WHAT WE DO IN THE NAME OF JUDAISM THAT DESECRATES JUDAISM

Being away from home for the Holy Days seemed only to amplify the most woeful meaning of “away from home.” I found no consolation in knowing that nowadays various forms of familial apartness make my own story all too typical. Moreover, the world has become an increasingly hostile place, full of contentiousness, mean-spiritedness, and cruel anonymity. The need for at-home-ness has become a full-blown emergency.

Where do we take refuge? One would hope that turning toward ones faith-community would provide some modicum of gentle kindness. We cannot deny that our Torah mandates that the community be a taproot of compassion, acceptance, and an antidote for the cold world “out there.”

How grievous is it when Judaism reneges on its calling and becomes a grotesque caricature of a hostile society? What happens when Judaism itself become the source of belligerence, even cruelty? What happens when its spokespeople become ludicrous mimics of the sanctimonious meanness of El Rushbo and Ann Coulter – and, lest we be accused of leaning leftward – James Carville and Al Franken?

How nice if Jewish compassion would come instinctively via Jewish inbreeding. It does not. It must be learned from the pulpit, yeshivot, seminaries, federations, teachers, periodicals, lay leadership, et al. More significantly, so must its negation, and it seems that negation is the order of the day.

A young ba’al teshuvah who went off to study in a respected yeshiva called me to report a dilemma and its proposed resolution. His niece was having her Bat Mitzvah at a Reform temple. Her parents were going through an ugly divorce, and the family was distraught. His rosh yeshiva had instructed him not to attend, given the prohibition among some Orthodox Jews against entering a Reform temple. What did I think?

I told him, “You should absolutely attend. As the only frummeh Yid – pious Jew – in the family, it would be a kiddush Ha-Shem – a sanctification of God’s name – for you to serve as conciliator, kindly presence, and promoter of shalom bayit. What a profound message about the essence of Jewish piety.”

Well, he brought this argument to his rosh yeshiva, then called to tell me that his rosh yeshiva had counseled him to tell the family that he would attend, then to call them a day before the Bat Mitzvah to tell them he had taken sick and could not be there.

“Your rosh yeshiva told you to lie?” Silence. “So, he believes that God is such a jerk that He is more pleased by lying and pouring frum salt on your family’s festering wound than by your being a peacemaker and Jewish symbol of compassion? Tell him that the God in whom I believe is not a jerk!” Did he attend? You guess.

Sadly, it is not an isolated incident. I have attended plenty of synagogues, shiurim, and lectures, rabbis’ eyes glinting with contemptuous smugness. The ratio of harangues to preachments about lovingkindness and against social injustice is at best four-to-one. The harangues are not all about Bin Laden and Arafat. They are more likely about entities at odds with their own vested interests, dogma, and worldview.

And, God knows, the mean-spiritedness is not merely public. It pervades private conversation as well – salacious gossip, rumormongering, defamation. One particularly embittering example: A prominent rav and posek who had never met a friend of mine nonetheless denigrated him behind his back for his divorce, not knowing, ironically, that he was speaking to a family member.

Neither is bellicosity the exclusive province of orthodoxy. If you have read Fried’s The New Rabbi or been privy to machinations of the other Jewish movements, you know that pettiness, backstabbing, ruthlessness, xenophobia, and bureaucratic intrigue are broadly nondenominational. Likewise, most congregations’ policies are long on hardnosed business processes and woefully short on basic compassion. All this contentiousness does not promote, but only impedes, the essential divine mission to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” If your congregation and rabbi have done better, then consider yourself blessed, but also know that, sadly, you are the exception, not the rule.

At this moment you may indict me for the same kind of belligerence. I can defend myself only by responding that mine is a belligerence against belligerence. I have just delivered four High Holy Day sermons calling for a return to a “kinder, gentler” Judaism, as God, the Prophets, and the Sages had intended.

Might you challenge your rabbi and religious movement to do the same and to keep preaching and practicing it all year long? Sure, you and I will foul up along the way, let ego, anger, and nastiness get the better of us. Yet, as we so often tell our Christian questioners, God does not demand our perfection, just our continuing upward climb.

The plaintive refrain to one of the Shabbos zemiros beckons, “From whence will we find respite? From whence will we find joy?” The storms of life “out there” batter us and demean us with cold anonymity. The monsters abound. What a cruel nightmare when we think we have escaped the monsters by taking refuge in our Judaism, slam the door shut, then turn around only to find that the very same monsters are right in there with us.

We wake up screaming. We should be screaming. We should demand better. God certainly does.