How Many Kinds of Jews are There -- Really?

"If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, whay warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?"

Percy Bysshe Shelley

After decades of Jew-watching, I have found that all Jews fall into one of three categories. Not the traditional ones. The labels mean little (even among Orthodox we find doubters); my categories are based on behavior as evidence of internal mental states.

(1) The true believers -- perhaps the majority of those called Orthodox, but you can find them in any denomination. They really believe it. They exist in an alternate, phantasmagorical reality in which the events of the Torah actually happened. The truth of these events, the reality of these characters -- they're part of the true believers' subjective world, as real as the automobiles and computers in their objective world.

In the case of the Orthodox, and many Conservatives, the zealousness with which they observe their countless commandments and try to out-Jew each other in doing so -- these indicate both obsessive compulsive behavior and mass-hypnotic, group-reinforced flight from reality. They reveal an astonishing level of mind control and groupthink -- the level that's usually associated with a cult. But then, a cult is just a religion you don't like.


(2) The wishy-washy/smorgasbord semi-believers. This category includes a wide variety of agnostics, hypocrites, getting-my-ticket-punched-and-being-seen people...maybe some people who hope the stories are true, who are in shul because they might be true, because it's socially acceptable, because a spouse really believes...and for other reasons, including intellectual laziness and cowardice. But they don't BELIEVE it as the truth, the way the true believers do. They hedge their bets. And they take the smorgasbord approach: They celebrate this holiday, that festival, toss in an opulent bar/bat mitzvah, and you're in.

Thus you find in Jewish suburbs, "kosher-style" delis, like Max and Benny's, north of Chicago, where you can get a delicious turkey and cheese panini. No truly kosher Jew would set foot in Max and Benny's.

Note that wishy-washiness (as in my own case and many others) is not incompatible with a hard-line stance on intermarriage. As the child of Type (2) Jews, I was stunned that my parents reacted to my marrying a gentile just as if they were Orthodox (but at least they didn't disown me).

(3) The atheists/secular humanists.

Only (1) and (3) actually take a stand. In the case of Humanists, the position straddles a fence and aspires to having it both ways - being in with the Jews (that won't happen with true believers, who will never accept humanists - yet maintaining their integrity and modern people of reason and science.


(I should also mention the wishy-washy Jewish Humanists who try to have it both ways: they don't believe in the truth of the Bible stories, but they nevertheless focus on these ancient tales and characters in their services, trying to wring some contemporary relevance out of them; they are thus barely distinguishable from Reform Jews.)

What's on Their Minds

Lately I have been exposed to the Internet presence of (1), the true believers. Paradoxically, the Internet enables them to keep their little closed communities tightly knit together. But it also allows an outsider to see what's on these people's minds. What I've found so far is disturbing.

Item: a concern for propriety and modesty in women's dress, typical of religions that want a role in supressing men's lust and give them no responsibility for controlling it. Such doctrine is degrading to both sexes. If a religion can get you by the genitals, it's got you. Women's dress codes are part of the process of controlling sex.

Thus, we find much debate, in a site used by true believers in Lakewood NJ, over a scrawled note left with a child after he and his Mom exited the doctor's office: "Your skirt does not cover your [k]nees in back." It is followed by MANY posts, including much support for this tactful way of reminding the woman of her responsibilities, how the community is or is not following the rules of tznius (dress codes), and some criticism of what the writer did.

Interesting to me as a linguist is the reinforcement of in-group ties via the importation of a great many Yiddish and Hebrew words, often to the point of causing me to lose the meaning entirely, e.g., "The Gemara tells us that the earlier Tana'im were able to perform miracles and not the later ones, was because the earlier ones were moiser nefesh ('body and soul') for the Torah."

Item: an obsession with correct ritual. Thus Sephardic Rabbi Joshua Maroof advises some poor troubled soul on how to prioritize prayers when lighting Hanukkah candles, memorializing a parent, and reciting the daily prayers. What a puzzlement! The Rabbi advises on this and other matters, such as exactly how men's beards should be cut in order to conform to the Torah's teaching.

More reports to come

I will visit these intellectual garbage dumps a few more times and report on what I find. If you're as naive as I, you knew these enclaves existed, but you had no idea how tightly-knit, ritual-obsessed, and judgmental they are. And they REALLY believe the Bible stories.

How is a Humanist to react to this immersion in fantasy, this obsession with correctness of behavior and ritual?

Mainly, I marvel at the power of the human mind to convince itself of that for which there is no evidence.

I also marvel at the extent to which people will sacrifice their dignity and invest themselves in fantasies in exchange for religion's comforts and consolations. Truly, it is cocaine for the soul.

Also, I'm saddened by the amount of energy that could be used in improving the human condition...and that is instead invested in propitiating non-existent deities, endlessly repeating obscure rituals (there are even sites devoted to taking shortcuts through the required prayers and how people feel guilty about it!), celebrating events that didn't occur and always pretending, pretending, pretending.

Again I ask: if God is so powerful, why does he need all the middlemen, all the ass-kissing?

I offer a friendly challenge to all of the faithful who are going to spend any part of today or tomorrow in prayer.

There are dozens of reasons why people engage in prayer and religious ritual, but one of them cannot be that it does them or anyone else any good in the real world. (Reuters recently reported an encouraging story about an Italian pilot who was held criminally negligent because he prayed instead of trying to guide the plane to safety. And I just [Feb. 2012] heard about a church that was destroyed by a storm during construction - clearly God disapproved, for whatever reason.)

Prayer works.

I don't doubt that prayer works, but not in the ways that the pray-ers think it does. Chanting/davening, toning, meditation -- all of these put people in a relaxed state in which it becomes easier for them not to be so anxious about their problems and even find a solution. There may be physical benefits as well.

Prayer doesn't work.

But again, no matter how much you beg God, no matter how assiduously you obey his multitudinous commands, it won't have any effect on the way things turn out. If you don't believe me, try one of these two experiments -- and I put this challenge to every religious believer in the world:

Here’s the deal:

Pick an interval -- any interval of respectable length. At least a week, preferably a month, six months, a year. And during that interval, simply go cold turkey on all prayer and religious ritual. Just say no.

I am aware that implementing this suggestion could upset a great many people's lives, because prayer and ritual are a source of comfort, for the reasons described above. If you want, they give you something to do every minute of the day.

For the orthodox of all faiths, the obsessiveness of religious ritual may be a form of repetition that gives comfort and protection against unpredictability, and, as such, is just as important a source of comfort as psychotherapy, art, music, lap swimming, or Zoloft.

That's why I propose two alternatives.

Alternative #1: For the prescribed interval, eliminate all prayer/ritual and devote all the time, energy, and resources that you normally invest in these activities...to improving yourself, your relationships, and your environment.

The possibilities are wide open. Take all the time you would have spent praying -- and improve your health and fitness, so that you're not a burden on society. Or improve your marriage or your relationship with your children, through quality time or counseling. Or volunteer for community service. Just don't pray, say a rosary, go to confession, lay tefillin, or any of that stuff.

Or...

Those of you who cannot bring yourself to do this...try the second alternative. For the prescribed period of time, ignore your community and environment, your physical and mental health, and your relationships. Take all the time, energy, and resources that you spend on these -- and invest them in prayer and worship.

I think that at the end of the agreed-upon period, we will wind up proving what we all knew to be true: that prayer doesn't do any good in the real world -- and that the way to improve things in the world is to actually do the work that improves them.

Living in the real world

We have so little time on this earth. Why do we want to waste it chanting before statues like medieval monks...or bowing before a scroll in a box like Semitic shepherds of the ninth century B.C.E. and talking in a strange language to somebody who isn’t there?

Just think what the world would be like if everyone went cold turkey on religious ritual and dedicated him/herself to improving the world. Don't you think we would have a better world? At least we would stop killing each other over the truth and meaning of ancient texts.

Humanistic salvation

In my fondest dreams, I see Sunnis and Shiites, Catholics and Protestants, putting their holy books in libraries and embracing each other like the brothers and sisters that they are.

This is the essence of a Humanistic Salvation: to realize that if we are to be saved, it is by ourselves and by each other.