Daniel,

If I repeat myself, it’s because I feel unheard and caricatured.

A new Judaic paradigm will not require us to abandon all elements of the older paradigms. Of course “Love your neighbor” from Torah (that’s Biblical Judaism) and Hillel’s interpretation of it (Rabbinic Judaism) remain valuable. Just as Hillel used what came from a previous paradigm, so can we. And we do.

But crucial elements of an old paradigm can become rigid and deadly. A major example: sacrificial offerings at the Temple. Maimonides taught that we dropped the sacrifices because we grew more mature and didn’t need them. They were regressive, childish. We needed a new paradigm.

I am surprised that you seem unsure whether Rabbinic Judaism was a new paradigm, a form of Judaism quite different from Biblical Judaism.

I am especially surprised that you scoff at the idea that Rabbinic Judaism presupposes that the Jewish people do not have and cannot exercise political power.

With the Bar Kokhba rebellion, Rabbi Akiba made an attempt to acquire politico-military power and independence for the Jewish people. Even though the rabbis thought that Akiba was an amazing teacher, they wrote Bar Kokhba out of the sacred history and downplayed the Maccabees precisely to prevent bids for political power, which had proved so disastrous.

Two millennia later, the Jews now have power. And because the rabbis had so little experience in exercising it, Rabbinic Judaism cannot guide us in how an Israeli Army or an AIPAC should behave. We must draw from Torah to create a kind of Judaism appropriate to our new reality—just as the rabbis once drew on a few lines of Hosea and Isaiah and Hannah in order to change Judaism’s focus from animal sacrifice to prayer.

Another example: the rabbis explicitly gave up on the Jubilee Year practice of redistributing land and letting it rest, saying this applied only in the Land of Israel, and only when the majority of the Jewish people lived there. As a result, the only “environmental” concept in Rabbinic Judaism is Bal Tashchit, a very weak way of protecting the earth.

This made sense for an era when the Jewish people had no way of making “land policy” or what we now call “environmental policy,” because they had no political power in the Land of Israel or any other land. But now we have both the need and the power to work with other communities toward healing the Earth. There are hints of what to do in some aspects of Biblical Judaism, but almost none in Rabbinic teaching. We need a new paradigm.

I do, however, want to celebrate one of your comments:

“In fact, given the horrendous job humans are doing these days in managing the world, I would welcome being bossed around by God, especially since we are ‘scorching’ the world.”

That’s precisely my point. You would welcome being bossed around by God, but it ain’t happening. Why keep addressing the God you know ain’t there, when you could be addressing the God who is—the mysterious but palpable YHWH, Breath of Life, joyful Breeze, shattering Hurricane, in-breath and out-breath. That metaphor for God might help you to not burn up the world, because you will feel its interwovenness with you. In contrast, God-as-King makes many Jews feel resentful, rebellious, as if they hold no stake in the world He owns.

As for the Orthodox community, I am not in the least surprised by their resurgence. They are reacting
against modernity by going back before it. Put women back in the bottle, other religions back in the bottle, the Earth back in the bottle. To do this, they need a lot more coercive power than their zeydes did. One hundred years ago, nobody had to beat up women to keep them from davening at the Western Wall. Now the genie is out of the bottle. It takes violence to put it back in.

So I see the extreme Orthodox as “Jewish restoration,” not continuity. This is very different from traditional Judaism.

Meanwhile, Renewal and Reconstructionism have pioneered the full involvement of gay and lesbian Jews. Conservative Judaism, long rigidly resistant, is following that path. Even Orthodoxy has its Trembling Before G-d, the film about gay Orthodox Jews that shook many people and opened many windows.

That is the rumbling sound of Rabbinic Judaism falling apart, a dozen bricks at a time rather than all at once. And it is the sound of a new home being built from many (not all) of the old bricks, along with some new hyper-insulated energy-conserving materials; and we are rearranging these raw materials into very new kinds of architecture.

Sh’ma!! To that sound, and to the breathing of the One! No branch of Judaism needs to vanish for the renewal of Torah and of the Jewish people, nor for a new paradigm to come into being.

Shalom,

Arthur

To: Arthur Waskow From: Daniel Bronstein Subject: Grass will Grow in Our Cheeks

Dear Arthur,

Sh’ma: I have heard you, and I have listened to you. As for caricature, I think you have been doing quite a bit of that in the ways you discuss “Rabbinic Judaism” and traditional conceptions of God.

A former icon of the boomer generation, Timothy Leary, spoke of “old” knowledge as “canned, static,” and “dead,” and of everyone becoming “his own Buddha.” I don’t want to caricature you, but Leary’s ghost echoes in some of your words.

Even so, your last letter is far more nuanced: It is heartening to see that you have shifted from the
metaphor of “dead idols” to that of “old bricks.” That’s progress.

I am also heartened that you wrote that no “present branch of Judaism needs to vanish for the renewal of Torah and of the Jewish people.” I am not Orthodox and often dissent from its ideology and practice. At the same time, we should acknowledge that Jewish “Orthodoxy” is far from monolithic and is in fact probably the most diverse “stream” of Judaism. I have been enriched by many aspects of Orthodoxy and have learned from many Orthodox teachers.

I understand that the Judaism of the Tanach differs from the Judaism of the Mishnah or Talmud. Yes, animal sacrifice is radically different from prayer. However, I object to your broad pronouncements about ancient and “Rabbinic” Judaism; we really don’t know a whole lot about how it “really was.”

I understand “power” differently from you. I don’t believe it stems only from politics, and I believe that the rabbis often empowered Jews by helping them maintain their humanity and their sense of history.

I believe in a God who is “there” and who is “here.” And while I regret human failings as well as God’s seeming absence, I am unwilling to relocate God to the self, which really returns us to the original discussion about narcissism.

We disagree about whether the Torah and Jewish people need to be “renewed.” I’m still old-fashioned enough to want to affirm what some rabbis taught so many centuries ago: the learning of Torah is equal to all other mitzvot because it leads to all other mitzvot (Talmud Torah k’Neged Kulam; it still resonates far better in the original Hebrew).

The need for renewal suggests decrepitude, and while certain forms of Judaism and perhaps even segments of the Jewish people have become decrepit, Jews and Judaism have been in an ongoing state of renewal for many centuries. I don’t think that we are anywhere close to knowing all the answers, or even whether we have been asking the right questions.

You mention Rabbi Akiba. He was illiterate for most of his life until he humbled himself, attending school with children, ultimately becoming one of our greatest teachers. Even so, he placed his faith in a soldier, Bar Kokhba, proclaiming the latter as the Messiah who had arrived, in the midst of war and profound suffering, to redeem Israel. Even our greatest teachers can be wrong. As one of Akiba’s rabbinical colleagues explained “Akiba, grass will grow out of your cheeks and David’s son the Messiah will still not have come.”

Arthur, the grass will grow out of our cheeks before the arrival of the messianic age. It will take all of us, collectively as well as individually, in a partnership with God, whose spark resides within us but still transcends us, to bring about the world we yearn for.

Shalom,

Dan

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From: Arthur Waskow To: Daniel Bronstein Subject: Anything can be cheapened

Rabbinic Judaism is dead and needs earth lovingly placed upon its coffin. Only then can we turn toward a new kind of life. The depth of our grief frees us to do that; if we grieve well, we will not stay imprisoned in a dead version of the past, a dead idol that deadens us.

A new paradigm of Judaism must emerge, but I am not claiming that Jewish Renewal is the unique bearer of this step forward. Wherever there are Jewish feminists, Jews who affirm Islam and Buddhism as truth-bearing traditions, Jews who practice meditation as a new way to carry Shabbat into the week, gay and lesbian Jews who want to get married under a chuppah, eco-Jewish organic farmers and Beyond Oil organizers, and eco-kashrut mashgichim (certifiers), the new paradigm grows.

Jewish Renewal is neither utterly new nor utterly perfect. But it is a new approach to Jewish life. It responds to modernity in a fresh way, rejecting some and digesting some, in the process transforming Torah.

I am a little baffled by what you do with my writings about God in Godwrestling Round 2. You quote my caution about “inflating the ego” and then say there are dangers. Right. Of course. If there weren’t, I wouldn’t have suggested caution. Suppose the old roof on a house is leaking badly. The family proposes to re-roof, and discusses the danger that a roofer might fall and hurt herself. You seem to be saying that the very acknowledgement that there are dangers means we should not fix the roof.

Do you doubt the roof is leaking?

An example: Most Jews recite in their prayers “Adonai, Melekh ha’olam, King of the World.” Do you believe that the universe has a king, a lord who bosses us human nachschleppers around? I know very few people who believe that. I know many who feel that saying these words in prayer is silly and shows how silly Judaism is.

I also know many who find that breathing meditation, consciously joining in the breathing of all life, is a profound practice. I know many who resonate to the eco-truth that what we breathe in, the trees breathe out; what we breathe out, the trees breathe in. I know many who believe there is an intricate weave of life, of which the interbreathing of all life is both a real aspect and a metaphor. And I know many who believe that what is sacred in the universe transcends all nations, languages, and religions.

Jewish Renewal teaches that YHWH can be breathed but not pronounced, that it traverses all languages and life forms, that it invites a karmic rather than reward-and-punishment understanding of God.

We teach this way of perceiving God, and then encode it in our prayers. Why on earth would other strands of Judaism want to scorn such a poetic way of encoding the best of our biological/ecological knowledge?

And is it really dangerous? More dangerous than “melekh”?

And why is it dangerous to learn Kabbalah? You wrote how distressed you were to see a sign advertising a new “Kabbalah” energy drink. Jews who have no idea what Kabbalah is may feel attracted to that drink. But Jewish Renewal folks struggle with the serious meanings of Kabbalah and are the first to snort at such silliness. Do you prefer that all Jews remain ignorant of Kabbalah, or that it be studied (to parody the old rules) only by those who own a PhD and have sex no more than once a week?

Have you seen the ugly tchotchkes sold as sacred objects in many Jewish bookstores? Or the “kosher” soft drinks made of chemicals and sugar? Anything can be cheapened. You should be thanking God for the substantive and beautiful music, poetry, art, and midrash that have emerged from Jewish Renewal.

Shalom,

Arthur

From: Daniel Bronstein To: Arthur Waskow Subject: Buried Alive

Dear Arthur,

Who you calling a nachschlepper? And who in Sodom and Gomorrah ever said that PhDs only have sex once a week?

Although I am somewhat reluctant to do so, let me offer a serious response to your last e-mail.

We are in dialogue about whether the Renewal movement represents a new spiritual path or is instead
another manifestation of boomer narcissism. As with other modern movements in Judaism, Renewal deserves credit for its contributions to Jewish life. But you go further, generalizing about what you call “Rabbinic Judaism” and claiming the future for your own brand of Jewishness. As a trained historian, you can readily understand what Yogi Berra once said; “Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.”

All sorts of predictions have been made about Judaism and the Jewish people. In the words of Judaic Studies professor Simon Rawidowicz, we are “Israel, the Ever-Dying People.” Just a few decades back, some of the finest sociologists of American Jewish life predicted the demise of Jewish Orthodoxy, but were, quite obviously, completely off the mark.

Around a century ago an “Orthodox” modernist, and one of the leading intellectual lights of Wissenschaft des Judentums, also proclaimed that it was his school of thought’s mission to give Judaism a decent burial. It’s fascinating that although professing to have transcended modernity you make the same argument decades later. Again, I am puzzled that despite your training as a historian you so capriciously make pronouncements on what actually happened in antiquity and claim to know how Judaism was “originally” practiced, or what certain rituals “originally” meant, despite our meager knowledge. The scholars of Wissenschaft, via their search for Ur-texts, made similar claims, but they, nevertheless, offered evidence for their theories.

The same prediction about the demise of Orthodoxy in the state of Israel also proved to be, how shall we say, shortsighted. So while you employ words like “arrogance,” “silly,” or “scorn,” I can think of few things as arrogant, scornful, or silly as proclaiming Rabbinic Judaism to be dead.

And is it not scornful and arrogant to write that “beneath” “Rabbinic Judaism” “lies an assumption of powerlessness?”

Let’s move on to God.

In the Age of Aquarius, some claimed that God was dead, but reports of this death were found to be greatly exaggerated. There are a lot of different “God ideas.” But before we shovel the dirt over those dead idols known as the rabbis, recall that the tradition teaches that we are created in the image of the Divine. On the one hand, that means that all human life is sacred. But on the other hand, the operative word is “image,” making it vital to acknowledge that while created in the image of God, we are human beings possessing all sorts of imperfections and flaws.

You feel that it is silly to recite the phrase “Melech ha’Olam.” I disagree: I don’t think the metaphor of God as sovereign of the universe is silly, and I don’t understand why conceiving of God as sovereign of the universe is any less valid than using circular or evasive language, or even talking about breathing. In fact, given the horrendous job humans are doing these days in managing the world, I would welcome being bossed around by God, especially since we are “scorching” the world.

Of course, none of us really knows the nature of God, and even Moses had to hide in a cleft of rock during his most intimate encounter with the Divine. I wouldn’t even say that the conflation of God with the Self is silly; but it is narcissistic and sounds a lot like good, old-fashioned idolatry. A sure roadmap to destructive behavior is the unwillingness to be humble before the Transcendent.

Hillel the Elder taught that “what is hateful to you, do not do to your friend.” Hillel did not cast this in the positive, (that is, “what is good for you, do to your friend”) because there are things that are good for oneself but bad for other people. Contrast this humility with “If it feels good, do it.”

Arthur, you are not trying to gently bury “Rabbinic Judaism,” you are not even giving it a decent burial; you are burying a living, breathing, thriving tradition alive.

Shalom,

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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 19^th-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

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Say you attend a speech by the prominent JR rabbi Michael Lerner. Once you experience the way he whips up a rapt audience of trustafarians into an orgy of indignation (followed, like clockwork, by a soothing postcoital bath of self-satisfaction), then you actually start to agree with conservative critics who see the movement as a lingering expression of 1960s narcissism. After that kind of trauma, it’s hard to give the movement’s theology or rhetoric a fair shake.

That JR keeps kicking despite its weaknesses is perhaps a testament to its potential. I first encountered JR on a trip to Israel during a stay at Heritage House, the Jerusalem hostel Aish HaTorah uses as a Venus flytrap for disaffected young Jewish travellers. Someone had put The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz’s fantastic book about of a group of rabbis who travelled to India to meet the Dalai Lama, into the hostel's otherwise rigidly Orthodox bookshelf. One of the stars of the book was Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a founder and leader of JR.

Schachter-Shalomi seemed everything Aish was not. His understanding of God was intellectually sophisticated, not archaic, and his Judaism inquisitive about other faiths rather than fearful of them. He relentlessly engaged with the non-Jewish world, rather than retreating from it or placating it.

So which is it? Is Jewish Renewal really the next step in spirituality, or just another expression of baby boomer narcissism? To demystify the issue we brought in Arthur Waskow, an influential author, rabbi, and political activist who is one of the leaders of the Jewish Renewal movement. For the next four days we’ll post his correspondence with Daniel Bronstein, a third-generation Reform rabbi and brainy young rationalist with little patience for airy-fairy posturing.

—Joey Kurtzman

From: Arthur Waskow To: Dan Bronstein Subject: The arrogant and stupid will be scorched by the world

Dan,

When Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and other Jewish teachers met with the Dalai Lama almost twenty years ago, they were all exemplifying renewal in their respective traditions. For centuries, the leaders of
Tibetan Buddhism had talked seriously only with other Buddhists. Most rabbis would have viewed Buddhists as idolaters bowing to the statue of a laughing fat man.

Only the impact of modernity on both Jews and Buddhists made it seem worthwhile to learn from each other.

This stems from an insight into history and God that the old paradigm of Rabbinic Judaism did not share: that other religious communities are also paths of truth.

Another insight of Jewish Renewal is that festivals need not be celebrated only as pleasant “private” ceremonies, but can also be political events. And political events need not be devoid of spirit, but can be filled with sacred energy, with awe for the Source of peace and justice.

Kabbalistic “oddball” rabbis in Safed 500 years ago created the Tu B’Shvat seder, celebrating the rebirth of trees in midwinter by eating a sacred meal of nuts and fruit. This meal did not even require the death of a carrot or a radish. It celebrated God as the Grower of the Tree of Life, reborn in every time of cold and dark.

Jewish Renewal rabbis in the 1990s turned this Tu B’Shvat seder into a framework for the protection for the earth by celebrating it where an American corporation was seeking to turn ancient redwood trees, 300 feet tall, into decorative panels for the party basements of the rich. We held the seder under a great grove of redwoods and then walked onto the corporation’s land—illegally—to plant redwood seedlings where it had cut down glorious trees.

The logging of ancient redwoods in California involves a moral and spiritual failing: arrogance. From it stems also an intellectual failing: stupidity.

The arrogant do not listen to the world around them, the world that greets invaders not with flowers but with improvised explosive devices; the world that greets despoilers of the forest with a climate crisis, the scorching of the planet.

Jewish Renewal affirms our own humility rather than the humiliation of others. It affirms that we share our lives with all the peoples and all the species and even the CO² in the atmosphere as members of a grand community, part of the Breath of Life—YHWH.

Arthur

From: Daniel Bronstein To: Arthur Waskow Subject: Before you think “outside the box,” find out what’s in the box

Arthur,

Much of your worldview is grounded in mysticism, while I’m more of a rationalist. You employ the language of the mystics, while I am more influenced by the Mussar movement and the language of Jewish humorists. And while I enjoy fruit and nuts as much as the “oddballs” of medieval Safed, I have never particularly cared for radish.

Your note sets inaccurate and superficial dichotomies; for example that there is an “old paradigm” of Rabbinic Judaism clashing with a “new paradigm” of “renewed” Judaism. As you know, Judaism has varied over time and place. To which time and place do you refer with the term “Rabbinic Judaism”? The Sages, the rabbis of Babylonian academies, and rabbis in 21^st-century North America share many rituals and beliefs, but there are also many differences.

I am even less persuaded by the equation that old = bad and new = good. As someone who loves artifacts more than computer games, I’ve never had anything against “old” things. Moreover, centuries ago, Christians also bifurcated what they framed as God’s “Old Testament” from their “New” version. While you’re not saying that your branch of Judaism supersedes othe
r forms of Judaism as Christians argued in relation to Judaism, you do strike a triumphalist note.

I am a third-generation Reform rabbi. From the late 19th century through the beginning of the 20th, Reform Judaism was in a triumphalist mode. It took a lot learning, human history, and humility to realize that we did not have all the answers, nor would we alone be the salvation for Jews and humanity.

A few decades back Conservative Judaism went through its triumphalist phase, followed by various branches of so-called Orthodox Judaism. The triumphalism of Renewal is a bracha le'vatallah—a wasted effort—and merely repeats the sins of its predecessors.

You argue that Renewal possesses a new “insight” that other “religious communities are also paths of truth.” In fact, as early as 1885, a group of radical Reform rabbis publicly proclaimed that they recognized “in every religion an attempt to grasp the Infinite, and… the consciousness of the indwelling of God in man.”

Renewal is not the first expression of Judaism to be influenced or even shaped by other cultures and religious traditions, nor will it be the last.

Our willingness to learn from other religious traditions does not mean we should conflate Judaism with other religious systems. Religious differences are not simply accidents of history, but reflect genuinely different worldviews and different conceptions of human life and the Divine.

Neither one of us truly knows whether rabbinic sages would have viewed Tibetan Buddhism as idolatrous or seen in it some sort of value. I know that Jews, Buddhists, and others often enjoy being with laughing
fat men, and I can think of more than a few fat Jewish men who even now entertain society as a whole. Even so, the melting pot of syncretism can easily lead to an impoverished understanding of others’ beliefs, as well as of one’s own.

What does this have to do with the ostensible narcissism of the baby boomers? Although it is dangerous to generalize, the truth is that from the 1960s through the present the boomer generation has viewed itself as the first to question established ideas in theology, politics, or sexuality.

Narcissism has many guises, and one of the most tiresome is arrogance, a trait you properly decry in your note. There is arrogance in believing that “new” is always “improved,” that one is always more intelligent or on a higher moral level than one’s elders or ancestors. And this is the arrogance that dismisses tradition without even understanding it, and replaces it with fads.

Arrogance, presumption, and narcissism will not lead to an enduring Judaism. Even when we choose to dispense with a particular tradition, the process of religious reevaluation must be grounded in knowledge of what is being rejected. Before one can “think outside the box,” you need to know the contents of the box.

Respectfully Yours, in Peace,

Dan

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