Welcome to Fire Extinguisher Judaism

Those of us who fight in the trenches of the daily public debate—tweeting, blogging and churning out columns about building rights in Jerusalem, global anti-Semitism, Goldstone and Madoff and all the other hot-button issues—rarely take time to step outside and look at the bigger questions. When all the acrimony and activism are set aside, what is left of our Jewish identity?

The basic problem with Jewish life today is its overwhelming emphasis on crisis. We fight. We “weigh in.” We identify enemies and proclaim loyalties. We hold high-level meetings to discuss our “brand.” We defend Israel as though our lives were at stake or criticize Israel with the passion of a democratic evangelist. We accost those Jews who fail to enlist in the cause, as though any minute we may need them to storm Washington, as we did in the decades when a million of our brethren were imprisoned behind Soviet lines.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with combating anti-Semitism or fighting the Iranian bomb. There are dangers out there, both political forces and simple ignorance that put Jewish life at risk. Our crises are not manufactured. But just as an individual’s life cannot be defined solely through his struggle for survival, isn’t there something disturbing about a Jewish identity defined principally by the constant effort to put a halt to terrible things? Welcome to fire extinguisher Judaism.

What’s missing is a coherent content to our identity, a positive message, a set of beloved things and ideas—other than ourselves and our organizations and the state we’ve built—to which we proclaim allegiance, in which we invest time and effort to understand, which we embrace as possessing the keys to ourselves and our future.

What am I talking about? Culture is certainly part of it. When we take a moment to shut out the rocket fire, both real and figurative, we’ll discover that a lot is going on in Jewish culture today—perhaps more than at any time in our history. On the Israeli side, the past two decades have seen, to take just one example, a huge surge in innovative Jewish music, from heavy metal to reggae to electronic and Arabic and Greek themes, where deep poetry catapults into stunning song, never fully abandoning the connection to ancient Jewish texts and figures. Precious little of this ever makes it stateside, partly because North American Jews know so little Hebrew, partly because they have never placed the Bible at the center the way that even secular Israelis do, but mostly because Israeli and American Jewish cultures have grown so far apart. Many American Jews barely recognize the deep Jewishness that drives Israeli creativity.

In North America, new developments are just as bold if not as numerous and just as alien to Israelis. New publications like Tablet or The Jewish Review of Books, cultural events like the Jewlicious and Limmud festivals and literary efforts like the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature all point to an instinctive awareness that in the diaspora, too, the Jewish people will refuse to live by bread alone.

Yet cultural expressions are only a partial answer. After all, through these we may be engaged, creative and forward-looking, but are we really unified by them? And are we really attending to the deepest needs of our Jewish souls?

For this, we need to look not just to the new but to the old—to our rich, swirling ocean of ancient texts and traditions, beginning with the Bible and continuing through the ages. Our legacy is too precious to be left to others, be they rabbis, professors or preachers of other faiths. Of course, this is an old song. So many hurdles have been built between us and these texts as to make us feel like they are scarcely ours: the language, the seemingly archaic values or disturbing stories, the alleged Orthodox monopoly on Talmudic exegesis and the academic arguments about authorship.

Yet, while all of these concerns have their place, they do not provide a good excuse. Our textual traditions are what really unite us, pointing to a core of human beliefs, ideas and dreams unlike anything else on earth. But for many of us they are as alien as Atlantis. How many of us have ever plowed through Proverbs in the original and laughed at Solomon’s deadpan wisdom? How many have cried with Jeremiah or raged with Samson, meditated with Moses, sung with Deborah, suffered in silence with Dinah or martyred ourselves with the rabbis who rebelled against Rome? If these sound like someone else’s story rather than our own, we may be in deeper trouble than we know. Our focus on crisis may have become an escape from ourselves.

To learn from tradition is first of all to submit ourselves to it, to recognize that our forebears may have known something about life that we do not, to learn from rather than just learn about, to embrace it and let it embrace us—and only afterwards to critique it and ask ourselves where we go from here. Every Jew is also a Hebrew slave, also an Israelite conqueror, also a Judaean vassal, also a Sephardi and an Ashkenazi exile waiting to be ingathered—in our hearts and minds, if not our bodies. Only when we put the rediscovery of who we really are high on our agenda, may we begin to understand what all this fighting is really for.

David Hazony’s first book, The Ten Commandments: How Our Most Ancient Text Can Renew Modern Life, will be published in September.