Some years ago, as I was waiting to give a lecture before a group at my synagogue, the rabbi came up to me and said confidentially, I hope you aren't going to talk too much about other religions. He was referring to my work in comparative religion. I had spent fifteen years studying and had a masters and a Ph.D. in the subject. But at his remark, I was startled. What do you mean? I asked. Well, you know, Jews don't bother with that stuff. Actually, I wasn't planning to talk about anything except Jewish material. But I rapidly began reviewing and censoring my speech in my mind. I had two reactions, one resentful: Is he trying to tell me how to think? And one fearful--maybe I'm not really kosher--not Orthodox enough.
My two opposite feelings were hints of what was almost my double personality. First, I was a creation of the secular world: I had spent years learning the ropes of academia; I knew the challenge of intellectual life, the stimulation from University colleagues. At the same time, I had accepted the way of Torah. I wanted most of all to grow in my relation to G-d, to develop a deep spiritual practice. Up to this point, I had believed that my previous studies had enriched my understanding of Judaism. I found in Jewish practice many echoes of what I had learned. The setting aside of sacred times, the holiness of certain places, rich symbolisms of the natural world and ancient cultures, complex systems of sacrifice--the religions of the world were full of these phenomena, and I was finding them alive in Judaism.
But now I began to wonder. Were there conflicts between my studies in comparative religion and my life as a practicing Jew? If I had been a computer technician or a doctor, perhaps it would not have been so great a problem. But I was studying things that seemed very alien to a Jewish philosophy and way of life. I loved teaching about everything from Buddhism to Judaism, from bizarre rituals to esoteric philosophy. I saw the world through the lenses of my studies of the history of religions, sociology and psychology. But perhaps these were not things I should be thinking about. I even considered giving it up entirely.
I had the good sense, at one point, to ask a rabbi if I could continue to seek professional work in my field. I received his approval, so my concerns about making a living were relieved. But many personal and intellectual issues remained. Some of these issues turned out to be superficial, and my problems quickly disappeared; others were deeper and required considerable inner work and intellectual searching to resolve them.
Many people, for example, assumed that it would have been difficult for me to believe in G-d or to practice one religion exclusively. They thought studying comparative religion discourages a person from believing in one G-d and promotes a relativistic morality wherein all beliefs and practices are equal. Comparative religion supposedly teaches that all religions are really one--they have basically the same myths, the same ethics, and the same ultimate purpose. But this is not really true of serious scholarship in comparative religion. True, for purposes of classroom teaching, questions of belief are temporarily set aside. The instructor does not put forward a particular religious viewpoint, because s/he must encourage students to ask significant questions fearlessly, and to develop the intellectual discipline to think through to some answers and to criticize all answers.
The result of this teaching method--it is a method, not a conclusion--is that many university students come away with the idea that there are no respectable religious answers to questions of goodness, truth, or divine reality; that every argument has its counter-argument; and that truth is relative. Simplified even further, some students hold (and vehemently affirm to their teachers) that anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's in religious matters, so how can the teacher dare give low grades for their opinions! This argument ad absurdum shows its own fallacy: it is not that there are no answers, but that one must be very careful about putting forward one's own culturally limited viewpoint as the answer.
But then, are there answers to ultimate questions in the study of comparative religion? No one so far has been willing to stake a scholarly reputation on a definitive answer, for there is always an element of faith involved. Yet, in my opinion, there has been progress. The inquiry has proceeded to the point where a simple atheism is no longer possible. Over and over again, the attempts to explain away religion as a function of social, psychological, or political forces have been demonstrated as inadequate. Positivists still struggle to come up with a more adequate explanation, but more and more scholars have left that narrow-minded enterprise behind. In that respect, the field is more open to serious discussions of faith than it was twenty years ago. For me, the further I inquired into the matter, the easier it was to accept a belief in G-d. In 1970, I was an agnostic if not an atheist; in 1980, I had no difficulty believing, though I was still searching for how to conceive of a relationship to the G-d I believed in.
G-d was one thing; accepting a Torah way of thought was another. Sometimes I wondered if I was consenting to my own brainwashing. Everything is in Torah, I was told. You don't need to go anywhere else. For someone who has sampled the richness of other traditions and the works of great authors, this seemed impossible. I considered it a statement coming from very intelligent but very narrow-minded individuals, designed not to encourage discussion and exploration but to cut it off. For after all, I didn't know much Torah--I only knew that strange other stuff, the ways of thinking taught in universities--so what could I say? Go and learn, they told me.
I went and learned. And I found that the deeper I went into Torah, the fewer conflicts I found within myself. For example, I was interested in depth psychology and its relation to religion. I found in Chassidic teachings and in certain commentators on the Chumash (Bible) ideas that preceded Freud and Jung by scores, if not hundreds, of years. I was interested in associations of symbols and the use of language. I found the poetry of the Siddur (prayer book) and Tehillim (Psalms) not merely beautiful but inspiring and challenging. And to see a mind at work on the intricacies of language, one need go no further than the Likkutei Moharan of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. I liked sociology and anthropology: it surprised me to find that our sages were enormously sophisticated in such areas: they knew about crowd psychology, social pressure to conform, radical differences in cultural viewpoints, and the difficulties of being fair and objective.
Was everything really in Torah, then? Certainly the phrase didn't mean that Chinese history or modern art was in Torah. But everything I needed to know to improve the quality of my life was in Torah, from spiritual inspiration and intellectual challenge, to depth of ethical thinking and practical advice.
Still I had problems arising from my scholarly background--for example, the matter of similarities among religions. I had learned to look at the larger patterns which many religions seem to have--for example, similar symbolism, common ways of marking off sacred space or sacred time.1 Traditional Jewish thought simply didn't recognize such parallels as having significance. It took me some time to understand why.
The history of Judaism is replete with examples of having to fight the incursions of other religions. We need only remember the golden calf: This is your G-d, O Israel, who took you out of Egypt! Together with all the great commentators, we wonder how the Jews who had just received the Ten Commandments at Sinai could have fallen for that one. Later on, we have the famous contests organized by Elijah between the Baal of Canaan and G-d as understood in Jewish tradition; these are followed by many examples of the prophets denouncing Jewish involvement in other religions.
Certainly no Israelite of ancient times intended to offend G-d by having a comforting little amulet of a goddess in her home, or participating in a seasonal ritual of a Canaanite god. But all such practices were consistently weeded out, as much as possible, by those clear-sighted leaders of biblical times whom scholars call the Yahwists (and sometimes refer to, less objectively, as the zealous fanatics). These prophets and sages recognized how easily alien practices diluted the reality of the historic Jewish experience of G-d: the G-d who transcended nature. Other religions tended to return the mind to the easier, more comfortable affirmation of god in nature, god in the forces around us. Judaism affirmed a G-d who was beyond all this, beyond all of reality as we know it.
Today, even the most innocuous-sounding statements about religion can lead in the same direction, toward a kind of nature-religion and away from the distinctive impulses of Jewish thought. We can see this, for example, in the work of Joseph Campbell, the well-known popularizer of comparative religion whose interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS attracted thousands of viewers. Campbell promoted the view that the many religions are similar paths to the same goal (except for Judaism!--his anti-Semitic views were well known to his acquaintances). He emphasized the personal spiritual quest over the communal dimension of religion, thus tuning his ideas to American individualism. At the same time he presented his views, ambitiously enough, as a foretaste of the planetary religion of the future.
But what was the goal of this religion? Not G-d in our sense--or what he disparagingly called the supernatural--but rather oneness with all life, the universal will in nature. This is a form of the same essentially pagan approach that Judaism has always challenged--the affirmation that nature is the ultimate. It is really an affirmation that I am the ultimate (hence, Follow your bliss was Campbel'ls motto), and a refusal to recognize G-d's transcendence over all the created world.
Our tradition, in short, is right to be suspicious of comparative religion. There are many genuinely spiritual dangers lurking down those attractive paths. It is true that one can find similarities among religions, but there are quite obvious reasons for that. All religions, even those which are based on a divine revelation, have some elements that are humanly constructed (in Judaism, an outstanding example is the prayer book). Since all human minds have certain patterns of imagery and understanding, we will find similar structures. Even in the category of what religious people regard as direct revelations, G-d certainly intended them for human minds, so one might find similarities even there.
For me, the examples of similarity became less and less important, because it became increasingly clear that Judaisms own strengths were so great, intellectually, communally, and in the daily life of observance, that there was virtually nothing to compete with it. The issue was not occasional striking parallels, or structural similarities between religions, but the comprehensive way in which these were interpreted, the coherent view of the world that had evolved, and most of all the effects on one's life.
I recall hearing a rabbi at a lecture, responding to a young man in the audience who had taken the opportunity of the question period to detail his wondrous mystical experiences. He asked if the rabbi would consider them authentic. The rabbi asked simply: have these brought you to do more mitzvot? Have they brought you to lead a better life? For me, the same was true of my ventures into comparative religion. If they helped me to deepen my belief in the wonder's of G-ds universe, or to have greater purpose in my performance of mitzvot, then they were fruitful. Otherwise, they were of academic interest only.
But, I am often asked, hasn't comparative religion undermined belief in the Divine revelation of Torah? As I mentioned above, all religions have some human elements. But the tendency of scholarship since the Enlightenment is to regard all of religion as humanly invented; in other words, to regard Divine revelation as impossible--or at least impossible to discover by rational means.
For a long time this assumption prevented me from appreciating even the written Torah itself. After all, I had been receiving strong doses of biblical criticism since I took my first course in Old Testament, as it was called, when I was sixteen years old. For years I had to struggle just to read the text of the Pentateuch straight, let alone understand what Rashi or the Midrash were trying to communicate. Gradually I began to realize that my difficulties were related to the fact that I had been taught that there was really no such thing as communication from G-d to human beings. Religious experience was some sort of emotional fluke, and anything that claimed to come from religious experience was really a fake. The guy's followers made it up later.
The main target of this argument in the college courses I had taken was Christianity; and indeed, it has been proven to be true, beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, that most of what was attributed to Christianity's founder (who in any case never claimed to be a prophet like Moses) was reconstructed later by the early church. But the assumption that people make things up after the fact and then persuade, delude, or force others to believe them ran through almost all of the scholarship on Western religions.
But, I realized, each case had to be understood on its own terms. I discovered that recent research done on the books of the Bible was finding more historical reliability than scholars had previously thought. As far as revelation was concerned, scholars had been unable to call the Biblical Prophets into question in the same way as they had the New Testament; these men and women we call the neviim apparently did receive messages while in an unusual state of consciousness. I knew, too, that parallels are found universally of individuals undergoing unusual experiences and then bringing a message--usually a vision, sometimes a verbal message--to their people. Often the ability, or susceptibility, for such experiences is inherited.
Scholars were claiming that religion was a human invention, but now I realized that scholarship had presented me with its own invented story, one with little believability. The story went something like this: A group of priests and scribes who have inherited powerful positions decide to rewrite all the traditional narratives to favor themselves. They invent laws which keep them in power, and attribute them to ancient authorities. They create (or borrow from other tribes) rituals which keep money coming into their temples. Power is kept in the hands of an elite, and the common people believe because they have no way of questioning what they are taught.
This pseudo-Marxist version of religion is, of course, beyond the pale of credibility. No one would believe a sudden, new rewriting of tradition. It would be as if someone came and told me that, contrary to everything I knew, I was really adopted and belonged to an ancient race from Atlantis. Theories about a small elite holding onto power and forcing others to accept their version of history are equally implausible. In the complex society of ancient Israel, prophets, priests, tribal and national dignitaries, traders, and agriculturalists all coexisted, none of them necessarily common, i.e. ignorant, people. One could say there was a natural system of checks and balances that kept any one group from pulling the wool over the others eyes (indeed, this was true of many traditional societies).
We have our own confirmation of this in the remarkable tradition that all the people heard the revelation at Sinai. This is unique in the history of religions. Often a group makes a claim that its leader is specially endowed, that s/he is enlightened or has contact with the Divine. But in no other case (except Christianity's Pentecost, which is clearly a copy of Judaism's Shavuot) do we have the claim that the whole group received a revelation. In addition, we have stories of the elders receiving part of Moses' prophetic spirit, and of people prophesying in the camp, suggesting that many had additional experiences of revelation. Indeed, in such a situation it was difficult for Moses to hold onto his leadership position--we are told that many people, including even Miriam and Aaron, expressed jealousy of him.
If you were making up a religion, you wouldn't claim that everyone had a revelation. On the contrary, you would try to prove that the privilege was very limited. Otherwise you would be opening yourself to all sorts of challenges, as indeed Moses experienced. The result was that Judaism, while acknowledging the primacy of the revelations to Moses, became a very open religion. Prophets, priests, scribes, and people of various lineages all made their contribution to the biblical dialogue; all had their distinct claims to authority and understanding. Later, with the development of the academies of the sages, Judaism continued to be open to discussion, to different opinions (three Jews, four opinions).
What this meant for my understanding of our written and oral tradition was even more mind-boggling. It became pointless to ask whether a section of the Torah was written by J, E, P, or D. I might as well ask whether Moses was writing with his right or his left hand. Instead, I had to be convinced--and I was becoming convinced--that the tradition as a whole was authentic. After all, even the most divine document could have been distorted if its transmission was controlled by people of evil character. I recognized that those who wrote down, selected, and copied the books of the Bible had to be committed, as fully as humanly possible, to the faithful transmission of the Divine word. So did the teachers who passed down the oral Torah. I had to believe that each link in the chain was faithful, down to the present day, down to my rabbi and my teachers; that none of them would knowingly deviate from the Word that had come down at Mount Sinai and the teachings that had been passed down for generations after.
A tall order? Yes--but not as difficult as it might seem. I had been learning with men and women of incredible dedication, of personal integrity and devotion such as I had never known before, They were also intelligent, inquiring, critical in their thinking. They told me that they were but midgets standing on the shoulders of giants: the generations that came before. They told me inspiring stories of their fathers and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, on back to the great scholars and great tzaddikim of earlier times.2 At the same time, the tradition was not merely a series of eulogies. The stories of even the greatest men and women showed their faults as well as their strengths, and this made them believable. I came to understand that this was an incredibly strong chain of human faithfulness, to one another, to Torah, and to G-d.
I realized that G-d had taught our people, through Torah, how to create human bonds of love and learning, compassion and wisdom, which could in turn sustain faith in G-d and in the Torah. The centrality of those bonds reminded me of the story of Ruth which we read at Shavuot. Ruth was the first convert, symbol of the whole Jewish people at Mount Sinai, the great event when we all accepted G-d, when we all converted. Yet Ruth's story tells of a human bond that cements her to the Jewish people, namely, her relation to Naomi. Ruth tells Naomi: Where you go, I will go; where you die, I will be buried; your people are my people, and your G-d, my G-d. Naomi, her mother-in-law, had been an example of faith, honor, and integrity during all the difficulties they had encountered in Moab. Her character impressed Ruth so much that she said, This is the way I want to live.
Ruth is not only the first convert; she also shows us the human chain of faithfulness on which our lives depend. It is people of faith, dedication, and good character who guarantee the Torah itself, and connect us through more than thirty centuries to the word of G-d.
As I came to understand the nature of the Jewish people and Jewish tradition, I understood better the nature of Torah itself. Slowly, then, the conflicts between my intellectual training and my Jewish life had begun to resolve themselves. I had peace of mind. I no longer felt brainwashed. I had discovered that Torah ways of thought were deeply connected to a Torah life. Both were not only rich sources of inspiration and challenge, but also an intricate melody that resonates in the mind, finally creating its own space for itself.
Then I began to understand at another level the statement that everything is in Torah: Torah is the space in which everything else comes to be thought. As we all live and breathe in G-d, so we understand our existence in Torah. This does not mean that we must be exclusive, or that there is no room for anything non-Jewish. But everything is filtered through our understanding of the purpose of life, how we and others play our part in G-d's plan for all humankind.
Other religions, then, serve a purpose, and not just the negative one of warning us about idol-worship. They remind us of our common humanity, the world we share on this planet, and the search of all human beings for G-d. We can appreciate the spiritual achievements of non-Jews as well as Jews, just as we can appreciate achievements in art, music, or science. We can acknowledge the moral leadership of a Gandhi, the grace of a Japanese tea ceremony, or the inner discipline taught by a master of meditation. These should inspire us to seek higher levels in our own practice. For Torah outlines the structure of our practice; but the human side of our religion, the way we respond to G-d, is not just to do the mitzvot in robot-like fashion. We should beautify the mitzvah, as it is said, externally by adding to its aesthetic quality, internally by increasing our level of devotion. In these respects, we can learn from others--as the sages said in Ethics of the Fathers, Who is wise? He who learns from everyone.
We will do this wisely, however, only if we are continually enriching our personal relation to G-d, our Torah learning, and our sense of ourselves as part of a people. The Sages said that G-d, Torah, and Israel are one. These three are the mutually interdependent conditions of our existence. To be fully and vitally alive, we must connect ourselves to these--and each will lead us more deeply into the others. Through prayer, through the study of Halachah and Bible and Talmud, through extending our knowledge of our history and our exemplary leaders, and by becoming more involved in community life, we are inscribing a circle within which we can live consistently, richly, faithfully. Everything significant to life can be encompassed within this circle; nothing we deeply care about, nothing that nourishes us need be left out. We need not fear that we are missing anything it out there in the world. As we deepen our practice and our learning, all that we need will come to us, as it is written: You open your hand and fulfill the desire of every living thing (Psalm 145).
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