Who Needs Organized Religion?

Surely we don't. After all, we're the descendants of Abraham, the man who sought G-d on his own, who listened to the personal call of G-d to leave his home and birthplace. He left behind the organized religion of Mesopotamia and never founded one of his own. Don't the prophets rail at the dulling effects of organized religion?

Judaism has always been among the least organized religions, and one could argue that it's for the best. We can follow most of the mitzvot as individuals or families in the privacy of our own homes. To have a full prayer service, we only need a quorum of ten. And if we want to learn, we can simply sit down with someone more learned than ourselves. This is barely organized religion. Why do we need big synagogues with their committees and lecture series? The best argument for organization is probably to educate the children, but even that could be handled on a small scale.

When we complain about organized religion, it's because we recognize that it can easily become empty. The great Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik wrote of this tendency in his famous book, The Lonely Man of Faith. Our religious communities often become what he calls the "majestic community," projects of humanity in the creative aspect of mastering the world. Religion becomes a way of creating pleasure and satisfaction, rising above mere animal survival by providing comfort and happiness,

But there is often something missing--a sense of meeting heart to heart in what Rabbi Soloveitchik called the "covenantal community." In the covenantal community, we reveal ourselves to one another in our deepest essence; we see each other's unique truth. This can be hard to find in many of our religious organizations, where we readily become preoccupied with mastering disorder and maintaining the organization itself. Then, when our synagogues are missing that special quality, we're tempted to ball out and search for true and deep relationships elsewhere, often just in the friendships life brings us.

This doesn't solve the problem, however, because there is another answer to the question, "Who needs organized religion?"

G-d does. G-d is in need of man. G-d asks us to change the world. If we want personal religion, we can have it in our own homes. But we are also called to transform the world at large. We may personally prefer to travel the more intimate road of Abraham and his companions. But G-d also wants us to remember King David and his son Solomon, who built a Temple whose light shone out into the world.

We find our personal nourishment in the divinely-guided relationships we form, inside or outside of synagogues. Our sources of inspiration can be our spouses or our best friends, our chavura or our monthly luncheon, our rabbi or our dentist. But wherever the inspiration comes from, we must take that energy and put it to use for the community--the covenantal community working within the majestic community. Judaism' insists that ultimately there is no separation between the personal and the public realm. G-d's will is manifest in both.

We may feel differently about these two levels of community and relate to them differently. That is because we suffer from a sense of separation between soul and body, the internal and external. Our challenge is to overcome that separation and make the majestic community reflect more fully the integrity of the intimate covenantal community.

Fusing these two worlds requires some sacrifice. It may mean wading through bureaucracy and putting up with people who are not on the same spiritual wavelength. Each day, we have to patiently reimagine the community we ultimately want to create so that it expresses more light and loving kindness than when we began. This sacrificial action is the nature of giving to G-d. In this mode, we don't go to synagogue to receive, but to give.

When we do this, another truth appears: religious organizations are where we're more likely to find what Kabbalah calls our "Companions," those who travel the same spiritual pathways as we do. Yes, there are people in synagogues who are there for extraneous reasons--because their kids are in Hebrew school or because they feel obligations to their parents' faith. But even those reasons are a thread of connection, a sign of wanting to be in the covenantal community that stretches across the generations.

And most people are there for much deeper reasons. They are searching too. We may find, when we begin to reveal ourselves more deeply, that a new Companion is sitting next to us at one of those unending committee meetings.

So before you cancel your membership, look at your relationship with organized religion. Sometime, you may find that it is truly not responsive, and you may have to seek elsewhere. But you may also find another way, and other people right where you are, to help you transform your local organized religion into a living religious organism--a radiant center of vitality, joy, and hope.