Now Reading
Day 2: Is Jewish Renewal the Next Step in Spirituality, or Boomer Narcissism?
Slut for Slicha
A Very Jewcy Rosh Hashanah
Snipped and Satisfied
Schtupless in Seattle
Gefilte Guilt
Messy Meshugane. Again.

Day 2: Is Jewish Renewal the Next Step in Spirituality, or Boomer Narcissism?

From: Arthur Waskow To: Daniel Bronstein Subject: Speaking of false dichotomies…

Dear Daniel,

Since you’ve raised the danger of false dichotomies, let me point to an obvious one: mystical versus rational. Jewish Renewal sees the rational and mystical as intertwined. Reason cannot stand alone, but the world cannot stand without it.

Reason has brought us telephones and computers and equal rights for women. But the perversion of reason has brought us H-bombs, the burning of the Amazon forest, and the shattering of local communities. Jewish Renewal embraces reason while rejecting the perversion that separates reason from spirit.

I respect many aspects of Reform Judaism. One of my heroes is Rabbi David Einhorn, a 19th-century Reform rabbi whose own congregation forced him to flee Baltimore because he called for the abolition of slavery. I am sad to say that many Reform rabbis have no idea who he was, and no interest in emulating his courage.

Reform Judaism knows it has shortcomings, but doesn’t know what they are. The most crucial one is that it never realized the need for a profoundly new paradigm of Judaism—as different from Rabbinic Judaism as Rabbinic Judaism was from Biblical Judaism.

Why am I pointing toward a new paradigm? Not because I celebrate whatever is new and reject whatever is old. If that were true, I would dump Judaism altogether.

Rather, it is because I see a world in which the human race is transforming the biological web of life, changing the chemistry and climate of our planet, achieving the biblical vision of “be fruitful and multiply, fill up the earth and subdue it”—and shows no sign of stopping.

I see a world in which the Jewish people—absolutely without precedent in our history—possesses one of the world’s mightiest states and armies, and enjoys major political power within the world’s mightiest nation.

And I see a world in which Jewish women, who have for three millennia been debarred from shaping the future of Judaism, are now beginning to exercise that power.

But I see little effort outside the Renewal movement to take all this into account and shape a Judaism that works and matters. The Jewish people must reconfigure itself as a transgenerational “movement” committed to healing the planet.

To do this, we must retire the assumption of powerlessness that lies beneath all Rabbinic Judaism. It is because of this assumption that the Jewish people has evolved no code for the responsible and sacred use of power either in the US or Israel.

Only Jewish Renewal has attempted to end the dichotomy between “ceremony” and “social action” so that a seder may mean assembling 2,000 people in a public space to demand the end of Pharaoh, as we have done. And we intend to light Hanukkah candles at the headquarters of ExxonMobil to demand a policy through which the oil we now use in one day might last eight days. There are many more such examples.

Recognizing the destructive culture of overwork, JR utilizes the practice of meditation as a way to ground
oneself and reconnect with God. Who else is doing this? And what other Jewish movement is nurturing organic gardens, or exploring permaculture?

Who else has proposed relinking bar/bat mitzvah to the sexual maturation that was originally at its root?

And—this is at the center of it all—who else is moving away from metaphors of God as “King” and “Lord” toward “Breathing-spirit of the universe” (ruakh ha’olam) and “Wellspring of Life” (eyin ha’chayim)?

It is hard but joyful work, swimming upstream against a Jewish and American culture that worships idols such as wealth and power. It is hardly “boomer narcissism.”

The boomers I know, and the surveys that look at them, show continued deep devotion to what we call tikkun olam. There aren’t as many sit-downs as there were 40 years ago, but there are lawyers doing Neighborhood Legal Services or challenging polluting corporations, doctors in Medecins sans Frontieres, and so on.

In fact, I wonder whether the whole notion of boomer narcissism was invented—not by you, Daniel—as a way of undermining the energy for social decency that still actuates most boomers.

Shalom!

Arthur

 

From: Daniel Bronstein To: Arthur Waskow Subject: Breath of Life? Or just Bad Breath?

Dear Arthur,

We’re talking past each other. We may be facing a true generation gap here.

I don’t think that anyone simply made up the idea of boomers being narcissistic. Their religious “journeys” often become one-way tickets to the mirror. Take a gander at the work of sociologists Robert Bellah or Robert Wuthnow, who have demonstrated this.

Regarding dichotomies, I’m reminded of the Three Stooges’ 1935 short film Restless Knights. Faced
with the choice of having their heads cut off or being burnt at the stake, Jerome Horowitz, a.k.a. Curly Howard, decides that a “hot stake is better than a cold chop.”

Yes, the world is far more complex than strict mind versus body, mystical versus rational, or even male versus female. Judaism has always demanded a holistic life entailing attention to mind, body, and soul. And even those who history has portrayed as rationalist—the Vilna Gaon comes to mind—were also practitioners of mysticism.

I’m also no apologist for Reform Judaism, and I have no interest in a micturition contest about whose denomination, Renewal or Reform, is “better.” We all need to be open to self-criticism, but we have an obligation to critique one another as well.

Indeed, it has taken a long time for Reform Jews to become Reform rather than “reformed,” and Reform Judaism still runs the risk of becoming mired in all of the balderdash, flapdoodle, poppycock, tomfoolery, and malarkey of modernity. But neither should we be dragged backwards into pre-modernity, with all of its suffering, violence, imbecility, and general smelliness.

That is to say, I would no more study Torah strictly via the documentary hypothesis than I would try to ensure a good harvest by “hooking up” with the neighbors and doing the “hootchy cootchy” on a field. It took long enough to get away from childish, gendered definitions of divinity, and worship of the material. Why, for goodness sakes, would we want to be pulled back into this muck?

Toward the end of your 1996 book Godwrestling Round 2: Ancient Wisdom, Future Paths in the segment titled “One I” you write, “I stand inside God’s skull, behind the face; I look through God’s eyes, my face in Face, I see myself, ourself.” On the next page you write that in this experience lies “the dangers of inflating the ego and of annihilating it.”

I agree with you completely about the dangers of inflating the ego, and I find these reductionist formulas of God=world=me=us to be both obfuscating and disturbing. On the other hand, our world could use far more annihilation of ego.

I recently saw a sign advertising a “kabbalah” energy drink, a perfect example of what happens when we subvert serious disciplines into mass fads, cheapen the profound, and gratify our egos rather than morally and intellectually challenging ourselves. You’ve written that the “breath of all alive will bless Your Name because the breath of all alive, it is Your Name. The breath is in us and beyond us, intimate and transcendent.” Whether or not one chooses to define God as “the breath of life,” I remain concerned that this language empowers the egotistical and enables those who are unwilling to turn from the intimate to the transcendent. To equate the Name with the "I" or "Me" is bad breath.

Daniel

View Comments (5)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Scroll To Top