A decent part of my internal life over the last year has been pondering and exploring Judaism. I more or less lacked access to it as a kid, so I've been playing a lot of catch-up. It's good work. As I've learned and am still learning, there's an immense wealth of cultural, philosophical, and religious depth to it.
(You could call me a bit of a dunce for not immediately realizing there might be something to those 3000-plus years of living tradition. But that would be rude!)
One thing I've found particularly wonderful about it is its emphasis on questioning - on examining our literature and traditions with a critical eye, on commenting and arguing and interpreting and reinterpreting. It's chaotic and combative and I LOVE IT.
In that spirit, the prayer book at the synagogue I visited for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur was absolutely filled with margin notes - some educational, some interpretive, some argumentative. I shamelessly took photos of some of my favorites, including this gem by Betsy Platkin Teusch:
I love this SO MUCH.
I love that the two most important holidays of our year are entirely devoted to self-examination, reflection, and improvement: finding what we could have done better in the last year, fixing any wrongs we've done, and finding ways to be a better person in the year to come. There's a huge emphasis on thought and awareness and sincerity and choice - and particularly on personal action.
We don't pray for God or whatever the heck is out there to save us; we pray for the power to save ourselves. Except "save" isn't even the right word - it implies a disturbing permanence to failure. What we pray for is clarity and humility and impetus: for the clarity to keep asking questions, for the humility to recognize our flaws, and for the impetus to correct them. We hope to keep moving and growing, and that by doing so we'll help the world grow with us.
Life is motion. If you put a rock on the floor, it will stay there until something moves it; if you put a cat on the floor, it'll be gone the moment you look away. (Or it might fall asleep. But its heart is still beating; it's still breathing; the potential for motion still lies within it.)
Our task in life, then, is nothing less than to move, and to help those around us to do the same. That's no small task. How many bildungsromans and Great American Novels have been written about some middle-aged guy who can't seem to work any change in his life? Self-improvement is hard. It takes constant, constant, grinding effort and a whole lot of humility. There's a reason hubris is such a classic theme - humans are always prey to the idea that we're already perfect, that what we are right now is the best we can be, that we have no flaws to improve on.
I've always been fairly agnostic. "Agnostic" isn't quite the right word for it - sure, I didn't know if any sort of higher being existed, but the question always struck me as kind of irrelevant in any practical sense. And even after examining my Judaism more fully, it still does. Jewish conceptions of God, to the best of my understanding, are abstract at best. That's by design.
God isn't a being, it's an abstraction. It's a unifying word we use to describe the qualities of the world that make it worth living in, and the qualities in ourselves that enable us to grow and make the world better. It's also a reminder that there are things beyond us, that there will always and should always be things in life we can't control. Without anything greater than ourselves we have nothing to remind us that we are flawed - that there are elements of ourselves we ought to improve on.
The presence or absence of a divine being in that equation are immaterial - the world has wonders enough.
NOTE: After this point, there will be spoilers for the musical Hamilton. If you don't want to see them, TURN BACK NOW.
Coincidentally, I was introduced to the music of Lin Manuel Miranda's new Broadway show Hamilton (now available on NPR!) just days after Yom Kippur. Hamilton is...a lot. In the same way as the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (which I talked about a few weeks ago), it's just too much to take in - and I've only listened to it!
Hamilton is a musical marvel with an awe-inspiring webwork of self reference that it weaves into a language of its own. It's a modern story of rebellion, triumph, and liberation. It's a classical story of hubris, an all-American Greek tragedy with modern rap's blistering cascade of rhyme in place of the thrum of iambic trimeter. And it's a commentary; a commentary within a commentary.
Yes, it's a Greek tragedy - but the specific manner in which Hamilton examines its eponymous founder comes across to me as much in the spirit of Yom Kippur. Hamilton's boundless energy, breakneck pace, and flair for commentary and argumentation carry him like a meteor through the first act. The narrative's extolling of those traits invites the audience to get excited, to question and argue and hunger for learning. The show itself is also a commentary - a reinterpretation of an American myth in the language of today's oppressed that tells us we can make this country better than it was. It reminds us that our task as citizens is to help it move, to help it grow.
If that isn't Jewish, I don't know what is.
The same traits lead Hamilton to ruin in the second act - primarily because he fails to examine himself and realize that the pattern of choices which had worked so well before would need adaptation if he were to thrive after the war. Though Hamilton is a brilliant scholar and commentator, compulsive and relentless, it's ultimately his failure to examine himself - to weigh his choices, to make amends for damage done, and to set himself on a different course - that lead to his fall and death.
Hamilton is by no means a Jewish story - to say otherwise would be to discredit the brilliant black and Latino artists behind it - but its resonance with Jewish ideals and values is undeniable.
GO SEE IT. (Or if you're like me and can't afford to...listen to it!)
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