Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [74]
Such a current of thought was widespread among liberal Jews in America a few generations ago (think of Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture movement, among many others). This way of thinking became discredited after the Holocaust, when we all took on the responsibility of preserving very threatened Jewish survival. I belong to that generation of newly reinforced commitment to continued Jewish existence. We want to survive as a distinct human family among nations. Without that distinctive identity, who would remain as bearers of our hard-learned values into the next and future generations? Would not all the painfully gained insights of the Jewish experience be lost if we simply merged with all the many others who share our essential truths? Yet I am still concerned that we Jews, now free to preach our truth to the world without harassment, devote much more energy to our own survival than to the message that is its purpose. As one raised as a loyal Jew, and as one who has given much energy to the training of leaders whose efforts also will be largely devoted to Jewish continuity, I sometimes find us erring on the side of too much insecurity about our own existence, distracting ourselves from our more ultimate goal, that of being and building God's mishkan in the world. Such efforts are completely understandable in an age that still recalls that a third of us were brutally murdered in an event that remains within living memory. We also live in an open and embracing society that serves, in a completely different way, to further diminish our numbers. Still, we need to remind ourselves that the Jewish people was brought forth from Egypt and continues to exist for a purpose, and that is one that reaches beyond ourselves. I live and work within a framework that struggles daily around balancing these values, and I cannot ignore that struggle.
Dealing as I do in myth and Midrash, I will have to express this agony around the universal and the particular by sharing with you some further readings of Genesis. Earlier we walked the journey from Eden to Abraham, tales of the near-failure of the human experiment. Now we must go from Abraham to Jacob/Israel, saying something about the rise of Jewish particularism and how it still embodies the universal message. From there, after an important detour, we will turn once again to Exodus and Sinai, asking ourselves “where we stand” in facing that mountain and how Israel's covenant might be renewed for our day.
The religious path I am describing here might well be called a Judaism for seekers. It is all about challenge and response, one that by definition has to change and grow in each generation and even in the course of single lives. I like to think of it as a Judaism faithful to the journeys of Avraham Avinu, our father Abraham, who is the original figure of religious quest in our tradition. Abraham did not live his religious life out of faithfulness or loyalty to tradition. He was anything but a nice Jewish boy, making his parents proud. On the contrary, he models a radical break with all that came before him. He is a seeker and a no-holds-barred experimentalist, daring to challenge each stage of his own religious development. Thus we are told that (after smashing his father's idols) he worshipped both sun and moon until he discovered a power greater than these. The biblical text portrays God's call to him as unearned and spontaneous — almost as arbitrary, one might say, as God's rejection of Cain's offering.28 But later tradition sees it quite differently. Abraham is the paradigmatic seeker in Judaism. Philo, the Midrash, the philosophers,