Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [78]
Jewish existence remains a covenanted existence. We know that we are not “like all the nations,” tempting as the thought of such normalcy might sometimes be. We go on throughout eternity for the sake of our message, in order to teach it, exemplify it, and bring it to others. Once we recognize that our essential message is a universal one, defining ourselves so narrowly as its exclusive bearers does not suffice. We want others to pick up the banner that proclaims all creatures sacred embodiments of the One, all humans the image of God. If our struggle is to share our insights with all humanity, we need a broader band of fellow travelers to bear this message. How will we make room for it to flourish? Some would want to become Jews, if we would make them more welcome. It is time to encourage and greet with open arms those who want to share our home with us, rather than drive them away. If Jewry was reduced by a third through the horrors of the Holocaust, it is time to replenish our numbers by opening the gates to make conversion more accessible. That will certainly make for a new and different Jewish people in this new and different age in which we live, but we should have sufficient faith not to be afraid of that. Those who choose conversion in this age, accepting Judaism's essential teachings and practices, ready to join themselves to the Jewish people, should be welcomed rather than driven away by ever more demanding requirements.
But we also have to find a place alongside the historic Jewish people for a bigger and broader “Israel,” an Israel of Noahides, Abrahamians, New Israelites, or whatever they will choose to be called. These are people who partake of the legacy of biblical Israel and accept our most basic Jewish teachings as their own, without being ready to fully share our history, language, identity, and fate. What might be required for membership in such a broader “Israel?” A spiritually wounded thigh, to show that one has wrestled with God? A forswearing of anti-Semitism? A monotheism/monism that lives the Torah's sacred story? Can we imagine re-creating in our time a kind of extended faith-community of Israel, a large “outer courtyard” of our spiritual Temple? For non-Jews wedded to Jews and others considering but not yet ready for full conversion to Judaism, might this also serve as a sort of spiritual antechamber?39
In making this proposal, I am not unaware that I will quickly be accused by many Jews of giving in to that sinner Saul of Tarsus, the one who welcomed the uncircumcised heathen into his New Israel, as the church was to call itself. No, I am not here announcing my apostasy or the rejection of my own very deep commitment to the specific and ethnically defined heritage I received from my Eastern European Jewish grandparents. But I am pushing against the borders of my own community, and admitting (partly in sadness!) that it no longer suffices for me to limit my sense of spiritual fellowship to those who fall within the ethnic boundaries that history has given us. In a way that is significant to me, I have more in common with seekers and strugglers of other faiths than I do with either the narrowly and triumphally religious or the secular and materialistic elements within my own Jewish community. Yes, I am quite aware that Hitler and his henchmen would have herded us all together. But that does not suffice as a standard by which to set the bounds of my own sacred community, at least not on every level.
Would membership in this broader Israel require a leaving behind of other faiths? Should Islam, a completely “kosher” faith for non-Jews from a halakhic point of view, be treated differently from some forms of Hinduism or Buddhism,