Individualized Religion Beit Midrash Session

8/14/2019 Individualized Religion Beit Midrash Session

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Beit Midrash Session

How can we live halachic lives in 21st century

America without compromising our values of individualexpression and religious autonomy? What room is there to

individualize halacha?

Sources contributed byRabbi Jacob J. SchacterCompiled by Aaron Steinberg

Eimatai Leadership Development Project2007 Spring Conference


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Personalized Religion

Sheilaism

Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and

describes her faith as "Sheilaism." This suggests the logical possibility of

more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us. "I believe in

God," Sheila says. "I am not a religious fanatic. [Notice at once that in our

culture any strong statement of belief seems to imply fanaticism so you have

to offset that.] I cant remember the last time I went to church. My faith has

carried me a long way. Its Sheilaism. Just my own little voice." Sheilas

faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many. In defining

what she calls "my own Sheilaism," she said: "Its just try to love yourself

and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. Ithink God would want us to take care of each other." Like many others,

Sheila would be willing to endorse few more specific points.

I am glad that Sheila does have at least a second point besides taking care

of herself and loving others and I suspect that that is a remnant of something

she learned somewhere else earlier on.

But the case of Sheila is not confined to people who havent been to church in a long

time. On the basis of our interviews, and a great deal of other data, I think we can say that

many people sitting in the pews of Protestant and even Catholic churches are Sheilaistswho feel that religion is essentially a private matter and that there is no particularconstraint on them placed by the historic church, or even by the Bible and the tradition.

Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, 1985), 221.


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Contemporary American Religion

A high level of personal autonomy creates an expanded menu of choices.

Many people, and especially those not very well grounded in any religioustradition, feel free to explore religious and spiritual alternatives. Many are

seekers not in some narrow meaning of that work, but in the sense of being

curious about how to enrich their lives. Even faithful followers within a

tradition are looking for ways of cultivating their spiritual life and learning

more about their own heritage. Broadly within American culture, there is

concern about the self, about personal growth and well-being. Religious life

is understood less as a stable identity and more as a process of development

and enrichment. This being the case, it is not surprising that the religious

themes people draw upon in their searching will be eclectic involving

psychological, popular spiritual, ideological, mass-media, and traditionalreligious notions. If we think of religious culture as a script and of the

contemporary world as consisting of multiple religious subscripts, then we

can appreciate the complexity of people drawing selectively off those

subscripts as they arrive at their own conceptions of themselves. Or

alternatively, the religious event horizon not just the number of religious

groups, but popular cultural styles and definitions of spiritual need has

expanded, producing a religious landscape with many new alternatives.Wade Clark Roof, Contemporary American Religion (New York, 2000), viii

Jews Too?

The principal authority for contemporary American Jews, in the absence of

compelling religious norms and communal loyalties, has become the

sovereign self. Each person now performs the labor of fashioning his or her

own self, pulling together elements from the various Jewish and non-Jewish

repertoires available, rather than stepping into an inescapable framework

of identity (familial, communal, traditional) given at birth. Decisions about

ritual observance and involvement in Jewish institutions are made and made

again, considered and reconsidered, year by year and even week by week.American Jews speak of their lives, and of their Jewish beliefs and

commitments, as a journey of ongoing questioning and development. They

avoid the language of arrival. There are no final answers, no irrevocable

commitments.


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Steven M. Cohen and Harold Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America.

(Bloomington, 2000), 2.

But What about Halacha?

The principal word in Jewish law, which occupies a place equivalent inevocative force to the American legal systems rights, is the word

mitzvah which literally means commandment, but has a general meaning

closer to incumbent obligation. All law was given at Sinai, and

therefore all law is related back to the heteronymous event.

Story TimeHalacha can demand a lot at times, not

just shoelace tying

Rabbi Soloveitchik speaking of his wifes passing:

The Torah requires of the Jew that he emulate the concept oftzimtzum, or

withdrawal and self-limitation. At times he must even be capable of

withdrawing from himself. Let me give you an example of this from my own

experience.

My wife died on the Fast of Esther. It was a Thursday. She was buried on

Friday. I was very attached to her, and part of myself went into the grave

with her. I came home, took off my shoes, and sat down on the floor. I began

to observe the seven days of mourning. This observance was therapeutic for


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me. The fact that I could sit down on the floor and cry was redemptive and

therapeutic.

Suddenly it was Sunday and Purim had arrived. I had to get up from the

shivah observance, put on my shoes, and celebrate Purim. Did I have the

strength to do this? No. But theHalakhah required it. This was tzimtzum.

So are we mindless robots who go through actions

were told to do?

I learned from my mother very much. Most of all I learned that Judaism

expresses itself not only in formal compliance with the law, but also in a

living experience. She taught me that there is a flavor, a scent, and warmth

to mitzvoth The laws of Shabbat, for instance, were passed on to me bymy father The Shabbat as a living entity, as a queen, was revealed to me

by my mother The fathers knew much about the Shabbat; the mothers

livedthe Shabbat, experienced her presence, and perceived her beauty.

R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, A Tribute to the Rebbetzin of Talne.

This is exactly our greatest need in the United States to feel and

experience Gods presence. It is not enough to eat Matzo; we must feel the

experience of Matzo. One should not only study Torah, but should actually

experience it as a great drama and redeeming act which purges thepersonality.

R. Joseph B Soloveitchik

So we should think about it, but arent we all going to

be thinking the same thing?

By spirituality I mean the intention we bring to our religious acts, the

focusing of our mind and thoughts on the transcendent, the entire range ofmindfulness whether simple awareness of what we are doing, in contrast to

rote performance, or elaborate mystical meditations that spells a groping

for the Source of all existence and the Giver of Torah.

The contrast between the two spirituality and law is almost self-evident.

Spirituality is subjective; the very fact of its inwardness implies a certain


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degree of anarchy; it is unfettered and self-directed, impulsive and

spontaneous. In contrast, law is objective; it requires discipline, structure,

obedience, order. Yet both are necessary.

The life of spirit need not be chaotic and undisciplined; the life of law,

similarly, need not exclude the pulsing heart and soaring soul of the religious

individual. In Judaism, spirituality is not antinomian, that is, the opposite of

law and a structured approach to our duty under God. Halakha, a way of

life, does not preclude the participation of the heart and a deepening

inwardness. In Judaism, each side spirit and law shows understanding for

the other; we are not asked to choose one over the other, but to practice a

proper balance that respects and reconciles the demands of each.

R. Dr. Norman Lamm, The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism (Philadelphia, 1998), 6-7

Halakha describes the manner in which the practice of a mitzvah is to be

undertaken. That is, while there are established modes of religious behavior,

there are no established modes of religious sensibility, religious experience,

or measures of moving ever closer to God. Here uniqueness reigns. Every

halakhic act is accompanied by practice of the heart a personal,

subjective religious component. The objective act is standard and

unchanging; the practice is various and multifaceted.

Dr. Isadore Twersky


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So I can think whatever I want as Im performing a

mitzvah?

This is an interesting question worth pondering; are there, indeed,

authoritative guidelines or boundaries to religion in essence?

I offered an option for the symbolism of the arba minim. The Torah (read:

God) did not just require taking a lulav and etrogon Sukkot; it required

bringing together a green object with a yellow one. Someone with a

particular affinity for art and color and a special appreciation for the

combination of green and yellow could, I suggested, see the beauty of Gods

creation in this manner as well that would enhance his or her performance

(read: religion in essence) of this mitzvah.

A student asked if this idea about the colors was found in the midrash, and

when I said that I dont think it mattered, she disagreed and felt that even the

religion of essence of a mitzvah needs to be anchored to a rabbinic source

of some kind and cannot be totally left to ones personal creativity or

originality.

Is this an acceptable authentic expression of religion in essence? Even if it

may not be, however, and here I tend to agree, my point is still, I believe,

well taken. There isstillroom for a great deal of personal autonomy and

individual choice in the overall world of religious authority, even givenlimitations to what may be considered appropriate religion in essence.

Dr. Twersky writes about halakhic monism and spiritual pluralism. Within

the large albeit, perhaps, somewhat limited area of unscripted essence

of mitzvah observance, individuality reigns, and it is this, precisely, that

allows for strict punctilious attention to its details and structures.

R. Jacob J. Schacter


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Final Word

The Turcites a midrashic statement that when the Torah refers to the 15th

of

Tishrei as the first day, as in And you shall take for yourselves on the

first day (Vayikra 23:40), it means to indicate that it considers the first dayof Sukkot to be the first day of the counting of sins of the new year. After

all, until then the Jew is constantly engaged in mitzvoth repentance during

the aseret yemei teshuva and building a Sukkah and procuring arba minim

from immediately after Yom Kippur until Sukkot. But, asks the Taz, what

about the fact that on the first day of Sukkot Jews are actuallyfulfillingthe

mitzvoth ofsukkah and arba minim? Why is building or procuring the item

more contradictory to sin than actually performing the mitzvah itself?

The author of the Sefat Emetpresents a very interesting answer that is

directly relevant here. He suggests that, indeed, preparing for a mitzvah is

even more exalted than performing it, and this for two reasons: 1) The

performance of a mitzvah is a one-time act whereas the preparation is for all

eternity. Preparing oneself to be in an appropriate frame of mind in order

properly to do a mitzvah is an on-going, full time enterprise.

2) While it is impossible to fulfill a mitzvah properly (mi yukhal le-kayyem

ha-mitzvah ki-mishpatah), feeling the desire to follow the will of God and

engaging in the preparations to do so are always proper and appropriate.

Mitzvah thoughts which a person thinks and, through which, desires tofulfill the commandment of God, may he be blessed, is better than the

mitzvah itself, he writes.

Here, once again, while the mitzvah act is scripted and defined, ones

hakhanah for it is not. There is no given or prescribed way of preparing for a

mitzvah; each person does so in his or her own unique and individual way.

And, in this case, the author of the Sefat Emetgoes so far as to say that the

unscripted is even better, more exalted, than the scripted!

Indeed, the fundamental awareness that multiple pockets of autonomy

exist and even flourish in the world of divine halakhic authority will lead

to a greater ability to submit to Gods will and accept the yoke of His

commandments.

R. Jacob J Schacter

Documents

Individualized Religion Beit Midrash Session