons - because it is convenient for them. They run away from their prior realities and seek a support system where they can live with fewer worries. This system is a Hashkafic community, which, like any organized religion, provides its vouchsafed member with acceptance, education, marriage, and a slew of like-minded friends. As such, some of the strongest advocates of a particular Hashkafa are Ba'alei Teshuva.
I became orthodox because my parents fought and a rabbi took me into his home, cared for me, and provided a safe heaven from my dysfunctional home. As I grew older, Orthodox Judaism proved to be bittersweet. It was an act and a way to get away from my home. As a teenager searching for an identity distinct of my parents, I dropped the act and forgot about the rabbi. I hung around friends who organized trance parties on Friday nights, visited "the village" often, smoked weed on the weekends, and on the side experimented with a few hard drugs. However, before long, I was unable to persist in such conditions and once again joined a Hashkafic community. This time I grew a beard, and enrolled into one of the main Yeshivot in Israel for Ba'alei Teshuva . I felt perfectly comfortable as a Jew. That is, until I came to YU.
The Halakhic Jew
I used to hate YU. But now I see it as a beacon of hope, an island in a vast ocean of confusion upon which stands a modern-day Temple of Delphi. At ancient Delphi there was a plaque inscribed with two words: "Know Thyself." This phrase is a great Socratic battle cry. The battle is within us. Socrates was a heretic in a society that rejected re-assessment, introspection, endless questioning, endless rediscovery, and self-knowledge. Similarly, YU's openness toward self-knowledge is heresy in the mind of a Hashkafic Jew.
After three years in YU I understood that while I became Orthodox to escape from what I thought was a dangerous world, Judaism is not an "opiate of the masses," but hard work, an endless battle. No one achieves tranquility of soul. I was disillusioned by this realization. If life is already not easy, why should I make my life even harder by being Jewish?
Oddly, even with feelings utterly devoid of kavanah, I continued to keep Halakhah. I davened thrice daily, ate only strictly kosher food, and kept Shabbos. I had no emotional connection to Judaism, but I refused to sever my connection to the Jewish people. Rabbi Norman Lamm in his essay "Faith and Doubt" talks about "cognitive faith," one's faith in the Almighty, and "functional faith," one's faithfulness to Halakhah. I believe that the difference between the two faiths is relevant to our Jewish identity today. One may experience doubts in his beliefs in Yiddishkeit and struggle with its demands. In fact, it is quite natural to do so. As long as he does not relinquish his "functional faith," he is unequivocally part of the Jewish people. A Jew who is not defined by Hashkafa, his cognitive faith, but by Halakhah, his functional faith, is a Halakhic Jew.
The Love
In the end, Jewish identity rests on love. As the Tzemach Tzedek writes in Derech Mitzvosea on Ahavas Yisroel, when one loves the Jewish people he also loves G-d. Rabbi Avraham HaKohen Kook taught that if one does not also love humanity he cannot properly love the Jewish people (Midot HaRiyah, Ahavah, 10). Love is characterized by what one is willing to do for another. The Rambam (Hilchos Teshuva 10:3), along with many medieval commentators, states that just as a man should love a woman so should he love G-d, with personal sacrifice. Similarly, love of the Jewish people denotes sacrifice for the Jewish people. Love is to transcend one's being, one's ego. In America's ego-driven culture, where college students selfishly think mostly about getting ahead or swimming in the enticing pleasures of life, one must at certain times, when repelled by the Hashkafic community and confronted by choice, think less of himself and more of the Jewish people.
Shimshon Ayzenberg is a senior in YC, majoring in Jewish History.