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.

[cellio]

We're all sinners in the eyes of certain evangelists, yes. But it also seems like there's a difference between leaving a religion and never having been in it. The Roman Catholic church now holds that Jews have a valid covenant with God and don't need to accept Jesus to be saved (this is relatively recent), but, as I understand it, I'm still damned in their eyes because I left, even though it wasn't my decision to be in in the first place.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

The unconverted and the apostate get different handling, yes. I think the only way to get out of it would be to try to argue that you never actually joined the church on account of never having believed in/with it. AFAIK baptism doesn't make you fully Catholic, it just gives you the possibility of being saved, and pretty much anybody's baptism is sufficient for that. I suspect you need to go though all three initiation rites before you become inarguably Catholic, and certainly Confirmation is something you have to decide to do by yourself, and ought to be susceptible to the same free will arguments they use to annul marriages.

[cellio]

Confirmation is something you have to decide to do by yourself

That's the theory. :-) Parental pressure, both overt and covert, can be a very powerful thing. I have no idea how annulment would work. In reality, though, I don't care; I'm certainly not going to go to any effort to formally leave. The God I believe in does not appear to require that of me, and I don't feel I owe it to anyone else.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Presumably parental pressure on confirmation would be treated the same way as parental pressure on marriage: as something which potentially invalidates it.

But, yes--it never comes up, because the person who left doesn't care, and should they ever decide to come back, a previous confirmation is not a bar to re-entry like a previous marriage is to a new one. So there are no mechanisms for it.