• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 391 0

in any religion we seek to promulgate today. I have spoken freely here of the power of myth, calling for a reinvigoration of Judaism by drinking deeply of the mythic and mystical traditions. I understand the God-language of the Torah itself to be essentially of a mythical sort, and in appropriating it as freely as I do (while being clear that I am not a literal believer), I propose a religion largely based on remythologization. But here we encounter a serious moral problem. The veneration of myth can itself become an idol. We are not the only ones in modern or postmodern times to have recourse to myth. Most notoriously, the Nazis and other fascists of mid-twentieth century Europe turned back to so-called Aryan myths to buttress their murderous ideologies. How do we justify our own turn to myth while firmly rejecting theirs? How do we morally differentiate one myth from another? As inhabitants of the Western world, living for so many centuries as a minority within Christendom, we Jews bear a deep awareness that we are the villains in the tale that for so many in the society around us is “the Greatest Story Ever Told.” The founding myth of Christianity, already in the gospels, was told in such a way as to implicate “the Jews.” I fully respect the attempts of many sincere and well-meaning Christians to cleanse their myth of anti-Semitism, but it is not an easy job. I do not know how to help my Christian friends and readers get by the fact that “Judas” and “Jew” just fit too well together, short of emending their Scripture. Despite the recently found and much-acclaimed “Gospel of Judas,” historical Christianity chose a different and often pernicious path. In the neoliteralist world of contemporary Islam, the worst selection of ancient sources is sometimes made, those demonizing the Jews in ways more redolent of medieval Christianity than the much more tolerant history of Islam. New “Africanist” mythologies have emerged in our time, seeking to combat old and venal myths of African inferiority. Are we then left with nothing more than a battle of myth against myth, my myth against yours? Can I reject the truth claim of your myth without your feeling that I am rejecting you as well? If myth in itself is to be celebrated, we are indeed going down a dangerous path. Claims of racial superiority and ancient ethnic rivalries, causes of renewed bloodletting in our own day, are most often rooted in venerable myths. The rise of fundamentalist religion, such a dangerous force in the world today, may be ascribed to myths that are being taken too seriously, even if they are not recognized as myth. Are we not aggravating those dangers, or at least weakening our ability to stand up to them, if we celebrate the power of myth?

Here we go back to the universalism of the vision with which we began. We need to go beyond our separate and divisive tales, back to the single great story that unites us all. The story of evolution, including the ongoing evolution of humanity, is bigger than all the distinctions between religions and their myths. The One I seek to address, that which I (perhaps recklessly) allow myself to call “God,” is also bigger than all that. Awareness of it is the call to all of us. Worship is our human response to that call, one that each of us necessarily hears in his or her own language. The worship of that One, in a way that does not diminish or constrict it, requires that we stand open to the full chorus of human naming and worshipping of that same One. “Everywhere there is incense burnt and offering made to My name,” says the prophet (Mal. 1:11). All of human worship belongs to the One. Any religion less open than that in its claims — whether under the banner of “Judaism” or any other — is precisely a “turning aside,” a lopping off of a certain part of human experience and taking it for the whole. That is idolatry, the worship of “other gods,” meaning the taking of something less than the whole for God, which is the all-embracing One.

The basis of Jewish moral teaching is universal. “ ‘Why was Adam created singly?’ So that