On Being Secular Jewish.

What can that possibly mean?

Burton Weltman

 

Prologue: Secularism as Judaism/Judaism as Secularism.

The purpose of this essay is to offer briefly some suggestions as to what it means to be secular Jewish.  I identify as secular Jewish, as did my father and mother and their parents before them, and as do my son and daughter and their children.  So, that’s five generations of secular Jewish people in America.  Recent polls show that some two-thirds of people in America who identify as Jewish consider themselves religious to some degree, albeit mostly Reform and not observant of the Kosher and Sabbath regulations.  About one-third identify as secular, and secularism is on the rise.  That is gratifying to those of us who identify as secular.

What is not gratifying is that when asked to describe their Jewishness, most secularists will say that they are non-religious Jews.  That is, they identify their Jewishness in negative terms, as what they aren’t instead of what they are.  It is a weak response and an empty position that characterizes secularism as a lesser form of Judaism and secularists as lesser Jews.  It is a response that is not warranted by Jewish history.  The goal of this essay is to suggest a stronger response that describes secular Judaism in positive terms and contends that the core of Judaism is secular.

A Matter of Language: Jew or Jewish/ Noun or Adjective.

First, let me say that I prefer to use the adjective “Jewish” rather than the noun “Jew,” and to refer to myself as a Jewish person rather than as a Jew.  I think that calling someone a Jew puts the person in a box with a label on it as though that’s all the person is.  In my case, being Jewish is just one of the many ways that I think of myself and describe myself.   It is one of the most important ways, but I am also white, old, American, partly New Jerseyan, partly Chicagoan, and many other things that are important in describing who I am and what I am.

And I don’t think it is healthy to call myself a Jew because it has the effect of implying that I am categorically different from people who are Christian or Muslim or whatever.  As though we have nothing in common.  So, I prefer to refer to myself as a Jewish person as distinguished, for example, from a Christian person, but we are both persons.  In turn, unless other people insist on referring to themselves as Jews, I prefer to refer to them as Jewish people.  It can be awkward and cumbersome to avoid using the noun “Jew,” and I frequently lapse into using it.  But I think it is better to talk about people as being Jewish rather than as Jews.

Being Jewish: Torah and Community – A Jewish Way to the Golden Rule.

There are two main ways that most people seem to think about being Jewish.  One is to see Judaism as a religion that focuses on worshiping God.  The other is to see Judaism as a culture and to focus on Jewish history, literature, and ethics.  This is also called secular Judaism.

There are also two main things that most people seem to think make you Jewish, whether you are religious or cultural.  The first is to see the Torah or Jewish Bible, what Christian people call the Old Testament, as the starting point of Jewishness.  The second is to be part of a Jewish community.

As to the Torah, Jewish people have often been called a people of The Book.  That book is the Torah.  Most religiously Jewish people see the Torah as some kind of sacred text, full of holy rules to be followed and holy heroes to be celebrated.  It is at the center of their Jewishness and the core of their beliefs.  Most culturally Jewish people see the Torah as a book of fictional stories that tell us what the founders of Judaism wanted us to think about when we think about being Jewish.  They don’t treat it as a sacred book, or as a book full of rules to be followed or heroes to be merely celebrated.  It is, instead, a cultural touchstone for people who have lived in many lands and among many different peoples over the last two thousand years, and who have used the Torah as a common cultural reference point.

Compiled around the fifth and fourth centuries BCE from folk tales, legends, and religious traditions that had been passed down orally for many generations, the Torah is from a cultural perspective a bunch of stories about our beginnings as Jewish people much as stories about the Pilgrims are about our beginnings as American people, except that while stories about the Pilgrims may be exaggerated and even full of untruths, the Torah stories are almost completely untrue.  They are about ancestors of the Jewish people who probably never existed and events that never happened, but that still constitute a background for Jewish cultural history.

The characters in the Torah stories are called Hebrews and Israelites. They are not like the Jewish people who composed the Torah, let alone like any Jewish people today.  And their religious and cultural practices were different than those of the people who composed the Torah, and are completely unlike those of Jewish people today.  They are, nonetheless, portrayed in the Torah as doing and saying things that are a foundation of what we are and what we do.  This is a complicated idea – fictional stories about fictional ancestors that contain important ideas about ourselves.  But who said that being Jewish was supposed to be simple?

Whatever some religious people may say, the stories in the Torah cannot be taken as the literal truth, and they seemingly were not intended by the founders of Judaism to be taken as literal truth.  The Torah is full of too many contradictions, too many things whose meaning is not clear, and too many things that are just not acceptable to a decent person.  The people who composed the Torah were not stupid.  They could see these things, and they had to have deliberately put these things in The Book.

So, what does it say about us that our Hebrew and Israelite precursors are portrayed in the Torah in this way?  What are we supposed to think about these things?   The Torah is full of things about which Jewish people have to reflect, and about which they have historically debated with each other.  For culturally Jewish people, the Torah mainly raises questions for debate rather than provides answers.  And, that debating is seemingly what the founders intended to promote when they composed the Torah, and it is one of the keys to being Jewish.

The Torah opens, for example, with two different creation stories, one right after the other in the Book of Genesis.  You cannot say which one is literally true, so you just have to try to figure out why the founders of Judaism put these inconsistent stories in their book.

Nor can you follow many of the rules in the Torah.  For example, the Torah says that disobedient children should be stoned to death.  That is not something we can accept, nor does it seem that the founders expected us to.

Likewise, no one practices the religion described in the Torah anymore, not even the most religious Jewish people.  The religion in the Torah is based on sacrificing animals and vegetables to God on an altar in a temple.  No one does that anymore, and they would be considered silly if they did.

Finally, the main characters in the Torah – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon and all the others – they do good things but they all also do lots of bad things.  They lie, cheat, steal, are guilty of murder, and occasionally commit genocide.  Whatever some religious people say, culturally Jewish people generally say that these guys are not to be idolized or blindly copied.

These Hebrew and Israelite ancestors need to be critiqued, not idealized, and that just makes Judaism like almost any other culture.  The truth about the ancestors of most cultures is a mixed bag of good and bad, including our American culture.  The European people who came to America and who massacred Native American people, enslaved African people, oppressed women, and did other nefarious things, are our ancestors as American people.  We do not want to be like them in these negative ways, but they are still our ancestors and what they were like and what they did – the bad as well as the good – are things we have to understand in order to understand who we are as American people.  The same goes for the Hebrew and Israelite precursors of the Jewish people, and especially because they were fictional representations of what the founders of Judaism wanted us to think of as our ancestors.

So, what is the point of the Torah?  Rabbi Hillel, who was an older contemporary of Jesus and possibly Jesus’ teacher, and who is widely credited as the founder of modern Judaism, once supposedly summarized the message of the Torah by reciting a version of the Golden Rule: “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.”  That is seemingly the key meaning of the Torah for both religious and secular Jewish people.

And focusing on the Golden Rule as a key to being Jewish puts us in good company.  Almost every major religion and culture in the world has some version of the Golden Rule in its philosophy.  Each of these religions and cultures arrives at it in a somewhat different way, and the maxim can be stated in different ways.  But all of them share the core idea of the Golden Rule – of caring for others – as a key to being a good human being.  For culturally Jewish people, thinking about the Torah – the good, the bad, and the ridiculous – is our Jewish way of getting to the Golden Rule which is the core of our Jewish culture.  And that is why thinking about the Torah is the first thing that makes one Jewish.

The second thing that makes one Jewish is a commitment to the Jewish community.  For religious Jews, this commitment is reflected in the requirement of a minyan, the presence of at least ten Jewish people (ten men in traditional Judaism), in order to initiate religious ceremonies.  For some religious Jews, the commitment to community extends only to Jews.  For most culturally Jewish people, the commitment extends not only to the Jewish community but to communities of other people as well.  Being part of a Jewish community is a pathway to the broader human community, just as thinking about the Torah is a Jewish pathway to the universal Golden Rule.  And this commitment to community is reflected not only in secular Jewish Sunday Schools and Jewish cultural activities, but also in a plethora of Jewish social services and civic organizations that welcome people who are not Jewish.  The goal of being part of a Jewish community is to promote the practice of the Golden Rule as the foundation of a humane society.

Whether explicitly stated or implicitly understood, the Golden Rule underlies the behavior of people in any humane community, and the extent to which it is practiced is a measure of the community’s humanity.  Probably every child, for example, who has ever done anything wrong in school has faced the question from the teacher: “What if everyone did that?”  That question is at the root of the Golden Rule, and it is reinforced by considering that the Golden Rule is not merely a prescription of what people ought to do but a description of what they actually do, for better and for worse.

“Love thy neighbor as thyself,” which is one of the ways in which the Golden Rule is often expressed, implies, for example, that loving others and treating them well will be reflected in how you think of yourself.  It describes a virtuous cycle of doing good for others and feeling good about yourself as a result which philosophers for thousands of years and psychologists more recently have said is a fact of the human psyche.  In turn, if you treat others badly, it will be reflected in feeling bad about yourself in a vicious cycle in which hateful people are caught, making them increasingly miserable and pitiful despite their bullying, boasting and bombast.

The bottom line is that you cannot be Jewish by yourself.  You must be part of a community, the bigger and broader the better.

Being Secular: Agnostic but not Anti-theistic – Keeping God out of the discussion.

There are two main reasons given by most culturally Jewish people for not being religious.  The first is that they do not believe in God, and especially not in a personal God, a God who is like a person and who has personal relations with people.  They are unable to believe in or unwilling to worship a supreme being who would allow all of the awful things that happen in the world.  Innocent children suffering and dying.  Horrible wars.  People being tortured.  The list is almost endless.  The idea of a God who would preside over this is unbelievable or unacceptable to them.

At the same time, most culturally Jewish people do not actively oppose the idea of God.  They are not anti-theistic.  If people want to believe in God, so be it as long as they don’t try to impose their idea of God on other people.  The main concern of secularists is to keep God out of the discussion of community affairs because once someone says God is on their side of an issue, there is almost no way to reach a peaceful agreement on that issue.

Many culturally Jewish people are even willing to accept the idea of something in the universe that holds things together and accounts for our belief that things will not fall apart in the next moment.  It is an abstract something that some people might like to call a god.  The secular Jewish philosopher Spinoza ascribed to such an idea.  Other secular Jewish people acknowledge a feeling that there is something more to the universe than we can see, and that accounts for things holding together.  Einstein, a secularly Jewish person, had this feeling.  In any case, the idea of an abstract god or the feeling that there is more to the universe than meets the eye does not interfere with the desire of culturally Jewish people to keep God out of the discussion of community affairs, and does not conflict with their belief in secular Judaism.

The second reason culturally Jewish people generally give for not being religious is that most of the rules and rituals that make up Jewish religion seem to be unnecessary toward being a good person and toward promoting the Golden Rule.  The rules and rituals seem to have been designed or at least emphasized mainly for the purpose of separating Jewish people from other peoples, especially from Christian people.

For example, having Saturday as the Sabbath which makes it difficult for Jewish people to work with Christian people.  Keeping strictly Kosher which makes it difficult for Jewish people to eat and socialize with Christian people.  Prohibiting Jewish people from riding on the Sabbath so that they have to live close together and close to a synagogue to which they could walk, and could not live among Christian people.

These were seemingly defensive measures intended by the rabbis to keep Jewish people from assimilating to Christianity if they associated too closely with Christian people.  Such rules are, however, inconsistent with the Golden Rule that is at the heart of being Jewish.  The question these defensive measures raise is whether Jewish culture is strong enough to keep Jewish people Jewish, without erecting artificial barriers against others.

The Survival of Judaism: Religion versus Secularism.

According to recent polls, cultural Judaism has been rapidly growing in popularity.  This rise of cultural Judaism is a source of dismay to religious Jews who claim that the main reason Judaism has survived for so long is because Jews were kept separate from other peoples.  Although this separation was effected partly by Jews being shunned by other peoples, it was done mainly by Jewish leaders trying to keep Jews from assimilating.  And religious Jews claim that it worked, which is why they see an upsurge in religiosity as the only way to keep Judaism alive.  Culturally Jewish people don’t read Jewish history this way and don’t see the future of Judaism in this way.

While it is probably true that ritually isolating Jewish people from Christian and Muslim peoples kept some Jewish people in the fold, it is likely that this ritual segregation drove more people out of the fold and into assimilation.  There was historically very little to which a person could aspire if the person stayed orthodox and remained within the Jewish shtetl.  So, most people left.  If one uses basic demographic projections of the Jewish population starting around 150 BCE, there should be several hundred million Jewish people in the world today, not merely fifteen million.

And the difference between the demographic projections and the demographic reality cannot be put down to pogroms and other murderous events.  An average of about fifty percent of each generation of Jewish people has had to have assimilated over the last two thousand years in order to get the numbers of Jewish people that have existed at various times throughout that time period and that exist today.  People regularly left the Jewish community because life in the shtetl was too narrow.

In support of the religious view, it is the case that if one was not committed to following the religious Jewish rituals, it was easier for a person to slip out of the shtetl and into assimilation, and many did.  But it is also the case that if a person did not adhere to the separatist rules and rituals that isolated Jewish people from the broader community, and adhered to a secular and cultural Judaism instead, it was easier to remain Jewish while also being able to do things in the wider Christian or Muslim society.  And it was seemingly the case historically, as it is today, that most people who identify as being religiously Jewish did not and do not practice most of the rules and rituals required by orthodoxy.  Even among the religious, there has always been a creeping secularism.

The bottom line is that most Jewish people today, even those who are religious, cite family tradition, culture and community as the main reasons they became and remain committed to Judaism.  These are, in fact, the reasons cited by most people as to why and how they are committed to whatever it is they are committed, whether it be culture, religion, political affiliation, or most anything else.  These are common and common sensical reasons for being committed to something.  And they were probably the main reasons that Jewish people in the past remained Jewish.  They are also consistent with the Golden Rule and are what being culturally Jewish is mainly about.

As such, it is likely that many, and perhaps even most, Jewish people have historically been culturally Jewish in practice, even if they did not always have a theory to match.  And although it is only in recent centuries that secular Judaism has developed as a clearly articulated alternative to religious Judaism, cultural Judaism has arguably been the core of Judaism throughout history.  It is a cultural tradition with a two-thousand-year history, and counting. [1]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                BW  2/16/20

[1] I have discussed Jewish secularism, religion and history at greater length in an essay on this blog called “An Unorthodox View of Jewish History: Why are Jews still here at all and why aren’t there more of us?”