New York — As a Jewish journalist, I’m privy to the deluge of decadent press releases sent by Jewish organizations hoping to wrangle a wee bit of press coverage for their sometimes silly and often self-indulgent new ventures. In the decade I’ve been in the biz, there has been no stupider an idea than the one that came across my desk about two weeks ago.
For thousands of years, Judaism has survived on one basic tenet: Religious belief in the Almighty. That’s what makes us Jewish. We believe God is omnipotent and that He gave the Torah to Moses at Mt. Sinai. That is the fundamental core of our faith. Anyone who believes otherwise, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Don’t get me wrong. Belief in the Sinai revelation is a difficult pill to swallow and has incredible ramifications on our daily life. To discard it as mere midrash would be easy, if not tempting.
How much easier life would be if we could justify our religious inadequacy. If God didn’t actually give the Torah and its commandments to our great-grandparents, then we wouldn’t feel so guilty every time we violated it. If only.
Well, for those lazy Jews who opt not to follow God’s commandments, a new organization may be — forgive the pun — a Godsend. A recent issue of Jewsweek reported on the launch of the Center for Cultural Judaism in New York. The organization, founded on the results of a questionable survey, hopes to wash away all your guilt by providing a place where Jews can go and not feel guilty about violating God’s Torah.
The article read like something out of the parody newspaper The Onion, with quotes from organizers saying how great Judaism would be if only it would just lose the religious side of it.
Not about gefilte fish
I want to be perfectly clear here: The Center for Cultural Judaism is absolutely, without a doubt, hands down, the stupidest idea to come out of the birthing canal of institutional Judaism in the last decade. In no uncertain terms, the CCJ is not only a bad idea, but it will prove to actually be detrimental to the future of the Jewish people.
Bereft of any serious substance or religiosity, the center will only help promulgate the assimilationist notion of being Jewish in America. Bagels and lox do not a religion make.
We were not persecuted by Rome because we all enjoyed klezmer. We were not persecuted by Spain because we liked “Seinfeld,” and we were not targeted by the Nazis because we danced the hora.
By now we should all know that Judaism is not a gastronomic religion. It’s not about the gefilte fish.
The Torah says keep kosher. Anyone who doesn’t keep kosher is somehow justifying their motives to themselves — it’s not important to me, these silly laws don’t apply in the year 2003. The same thing goes for observing Shabbat or praying three times a day.
When we don’t follow God’s commandments, we are nothing more than lazy Jews.
There’s no if, ands or buts about it.
You can counter that you’re on your synagogue board, you read Jewish books and you give money to Israeli causes. All well and good, but here’s a newsflash for you: Judaism is made of two components — deed and creed.
We can be involved in intellectual debate about Jewish causes from now until kosher pigs fly, but if we don’t follow some basic commandments like praying three times a day then we are lazy Jews. There’s not an excuse in the world you can come up with that would satisfy God when He asks you: Did you pray three times today?
However, the bottom line, as the CCJ found out in its survey, is that most Jews don’t care about these things. I won’t argue with that as I myself sometimes fall into some of those categories. But make no bones about it: That’s not a good thing nor something we should be heralding with a new center.
The absence of serious spirituality and study marks the end of millennia of Jewish thought and tradition. I, for one, am not happy about that. To say Judaism is just a messy amalgam of cultural icons is robbing us of our deep heritage.
One of the things separating Judaism from other religions is that, at its core, it’s fundamentally based on the teachings of previous generations. Unlike other religions, which may “make up” new ceremonies and traditions on a whim, Judaism has Torah, the Mishnah and the Talmud to guide us through our spiritual lives until the end of time.
The answer to any religious question, no matter how mundane or modern, can be found in those texts.
This center’s launch is a bellwether event in our generation — and I don’t mean that in a nice way. The sheer waste of our community’s resources on such a project is absolutely mind-boggling.
The CCJ already started and opened its doors so it’s too late to stop it from launching. But if enough of us protest its work, perhaps its organizers will come to see the astonishing error of their ways.
Jonathan Applebaum writes from New York. This article originally appeared in Jewsweek Magazine and is reprinted by permission.
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