27
ImagInIng the JewIsh Future
God goes to the Edomites, the children
of Esau, and says, “Here’s the Torah.
Do you want it?” They say, “Let’s hear
what’s in it.”
And God says, “Well, it says thou shalt
not murder.”
“
You know, we’re Edomites. That’s
what we do. No thank you, we don’t
want it.”
So God goes to the Ammonites and
the Moabites, descendants of Lot’s
incestuous relationship with his
daughters. “Well, what does it say?”
“
Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
“
No thank you, not for us.”
So God takes the Torah to the
Israelites, who accept it and say,
“
We’ll take it, we’ll do it, and we will
understand.” Understanding comes,
hearing comes. But it comes
after
action, it comes
through
action.
Now, this is a different model that
relates action and behavior together,
rather than the “why be Jewish” model,
which says first you have to understand
why you do what you do so that you
explain it and thereby encourage other
people to do it too. This is different.
This one says do it first and the
meaning is going to emerge from the
process of doing it. There are other
rabbinic approaches that say the same
thing. “
Mitoch shelo lishma ba lishma.
”
If you begin doing an act not for the
right reasons, the reasons you
should
be doing it, you can eventually come
to doing it for the right reasons.
I teach at a university where we
have a lot of college students who
are enrolling in classes because they
have to fulfill their distribution
requirements. They’re not necessarily
in the Shakespeare class because they
love Shakespeare, but they take the
class and guess what? They discover
that in fact they love it.
So we have two different models: a
“
Why Be Jewish” model and a “
Na`aseh
V’Nishma
”
model. Let’s step back and
look at these two models and think
about the deeper social theory that
they’re suggesting here and what we can
lean about Jewish leadership from this.
In the “Why Be Jewish” model,
meaning motivates action. In the
“
Na`aseh V’Nishma
”
model, action
generates meaning.
Meaning motivates action. It makes
sense, it’s logical. But if you think about
it in terms of 20th-century social theory,
there is a tiny problem with that.
That tiny problem is named Sigmund
Freud. You think you know why you
do what you do? Have you spent ten
years in therapy yet? Freud introduced
us to the notion of the subconscious,
to the notion that our motives are not
immediately accessible to us. So we can
try to explain why we do what we do,
why be Jewish. We can come up with
reasons: “in this hyper-individualistic
world this provides community;” or
“
with all this rapid change where even
kids are not on Facebook anymore
because that’s for old people already
(
old being 25 and older), Judaism
gives stability and some anchor in
tradition;” or “in this globalized world
where we’re always moving all over the
place, wherever you go you can find
community.” These are good reasons
and good rationales and they work.
But is this why we do what we do?
The reasons that we ourselves engage
in this are so deep and so complex
and so fraught. And to think that
we can reduce this to a set of rational
arguments to make a case to others
to act as we do, is highly problematic.
What about the theoretical grounding
of the “action generates meaning”
approach? There are all these hard-
to-quote French social theorists from
the 1970s, Foucault and Bourdieu
and DeCerteau, who talk about
practice and
habitus
,
and take up this
idea that meaning is something that we
construct through the actions that we
do. (There is a traditional echo to this,
which I’ll talk about in a minute.)
As a sociologist, I’m in the social
constructionist camp. That means that
I believe that we as people create the
reality in which we are living. There is
an anthropologist named Clifford Geertz
who explained it this way: human
beings are like spiders who weave
meaning; we weave these webs of meaning
and then we live on the webs of
meaning that we ourselves have created.
A social constructionist approach
means that right now we are engaged
in the act of creating Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
If everyone connected with this
institution stopped doing what they
were doing, the institution would
not exist. It is created and recreated,
produced and reproduced from
moment to moment by the actions
that we collectively do to recreate it.
All the things that have been created
before are the webs that we’re climbing
on: they’re real. But we’re carrying it
forward. We produce it. The traditional
echo comes in the morning prayers:
if everyone connected with
this institution stopped doing
what they were doing, the
institution would not exist. it is
created and recreated, produced
and reproduced from moment
to moment by the actions that
we collectively do to recreate it.