Does Judaism Matter?

Dr. Elliott Malamet

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 1984.

“Time running out/time running out/For the fool still asking what his life is about.”

Jackson Browne, “Black and White,” 1986.

In 1942, the French philosopher Albert Camus was temporarily living in Algeria and published his first work, The Myth of Sisyphus, with its immortal opening: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Camus was not advocating for doing yourself in, but he was pushing the boundary on the question of meaning in a world that seemed absurd. His question, even without any endgame drama, remains our question:

Are there things that really make life worth living?

Thinking about meaning and how can we achieve and integrate it into our lives is central to being human. Yet ask most people and the usual account is that you sort of pick up proper values (or bad ones) from your parents and your peers, and the rest is kind of a mixture of good fortune and cultural exposure. So, as teenagers and then adults, we learn about math and sports, investments and global warming, how to write a job application letter or master the newest technological gadget. The right hair colouring to use and the wrong alleyways to take.

But we are not encouraged to engage the larger existential issues of life.

Indeed, our culture–and not infrequently education reflects this bias– often mocks such inquiries as pretentious or the province of dreamers.

Yet certain basic questions — is it possible to know right from wrong and act upon our conclusions, what is the good life, do the structures in my life help or hinder me in the quest for a meaningful existence — remind us of what is at stake if we do not take seriously the central challenge of meaning. Whether what we pursue is trivial or important, meaningful or futile is not an academic discussion, if by using that word we mean to imply a whiff of snobbery and the taint of irrelevance. Meaning lies at the very heart of what we are dealing with every day, the backdrop to our conversations, our dreams, our disappointments, our sense of the world we inhabit.

What role can religion play in a meaningful life? Part of the answer to such a question depends on what you think religion—Judaism, for instance–is really about. Is it about obedience to the everpresent expectations of an ancient yet current God? Is it about teaching us how to be good, how to forge us into ethical beings who can make a better world? Is it about building a community that can participate in rituals that give people a sense of belonging? All of the above? Or is the truth located somewhere quite different?

I would like to recount something from my personal experience. For several years in the 1990’s I conducted a Shabbat (Sabbath) morning prayer service in Toronto called Pray and Learn. In this work, I focused on bringing people to prayer who had often felt intellectually and emotionally frustrated by their previous prayer experiences. If one of my congregants did not understand something in the service or wanted to ask a question about a particular prayer, or anything at all, we stopped to discuss it, and the people in the congregation participated fully in this discussion. Everything was on the table, including whether the whole idea of a God was an invention of human beings to create a comforting fiction to ward off the stark facts of mortality.

One Shabbat morning, one of the congregants, a very bright and vibrant woman who was converting to Judaism, said to me in tones of bewilderment and urgency: “Dr. Malamet, one of my closest friends is an atheist. She is healthy, has a nice house, a wonderful husband and beautiful children. It’s not that she has anything against religion, it’s just that she almost doesn’t see the point. And I have a hard time telling her why this should matter to her, why it should have any particular importance for her.

What does a person really need God or religion for?”

Over the years I have been asked this question many times in one form or another. It is the key religious and moral question, I think, of contemporary life. Why should I really care about any of this? Why should a spiritual life play a role in my structured and secularized life of work and family and entertainment? To me it is a no brainer question and, you may be surprised to learn, that I believe in many respects it may be unanswerable. Nonetheless, I will tell you what I told her at the time (this took place over the course of several weeks).

The first thing I told her is the rule I have for all religious claims that are metaphysical.

1. No one knows anything.
2. No one knows if God exists, or if there is such a thing as a soul or an afterlife.
3. No one knows anything.

But Judaism is about belief, the hope that there is something beyond the material world.

That our existence is not just limited to what we can see or taste, touch or hear. That love and music and dreams suggest an experience that cannot be contained by a strictly scientific description. But this is all intuition, a glimmer of faith. It is not the cold hard grip of knowing. As the great 18^th century philosopher Immanuel Kant puts it, “We cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.”

I do not think that faith is a dirty word, but faith should be distinguished from common sense empirical experience. Despite some rather amusing philosophical debates, I am quite confident that when my hand touches a chair or a table, that I am not deluded, and that in fact, I have really touched the chair and the table. Not only can faith never be proven, but it would be diminished in the attempt. One should never have to apologize for having a religious belief; the apologies should begin when we assume that our beliefs are facts, and then judge other people for not sharing them.

Can one live a Jewish life, and a meaningful one at that, in the absence of complete or even partial conviction about these Jewish metaphysical claims, claims that God created the world and endowed the Jewish people, and revealed a book called the Torah? I believe that answer is an emphatic yes, but one must get used to living a life of uncertainty, of never knowing fully whether one’s Jewish practices have a basis in some hard and fast reality.

I told my congregant that I practice Judaism not because I am certain of its larger truths, but precisely in the face of my daily doubts. It is not crucial to have dogmatic certainties, but rather to let go and surrender to uncertainty and forge a meaningful life anyway. Belief need not be proven to others through argumentation, but given to oneself through a life of meaning and purpose.

It is this lack of purposefulness that at the end of the day afflicts the souls of many Jews today, who even if they are engaged in Jewish practice frequently do not understand Jewish mission. A stunning example from a book on humanitarianism highlights the kind of paradigms we might present to our students regarding a new vision of Jewish identity. On July 3, 1994, on one of the final days of the Rwandan Genocide, in a hospital in Kigali, Dr. James Orbinski was amputating the leg of a 14 year old boy who had stepped on a land mine. There were no instruments available; all the hospital’s surgical blades were broken. The only available tool was a hacksaw. Dr. Orbinski shaved off the boy’s leg above the knee and then stitched and shaped the tissue. The boy’s leg was gone, but he was alive. “It was,” says Orbinski, “an imperfect offering.” All we have are imperfect offerings, writes Orbinski, with imperfect outcomes.

At the age of nine, living in Montreal, Orbinski saw a television program on the Holocaust with images of bodies and arms with tattooed numbers. The next day, his mother took him to the Jewish section of the city to buy him new shoes. A very kind old man helped him with the shoes and Orbinski, who is not Jewish, noticed the number on the man’s arm. As Orbinski grew older, he knew that what he wanted to do was to help alleviate the suffering of others. Orbinksi speaks of something he calls “living your question,” which he defines as entering into what really draws you in life, what calls you, that is to live your question. Each person needs to find their Jewish question and pursue it and not let it go.

In subsequent posts, we will talk about how to find and pursue your question and how Judaism can be of infinite service in the quest for meaning. Please feel free to write me at ellliott@livingjewishly.org and share your thoughts, ideas and experiences.