Monday, August 03, 2009

Orthodox Judaism Must Lead to Moral Behavior

Orthodox Judaism has reached its moment of truth. With the many scandals involving religious Jews of late, an increasing number of people no longer believe that Jewish observance necessarily makes you into a better person. That there is no correlation between keeping Shabbos and being honest, there is no connection between wearing tzitzis and being faithful in marriage, and that there is no correlation between lighting Shabbos candles and treating employees with respect. And we the orthodox have no one but ourselves to blame. We have allowed ourselves at times to be religious without acting spiritual, to be prayerful without being humble, and to be ritually pedantic without being honest in business.

I am a passionately orthodox Jew. Only death could ever come between me and the G-d of Israel. But orthodoxy without morality and Judaism without humanity is a religiosity without G-d as well. It is cold, it is harsh, and it is an abomination.

The notion that orthodox Jews are not necessarily moral, were it to grow, will no doubt prove the single most catastrophic event to befall Jewish observance in all of Jewish history. Simply put, if practicing Judaism doesn’t make us better people then most will choose to discard it as an empty relic of a superstitious past.

The pictures of five Rabbis being led away in handcuffs in New Jersey had already rocked the American Jewish establishment when the even more gory news of a shooting attack in a gay community center in Tel Aviv, that left two dead, gave orthodoxy an even greater challenge. To be sure, noone knows whether the attack was a religious hate crime against gays and noone is to draw any conclusions before the facts are known. What is undeniable, however, is that too many orthodox Jews vilify gays as a disgrace, thereby sewing a climate of hate.

We can reverse all this. We the orthodox have it in our power to restore the true light and love of Judaism by demonstrating the power of our faith to shape outstanding ethics and inspire righteous action. Indeed, most orthodox Jews live lives of exemplary honesty, hospitality, and communal devotion. But now is the time for that truth to shine, to demonstrate that resting on the Sabbath and studying the Torah makes people less greedy, more noble, and more spiritual.

First and foremost, our children must be taught not just the rituals that that will make them good Jews but the values that underpin those rituals that will make them good people. As part of every Yeshiva education children should learn not only to say a blessing before eating an apple, but that the purpose of that blessing is to instill gratitude. That when a boy with a Yarmulke passes a soldier in uniform he thanks him for protecting him and allowing him to live openly with his faith. When our children don a Yarmulke let us remind them that not only is this a symbol identity but a symbol of supervision. G-d is watching you at all times, even when the FBI is not. When our daughters light Shabbos candles let us teach them that the purpose is not only to continue the tradition of the matriarch Sara but to illuminate the earth’s dark spaces. Sometimes those dark places are the hearts of suicidal gay orthodox Jews who write to people like me because they are afraid to go to parents. And I’m not asking that we compromise the Torah’s laws on homosexuality, but that we simply demonstrate love and humility when we see any of G-d’s children in pain.

Second, there should no room in orthodoxy for people who preach hate, something I have repeatedly encountered. By now it is well-known that in 1993 I was given a directive from the leadership of Chabad UK to dismiss all non-Jewish members of our Oxford University student society. The Rebbe had just died and I refused to do so because he loved non-Jews and regularly reached out to them in his public addresses. Chabad, however, terminated my employment. I continue to love Chabad and raise my children in the Chabad tradition. But I have had to endure a steady-stream of painful attacks like that of Rabbi Levi Shemtov, a defender of the existing Chabad hierarchy and nephew of the head of Chabad UK, who wrote on a super-secret global Chabad website that I ‘desecrate’ any Chabad House I visit and should not be invited to speak. One shudders to think that a man of such fanatical views is Chabad’s representative to the American government in Washington, DC. My bruised ego will no doubt recover from being attacked by a former classmate. But why should my children suffer, growing up in a community where they have to read this stuff? And if Chabad, which is the most tolerant movement in all of Judaism does not silence its fanatics, what hope is there for the rest of Judaism?

Or even the lesser, yet equally strange criticism leveled by Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin who felt the need to inject this curious insight into a New York Magazine cover story praising my work in bringing Jewish values to the non-Jewish world: “We have no right to bring the Torah to them, to water it down and change it. I don’t think writing these racy—these books. I don’t think that is the way to ‘bring people to the Torah.” The man is entitled to his opinion. But one struggles to comprehend how the official spokesman of Chabad believes that we have no obligation to use Jewish light to heal the world.

Finally, let us Orthodox Jews extend ourselves, as we say in the Kol Nidrei prayer of the eve of Yom Kippur, to ‘pray with sinners’. The best way to destroy the myth of our less observant Jewish brothers and sisters that we are insular, judgmental, and disrespect secular authority is to invite them into our homes where they will see that our daughters are raised to comport themselves with dignity and become scholarly,  our sons are raised to read books rather than watch television, and that we work not to put money in the bank but primarily to host guests and do good deeds. In our various cities we orthodox Rabbis must reach out to our conservative and reform colleagues in friendship and respect, even as we strictly maintain our orthodox beliefs.

Of course, a relationship is a two-way street. Too many more secular Jews look at religious men in long black coats and religious women wearing wigs and see something primitive and backward. When one or two do something wrong they rush to condemn all as a means of distancing themselves from a group they find unseemly. But how sad to be so dismissive of men and women who live righteous lives distinguished by piety and eternal fidelity to the Jewish tradition. And when will we finally learn that we are all one people, whether we look like it or not.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values Network. He is about to release his newest book ‘The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger.’