birthright dogma

[cellio]

(This is somewhat stream-of-consciousness.)

This morning in torah study we talked about this part of Nitzavim: "And not with you alone will I make this covenant and this oath, but with him who stands here with us this day before the Lord our God, and also with him who is not here with us this day" (Deut 29:13-14). The context is Moshe's final address to Israel; we can prety much take as given that this is not referring to people who slept in that morning. The rabbis understand this as a source for the covenant being binding on all Jews, the ones who stood at Sinai as well as those who came later. In other words, Judaism claims you by virtue of your birth. (I knew that, of course, but I learned a new term for it: "birthright dogma".)

This is hardly unusual; some other religions do this either as a birth condition or based on an action that your parents take very soon thereafter. We say "once a Jew always a Jew"; the Roman Catholic church says the same thing once you've been baptised. Surely there are others. (I'm not sure if Muslim status is automatic at birth; I have the impression it is.)

Some modern Jews have a problem with this, but I don't. We're born into other obligations that we got no say over; why should this be different? The issue to me isn't what you're born to but what you're going to do about it and what anyone else can or should do about it. As a convert from one "we claim you forever" religion to another, I find myself in an interesting position.

There are folks out there who try to preach obligation to the people they see straying -- and that just doesn't work. The church thinks I'm a lapsed, sinning Catholic -- fine for them, but I don't care, because I don't subscribe to their belief system. That they think they have a claim on me means nothing to me; I think they're wrong. (No offense meant to my Catholic readers, of course.) Any attempt to reach me via the "but you have to" path would utterly fail. (Ok, any attempt to reach me at all would fail now, but there might have been times in my life when that was not true.) And we have this in Judaism too; there are people who are very concerned with bringing back those who've strayed by going down the "obligation" path. Going down the "benefit" path is much more likely to be productive. You'll almost never succeed (long-term) in intimidating people, but if you can show them the beauty, fulfillment, or richness of a religion or tradition, you might hook them. Chabad, for all its other problems, gets this; the people who stone cars on Shabbat do not.

If status is forever, then we should be picky about entrance criteria when we can be. If a gentile eats bacon cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur, so what? But once he becomes a Jew, he's sinning. if the members of the beit din (the rabbinic court) think he's not committed, they can and should tell him "not now". This is part of why Judaism requires a significant period of study and evaluation, which can take years. The rabbis on the beit din need to assure themselves that they aren't making things worse for K'lal Yisrael (the community of Israel), while of course also weighing the issues of the individual candidate. As a candidate I expected that kind of rigor and would have been unhappy if I hadn't gotten it. (In fact, during my studies I met one local rabbi who said "I always say yes", and I made sure that rabbi was not on my beit din.)

Somehow from here we ended up talking about interfaith families, but that's another set of topics for another time.

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

This, of course, is something that you would naturally have a very interesting POV upon, and I'm glad you chose to comment on it. It does strike me, though, that you're really not alone or unusual here, in a certain sense. In fact, I think I can claim that we all share this. Consider that among evangelical Christians, we are all God's children and those of us who have not accepted Jesus as our personal savior are living lives of sin and ignorance and will surely be condemned to the evelasting torments of Hell for our obstinance. (And certainly, FWIW, that was clearly the position of the Roman Church through the Middle Ages, and for all I know, may still be). That is, it is held by them that we all have a birthright obligation -- as children of Adam -- to follow the path that they see as Truth, and so my failure to do so is every bit as grave to them (even though I am not and have never been Christian) as my failure to follow strict Halachic rules is to the Meah She'arim (?) car-stoners.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

It has been pointed out that the people who stone cars do not seem to oppose Sabbath desecration in general nearly so much as they do Sabbath desecration in their area. If the people of Mea Shearim (or any other neighborhood) wanted to stop people driving at all on Shabbat, they should lie down on the Begin Highway or Herzl Avenue (much larger roads), rather than in Kikar Shabbos (which is in the middle of two religious neighborhoods).

Allegedly there was a period when a group of non-observant Tel Avivians rented a bus every Shabbat to drive them from Tel Aviv to religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem with the radio blaring.