My friends who know I’m a blogger like to send me news articles. Many involve some kind of craziness involving Jews.
The latest was published in Haaretz (May 8) involving an Orthodox woman who has sued Lancome. She claims that Lancome is liable because its “24-hour mascara” didn’t make it through Shabbat and threatened to ruin her big day (referring to her son’s upcoming bar mitzvah the following month).
The California lawyer in me immediately started wondering about such things as reliance, causation and damages (We’ll get to lunacy in a moment). But of course that was not why the article was sent to me — it was the apparent craziness of someone making a claim like this.
That reminded me of another time I was sent such an article. It was around the High Holy Days. The article, from the New York Times, was about some frail ultra-Orthodox Jews who resorted to intravenous feeding in order to present the appearance of fasting on Yom Kippur.
My friend sent the article to me with the suggestion that it was descriptive of “the ridiculous machinations of the [O]rthodox.” I wondered why my friend, a staunch Conservative Jew, was so fixated on the craziness of the Orthodox while ignoring what struck me as crazy behavior in his own movement.
More than once I have wondered why people really come to services on the High Holy Days. It can’t be the services themselves (and this is true of all movements, so don’t think I’m picking on any particular one). Much of the time the room is full of people who are clearly bored, often reciting prayers in a language they do not understand, voicing sentiments which, in English, they might well reject, and who are following, ever so briefly, a system of religious practice that they will abandon the moment Yom Kippur is over.
Yet my friend thinks the Orthodox are crazy? I think there is plenty of mishegas (craziness) to go around and while we like to make fun of what the other Jewish streams do or don’t do, sometimes it is worthwhile to think about what drives our own religious practices.
In fact, I actually have some sympathy with the Bobover hassidim depicted in the Times article. Here is why:
I had a minor physical complaint last year that required me to sit, for the first time in my adult life, during
portions of the Neilah service, when the Ark is open and, therefore, people are supposed to stand. Now Jewish law is extremely clear that health concerns trump otherwise applicable halacha (Jewish law). But it felt totally weird to sit. So I kept trying to stand even though I knew better. Fortunately, enough common sense kicked in that I didn’t do myself any harm, but I was struck by my need to conform. So I can understand, even if I disagree totally, with the frail Bobover hassidim getting their nutrition intravenously.
In a broader sense there is a battle between the heart and the head when it comes to religion. On the one hand, it is terribly difficult to defend, at least intellectually, adherence to the normative religious practice that is the hallmark of the High Holy Days, involving the intoning of endless, repetitious prayers praising God and beseeching God, repeatedly, not to do terrible things to us on account of our bad behavior.
But on the other hand, intoning the prayers and following traditional practice, on a productive Yom Kippur, makes me part of a chain of tradition and religious continuity that just feels right. There is something magical in the process and magic isn’t meant to be a function of logic.
Now my Conservative friend, if he attended shul on Sukkot, starting mere days after Yom Kippur, likely did so in a virtually empty sanctuary, even after all that singing, keening, wailing and talk of repentance. There could not be a more stark contrast than between Yom Kippur and Sukkot in a traditional Conservative synagogue, at least in the Bay Area.
In comparison, my Orthodox friends were attending relatively full shuls on Sukkot. The moral of the story: Be careful where you throw rocks. And my Reform Jewish friends shouldn’t act so smug either — I’m prepared to make a bet that someone who knows your movement could add to this piece. There really is plenty of mishegas to go around.
Robert E. White is a San Francisco attorney and long-time member of the San Francisco Jewish community. He writes about Judaism, law, social policy and computer technology at http://rwhitesf.blogspot.com.