Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [53]
Religions emerge to create forms that serve as such reminders. I do not know a God who “commands” or cares about the fulfillment of specific rites. I understand that all religious practices are of human origin and evolve within religious communities through history. But I am suggesting that the creation of such ritual forms is indeed our human response to an authentic single mitzvah, a divine imperative of the immanent presence, a wordless calling forth within us that says: “Know Me!” “Wake up!” “Be aware!” “I am Y-H-W-H your God.”
The word mitzvah is usually translated as “commandment.” As traditional Judaism meets the modern world, it often founders on the question “Who commands?” Do we believe in a personal God who demands that we perform certain rites, recite certain words, acknowledge “Him” in established ways? If not, the fear is that nothing will be left of Judaism, that the authority that stands behind tradition will be shattered, and with that Judaism will come to an end.
Here too, as in the case of the traditional Creation story versus evolution, we need to understand that the past century's battle is over. Having studied the history of religion, including the specific contexts in which biblical and rabbinic religion emerged, we understand that the forms we know as Judaism developed over a long period, often in response to circumstances now lost to us. Some practices were magical in origin, given a more historical or “spiritual” meaning only by later interpreters. Some of these transformations reach back so far that they are already found in the Torah text, where they are presented as the word of God. Others emerged only later, codified by the rabbis in explaining either obligatory laws or optional customs. But all of the forms came about at one time or another as products of human innovation and the ensuing evolution of religion, rather than as dictated by the will of God.
Such an admission need not spell the end of Judaism, however. As I said with regard to evolution, our religious task is not to fight a rearguard battle against the scientific (in this case historical and literary) evidence. Here again the challenge is that of reframing the issue, lifting our discussion of it to a different level or state of mind. Torah remains Torah, even after we digest all of historical criticism. We, the community of Israel, continue to accept it as our canon; we live in relationship to it. The form remains a mitzvah, a sanctified religious deed. Doing the mitzvah is the will of God, in the sense that it is the way we as a religious community respond to the One that calls out to us, that seeks to have us know it, ever awaiting our response. This particular form of response rather than another is sanctified by the canonizing power of the Jewish people, an ancient community that bears much wisdom about how to bring divine awareness into everyday life. The mitzvah is holy because Jews do it, because they have done it for such a long time, and because they have invested it with a depth of kavvanah, or spiritual energy, that is never lost but only builds in intensity over the course of centuries. The fullness of that energy is the divine presence that lies within it, waiting to be uncovered anew in each generation. Mitzvah is more than a custom, not merely a folkway. We have declared it holy, and so it is.31 Hasidic tradition reads the word mitzvah