Hitzonim | Outsiders

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My mom gifted me Noah Feldman’s recent release (March 2024), To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, after hearing him interviewed on NPR or maybe after an appearance on CNN, something like this. We’re a typical NPR, CNN, MSNBC sort of family, and Mom and I are avid news followers.

A week or two after she gave me the book, I heard Feldman interviewed on maybe the Haaretz podcast or another outlet that shows up daily or weekly in my inbox–I looked up the episode; yep, it was Haaretz (April 21, 2024). After listening to the interview a few months ago, I was excited to dig into the book. It’s been taunting me from the bookshelf for several weeks.

I started on Feldman’s book yesterday, Saturday. It was a beautiful, sunny day in the Midwest, and I was sitting in a camp chair in the driveway at the end of our cul de sac. What better way to spend a couple of hours on Shabbat than enjoying the late-Summer sun on a clear day with a book in hand—a Jewish book, no less! Baruch HaShem!

Feldman writes in the Introduction, pardon the extended quote:

I must also ask you to accept, for the sake of this book, that the many struggles and arguments and debates and exchanges at the heart of this story matter. They matter to me–that goes without saying. But they also matter to other people, Jews and non-Jews and those in between. 

Maybe they shouldn’t matter. Nothing in this book will in any immediate sense preserve a verdant earth or establish justice or create the conditions of permanent happiness for us and our posterity. This book won’t solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, nor even offer an adequate account if its intricacies and moral weight.

Nevertheless, the ideas I hope to expound here do have the potential to help humans make meaning (pp. 5-6).

I don’t want to reduce Feldman’s project to only an effort to help make meaning of our world. What he’s written is a few hundred pages tell the history, development of thought, and sociological characteristics of the Jewish people, and “The hint of theology I offer,” writes Feldman, “departs in certain respects from other Jewish theological approaches with which I am familiar” (p. 7). So, not only is Feldman telling history and offering his analysis of things, but he’s also engaging in some light theology, or as I like to call it, “God talk.”

All of this profoundly resonates with me, from the positive attribution of meaning-making in our traditions to the intellectual analysis and the casual theology breaking with some traditions. I’m reminded of some opening remarks in a slightly older book (June 2008), Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism. Author Rebecca Alpert responds to the question, Whose Torah is this? With the reply, all of ours!

I’ve written several essays over the years, some appearing in fragments on this blog, others written for some purpose and delivered elsewhere, and others written only for me to wrestle with my thoughts. One idea that I return to is that my identity rests in large part on awareness of the laws that I’m breaking. I was at least a little surprised that Feldman made a similar point in his Introduction: After some discussion, he concludes a section with this, “The feeling of being a bad Jew is therefore archetypically Jewish” (p. 9).

My neighbor shared a couple weeks ago that he was starting a project around the house. I offered then that I’d be happy to grab a shovel and join in the work when he was ready. Friday evening, I saw he was getting started, and I remembered my offer to lend a hand. I headed out through the garage, grabbed my shovel, and joined him and one of his friends. My neighbor and his wife are Jewish, and I jokingly said, “I’m pretty sure we’re violating several of the 39 melachot right now”; melachot, Hebrew plural, refers to the 39 categories of work prohibited on the Sabbath.

I don’t say this to mock the law, and I certainly don’t say this to mock my fellow tribe folk who abstain from work and “keep Shabbat.” Candidly, I think I’d love to keep Shabbat. We have not organized our family, lifestyle, or community to facilitate such a practice, and that’s not the point here anyway. Still, I wanted to say another thing to affirm our rites and rituals. The one-off weeks here and there that I’ve made an effort to be more mindful of a rabbinically approved shabbos have been opportunities for true shalom.

Anyway, the lesson here is not my violation of Sabbath rules; instead, the point of the experience, for me anyway, is that I was keenly aware of the violations as I performed them. In fact, I think we can flip the frame here. I was mindful that I was engaged in a positive mitzvah by studying Torah on Shabbat, for example, preparing my Parsha summary and starting Feldman’s book. I knew, also, that I was in breach of some negative mitzvot with my shovel, probably with publishing the blog post, too, but I’m not splitting hairs.

There is a tradition in Judaism that instructs the righteous person to say 100 blessings each weekday, it’s a different number on Shabbat owing to a different liturgy of prayers. On weekdays, between the daily prayers, blessings before meals, and so on, the tzadik, the righteous person, from the root tzedek, justice, will recite 100 brachot, blessings daily. Whether I’m a righteous man or not, it’s anyone’s guess. I try to be a fair, decent, honorable, and a just man, but I’m no mensch, and I’m about 99 blessings short of 100. I’ll take the credit for my morning prayer ritual. But having the law sort of always on your heart, or something, is the guidance here. And there is a sense that the law is always on my heart.

But I raise my voice with Feldman’s. To put things plainly: So what? But it does seem to matter in a salient sense.

I think Feldman has rightfully diagnosed the situation. He prefaces the book with other rhetorical questions to shape his aims: What does it mean to be Jewish? Does Jewish peoplehood matter? Should it? I suspect that answers differ sharply inside and outside of traditionalist communities. I think for secular Jews, cultural Jews, Jews with unconventional stories like mine, likely feel this uncertainty more so than those within more closed communities of practice, but maybe even within more traditionalist communities, too. This simply is not my frame of reference or experience.

When I say that I’m aware of my identity by awareness of the laws I’m breaking, what I’m expressing is something more fundamental: Daily, I’m aware of a chain of transmission from Mt. Sinai to me, even if there was no Moses, no Sinai, no divine transmission. “Nevertheless,” says Feldman, “the ideas I hope to expound here do have the potential to help humans make meaning.” I’m part of a tradition that shapes how I see the world; a tradition that “[has] the potential to help humans make meaning.”

I hope we’re doing that together, in this sacred space we’re sharing. Maybe you’re Jewish, maybe you’re Christian, maybe you’re a curious reader of no particular brand of supernatural cult, if I’m doing anything worth reading here, I hope it’s in a collective effort to make some meaning of the world, even if it is with a shovel and a book.