Time to Grow Up

If you’re looking for interesting summer reading, why not pick up an old classic?  Though it's not quite a page-turner, I recommend Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. 

It reads in part as a sophisticated critique of religion, but it’s also an attempt to understand how the human mind works. 

Freud draws an analogy between the human mind and a city.  A city is established when its first buildings are built; while these buildings are sometimes destroyed as the city grows, often they are preserved as new layers emerge.  In Paris, the ile de la cite remains central; in New York, it’s Lindy’s near Time Square. . .

But far more than these foundational buildings shape a city, Freud argues, foundational experiences shape our cognitive and emotional development.

The yearnings and fears we experience in infancy carry on profoundly as part of the human psyche.  Our hungers, for example, or our fear of abandonment, remain core elements of who we are.

What do we do with these intense and foundational parts of our identity?

Some people don’t ever quite get beyond their own selves. 

Hopefully, most of us build on our core hungers and fears.  We come to recognize that, just as we have needs and fears, others do, as well.  We come to appreciate that for us to have opportunity and liberty, others must, as well – or else the whole house begins to collapse.

I highly recommend a series on HBO about John Adams, based on the biography by David McCullough.

On and around July 4, it’s especially pertinent.

Here is man who used his stridency and pique in advance of the common good.  Not to mention that if they were alive today, his wife, Abigail, might have become the president.  (Well, unfortunately, maybe not just yet.)

His speeches and correspondence, brought to life in this excellent drama, bespeak a highly evolved and courageous individual.

He defended the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, which was not a great way to win friends at the time.  Before and during the trial, he explained to the Boston masses that a nation must be governed by law, not by fancy or predilection.  He said, in a phrase that would become famous, that “facts are stubborn things.”  They don’t evaporate conveniently to suit human bias.

He denounced the tarring and feathering of a British-sympathizing customs officer as barbaric.

The push toward independence, which was dramatized based on ample documentation, involved the gradual realization of all of the colonies that when one colony (at the time Massachusetts) was under siege, all the colonies were under siege.

To borrow from Freudian terminology, the fear and yearning of one infant colony became the concern of all the others who recognized, as Benjamin Franklin wittily and famously put it, that they would either all hang together, or surely hang separately.

The writings of John Locke and others in the 17^th century were, in large measure, an extension from the needs and rights of each individual to the needs and rights of all individuals. 

It was a progression writ large on the political stage from infancy to adolescence and beyond.

As our allies at the time of the Revolution loved to say, plus ce change, plus c’est la meme chose.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Our compatriots in Israel are fighting for equality, still.  The Supreme Court in Israel, weeks ago, issued a ruling in favor of funding for non-Orthodox rabbis, which constituted a form of recognition.  Mind you, the funding was to be channeled through the ministry of sports and recreation, rather than religion.

But nevertheless, it’s a breakthrough.  That’s certainly how it was seen by the Chief Rabbi Amar.  Which is why he issued the following proclamation:

NO TIME FOR SILENCE

A Letter Addressed to all Rabbis in Every Part of the Country,

May God be With Them

We hereby make known our distress and deep pain about the desecration of Heaven’s honor, about the trampling of the Torah, and about the aid and comfort given to those who uproot and destroy Judaism, people who have already brought horrendous destruction on the Jewish people in the Diaspora, by causing terrible assimilation and an uprooting of all of the fundamental principles of the Torah.

These people now seek recognition in the Land of Israel as well, so that uprooters of the faith will be recognized as religious leaders. Woe to us that this is happening in our time – that heads are held high by enemies of God, wicked people who are like the turbulent sea that cannot be quieted, their entire aim being to do harm to the sanctity and purity of Torah in our holy land. So we declare before one and all: “This will not stand!”

We are therefore calling on one and all to assemble for a deliberative rally, to cry out bitterly on behalf of the Torah, and to entreat the Almighty to void this evil decree, to preserve our holy Torah as it was given, to keep it untouched by alien hands, and to stop those who would sabotage [modern Hebrew: commit terrorism] and destroy the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts.

WE WILL ALL GATHER ON TUESDAY, 6 TAMMUZ AT 2:00 P.M.

AT THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE CHIEF RABBINATE OF ISRAEL

No one should be absent at such a time, when the participation of all Rabbis is essential, so that each can lend support to his brother and give one another strength. Let us be strong and supportive on behalf of our holy Torah, and on behalf of the Jewish people, so that the wall of its vineyard not be breached. May the One who repairs all breaches repair this one as well in mercy, and put repentance into the hearts of those of errant ideas, so that they come to believe that this Torah will never be replaced or changed, God forbid.

Shlomo Moshe Amar

Rishon Le-Tziyon, Chief Rabbi of Israel

There were very strong reactions to this statement on the part of the Rabbinical Assembly, including the fact that two of my colleagues in Israel are suing the chief rabbinate for defamation.  But what was especially heartening was the editorial article in the Jerusalem Post, criticizing the Chief Rabbinate for become increasingly isolated, myopic and, therefore, irrelevant. 

The editorial indicated the following:

“Tuesday’s rally was yet additional proof of what has become abundantly clear: The Chief Rabbinate has become an institution that does more harm than good to the way Judaism is perceived by the wider public.”

There is something, frankly, infantile about an approach which reacts so angrily to any perceived infringement on turf.

My colleagues in Israel are fighting for religious freedom, not just for themselves, but for all Jews.

The accusation of the Chief Rabbi is inaccurate.  Masorti and Progressive Jews are not fostering assimilation, they are fighting assimilation.  Ask the thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union who have been embraced by Masorti congregations.  Ask the hundreds of families of special needs children whom Masorti congregations provided with bar and bat mitzvah instruction.

Freud theorized that religion was a way to satisfy our infantile needs.  Religion, he argued, offers facile comfort.

While often religion does just that, it doesn’t always and it doesn’t have to.

A religious community, and a secular government, can actually catapult us from the confines of infancy into the often painful, yet ultimately beneficial, world of adulthood.

So John Adams says to his cousin, Sam, “no more barbarism.  Not in the nation we are creating together.” 

And Masorti Rabbis say to the Chief Rabbi, “no more monopoly on religious expression.  Not in the nation we are creating together.”

The fears and hungers of infancy are always with us.  Freud was right about that.  And they will always influence us.  Freud was right about that, too.

But they aren’t the endpoint of our development.  They are the beginning.

When Moses struck the rock instead of talking to it, God said to him, “you’ve had it.  Time for a new leader.”

Was it so terrible?  The poor man lost it once.  Don’t we all lose it?

Ramban said that the problem was that his loss of temper dispirited the people.

I would say, in the context of the framework I’m putting forth, that Moses regressed to a place of selfishness and impatience.

Should he have been given another chance?  Perhaps.

But one message of this story is that God is looking for adult behavior – the integration of self and other, the capacity to think long-term, the willingness to extrapolate from one’s own needs to those of others.

As we celebrate our independence once again, we affirm that all human beings are created in God’s image, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

That’s what ought to guide us as we continue to “grow up” together.

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on June 30, 2012