IT HAS BEEN said many times, including by me, that Judaism is the most misunderstood religion, and Jews the most misunderstood people, this planet has to offer.
Take this conversation I had with someone the other day. It should first be noted that this someone is one of the most inclusive, bighearted, and real human beings I’ve ever met; I both respect him tremendously, and regard him with a good deal of collegial affection. The context was how to big-tent the Jewish attendees at a local public event where he delivered an address containing various names for the Divine. But we ran aground on this point:
“What is the Jewish name for G?d?” he asked. “Is it ‘Yahweh?'”
“Well, that’s a great question,” I replied enthusiastically. “That particular name is a transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning ‘to cause to be.’ But most Jews don’t use it. Jews have more than one name for G?d, and like anything else Jewish, the answer depends on who you ask. Some would even say that G?d really has no name.”
He regarded me with a very polite and sincere version of a blank stare. And I don’t blame him.
Judaism is complex, in the way that any millennia-old, culturally adaptive, self-reinventing, participatory art project is complex. Not only do we not call G?d* by a single name, we can’t even agree on who should be called “a Jew.” There are a few basic things that most Jews hold in common – monotheism, if they believe in any deity at all, and a self-identity as Jews – but that’s where the similarities end. For me, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (mid-20th Century) said it best: “Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish People.” But not everyone would agree with that definition, either.
At its heart, Judaism requires a certain comfort with ambiguity that’s challenging for many Westerners to grasp. (For various reasons, the Western worldview often tends to think a thing either is or isn’t; there’s not much room for the excluded-and-fuzzy middle of “sometimes.”) Jewish tradition wallows in the ambiguity of contextuality – it doesn’t teach definitive answers so much as how to ask better and better questions.
I yearn for, and dread, the day when someone somewhere can define Jews and Judaism in a soundbite. I yearn, because it would be kind of nice for people to more easily “get” Jews and Judaism – and I dread because it would reduce something transcendentally beautiful to a fossilized factoid. The Talmud, that thousand-year-long record of rabbinical arguments, settles its otherwise unsettle-able questions with the word “teiku” – an anagram of the four-word Aramaic phrase roughly meaning “Elijah the Prophet will answer this when he announces the coming of the Messiah.” May that day swiftly, and never, come.
* I spell it this way to remind myself that the Divine is a Mystery. YMMV.
