How Can We Identify the Authentic Religious Person?

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006

People profess to be religious all the time. In some circles, being religious means that some one is addicted to the opiate of the masses, and in other circles, professions of faith are tickets of admission to the club, which comes with social status, invitations to the theologically correct table, to social insiders, and to the exclusions of the heretics, the noncompliant, and the outsiders.

There are Jews who religiously attend late Friday night services at Liberal Synagogues to enjoy a liturgy orchestrated artistically, to hear edifying words of a rabbi who speaks the king's English even when no king reigns in Britain, to enjoy sweet pastries and tea, and to mingle with people whose presence is a source of honor. These are the Jews who want Judaism to be what Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise called a "Judaism without tears," a Judaism that makes its devotees feel good.

And there are Jews who go religiously to the Yizkor services four times a year to an Orthodox shul because they need to remember a past that they no longer live, who search for Jewish authenticity but find no place among traditional Jews who exclude them from the club, and whose Jewish emotions are nostalgic at best and guilt ridden and driven at worse.

The Judaism that sells pleasure, good music, edifying sermons, grammatical English, great food and good company is not attracting its own Liberal youth. A Judaism for those who have made it in America is not being heard by young people for whom making it in America is an economic but not a social or religious concern. Most young people are not asking rabbis to permit them to eat non-kosher food. And the Judaism that continues to draw the nostalgic Kaddish crowd and the Yizkor goers is aging and is becoming distant from the Jews who seek to segregate themselves from secularity, which speaks differently, dresses differently, and cuts itself off from the television, Internet, theater, and secular humanistic education that defines what it means to be an American.

The modern Orthodox Jew, who is identified by one's courage to be both Orthodox and modern, is really very old fashioned. This is the Jew who goes back to the sources in order to see the authentic religious source of Jewish wisdom. There are five relevant verses in Hebrew Scripture that define the identifiably religious person by temperament. It is not the Jew who yearns for great music, edifying intellectualism, and sweet pastries. And it is not the Jew who mumbles Psalms, runs to say Kaddish with a compulsion driven by guilt, or who tries to be as anti-modern as possible. It is, however, the Jew who lives Judaism with joy. It is the Jew who is religiously free and not bound, so living right with God is more compelling that fitting in with the crowd, what ever that crowd may be.

1. Psalms 2:22 commands that we should "serve God with awe, and be joyful in our trembling." God and eternity are serious business. It is about ultimate concerns. And once we identify God as our ultimate concern, we celebrate God's gift of life joyfully, happily, not with the artificialities of fear, guilt, or nostalgia.
2. Psalm 100:2 gives a similar command, "serve the Lord with happiness, appear before God's presence in joy." Maimonides, in "Laws of Repentance 8" contends that joy represents the state of the human being in the Eternity to Come. The Psalmist is not demanding mournfully melodies, bittersweet nostalgia or very sweet pastries. When we take God seriously, we are happy. And this is a happiness not wrought by being slavishly addicted to the approval of peers, but of a satisfaction that one's life is in order.
3. Deuteronomy 28:47 informs us that we deserve exile if we do not serve God with happiness and with good heart. We must recognize the good, albeit with hardship, that has come our way. There is good in our lives. We must focus on the good. We will find God in the good, not in sorrow, mourning, anger, or fear of peer pressure. Without gratitude and a smile, one may be a ritual virtuoso, but such a person is profoundly secular and observing rites for the wrong reason. When an individual is not happy unless he or she is not happy, that person is in tragic exile from her or his self. When God created humankind on the Sixth Day of Creation, God said that the creation was "very good." The benchmark of Godliness is goodness, and the tell-tale sign of goodness is joy. A rabbinical colleague told me that it is proper to say Yizkor on Yom Kippur, which is a sad day. I am profoundly uncomfortable with the Yizkor prayers altogether. Yizkor, which was not mandated by the sages who formulated the Oral Torah, is not really a "tradition" in the Tradition's sense of the idiom. It is an innovation, borne in tragedy, that has become socially accepted. Rav David haLevi suggests that Yizkor not be said even by Ashkenazim, because Yizkor introduces sadness into the season of our joy. And Yom Kippur, properly appreciated, is not really a sad day, it the day upon which we rejoice in our reconciliation, when we act as angels, and when we realize that we can be better than we are.
4. Psalms 18:9 explains that the "orders of God are straight, gladdening the heart." If one filters out the Jewish actions that are listed as commandments in our canon from the customs, conventions, rites, folkways and habits that reflect Jewish culture, one finds the actual essence of Judaism. We are sanctified, and gladdened by the sanctification that comes with obeying the commandments, by walking God's map. God commandments know nothing of hierarchy, fear, anxiety and sadness. When one feels guilty for a possible infraction, there is an offering of reconciliation to be made. Edification of the mind does not always sanctify the soul; black hats and women's wigs, whatever their spiritual worth and whatever their financial cost, are not in and of themselves commandments of the Torah canon. By focusing on Judaism's essence, one is not distracted by the social games Jews play.
5. Psalms 118:24 reminds us that "this is the day that the Lord has made, we must rejoice and be happy with it." Today is the day to be happy. God is not found in the storm. Elijah the prophet failed because he could not smile. He had an anger management problem and God did not yet invent MSW's who could handle him. Moses lost his commission to take Israel into the promised land because he could not control his anger.

The religious Jew is at peace with oneself, with God, and with humankind. This Jew is gentle, this Jew learns to seek God and do the commandments. This Jew is a salesman, selling for no cost real estate in the world to come. Just as God was not in the thunder but in the thin, small voice, the sound of silence in the time of Elijah, God is not now to be found in the anger of the fire and brimstone, but in two stone tablets, carved with white and black fire, whose commandments bring joy, in this world and in the next

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