If I lived alone on Planet Laura, I would stop writing about the Pew survey, in protest against unproductive, polarized debate.
But here I am, on Planet Earth inhabiting the body of a Jewish communal professional. So I’ll write something in protest, instead. And I’ll argue that, deep down, we are not as polarized as we think.
We’ve seen the first set of Jewish responses to the survey. Some writers prophesied the death of Judaism, and the fulfillment of Hitler’s project of extermination. Others denounced this view as evidence of a “holocaust complex,” and instead celebrated the multicultural reincarnation of Jewry in America.
Personally, I think we’ve all got a bit of a holocaust complex.
Keep in mind that the Pew survey offers a snapshot of the Jewish people. If you look closely, you see it is not a new image. Actually, it dates back to Torah times.
In Torah, quantitative census data only appears in stories about taxes and armies. But qualitative data, in the form of narrative, pops up everywhere. Jews do not believe in God. They marry non-Jews in great numbers. They practice religious syncretism – blending Jewish rituals with those from other religions. Moses brings them back into national religious particularism, and then they fall away again.
This WAS the Jewish people. This still IS the Jewish people. Here we are, 3,000 years later, still living out our pattern.
For Israeli Depth Psychologist Erel Shalit, the lives of all human beings express archetypal patterns. Human psychological growth revolves around a number of key motifs. One, he says, is the “birth-death-rebirth theme of transformation.”
Anyone acquainted at all with Jewish practice knows how important this archetypal theme is to Jewish self-understanding. Over and over again, we move from slavery to freedom; we move from exile to return. We often describe our history as a repetition of this pattern.
Clearly, this is a Jewish national version of the “birth-death-rebirth theme of transformation.”
Does the holocaust fit this theme?
Some postwar Jewish theologians argued that it does not: the holocaust is an absolutely unique event, too terrible to be held by any existing categories or concepts. But the writing of some holocaust era activists argues otherwise.
Zivia Lubetkin, a secular Zionist leader in the Warsaw Ghetto underground, sometimes felt herself shaped by the Exodus from slavery to freedom. On the first night of the ghetto uprising, she wrote, she visited a Passover Seder, and received a blessing from a rabbi.
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, a Hasidic spiritual teacher in the Warsaw ghetto, framed his experience in similar terms. During the war, he told his followers: We finally understand the Israelites’ despair under Egyptian slavery. We literally see Isaiah’s vision of Babylonia’s cruelty, and we can share his hope for restoration. Perhaps our oppression will turn out to be birth-contractions of the Messiah.
The “birth-death-rebirth” theme of transformation.
So many of us are caught up in it. As we should be: our last national near-death experience was less than 60 years ago. That’s not even a whole lifetime ago.
For some of us, life events have directed our psychic energy towards the slavery/exile side of the process. When significant events trigger our emotions, we describe what we see.
Some of us were shaped differently; we focuse on freedom/return. When we are triggered, we, too, describe what we see.
We are all engaged in the business of transformation.
We have no choice. In our former European population centres, we were one thing; in our contemporary Israeli and North American centres, we will be different.
Yes, our old identity is dying. Yes, our new identity is being born. Yes.
Slavery and redemption. Exile and return. Death and Rebirth.
It’s an archetypal Jewish framework for understanding our history; let’s use it well.
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Image: http://maditsmadfunny.wikia.co. Cross-Posted at OnSophiaStreet.
Hasidic
Pronounced: khah-SID-ik, Origin: Hebrew, a stream within ultra-Orthodox Judaism that grew out of an 18th-century mystical revival movement.
Torah
Pronunced: TORE-uh, Origin: Hebrew, the Five Books of Moses.
