Art Green Misses The Mark on Kabballah
The standard story as to why so many Jews have stopped attending synagogue since about the 1960s is repeated here by Art Green, a leading exponent of Jewish Mysticism, in this piece over at The Atlantic.
Laced with Green’s not-so-subtle political barbs, his version is that secularism and the disasters of the 20th century—which he refers to as Auschwitz and Hiroshima—called into question the belief in the scientific secularism that had gone before it, and religion eventually was thrown out along with the bathwater.
But this isn’t the problem. It has never been the problem. There are virtually zero families who stopped going to religious services because they took an historian’s eye on these events.
The suggestion that Green doesn’t disclose he has made in the past and that many others have put forward is that the return of Jewish mysticism will fill a hole that will get butts back in seats. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, it has had the better part of 30 years to be tested. Things have only gotten worse.
Why?
It’s not that services aren’t exciting. They might point you to megachurch services that are like a rock concert. The thing about that isn’t that they’re exciting. It’s that they’re full of people that believe.
Many, if not most, Jews simply do not believe in the aspects of their religion enough to believe that they are seriously required to attend services. This isn’t a dig at Reform. Reform Judaism asks you to search yourself for what is meaningful in the tradition. You’re not supposed to say, “virtually nothing.”
If you agree with me that lack of belief is driving the decline in Jewish involvement, the last thing you want to do is base services on kabballah, which includes the most supersititious and arcane aspects of Judaism. If it’s hard for you to believe that Moses walked across the Reed Sea—even not literally, say at low tide—it would be impossible for you to believe in something like metempsychosis (sort of like reincarnation).
Rabbinical schools should emphasize the timeless lessons in our tradition and its rich philosophical tradition of ethics and the dialectic of the Talmud that is the basis for a religious tradition unmatched in its intellectual ferocity. They should also quit fearing the one thing that does keep Jews bound together religious or not: the feeling of our shared peoplehood based on our religion but not 1:1 identical with it.
Art Green engages in this very exercise in his book Radical Judaism by suggesting that evolution is the greatest cosmic drama of all time. Indeed. The sheer profundity of nature is something truly worth meditating on.
