History Versus Mythology

Because of my personal history and psychological makeup, I have thought a great deal about the difference between being a religious person and a secular person. In some ways I am both, unable to come down squarely on either side.

I grew up in an unequivocally secular Jewish family. My parents never mentioned God. My father was an absolute rationalist, but my mother, though not religious, had a strong sense of identification with the Jewish people, and she sent me to Hebrew school when I was about eleven, in preparation for my Bar-Mitzvah, which was, for her and myself, confirmation of my Jewish identity. My father went along with it. The Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Reconstructionist synagogue where I had my Jewish education was essentially atheist. We were not taught to believe in a “personal” God, since Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, called God “the power that makes for salvation.” This is not a concept that can inspire a young person or infuse him with religious faith. The concept of salvation was meaningless to me.

Nevertheless, I took on my mother's identification with the Jewish people. Since I was born in the end of 1944, when the Second World War and the Holocaust were still going on, in my youth I was strongly affected by knowledge of the destruction of European Jewry, though, again, I don't remember my parents discussing the subject with me. Perhaps it was so evident to them that they didn't feel the need to bring it up. Our immediate family was spared the Holocaust, because my grandparents and almost everyone in their families emigrated from Lithuania to the United States before the end of the nineteenth century. But I couldn't help knowing that the Nazis had tried to destroy the entire Jewish people, and I regarded the strengthening of Judaism as a retroactive act of defiance against the them.

I have only two specific memories connected with my awareness of the Holocaust from the time I was high school age. The first concerns a book of photographs of the liberated death camps in Europe, showing piles of emaciated corpses. Someone in my Hebrew school class brought a copy, and it was passed from one of us to another – not by a teacher as part of a class, but among ourselves. The shock of seeing those murdered Jewish people was indelible. The other powerful memory was left by André Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just, which I read in French, since I was an outstanding student of French in high school. I identified with the hero of the book, which I only remember dimly, and it heightened my loyalty to the Jewish people.

Because of that loyalty, I attended synagogue intermittently during college and spent the summer of 1967 in Israel as a volunteer on a kibbutz during the Six Day War. Evidently, judging by my later life, although some of these currents in my soul were subterranean, barely discussed and hardly evident in my behavior, they were very powerful.

In finding a marriage partner, it was very important for me that she be Jewish, in part to please my mother, who would have been sorry to see me marry a gentile. Why? All I remember her saying was that it would make married life easier – not that the survival of the Jewish people depended on avoiding intermarriage. There were intermarriages in our family, and we were friendly enough with the non-Jewish spouses of our relatives. But what was tolerated for cousins would not have been tolerable for me.

To skip the tedious details, in 1973 I ended up in Israel, married to Jewish woman, with a baby daughter, and my family and I gradually joined the (orthodox) religious community in Jerusalem. For many years I was a rather observant orthodox Jew, wearing a kipa, praying daily, eating only kosher food, observing the Sabbath and holidays, and sending my children to religious schools. My reasons for adopting this style of life never had to do with belief that the Torah was divine or that the commandments reflected the will of God. Being an immigrant, I needed an entrée into Israeli society, and I saw orthodox practice as the ticket of admission. I was also intellectually curious about Jewish texts and customs, we had many orthodox friends, and Jewish observance gave our family life structure and stability. By becoming observant, we became affiliated with a wonderful community, some of our closest friends in the past three or four decades.

Gradually, however, I began to think that without religious belief, religious practice was empty – though I'm still not sure about this. I am sure, however, that it became impossible for me to identify with values characteristic of most if not all members of the orthodox Jewish community: political conservatism, chauvinism, xenophobia, focus on driving the Arabs out of Palestine, discrimination against women, and homophobia. If behaving as if I were an orthodox Jew is a sign of identification with that community, forget it. Another feature of Jewish orthodoxy is acceptance of rabbinical authority, something I never did. The only kind of question I would ever ask a rabbi would be a very specific technical question about a detail of religious observance, and I can't even think of an example now. I certainly would never have asked a rabbi whether it was okay to eat fish in a restaurant that wasn't kosher. I knew it wasn't okay, but I did it anyway, even when I was taking kashrut pretty seriously.

Identity is a central element in religiosity. It is not a tautology to state that a religious person conceives of herself as a religious person. Participating in religious ceremonies, sharing religious beliefs, wearing certain kinds of clothes, eating or refraining from eating certain kinds of foods, using a certain kind of language – all of these are part of who the religious person is. This is true of Muslims, Jews, and Roman Catholics, whose religions require a regimen of specific behavior, as well as of Quakers, let's say, of whom one of their web sites proclaims: “Friends reject traditional, outward ceremonies and sacraments, sometimes characterized as 'empty forms.'”

In addition to identity, as demonstrated both to others and to oneself by adherence to certain behavioral norms, and the sense that observance of these norms is an expression of who one essentially is, religiosity denies historicity, and this is where we part company, for I am a child of the Enlightenment.

I earned a PhD in Comparative Literature, and my period of concentration was the late Renaissance, the sixteenth century. I chose to study that period, because I regarded it as the key to the uniqueness of Western European civilization, and I still think the Renaissance marked the beginning of the deep cultural change that gradually led, during the following two hundred years, to modern Western culture. There are three interconnected reasons for this. During the Renaissance the intellectual style of humanism emerged; critical rationalism began to take hold; and people became aware of historical change and the need to explain it. The last of these three developments most interests me at the moment.

To generalize much too broadly, early in the Renaissance thinkers noticed the discontinuities between ancient Roman civilization, medieval Christian culture, and their own times. Seeing themselves as a new kind of people, they rejected medieval philosophy and theology, and they sought to understand history not as the working out of a divine plan, but as the consequence of historical forces, forces that could and should be analyzed and understood in human and natural terms.

Gradually the idea that all the phenomena in the universe are historical took hold in every area of intellectual life in the West. We now believe that the universe itself has a history, that events are not caused by acts of God, but by previous events, and, in turn, they give rise to subsequent events. The explanation of why things happened in a certain way is to be sought empirically, not metaphysically. For secular people today this assumption is self-evident, even axiomatic. However, the consequences of this idea were revolutionary, because it implies that the Bible, too, has a history, as do all religions. If this is so, then the story the Bible tells about itself, and the explanation that events occur because God intervenes in history, cannot be true. Or, at the very least, they must be subjected to the same kind of critical evaluation we apply to any other historical account. The secular historian does not resort to the will of God to explain events, except, perhaps, as some vague and abstract “first cause,” since, given our assumptions about the universe, we believe that something must have given rise to the Big Bang.

I subscribe wholeheartedly to this view of history. Any claim, for example, that AIDS is God's way of punishing homosexuals and drug users, or that natural disasters are meant to teach us something about God's will, or that diseases such as Parkinson's or pancreatic cancer are connected to our accounting with God disgusts me. I don't believe Jewish claims that God chose the Jews and gave them the Torah and gave the Promised Land, or that Jesus is the son of God and died to save our souls, and I can't understand how anyone who subscribes to the secular understanding of history can take such claims seriously except as important historical objects, highly influential myths, stories humans have made up about the ways of the world. Like any other historical object or event, these myths demand a historical explanation, because so many people believed them in the past and still believe them today.

But why do people believe them, despite centuries of critical historical study, the development of science, and tons of evidence? Because the secular view makes history meaningless to anyone but ourselves. Historical events only matter to us humans, the people who live through them, remember them, and try to understand them. “History” is not an entity or force that is going anywhere in particular. History, with a capital 'H,' is an artificial construct. Events just happen for reasons inherent in themselves.

Now, why do I, a person who firmly believes that the secular view of history is correct, attend synagogue services, recite prayers, listen to the reading of the Bible, and even study Jewish religious texts? The reasons are essentially emotional – a statement that I acknowledge to be an oxymoron.

Let me begin by stating that I enjoy attending services (though not all the time, and not when they drag on too long). I like the singing, I like reading the beautiful Hebrew of the texts, and I like the feeling of fellowship that participation in prayers offers me. When I am praying in the synagogue, I belong to a virtual community with two dimensions in time: the Jewish people for the past two thousand years or more, my ancestors, and a real community, my fellow worshipers, those immediately present and those performing the same ceremonies at the same time elsewhere.

Reciting the prayers with a congregation is a collective performance, like playing a part in a play, the part of a religious Jew. Religion in general can be viewed as a collective work of art, and you don't have to believe in the empirical truth of a work of art to enjoy it in the deepest sense. Indeed, the Jewish religious view of the world as having a meaningful history, which is headed in the direction of final redemption, has much in common with art. Works of art have authors and creators, just as the universe, in the religious view, has an Author and a Creator. The details in a work of narrative art are placed there intentionally, for the purpose of advancing the plot, shedding light on characters and their motivations, and also for compositional, structural reasons. A religious person believes that this is also true of everything placed in the world by its Creator.

My reason knows that this is not true, in the sense that there are better explanations for what is in the world, and also because so many catastrophic events in the world make it impossible for me to believe in that they have been planned and executed by a merciful god. However, I cannot help wishing it were true. If only the world were the way the prayers say it is!

Prayer rescues me from cynicism, reminding me that there are values worth hoping and striving for. I can't define holiness, but I do believe that if we consistently regarded life as holy, we could make the world better.

 Prayer also puts me in contact with the mythical dimension of human consciousness, and a major flaw in the attitude of categorical opponents of religion is their deafness to that dimension. If we secular humanists accept Terence's dictum, that nothing human is alien to us, we cannot ignore the powerful effect of the symbols of mythology in our own lives, as rational as we may wish to be, nor can we understand the behavior of those who don't subscribe to our understanding of the world, surely the vast majority of people on earth. No rational argument can persuade a billion Hindus that their gods don't exist, a billion Muslims that Muhammad couldn't possible have heard the words of Allah, or a billion Christians that Jesus wasn't really the messiah. If we think that aspects of these beliefs are damaging, we should try to avert that damage, but dismissing the entire business of religion as balderdash is fruitless. So, praying with other Jews keeps me open. Open to what? I found it impossible to finish that sentence and answer that question. I'm still thinking about it.