For many people, I suspect, Judaism without tribalism won’t sound like Judaism at all. That’s because Judaism– at least as my friend Rami Shapiro and I understand it– may best be thought of less as a religion than the way we get over religion.
Think about it. Our Torah doesn’t tell the story of the founding of a religion. It’s about our escape from an empire of slaves controlled by death cults. We are rescued from Egypt, or mitzrayim– not just “the narrow place” imprisoning Israelite bodies, but a narrow mindset imprisoning Israelite hearts and souls.
And how do we get out of there? The plagues, each of which represents the desecration of another Egyptian god. Blood desecrates the Nile, a god. Locusts desecrate the corn god, and so on, until we get to the ultimate desecration. In April, the Egyptian New Year, when everyone is supposed to be worshipping a ram, what do the Israelites do? Kill a lamb as a sacrifice– an abomination in Egypt– and then put the blood on the door, as if to publicize the fact.
Out to the desert we run. For forty years we walk around out there, not to create a new religion but to wean ourselves off the need for idols, and beliefs, and any religiosity at all. The whole generation of “believers” has to die off. Sure, we build an Ark of the Covenant, and it’s pretty much like the Egyptian arks we built before as slaves. But there’s one key difference: there’s no god up on the top. Rather, there’s an empty space guarded by two fierce cherubs. We get no “thing” to worship, and those cherubs are going to make certain of it.
Sure, occasionally we go crazy and try to shove something into that empty space. Moses can’t turn his back for a minute before we’re crafting a golden calf of one kind or another. And even today, we try to deify silly things like money and power, or even important things like education or Israel. But none of them are gods.
No, our deity is so unknowable, unseeable, unnamable that it may as well not be there at all. That may be the whole point. Judaism invites us to take our gaze off the idealized icon in the sky– however temporarily reassuring– and place it on one another.
Yes, we are the real prize, here. We people. Our families, communities, friends, neighbors– and even those people over there who we don’t quite understand and certainly don’t agree with.
Living in a tradition like this, as Tevye reminded us, isn’t easy. It requires constant improvisation and adaptation to new circumstances, grounded only in the wisdom of the generations that preceded us. Our Talmudic laws may be helpful guideposts, but our morality comes in the moment, spontaneously emerging from our conscience. And this conscience, this moral sensibility, is what we learn from our stories, our community, our experiences, our holidays, and our parents.
Judaism without tribalism requires us to abandon the idols and icons, brands and beliefs on which we might prefer to rely as we navigate a course through the strange, modern world. But these symbols are not up to the challenge. They’re dead, static traps– artifacts of fear and desire– and not at all relevant to lived experience of Jewishness.
I’ve always found it telling that the five books of the Torah– the first and most sacred books of the Bible– end before the Israelites make it into Canaan. The story leaves them in the desert, as if to make sure we understand that this is the truest and most essential state of being for a Jew. In between here and there, this and that, the narrow place and the promised land. Always in between, always in motion, always alive, and– if we do it right– always in love.
With love,
Douglas Rushkoff
New York City