The wisdom of what we’re already doing

At the Squirrel Hill library there is a cart by the side entrance filled with free books left by other patrons. Inevitably there is a lot of Judaica mixed in (old Schocken paperbacks, Torah commentaries, PJ Library books for kids), and I try to grab a few every month.

The most valuable finds, though, are the ones that feel most dated. Although written at different times, every author assumes they are witnessing irreversible (and usually negative) changes seeping into Judaism from all sides.

At some point, they all dwell on the same questions Jews have always asked about tradition, assimilation and the many levels of religious observance and disbelief.

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One book in particular helped convince me, not that the versions of these questions in the year 2024 are meaningless, but that they aren’t nearly as pressing as they appear. This book (it feels unfair to call it out by name) was published in the early 1980s by a novelist and essayist born in the 1930s. In it, the author details her upbringing in a Conservative home, her eventual loss of faith and her embrace of psychoanalysis (Freud is everywhere) and high culture.

At one point, observant Judaism is simply dismissed as those beliefs she held “before I read ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ before I had heard of Dorothy Parker, before I had seen a Rothko or read The New Yorker.” There is also the expected skeptic’s disgust at believing in a God who “allowed” the Holocaust, and a hatred toward God “for His destructiveness, for the serpent in the garden, for the suffering of Job, for the diabolical unfolding of His vicious grand plans, for the humiliations He forces on mankind.”

Later she simply says that the Jewish ritual year is no good if “the ancient ways exclude you from the mainstream.”

Religious ritual, for her —indeed for many — is merely a pathological remnant of the current stage of evolution, where human beings can only find cohesion through rules and tribalism.

Now, I have a problem with nearly all the author’s points, which I consider vastly simplistic. I know of few religions that have grappled with the question of suffering, and the difficulties of belief at all, as richly as Judaism has. I once believed that the study and experience of high culture could be the work of my life, too, and so I know that religion isn’t for everybody. I am also sensitive to the fact that the author of this book was not raised in the same Jewish world as my daughter, who takes it for granted that, depending on the synagogue, there are female rabbis and cantors and administrators.

But still, reading this book taught me something important. Books like this are my version of addictive social media feeds, and usually they make me want to respond to them immediately. This time around, however, I realized that I had better things to do.

In other words, while arguments about religion are perennial, beneath them is an undercurrent that is also perennial but much less showy, and much harder to write about than theology: It is all the private moments of Shabbat, or daily prayer or study. It is the daily, weekly, seasonal and yearly round of slowly doing these things again, doing them the same but differently. It is the food, the songs and all the necessary gear — the candles and more candles, lulav and etrog, kippah and tallit, books and more books, or a preferred seat at shul. It is the wisdom of what my family and I are already doing.

When the author writes near the end of her book that she is surprised to find Jews who revel in doubt rather than trying to explain it, I am at home. Because what an observant Jewish life offers, at least to me, is meaning alongside doubt and difficulty, not their eradication.

And this meaning is primarily found and achieved in the doing and the daily living. That phrase encountered every year in the Torah, where Jews are called to do and understand (na’aseh v’nishma) is an idea ripe for mockery by anyone who simply sees it as an excuse for mindless adherence. But for those with a certain bent, living in and around an enduring and changing tradition provides an immense cycle of doing, reflection, understanding and reinvigoration.

We live in an immensely argumentative age, as well as one that believes our daily lives are only a few adjustments away from perfection. I prefer to focus on what I’m already doing, to see how it deepens and enriches and changes, and how it changes me. PJC

Pittsburgh resident Tim Miller’s most recent book is the essay collection “Notes from the Grid.” He is online at wordandsilence.com.