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Ideals and Imperfect Observance by Sarah Shapiro When Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by a man who calls himself an Orthodox Jew, all religious Jews found themselves under the vast shadow cast by his misdeed. If Yigal Amir could commit murder in the name of G-d, claim to have found sanction for his deed in religious texts, and imagine that he might favorably impress his judges by saying he had only intended to paralyze his target, then not only religious Jews but Torah Judaism itself is seen as suspect. The extreme self-scrutiny undergone by religious Jews in the wake of the assassination has not been without its benefits. Ultimately, any process of self-examination can only serve an individual's or a group's best interests, even if---or precisely because---the process is painful. For me personally, the process was grueling. Politics in this country being what it is, here in Israeli I veer towards the right. And I'm religious. However, the secular, leftist universalism of my father, is in my blood and my bones. As Jewish children growing up in the idealistic stratosphere of my father's liberalism, my sisters and I gathered, without being told as much, that all religions are equal, and equally unnecessary, and potentially destructive. The proof was in the pudding. My parents were extraordinarily kind, ethical, honest, caring. They didn't need Judaism to be Jews. G-d was too smart to make narrow-minded distinctions between his children. Ancient habits of tribalism were dangerously antiquated in a nuclear world. The spiritual child within me, though, was not sated with World Federalism and literature and the wisdom of Dag Hammerskold. Even Proust, even Matisse, failed to answer my underlying questions about my role in the cosmos and G-d's existence or absence. When in my late adolescence an Israeli Yemenite rabbi introduced me in New York City to his own fervent brand of Kabbalistic Judaism, my spiritual self, and my specifically Jewish self, awoke. My father extended to this Orthodox Jew the gratitude of any parent to someone who benefits his child, since my new acquaintance with Judaism was obviously giving me a sense of identity and joy that I had not found in meditation, or university, or art, or literature. Most challenging of all for my father to accept: Judaism had given me a sense of my authentic self which I'd never gotten from his generalized humanitarianism. His gratitude was profound, even though it frightened him to see his daughter's mind turned towards what he considered the superstitious Old World that his parent, my grandparents, had escaped. One day, not long after observing my first Shabbat, I got a call from a New York prison. Seems that my mentor, who had known so well how to introduce me to the God of the Jews, had been convicted for stock fraud and sentenced to ten years in jail. And by the way, it seemed that his rabbinical status, supposedly issued in Sa'ana, was in question, too. Oh, and something else: the school of which he claimed to be founder and director didn't exist. My mentor denied all these charges and maintained his innocence, as he would continue to do throughout his prison term. My parents, as consistent in their kindness as ever, joined me in efforts to get kosher food to the "rabbi" in prison, and to help his wife and children survive their long years without husband and father, and their humiliation. But in my father's heart of hearts, of course, (though he would never stoop to say such a thing at the time), all this was just confirmation of the fact that religious observance is no guarantee of morality and ethics. The rabbi's wife, an American convert, had a number of children and no money. An Orthodox Jewish social worker informed the Chabad Community Center in Brooklyn of her plight, and at this point my parents got a glimpse of Torah values. From that time on, she and her children were provided for by Orthodox individuals and institutions in every way possible, materially and emotionally. For the next three years, until my aliyah as a young woman, we witnessed a consistent, extreme outpouring of kindness that was a living Torah in itself. In every Orthodox Jewish community I was to encounter around the world throughout the coming decades, scrupulous honesty in business as commanded by Jewish law (the set of commandments that my first teacher had tragically neglected), and the phenomenal generosity of spirit which we had found in Crown Heights, turned out to be the norm. In 1990, a few months before my father's death, my parents and I were searching one Saturday night in Jerusalem for a kosher restaurant. With my small children growing increasingly tired and cranky in the back seat of the rented car, we dragged ourselves from one restaurant to the next, finding all the kosher places still closed after the Sabbath. At one point it seemed that we'd come upon a good one, all of us brightened instantly, my father found a parking place, and the children skipped gaily on ahead. On closer inspection, however, the kashrut certificate at the door seemed of dubious authenticity, and I told my parents we couldn't eat there. "But, Sarah," my father implored, baffled, "It says kosher." "I'm so sorry, Daddy." Back we all piled into the car. A half hour later (having just knocked upon the closed doors of the Kumsit Coffee Shop and now on our way back to the parking lot) we were all packed inside an elevator, rising up in silence through the bowels of the Hilton Hotel, when suddenly my father turned to me, his face rather ashen from these nocturnal wanderings, and he said, out of the blue, "I'm glad you're leading a religious life." My mouth fell open. After all, we had been carrying on a twenty-year dialogue about the religion, and neither of us had changed our minds. "You are, Daddy," I asked in astonishment. "Yes," he said, with a slight nod of utter certainty. "It's consistent with my values." That was that, and since that was the last time I saw him, we didn't have an opportunity to discuss the matter again. But apparently my father had seen that his daughter was willing to go through physical discomfort for an invisible ideal, and this was not unlike what he had endeavored to do in his own life. As my father knew from experience, calling oneself religious is no guarantee of complete morality, since perfection is not a human attribute. Trying to bring the idea into the small details of our daily lives will not obliterate the weaknesses and self-deceptions that constitute what is referred to in Torah as "the inclination towards evil" in the human soul. That's why the commandments exist, precisely because they are necessary. Murder, theft, adultery...these are things which tempt us. There's no explicit commandment not to jump off a roof, because under most circumstances, this is not a temptation. But just as democracy itself is not tarnished by the man who, for demo- cracy's sake, bombed a building in Oklahoma City, the ideals of Judaism persist in spite of their defilement. The Yemenite rabbi, who may or may not have authentic rabbinical certification, and to whom I myself am eternally grateful---not only for introducing me to Judaism but for treaching me early on not to expect wholeness from any human guide---managed to pass on to a thoroughly assimilated young American her own heritage, and for the first time in her life she felt proud to be Jewish. The ideals of godliness are there, and each of us succeeds and fails in our own manner to live up to them. The ideals themselves are not diminished by the infinite varieties of our human failures, imperfections, and abominations. This essay was excerpted from Sarah Shapiro's Don't You Know It's A Perfect World (Targum Press) with permission from the author. |