Kaddish

Me and mom from the mid-80s

In early April I received a letter from Victor, my late mom’s 94 year old long-time companion. (They did not live together nor were they intimate, but their bonds were as strong as any couple’s.) He sent me a Yahrtzeit schedule, which indicates when Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, should be said for my mother and explained: “The enclosed [schedule] should be very clear. Your mother would be very happy if she knew you would say Kaddish over her.” The irony, of course, is that I have only decided to step foot in a temple after my mother’s death. In the past 25 years or so, she had pressured me constantly to become observant but in my own stubborn way (inherited from her), I refused.

As it turned out, I had plans to do this without any prompting from Victor, as I stated not long after my mother’s death.  So yesterday my wife and I went down to Temple Shaaray Tefila, a Reform Synagogue on Second Avenue and 79^th Street, for 10:15 Minyan services. (A Minyan means ten, a kind of quorum for Jewish services.) I had called the temple on Thursday to check out whether you had to be a member to attend. This synagogue is in the middle of prime NYC real estate and I had a feeling that it might operate as private club. There’s a funny “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode when Larry David tries to get entry to a ritzy Beverly Hills Synagogue for Yom Kippur using a ticket he bought from a scalper. The Shaaray Tefila receptionist said that there was no need to be a member—just show up.

The Minyan service was led by a Cantor and was sort of a side attraction on Saturday, with the main service taking place on the ground floor. He began by singing some prayer as he played the guitar, which is fairly typical for the Reform movement. My wife and I sat patiently while the group of about 20 worshippers said prayer after prayer, mostly in Hebrew, praising god. At one point, a line of a prayer was recited in English row by row. When they got to our row, I signaled to my wife to recite the line. It was probably the first time a Turk of Muslim descent (she is named after one of Mohammad’s wives) had ever participated in a Minyan there.

Toward the end of the 90 minute service, the Cantor asked us to read verses from Leviticus 18, the passage in the Old Testament that has the business about homosexuality being an “abomination” that rightwing Christians harp on. As has been pointed out by the more enlightened students of scripture, there are lots of other abominations, like wearing clothing made from blended textiles (cotton-polyester blends) and cross-breeding livestock. Nobody seems to get upset about those abominations for some reason.

The Cantor had the good sense to gloss over the business about homosexuality, but the verses we read were just as repellent to me since they expressed the view that you should do unto “fellow Israelites” as you would have them do unto you, a kind of tribal understanding of the Golden Rule. As the worshippers discussed the meaning of this, one man expressed some reservations about the idea that mercy and goodness only applied to fellow Jews. I kept my mouth shut because my only purpose in being there was to say Kaddish for my mom.

If in fact I decided to say something the words would come out like molten lava from a volcano. I would have repeated the words of rightwing radio host Rabbi Yaakov Spivak from Thursday night. Late at night, just before going to sleep, I scan through various talk radio stations just to hear what is on peoples’ mind. The politics do not matter to me that much, I just enjoy the rawness and the intensity of ordinary people talking about Obama, the New York Mets, or whatever.

Spivak runs a seminary to train Orthodox rabbis in Monsey, New York, an orthodox enclave, and has politics that can best be described as in the tradition of Meier Kahane. In other words, he is a fascist. On Thursday he expounded on his “two state” theory. He said that Palestinians, including those that live in Israel, should have their own state in Gaza and the Sinai desert and if they don’t agree to move there, trucks should come at night and pick them up. In other words, Spivak was talking up the kinds of proposals that are now being made by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new Minister of Foreign Affairs.

I could not shake the image of trucks coming in the middle of the night. Despite whatever Spiked online and the American SWP say, this sounds Nazi-like to me.

I wondered what the guitar-playing Reform Cantor would make of this, but I assumed that if the Labor Party in Israel could operate in a coalition with the ultraright he would be able to justify any new round of ethnic cleansing coming out of Israel.

That remained my big problem with Judaism, leaving aside the deeper problem of the lack of evidence for a Supreme Being. Even when I was 12 years old, I could not understand the basis for a religion treating “fellow Israelites” differently than the “Goyim”, the word for non-Jews. This kind of tribalism struck me as backward and idiotic. That is one of the main reasons I began to stay away from synagogues after being Bar Mitzvahed, not to speak of having Saturday mornings free to read or watch TV—the Homer Simpson approach to religion, so to speak.

My mother was a diehard Zionist and Reform Jew. She hated the orthodox branch of the religion for turning people off (my own synagogue growing up was orthodox) but had little sense of the more universalist leanings of the Reform movement. As she grew older, her advocacy for Israel and her Reform Judaism became more and more cranky. I suppose that my own feelings about Marxism will take on that character as I reach my seventies and later.

Norman Cantor’s “The Sacred Chain: the History of the Jews” is a good overview of Jewish history and even betrays a certain familiarity with the Marxist method, although his reputation is much more that of a mainstream scholar (he died in 2004 at the age of 74). In chapter 9, he deals with “The Response to Modernity and Modernism”, part of which was the emergence of Reform Judaism during the Enlightenment.

In a way, the pioneers of Reform Judaism were motivated by the same instincts that led to my break with “Marxism-Leninism”. They viewed their traditional institutions as narrow and sectarian, as did I. The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, started in 18^th century Germany and sought to integrate Judaism with Kantian philosophy. As opposed to the mysticism and cultishness of the Hasidic movement, Reform stressed rationality, justice and learning.

The German Jewish émigrés to the United States brought their religion with them. For an educated businessman, it was much more appropriate to go to a Reform synagogue where the services were much shorter and less ritualistic. Sermons were much less about how to interpret a biblical text but how to better one morally and spiritually. In a way, the Reform movement was trying to accomplish the same sort of thing as mega-Churches today, which is to become more relevant.

As is always the case with “improving” religion, there is a risk that it will no longer have the same kind of hold on one’s life that a more orthodox sect does, especially when the deity is turned into some kind of Kantian transcendental spirit. In reality, the Reform movement has hastened the assimilation process in the U.S., even if it was intended to stave off the deadening irrelevancy of the Orthodoxy.

As Cantor points out, the Reform Movement was geared to the class/ideological needs of a rising Jewish bourgeoisie:

For emancipated and well-educated Jews, the market economy was among the most readily identifiable and presently shaping structural segments in this God-created, rationally explicable, phenomenal world  they experienced.

The prime theorist of the market economy for the nineteenth century, whose economic theory is still canonical in most economics departments and all business schools, was a Sephardic English banker, David Ricardo, writing in London in the 1820s. There is a direct line from Ricardo to Milton Friedman, the Chicago Jewish market theorist of the 1980s who was the guru of the Reaganites in the United States and the Thatcherites in Britain.

Ricardo lives. He owed much, of course, to the clever Glasgow moral philosopher Adam Smith, writing in the 1770s. But it was Ricardian economic theory that became and remains the theoretical foundation of that market capitalism in which so many nineteenth-and twentieth-century Jews made their fortune and general fame, or at least found the means for a satisfying private family life. Ricardo was the Moses of Jewish capitalism, who brought down the tablets of truth to show to the chosen people and the admiring Gentiles as well.

The main point of Ricardian economics is identical with that of Reform Judaism’s Haskalah-Kantian theology. Just as God in the latter is a creator whose majesty is humanly unapproachable, so the market is a universal, rationalizing structure that cannot be modified by human will or sentiment, such as by paying wages beyond the minimum with which the market can operate, or by state interference with the business cycle or capital accumulation. Leave God and the market alone and attend to your personal, family, and communal lives and business interests.

The phenomenological Kantian message parallels Ricardo’s demonstration that the market economy must be left alone by ethics and politics to maximize and distribute wealth. Trying for a close encounter with the deity leads to uncouth Hasidic practices and superstition and threatens a return to the ghetto. Trying to rectify the market’s distribution of wealth and poverty by government intervention will produce not only social anomalies but also severe economic underdevelopment and therefore much more poverty than the minimally necessary amount that liberal capitalism allots.

Both Ricardian economics and Reform Judaism can be seen as partisan self-promotion for the entrepreneurial and professional classes. Their wealth, ease, learning, and power are allegedly the result of privilege and power rather than divine and scientific revelations of truth in cosmology and sociology. There is inevitably a degree of self-justification involved in the mutually interactive Reform Judaism Haskalah-Kantian theology and Ricardian economics.

But there is also involved the austerity, the asperity, the social aspiration of the postmedieval Jew who has found stability, comfort, and reason in modernity in its cultural and fiscal aspects, and has no desire or motive for going beyond this resting place in the Jewish historical pilgrimage and wants to make it a permanent home.

Both Reform Judaism and liberal capitalism, whatever their limits intellectually as doctrines, whatever their propensity to cut off spiritual exaltations and impede social revolutions, are quiet havens at last for the Jews where they can be at peace with their Gentile neighbors, within the Christian state, and draw upon their comfortable bank accounts and investments and cultivate the material and behavioral amenities of life. It is a dry, quietly happy world of bourgeois learning, security, and wisdom. There is no need to seek further. Here world history and Jewish history putatively end.

They say that by mid-century the only observant Jews will be those in the Orthodoxy. With their fanaticism and their willingness to impose their beliefs on children (imagine if Said Sayrafiezadeh had grown up in a Hasidic household, we never would have heard the end of it!), it is easier to resist assimilation.

I tend to agree with my friend Paul Buhle, a scholar of Jewish culture although not Jewish himself, that what will define Jewry is a sensibility more than anything else. Despite my antipathy to Israel and to the narrow “fellow Israelites” view of Judaism, I remain Jewish to the core. This morning after eating Matzoh brei and pickled herring, I sat down to watch television through my “rootless cosmopolitan” perspective. And if I had my choice of what Kaddish to recite yesterday, my preferences would have been with Allen Ginsberg’s poem excerpted below than the traditional Jewish liturgy since it is Ginsberg’s non-Jewish Jewishness that I feel the most affinity with:

In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under
pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,
Father in death.  Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m
hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not
light or darkness, Dayless Eternity–
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some
of my Time, now given to Nothing–to praise Thee–But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-
derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping
–page beyond Psalm–Last change of mine and Naomi–to God’s perfect
Darkness–Death, stay thy phantoms!