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Books: Gimme That No-God Religion
Lisa Anuradha Singh
The Truth
About Judaism
By Douglas Rushkoff
Crown Publishers
288pp; $24.95
When Douglas Rushkoff lost faith in the Internet, he turned to Judaism, and now he�s ready to share �the truth�
A national public radio commentator and New York Times Syndicate columnist, Douglas Rushkoff has become a megaphone for the Zeitgeist with an easy message: "Religion can be a great thing," he says, "as long as we don�t believe in it." In the past few years, this yoga-practicing, atheist Jew from New York�s East Village has wowed his audience with Midrash Lite at top Jewish venues -- the Upper West Side�s Jewish Community Center, Makor, CLAL, Silicon Alley Jewish Center, among them -- where he has assumed as his pet project those he refers to as "so-called lapsed Jews," individuals so turned off by their synagogues� stress on self-preservation that they either run to "less self-obsessed faiths like Buddhism or Hinduism" or end up nowhere at all. Rushkoff refuses to mourn such Jews as religious failures, insisting that they alone understand that Judaism is an "iconoclastic" religion of open-ended inquiry that must continually smash sacred cows, all in the effort to reach new spiritual possibilities.
It�s that dubious, dogmatic message that underscores his new book, "Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism," in which Rushkoff offers a "working proposal for Judaism�s next great renaissance." The subtitle alone is the most extraordinary chutzpah, for Rushkoff himself confesses -- only near the book�s end -- that he has scant religious education (largely Reform after-school classes of yore). And yet, this Village atheist has a growing audience. Looking for assurance that they�re okay, his listeners and readers have found their pacifier in a man who makes belief in unbelief sound truly Jewish. Among his fans is Naomi Wolf, the feminist author, who, in a release accompanying the book, called his latest work "one of the most important books � uncompromising and honest and brilliant and true � a burst of badly needed intellectual and spiritual oxygen and light."
Maybe it is easy to be a great man today; among the blind, the one-eyed is king. Rushkoff�s "intellectual" book on contemporary faith begins with a bow to comedian and TV hostess Joan Rivers, with her trademark question, "Can we talk?" As Rushkoff muses, "Joan Rivers is responsible for one of the most accurate condensations of the core values of a three-thousand-year-old tradition."
Tolstoy he is not: Rushkoff attributes his crisis of faith -- if it can be called that -- to the day he became disillusioned with a shift in the Internet. The author of eight books on popular culture and new media, he had "found [his] meaning" during the Internet boom years, when the "computer keyboard filled [him] with hope" that the Web would usher in a global village of shared ideas. But that utopian ideal unraveled as "business advocates" turned it into a "direct marketing" sty that left Rushkoff to lament, "I had no place to call home."
Looking for some other "template" to give coherence to the lives of the masses -- the Jewish ones, to start with -- Rushkoff found it in Judaism, which he concludes (incorrectly, many would argue) is inherently mutable. "Like the early Internet," he writes, "Judaism is a text only religion�also, like the early Internet, Jewish law and legend is as easy to write as it is to read -- the very definition of transparency." For Rushkoff, Judaism is like tofu, taking on the flavor that the autonomous individual gives it.
For millennia, though, Jewish learning has been based on the assumption that the individual approaches the work in order to learn something, not in order to force his own worldview upon it. That is one reason why a blessing is said before such study. One wonders whether Rushkoff has ever struggled through a class in Gemara.
In direct contradiction to all three major branches of Judaism, Rushkoff asserts that authentic Judaism, being iconoclastic, is the equivalent of "nothingness." "Judaism does not teach faith," he writes. "Judaism is not a set of beliefs, but a process." As such, Rushkoff�s "strategy" for a Jewish renaissance is "governed by a filter of iconoclasm and negative theology" that leads to "widely sensed obligation to enact social justice -- preventing others from suffering what we would not want for ourselves." With our own desires and impulses as template, Rushkoff believes we should "analyze a ritual, decide what it means to us today, and then adapt it or add to it in a way that reflects these values."
The same approach goes for holidays, the Sabbath and learning. Nowhere in this approach is there the assumption that in doing, we can learn from something greater than ourselves, that is, something along the lines of "We will do and we will hear" (Exodus 24:7). And if all this perpetual revision leads us out of Judaism, so be it; that�s part of the iconoclastic mission: "Once we let go of the exclusivity of being God�s chosen race, we are finally free to proselytize Judaism," he says. "We may just have to give up calling it �Judaism� in order to do so. Might this word itself be an icon to us now?" As for Israel, in Rushkoff�s vision "we lose the Zionist claim over a patch of sacred soil, but get to claim the entire planet as a kind of Jerusalem."
As Rushkoff tells it, this isn�t the first time that he has sparked enlightenment. When he was growing up in Westchester County, New York, there was a Sunday school encounter with a new rabbi: "I raised my hand and asked the most perplexing question I could muster to stump the rabbi: �What is God?� He must have known I was merely trying to mess him up, but when he answered my devilish grin with his own, I felt I had found a kindred spirit. A fellow troublemaker."
The rabbi answered: "God is not in the sky. God is your conscience." Three weeks later, the teacher was replaced. "I still don�t know how much his blithe response to my not-so-innocent question played a part in his dismissal," writes Rushkoff, "but I carry the scars and the inspiration of the whole episode to this day."
Indeed, today's man is still that boy, but neither then nor now does Rushkoff rise to the level of a troublemaker: He may confound some, but a Hillel ("go and learn") would make short work of him. Full of self-congratulation, Rushkoff simply asks questions but never looks for answers. Why should he? He knew it all, way back in Sunday School -- hence, "The Truth About Judaism."
Perhaps in this scientific age, the simple faith of our Jewish forefathers is no longer possible. But then the question is, Where do we go from here? A truly questioning soul, a real troublemaker, would have some sense of the divine, would feel the stirrings of wonder at creation, at the starry skies above, the moral law within -- and all that is frustrated. But Rushkoff is so charmed by himself, he senses none of this. Yes, he perceives some moral order, but he neither questions where it comes from nor considers what its sanctions are. He presents no theodicy, no questions (incredibly!) about the Holocaust. Why attempt to justify a God who does not exist? Why confront the void if you never sensed the ground of creation?
Additionally, "Nothing Sacred" rests in part on an ill-informed and tendentious discussion of Jewish philosophers, most notably Maimonides, whose work Rushkoff sees as "an effort to encourage evolutionary leaps in Jewish thought and practice." Certainly Maimonides understood that there is an evolutionary aspect to Judaism, inasmuch as it comprises a legal system that must adapt to changing times, but the core principles themselves must remain sacrosanct and fixed. And by leaps? Never. And never in a way that subverts halakhah, basic Jewish law. Just so, following the destruction of the Second Temple, the rabbis adapted laws of the Temple service to new times, but did so only on account of the most tragic and pressing necessity, and made every attempt not to change the pulse of the religion. Later, it was Maimonides who elaborated Judaism�s credo, expressed in the 13 articles of faith and recited by Jews to this day, including faith in the coming of the Messiah, and above all, in the immutability of the Torah.
If, for Rushkoff, Judaism means not having religion, what then is left? It has been said that the Articles of Faith of Reform Judaism is the Democratic Party�s platform. Ruskhoff is to the left of Reform: His religion is circumscribed by civil rights, gay rights, animal rights and women�s rights, and his heaven is the election of a socialist president to the White House. All well and good perhaps, but for a religion, how banal! Of course, Judaism speaks highly of justice and peace, but so does secular humanism, and that being the case, just as you don�t need to be Jewish to love rye bread, you don�t have to be Jewish to be liberal.
Rushkoff does say there is no God -- "there is no single Creator" -- and if no God, then no religion, and if no religion, then no Judaism. If he were a principled atheist, Rushkoff might have the honesty and the courage to give up tinkering with all this, and stare into the abyss. But he is staring at himself, and it is a matzah ball staring back.
A writer in Richmond, Virginia, Lisa Anuradha Singh is working on a book about her return to her father�s village in India.
May 19, 2003
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