Belonging and Believing

Dean Inge once defined religion as “what an individual does with his own solitude.” This is one view of the nature of spirituality, and it has deep roots in western civilisation. Plotinus spoke of “the flight of the alone to the Alone.” Epictetus wrote of the experience that comes upon a person when he shuts himself away from human company and there in isolation discovers that he is not alone, “but God is within.” Faith, for them, was something encountered in the privacy of the soul, in the secret fastnesses of lonely meditation. Walter Savage Landor called solitude “the audience chamber of God” and Aldous Huxley wrote that “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” There are religious traditions built around such private experiences. But they are not Judaism.

The Torah begins with creation. In a majestic series of phases the universe unfolds to the repeated declaration, “And God said, Let there be... And there was... And God saw that it was good.” Only one aspect is described as not good: “It is not good for man to be alone.” Solitude, for the Torah, is not humanity’s highest state, nor is it the condition in which we come most fully into the presence of God. The individual must share his life with others. The Torah is a book about persons-in-relation, about marriages, families, tribes, an emergent nation, a people. It recognises that relationships are rarely smooth. The Torah’s narratives are often painful. They tell a story of conflicts, rivalries, jealousies, antagonisms, rifts, murmurings and rebellions. In our collective life we seldom if ever reach the serenity that sometimes comes upon an individual when, alone, he or she contemplates the universe. Nonetheless it is here that we must struggle to make a space for God. Judaism is not a religion of the lonely man or woman of faith. It is a covenant which calls into being a community of faith. What is it that leads some religions to find truth in solitude, and why does Judaism reject that route?

Religion has often been humanity’s most profound source of consolation. It is hard to live long in the company of society without deep disillusionment. The Hebrew Bible contains a book which perfectly expresses this mood: the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes. Its author has explored all avenues of human happiness – wealth, power, the pursuit of knowledge – and seen that they end in grief. Wealth dies with us. Fame is fleeting. Wisdom is briefly acknowledged, then forgotten. Justice withers under the relentless onslaught of power. Beneath the sun, human striving seems futile, empty, destined to failure. Faced with the apparent arbitrariness of the world, the individual driven by a glimpse of perfection can come to find it in an alternative reality, the world within the soul in whose quietude can be heard the mystic reverberations of infinity. Reality is not here, in the ceaseless conflict of the visible world, but elsewhere, in that “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,” the world of Platonic forms, or Pauline grace, or the mystic’s rapture. This is not Kohelet’s conclusion, but it is an understandable one, and it has spoken to some of humanity’s greatest minds.

Judaism’s most revolutionary gesture is to have declined this consolation. At most times it has had its mystics and solitaries but they have not been, nor have they claimed to be, its representative voices. With unusual courage, often in dire circumstances, Jews have felt called on to bring the presence of God into the public places of our shared life. God is not in another world but in this, the world of deceit and desire, collision and collusion. He is here, less as a presence than as a challenge, a call, a summons, a command. It is not the world as it is that bears deepest witness to the existence of God, but the world as it ought to be, which is why creation is incomplete without revelation. We must resist the flight into solitude, for we are called on neither to forsake nor to accept the world but to change it, creating in its midst a society of justice and compassion, equity and moral integrity, never yielding to despair even after a succession of failures.

This cannot be a private task. Building a society is an essentially public undertaking. It needs the efforts of an entire people, sustained over many generations. That is why Abraham was chosen not because of his personal righteousness but “so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” That is the basis of the event which brought the Jewish people into being as a holy nation: the covenant at Sinai. It was a covenant not with individuals in their solitariness but with a people in its collective entirety. For only a people can create a society, and only a society can bring God from the privacy of heaven to the public spaces of life on earth.

The Talmud says that when Moses ascended to heaven to receive the Torah the angels did not want it to be brought down to earth where inevitably at times it would be dishonoured. Moses challenged the angels. “Are the Ten Commandments meant for heaven? Is there violence or passion or envy in the world of disembodied spirits, that they need to be taught that murder, adultery and robbery are forbidden?” The Torah is not meant for angels but for human beings in full recognition of their fallibility. Judaism is the sustained attempt to bring the Divine presence from the soul to the body, from poetry to prose, from the innermost mind to the public domain, from exalted moments into the texture of everyday life.

Despite its insistence on the dignity of the individual and the infinite value of a single human life, Judaism sees the person within a network of relationships, as part of a family, a community and a society. It is society as such that must be sanctified if the individual is to find God in the daily life of the world He created and pronounced good. The great symbol of Jewish spirituality is the tabernacle, a fragile sanctuary made by human hands and placed at the centre of the camp as a visible reminder that God is in the midst of the community as well as in the secret spaces of the soul.

Judaism is of its essence a collective endeavour, and as a result it is deeply communal in its spirituality. Its most sacred prayers cannot be said in private. The liturgy, other than occasional meditations, is written in the first person plural, not the singular. When we pray for an individual we include him or her amongst “all others in Israel” who need healing or consolation. We confess our sins together. When a couple stand under the bridal canopy, the blessings said on the occasion, the sheva berakhot, speak of “Zion rejoicing in her children” as if the whole Jewish people past and present joined in the celebration. Jewish mourning customs draw the bereaved gently back into the ambit of community at the very time when they feel most alone. Even the Jewish home is not a closed institution, a “haven in a heartless world.” Jewish teachings emphasise the open house, the extended family, and welcoming the stranger. Hospitality is “greater than welcoming the Divine presence.” We discover God in our togetherness, not our isolation. Martin Buber misdescribed the faith of Judaism when he spoke of I-and-Thou. The primary relationship in Judaism is We-and-Thou, the Jewish people standing collectively before God.

This explains the centrality in Judaism of the idea of law. Jewish tradition has many names for law: Torah, edah, hok, mishpat, din and halakhah. What they have in common is the understanding that it is through our shared patterns of behaviour that God is revealed in the world. This idea has perplexed and occasionally exasperated those for whom spirituality belongs to the soul. Laws have their place, they would concede, but it is not in the realm of religion. Their role is limited and essentially secular, to preserve the social order and prevent people from harming one another. But if we believe that society can become a vehicle for the Divine presence, then law takes on a quite different character. It is the architecture of kedushah, the blueprint of a society that mirrors the goodness and order of creation. It is the arena in which we set aside our private inclinations and join our efforts to those of others in building a shared domain dedicated to God. Law is the expression of the We which takes priority over the I. It is the code not of individual salvation but of collective redemption, and this has implications for the concept of faith itself.

The Hebrew word emunah is usually translated as “faith” or “belief.” But like many words which lie at the centre of a unique way of life, it defies exact translation. When Abraham, old and childless, was told that he would have as many descendants as the stars of the sky, he “believed in [vehe’emin] God,” who “counted it to him for righteousness.” This means less that Abraham believed he would have a child than that he trusted in God who had given His word. When Hosea describes God’s relationship with Israel he says, “I will betroth you to Me in faith [be’emunah].” By this he means fidelity, loyalty, staying together in troubled times. Emunah conveys strength, firmness and tenacity. It characterises a moral relationship between persons, a mutuality of trust and dedication. As these two examples suggest, it is often a relationship created by words – a promise given, a betrothal spoken – and signals the power of language to express binding commitments. The key undertaking in Judaism is the covenant between God and the children of Israel at Mount Sinai. Emunah, in this context, means that both parties remain loyal to its terms.

Only against this background can we understand how faith, in Judaism, can be a communal phenomenon. The key concepts of Judaism – creation, revelation, redemption – do not refer to the relationship between God and an individual soul. They refer to the relationship between God and humanity, or God and an entire people. God creates the world not for lonely Adam but for people who marry and have children and build societies. It is Israel the people which experiences slavery and liberation; Israel the people which accepts the covenant and its commands; Israel which is charged in its collective life with being “witnesses of God” and exemplars of righteousness. The prophet Ezekiel, in his vision of the valley of dry bones, sees the resurrection of the dead as something which happens to a nation, not simply to individuals. Emunah, as it resonates through the verses of the Hebrew Bible, is the faithfulness of a people to its shared and public undertaking. Individuals may sin, whole groups may break away, but the people as a whole endures and despite its many rebellions remains faithful to the terms of the covenant.

Believing therefore begins with belonging. We become Jews, not by formal declaration of articles of faith, but by being born into a people and accepting the terms of its history and constitution. That is why the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud, despite their exhaustive explorations of Torah, never formulated a definitive code of Jewish belief, and none appeared until the twelfth century when Maimonides wrote his “Thirteen Principles” of faith. It was not because Judaism lacks beliefs, but because emunah means something other than individual assent to a set of propositions. It means identifying with a people, sharing its memories and aspirations, and participating in its collective encounter with God. Maimonides writes that one who “separates himself from the community” forfeits his share in the world to come, and defines him as one who “even if he does not commit any transgression, nonetheless separates himself from the congregation of Israel, does not fulfil commands together with them, is indifferent to their distress, does not share in their fasts, and goes on his own way as if he were a member of another nation, not theirs.” Nothing more powerfully expresses the participative nature of Jewish faith. I believe, because I belong to a people which has dedicated its collective life to God, and I have made their vocation my own.

Where then did belonging grow into believing? What was the schoolroom of Jewish faith, and which were its texts? They were the synagogue and the siddur, the book of Jewish prayer. We find traces of theological debate in the rabbinic literature, but the real battleground was elsewhere. It was in the liturgy that Judaism wrote its creed. Against dualism the morning service declared that God “forms light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates all things.” Against the Sadducees who denied the resurrection of the dead, the second paragraph of the Amidah insisted that God “restores to life.” The blessings over the Torah enunciated Jewish belief in revelation. The “verses of praise” spoke of creation and the Divine presence in history. The rabbis discontinued an earlier practice of reciting the Ten Commandments as part of the daily service on the grounds that it was being used by sectarians to argue that only these, not the rest of Judaism, were Divine and therefore binding. They introduced a paragraph against schismatics (“For slanderers let there be no hope”) into the Amidah, and legislated against leaders of prayer who used phrases suggestive of heresy.

In place of creeds, catechisms and articles of faith, Judaism had its prayers. The home of faith was the beit knesset, the place where the community gathered and rededicated itself to God. That is why the synagogue has held such a pivotal role in Jewish life, for it was there that Jews came together to identify with the totality of the Jewish people and its ancient but still lively covenant with God, committing themselves to continue it as the representatives, here and now, of the “congregation of Israel” throughout time and space. By making the synagogue and its liturgy the guardians of faith, Judaism expressed the primacy of “We believe” over “I believe.” It was by being part of the “congregation of Israel” and joining in its prayers that the individual participated in the journey, for some simple, for others complicated and full of hesitations, from fate to faith, from belonging to believing, from the member of an am to the participant in an edah.

There is a prayer we say every morning which, for me, perfectly expresses the Jewish experience of standing before God. It begins with a devastating confession of man’s insignificance in the face of infinity:

What are we? What is our life? What is our piety, our righteousness, our salvation? What is our strength, our might?... Are not all the mighty men as nothing before You, The men of renown as if they never existed, the wise as if devoid of knowledge, the intelligent as if without discernment?

As individuals we are nothing, a speck of dust on the face of time. And then comes a monumental “but:”

But we are Your people, The children of Your covenant...

Collectively we are part of a remarkable heritage. We are members of the people who followed God into the desert, accepted His word at Sinai, built His home in Jerusalem, and stayed loyal across the centuries to a vision of “the right and the good in the eyes of God,” the building of a vast edifice of spirituality through the sanctification of small deeds. As the American writer Milton Himmelfarb once wrote, “Every Jew knows how thoroughly ordinary he is; yet taken together, we seem caught up in things great and inexplicable... Big things seem to happen around us and to us.”

Jewish faith is learned and taught, lived and experienced, in community. That is why the integrity of the community, its inner cohesiveness and its loyalty to the founding terms of its existence, matter even more than the learning or piety of individuals. This is a theological proposition but its significance has not been lost on those who stood outside tradition. In 1955 Nathan Glazer, a secular American sociologist, expressed it well:

The role that in Christianity is played by God’s grace… is taken in Judaism by the holy community. It is that which touches and moves people, and brings them back to the faith. And the return to the faith, which in Christianity means the acceptance of beliefs… in Judaism means the return to the community, which is made holy because it lives under God’s law… In Judaism, then, it is not God directly, found after an inner search, that changes man, but the example of the good and holy life, presented by the community of Jews.

Almost since its inception the United Synagogue has been criticised for the apparently strange phenomenon that “as an institution it was orthodox, but it admitted to membership all who were Jewish according to orthodox criteria, irrespective of their own personal degree of religious commitment.” Many of its members were what is sometimes called “non-observant Orthodox,” and for this it was taken to task by both right and left. On the right, those who were used to the separatist Orthodoxy of Germany and Eastern Europe wondered why a synagogue body should be open to and provide a spiritual home for those who did not live rigorously by its standards. On the left, those who were used to the secularism or religious liberalism that prevailed elsewhere wondered why the Jews of Britain should adhere in public to standards they did not necessarily keep in private. Why did they not simply form associations where what they did was declared to be the norm? The right accused it of latitudinarianism, the left of hypocrisy. Neither could understand what the United Synagogue represented.

The answer is that it represented something profoundly Jewish: the decision to be part of a community which embodies the Jewish faith of the generations. It was the classic gesture of emunah. Those who joined it were not necessarily strictly observant, nor did they thereby signal that they had through personal reflection arrived at all thirteen of Maimonides’ principles of faith. But they were making a significant declaration nonetheless, that they wished to belong to a congregation which in its public and collective expressions remained loyal to the principles by which Jews had always lived, and whose faith they wished to see continued as a living possibility for those who came after them. It was not a personal profession of righteousness, but it was a decision to remain related to the community of faith. And it had significant consequences.

It meant that, whether frequently or intermittently, they were in touch with the Judaism of the ages, performing its deeds, sharing its prayers and aspiring to its ideals. It meant that they had not foreclosed the possibility of a deeper engagement with tradition, whether for themselves or for their children or grandchildren, for they had never institutionalised and thus perpetuated their private disagreements with it. It meant that they were open – and faith itself is a form of openness – to the voice of the Divine presence as it spoke through the texts and laws and prayers that the Jewish people had always held holy, and even if they did not hear it now they kept alive the possibility that they might one day. It meant that they were loyal – and emunah means loyalty – to the Judaism of all time, not just one time. The United Synagogue stayed open to them, and they stayed open to it. By drawing a distinction between the individual and the community, and protecting the latter against changes that might sever its connection with the “congregation of Israel” extended through space and time, Anglo-Jewry was faithful to a fundamental of Judaism, that it is in community that faith must be kept alive.