Judaism also stands apart for being both a religion and a people. The word religion comes from both relegere, to recollect, and religare, to bind together.4 And the Jewish people do both, binding themselves to one another and to God through stories, law, and other modes of recollection.
It is sometimes said that Judaism is about ethnicity as much as religion, but that is not quite right, since Jews come from all sorts of different ethnic groups. There are Ashkenazi Jews of German and Eastern European descent (by far the largest group), Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Arab descent, and Ethiopian Jews of African descent. Like Hindus, however, Jews do function as an ethnicity of sorts, bound together not so much by shared beliefs as by a shared sense of community. This solidarity is fostered by the observance of rituals and festivals that set Jews apart, but even the unobservant are still considered Jews. To say you are Jewish may mean that you believe in the God of Israel, attempt to follow His commandments, and study Torah. It may also mean that you come from a Jewish family. You can’t be both an atheist and a Muslim, but a large minority of Jews do not believe in God.
Arguing for the Sake of God
Given this diversity, it should not be surprising that Judaism isn’t easy to pin down. That there are as many Jewish opinions as there are Jews is a commonplace, but this estimate is understated. As an old adage goes, wherever you have two Jews there are always at least three opinions. No religion, of course, speaks with one voice. But Judaism is unusually cacophonous. More than any of the other great religions, its practitioners follow Rilke’s admonition to “love the questions.”5 Only in Judaism is there a religious teacher principally famous for asking “Why?”6
If you ever stumble on a traditional yeshiva, a Jewish school for the study of sacred texts, the first thing you will notice is the noise. Students study in pairs in a large hall, often with wild gesticulations and hardly ever in hushed tones. They read aloud from this story or that law, and they argue even louder about the meanings. The yeshiva demonstrates that learning is valued in Judaism and that disagreements are a path to learning. Perhaps most important, it demonstrates that Jews revel in a good debate.
When yeshiva students are arguing with their partners, they are trying to get at the truth. According to a Hasidic saying, “If you are proved right, you accomplish little; but if you are proved wrong, you gain much: you learn the truth.”7 But these students do not necessarily assume that the truth is on one side or the other of their disputes, or even somewhere in between. The name Israel refers to one who has wrestled with God (Genesis 32:28), and for millennia Jews have done just that. They have also wrestled with one another (including the pious dead) and with their own tradition’s tensions between story and law, prophet and priest, exile and return, mercy and justice, movement and rest.
What is required in Judaism is not to agree, but to engage. According to Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, “If a Jew has no one to quarrel with, he quarrels with God, and we call it theology; or he quarrels with himself, and we call it psychology.”8 It was a Jew, Albert Einstein, who proved via the theory of relativity that even scientific observations depend on your perspective. Another Jew, American philosopher Horace Kallen, coined the phrase cultural pluralism and with it the metaphor of civilization as an orchestra in which differences in religion, language, and art can enhance social harmony rather than undermining it.9 In what might seem like the cacophony of yeshiva training, Jews hear a symphony.
Jews record the commandments of God in two major scriptures, each as multivocal as the yeshiva itself. The Tanakh is a sprawling anthology of diverse genres, voices, and sources spanning roughly a millennium. It begins with not one but two different stories of creation. In its twenty-four books (two of which—Ruth and Esther—are named after women) we hear of God and angels, kings and commoners. We encounter proverbs, prophecies, love poems, hymns, theological history, wisdom literature, law, and apocalyptic visions.
Judaism’s second major sacred text, the Talmud, is even more unruly. A vast tangle of various lines of argumentation, its two and a half million words don’t just contain contradictions; they are designed around them, with a passage at the center of each page literally surrounded by competing interpretations. “Turn the pages,” one rabbi says, “turn them well, for everything is in them.”10 In one of the great intellectual contests of all time, two rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, joust in this anthology of arguments over three hundred different issues. Hillel, who has been described as “Judaism’s model human being,” almost always gets the upper hand, which is why the Jewish student center near my office is named Hillel House and not Shammai House.11 But the Talmud does not simply record Judaism according to Hillel. It records Shammai’s views too. So his words are also scripture. Or, as the Talmud reads in a passage that concluded three years of bitter debate between the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel, “Both are the words of the living God, but the law is in accordance with the view of the house of Hillel.”12
Most human beings find ambiguity intolerable. Chasing after uncertainty and running away from contradictions, we squint when testing our eyes, determined to bring what is blurry into focus, as if our determination could make it so. Jews are trained not just to abide ambiguity but to glory in it. If, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “The well-bred contradict other people” while “the wise contradict themselves,” the Jewish scriptures are wisdom personified.13
This wisdom echoes in the ways and means of the U.S. Supreme Court, which like the Talmud records dissenting opinions alongside majority decisions. It also lives on in a sixteenth-century text called the Shulchan Aruch (literally “Set Table”), the most authoritative collection of halakha (Jewish “law” or “way”) after the Talmud. The main text of the Shulchan Aruch is written by a Sephardic Jew from a Sephardic perspective, but the glosses, which serve as the “tablecloth” (mappah) to the “table” set by the Sephardim, are written by an Ashkenazi scholar. The rabbinic tradition also animates the life and legacy of Sigmund Freud, one of the great Jewish thinkers of all time, who built his discipline of psychoanalysis on the insight that there are competing voices not only among individuals but also inside them. One of psychotherapy’s tasks is to attend to these voices, and to find a way to live with the ambiguities and contradictions they conjure up.
On Converts and Creeds
So why does Judaism, which affirms one and only one God, abide so many different interpretations of the good (and godly) life? Why are Jews divided today into Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanist branches? Why, at the time of Jesus, were there already so many different types of Jews (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots)? Why in the pages of the Talmud do Abbaye and Rava, two rabbis who are also fast friends, disagree so frequently, and so fiercely? Why does Judaism, more than any other religion, exemplify what poet e. e. cummings referred to as “whying”?14
To begin, Judaism is not a missionary religion. Although there have been times when Jews have attempted to make converts, for the most part Judaism has survived through inheritance, not evangelization. In fact, rabbis traditionally discourage conversions, rebuffing potential converts three times before agreeing to take them in. So there has never been a practical reason for Jews either to define their message to outsiders, or to stay on that message.15
In other words, Judaism has no real creed. Excommunications are exceedingly rare, and Jews have never tried to root out heretics by convening the equivalent of the Council of Nicaea or drafting the equivalent of the Nicene Creed.16 The Shema does function as a creed of sorts, however. This formula, which is recited today in Jewish worship services and has lived for centuries on the lips of Jewish martyrs, begins with a clear affirmation of monotheism: “Hear (Shema), O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” It moves immediately from this doctrinal statement, however, to the ritual dimension: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy hea
rt; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thy house, and upon thy gates” (Deuteronomy 6:4–9). So even the Shema points beyond doctrine to practice, underscoring Judaism’s affinity for doing over believing, orthopraxy over orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy was, of course, an obsession of the early Christians who wrote and enforced acceptance of the Nicene Creed. But Jews have rarely given in to the impulse to define and defeat heresy. In fact, Jews got along just fine without a statement of belief until Maimonides (1135–1204) proffered his “Thirteen Principles,” but his quasicreed was controversial and not universally accepted.17 So Judaism has always been more about practice than belief. What makes you a Jew is being born a Jew. What keeps you active is participating in the life of the Jewish community—showing up at synagogue, atoning for your sins on Yom Kippur, and honoring your parents by saying the Kaddish prayer for them when they die.
One reason defining orthodoxy and repelling heretics has never been a Jewish preoccupation is that Jews have long seen themselves not only as a people but as a people under threat. Other religions have founders who, by diagnosing the human problem in a new way and offering a novel solution, gather communities around them. With Judaism, however, the community itself was the starting point. The purpose of this tradition was not to solve the human problem but to keep a people together. Jews see themselves in collective terms, as a “holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) chosen by God. And why were they chosen? Not to believe something but to do something—to repair the world (tikkun olam). So Jews are knit together more by ritual and ethics than by doctrine.
Most fundamentally, however, Jews are knit together by memory. This memory speaks of one God who is personal but by no means should be understood as a human being. Unlike the Christian God who takes on a human body, the Jewish God stands above and beyond the world He created, which is to say that He is radically transcendent (though never without an immanent, and intimate, dimension). Like Muslims, Jews emphasize the radical qualitative distinction between God and human beings. Unlike Christians, they insist that God is not to be depicted in human form or worshipped in “graven images.” Although the Tanakh refers in places to God in almost embarrassingly human terms—He is said to have hands and eyes, to wrap Himself in a prayer shawl, and to put on phylacteries—Jews insist that God is beyond comprehension and description. Even writing the name of God is problematic for many Jews, who write the English word “God” as “G-d” in order to avoid disrespecting the divine when the paper on which that word is printed is thrown away. And so this tradition warns repeatedly against the temptation to confuse our opinions with the wisdom of God: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8).
Exile and Return
Given this emphasis on peoplehood, it should not be surprising that the problem in Judaism centers on the community rather than the individual. This problem is exile—distance from God and from where we ought to be. The solution is return—to go back to God and to our true home. The techniques for making this journey are two: to tell the story and follow the law—to remember and to obey.18 As a Jewish friend once explained to me, the motivating tragedy in Christianity is the death of Jesus. If Jesus is the Messiah who is supposed to rule the world, why were the rulers of the world able to kill Him? The motivating tragedy in Judaism is exile. If God is all-powerful and we are God’s people, why aren’t we in our land? And what are we to do elsewhere?
The Jewish God is a “God of movement,” and the Jewish people are forever on the move.19 But their epic journey from garden paradise to desert wilderness to New Jerusalem is not yet complete, because the problem of exile is chronic. So the Jewish people live with hope for the place to which they are going, and with lamentations over the places they have left behind. Some hope for a messiah (literally, “the anointed,” which is to say, king), but this messiah has not yet come. Neither has the peace and prosperity his coming will usher in. So it is the job of the Jewish people to make things ready and to make things right—to “repair the world” and put an end to exile. However, until they complete this task (or the messiah does it for them), they live in the awkward middle space of almost and not yet.
The paradigmatic story for this pattern of exile and return centers on the destruction of the first Jerusalem Temple in 586 B.C.E. According to the Tanakh, after the death of Moses, who never made it to the Promised Land, Joshua led the Israelites into Canaan. King Solomon later built the Jerusalem Temple, which served as the sacred center of Israelite religion, the proto-Jewish tradition out of which Judaism as we know it would grow. Israelite religion (also known as biblical Judaism) was a priestly tradition focused on sacrifice. The fact that the prophets of the Tanakh fumed so furiously against its feasts and sacrifices as distractions from the real work of doing justice only indicates how central these temple-based practices had become. In 586 B.C.E., however, the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and razed the temple. Or, as the prophet known as Second Isaiah put it, “Thy holy cities are become a wilderness, Zion is become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is burned with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste” (Isaiah 64:9–10).
The Babylonians also trounced Judah, the southern kingdom that would later lend Judaism its name, and sent many Israelites into exile in Babylon (in modern-day Iraq). While in exile, these refugees were separated not only from their promised homeland but also from their monarchy, their sacrificial rites, and their God, who was said to reside in the temple’s “Holy of Holies”—an inner sanctum so sacred it could be entered only by the High Priest and only on Yom Kippur. This exilic experience led to the development of the synagogue as a place of prayer and study and to the widespread adoption of portable practices such as circumcision that the Israelites could take with them as they moved. This tragedy also led the Israelites to see that God’s covenant with them was conditional. Yes, they were a people chosen by God, and that meant He would bless them if they walked in the path He had set before them. But it also meant that He would punish them if they deviated from that path.
After the Babylonians were themselves defeated in 538 B.C.E. by the Persian king Cyrus, the Jews (as the Israelites were now called) were allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. Most did not return. But those who did got to tell the story. They told their story in the five books of Moses, which were codified in the fifth century B.C.E. and read by Ezra—a Second Moses, some say—in Jerusalem’s Second Temple, which was dedicated in 515 B.C.E. And the story they told was one of exile and return—a pattern that now provides, in the words of Judaic Studies expert Jacob Neusner “the structure of all Judaism(s).”20
This theme announces itself in the first chapters of Genesis, when the first three human beings are punished by exile—Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit and Cain for killing his brother. It reappears in the story of Abraham who follows God’s instruction to wander west from his home in Ur in Mesopotamia toward modern-day Palestine and, as God puts it, “unto the land that I will show thee” (Genesis 12:1). It surfaces again in the story of Moses, who leads God’s people out of Egypt and across the Red Sea only to find himself wandering for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert. Neither Abraham nor Moses arrives in the Promised Land.
In 70 C.E., all but the Western Wall of the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, and the Jews were sent once again into exile. Together these exilic experiences prompted a literature of longing and turned the Jewish community into a “people of the book.” The book of Psalms gives voice to this longing, recalling a people who lay down by the rivers of Babylon and wept as they remembered Zion—a people who asked, as immigrants the world over continue to ask toda
y, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Psalms 137:4). Tears also drop off the pages of the Talmud, where we encounter the figure of the messiah. With their people scattered from Egypt to Babylon, and the great kingdom of David a distant memory, the Jews begin to hope for a redeemer with the might to end their exile, to gather the Jewish people back home, and to make of that home a heaven on earth.
For roughly two millennia after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, this theme of exile and return lived more in the imagination than on the land. The founding in 1948 of the state of Israel, whose Declaration of Independence speaks of a people “forcibly exiled from their land” yet never ceasing to “pray and hope for their return to it,” brought this story down to earth.21 Now it was possible, as it had not been for centuries, for Jews to live in and govern their homeland. As in the time of the Babylonian conquest, today some Jews choose to remain in exile—to make common cause with Moses the wanderer rather than David the settler, and even to reject the distinction between homeland and diaspora altogether. Others choose to make aliyah, namely, to put Israel under their feet instead of merely in their hearts. The temple has not been rebuilt, however. Though Orthodox Jews pray three times a day for its restoration, the land on which it once stood now houses the Dome of the Rock, the world’s oldest Muslim building. So Jews remain a “people of the book” rather than a “people of the temple.”
This exile and return theme also leavens much Jewish art and literature. But its motifs of desire and fulfillment, dislocation and reconciliation, destruction and restoration resonate far beyond Judaism, in diasporic communities worldwide and wherever immigrants struggle to sing an old song in a new land. Exile and return is also acted out in Jewish families every year during the holidays and whenever the touchy topic of intermarriage arises. (“Is my Jewish daughter going into exile by marrying a Protestant?” “Will her children return?”) It informs individual lives, making sense of our own dramas of God’s concealing and revealing, our estrangements from God and homecomings to Him. After six million Jews died at the hands of Hitler and the Third Reich in the Holocaust, many Jewish thinkers asked where God was when the Nazis turned on the gas chambers in Dachau and Auschwitz—whether God, too, had gone into exile. Throughout their history, however, Jews have refused to see their story merely through a lachrymose lens. While this tradition does give voice to longing for what was, and desire for what will be, it also speaks of celebrating life as it is right now: L’Chaim (“To life!”).22
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