Beit Midrash Session

How can we live halachic lives in 21st century

America without compromising our values of individual
expression and religious autonomy? What room is there to
individualize halacha?

Sources contributed byRabbi Jacob J. Schacter

Compiled by Aaron Steinberg

Eimatai Leadership Development Project

2007 Spring Conference
 Personalized Religion

Sheilaism

“Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and
describes her faith as "Sheilaism." This suggests the logical possibility of
more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us. "I believe in
God," Sheila says. "I am not a religious fanatic. [Notice at once that in our
culture any strong statement of belief seems to imply fanaticism so you have
to offset that.] I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has
carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice." Sheila’s
faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many. In defining
what she calls "my own Sheilaism," she said: "It’s just try to love yourself
and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I
think God would want us to take care of each other." Like many others,
Sheila would be willing to endorse few more specific points.

“I am glad that Sheila does have at least a second point besides taking care
of herself and loving others and I suspect that that is a remnant of something
she learned somewhere else earlier on.

“But the case of Sheila is not confined to people who haven’t been to church in a long
time. On the basis of our interviews, and a great deal of other data, I think we can say that
many people sitting in the pews of Protestant and even Catholic churches are Sheilaists
who feel that religion is essentially a private matter and that there is no particular
constraint on them placed by the historic church, or even by the Bible and the tradition.”

Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, 1985), 221.
Contemporary American Religion

A high level of personal autonomy creates an expanded menu of choices.

Many people, and especially those not very well grounded in any religious
tradition, feel free to explore religious and spiritual alternatives. Many are
seekers not in some narrow meaning of that work, but in the sense of being
curious about how to enrich their lives. Even faithful followers within a
tradition are looking for ways of cultivating their spiritual life and learning
more about their own heritage. Broadly within American culture, there is
concern about the self, about personal growth and well-being. Religious life
is understood less as a stable identity and more as a process of development
and enrichment. This being the case, it is not surprising that the religious
themes people draw upon in their searching will be eclectic – involving
psychological, popular spiritual, ideological, mass-media, and traditional
religious notions. If we think of religious culture as a script and of the
contemporary world as consisting of multiple religious subscripts, then we
can appreciate the complexity of people drawing selectively off those
subscripts as they arrive at their own conceptions of themselves. Or
alternatively, the religious event horizon – not just the number of religious
groups, but popular cultural styles and definitions of spiritual need – has
expanded, producing a religious landscape with many new alternatives.
Wade Clark Roof, Contemporary American Religion (New York, 2000), viii

Jews Too?
“The principal authority for contemporary American Jews, in the absence of
compelling religious norms and communal loyalties, has become the
sovereign self. Each person now performs the labor of fashioning his or her
own self, pulling together elements from the various Jewish and non-Jewish
repertoires available, rather than stepping into an “inescapable framework”
of identity (familial, communal, traditional) given at birth. Decisions about
ritual observance and involvement in Jewish institutions are made and made
again, considered and reconsidered, year by year and even week by week.
American Jews speak of their lives, and of their Jewish beliefs and
commitments, as a journey of ongoing questioning and development. They
avoid the language of arrival. There are no final answers, no irrevocable
commitments.
Steven M. Cohen and Harold Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America.
(Bloomington, 2000), 2.

But What about Halacha?

“The principal word in Jewish law, which occupies a place equivalent in
evocative force to the American legal system’s “rights,” is the word
“mitzvah” which literally means commandment, but has a general meaning
closer to “incumbent obligation.” …All law was given at Sinai, and
therefore all law is related back to the heteronymous event.

Story Time – Halacha can demand a lot at times, not

just shoelace tying…
Rabbi Soloveitchik speaking of his wife’s passing:

The Torah requires of the Jew that he emulate the concept of tzimtzum, or
withdrawal and self-limitation. At times he must even be capable of
withdrawing from himself. Let me give you an example of this from my own
experience.

My wife died on the Fast of Esther. It was a Thursday. She was buried on
Friday. I was very attached to her, and part of myself went into the grave
with her. I came home, took off my shoes, and sat down on the floor. I began
to observe the seven days of mourning. This observance was therapeutic for
me. The fact that I could sit down on the floor and cry was redemptive and
therapeutic.

Suddenly it was Sunday and Purim had arrived. I had to get up from the
shivah observance, put on my shoes, and celebrate Purim. Did I have the
strength to do this? No. But the Halakhah required it. This was tzimtzum.

So are we mindless robots who go through actions

we’re told to do?
“I learned from my mother very much. Most of all I learned that Judaism
expresses itself not only in formal compliance with the law, but also in a
living experience. She taught me that there is a flavor, a scent, and warmth
to mitzvoth… The laws of Shabbat, for instance, were passed on to me by
my father… The Shabbat as a living entity, as a queen, was revealed to me
by my mother… The fathers knew much about the Shabbat; the mothers
lived the Shabbat, experienced her presence, and perceived her beauty.

R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, A Tribute to the Rebbetzin of Talne.

“This is exactly our greatest need in the United States – to feel and
experience God’s presence. It is not enough to eat Matzo; we must feel the
experience of Matzo. One should not only study Torah, but should actually
experience it as a great drama and redeeming act which purges the
personality.

R. Joseph B Soloveitchik

So we should think about it, but aren’t we all going to

be thinking the same thing?
By “spirituality” I mean the intention we bring to our religious acts, the
focusing of our mind and thoughts on the transcendent, the entire range of
mindfulness – whether simple awareness of what we are doing, in contrast to
rote performance, or elaborate mystical meditations – that spells a groping
for the Source of all existence and the Giver of Torah.

The contrast between the two – spirituality and law – is almost self-evident.
Spirituality is subjective; the very fact of its inwardness implies a certain
degree of anarchy; it is unfettered and self-directed, impulsive and
spontaneous. In contrast, law is objective; it requires discipline, structure,
obedience, order. Yet both are necessary.

The life of spirit need not be chaotic and undisciplined; the life of law,
similarly, need not exclude the pulsing heart and soaring soul of the religious
individual. In Judaism, spirituality is not antinomian, that is, the opposite of
law and a structured approach to our duty under God. Halakha, a “way of
life,” does not preclude the participation of the heart and a deepening
inwardness. In Judaism, each side – spirit and law – shows understanding for
the other; we are not asked to choose one over the other, but to practice a
proper balance that respects and reconciles the demands of each.

R. Dr. Norman Lamm, The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism (Philadelphia, 1998), 6-7

Halakha describes the manner in which the practice of a mitzvah is to be

undertaken. That is, while there are established modes of religious behavior,
there are no established modes of religious sensibility, religious experience,
or measures of moving ever closer to God. Here uniqueness reigns. Every
halakhic act is accompanied by “practice of the heart” – a personal,
subjective religious component. The objective act is standard and
unchanging; the practice is various and multifaceted.

Dr. Isadore Twersky

So I can think whatever I want as I’m performing a
mitzvah?
“This is an interesting question worth pondering; are there, indeed,
authoritative guidelines or boundaries to “religion in essence?”

I offered an option for the symbolism of the arba minim. The Torah (read:
God) did not just require taking a lulav and etrog on Sukkot; it required
bringing together a green object with a yellow one. Someone with a
particular affinity for art and color and a special appreciation for the
combination of green and yellow could, I suggested, see the beauty of God’s
creation in this manner as well that would enhance his or her performance
(read: “religion in essence”) of this mitzvah.

A student asked if this idea about the colors was found in the midrash, and
when I said that I don’t think it mattered, she disagreed and felt that even the
“religion of essence” of a mitzvah needs to be anchored to a rabbinic source
of some kind and cannot be totally left to one’s personal creativity or
originality.

Is this an acceptable authentic expression of “religion in essence?” Even if it

may not be, however, and here I tend to agree, my point is still, I believe,
well taken. There is still room for a great deal of personal autonomy and
individual choice in the overall world of religious authority, even given
limitations to what may be considered appropriate “religion in essence.”

Dr. Twersky writes about “halakhic monism and spiritual pluralism.” Within
the large – albeit, perhaps, somewhat limited – area of unscripted “essence”
of mitzvah observance, individuality reigns, and it is this, precisely, that
allows for strict punctilious attention to its details and structures.

R. Jacob J. Schacter
Final Word
The Tur cites a midrashic statement that when the Torah refers to the 15th of
Tishrei as “the first day,” as in “And you shall take for yourselves on the
first day” (Vayikra 23:40), it means to indicate that it considers the first day
of Sukkot to be “the first day of the counting of sins” of the new year. After
all, until then the Jew is constantly engaged in mitzvoth – repentance during
the aseret yemei teshuva and building a Sukkah and procuring arba minim
from immediately after Yom Kippur until Sukkot. But, asks the Taz, what
about the fact that on the first day of Sukkot Jews are actually fulfilling the
mitzvoth of sukkah and arba minim? Why is building or procuring the item
more contradictory to sin than actually performing the mitzvah itself?

The author of the Sefat Emet presents a very interesting answer that is
directly relevant here. He suggests that, indeed, preparing for a mitzvah is
even more exalted than performing it, and this for two reasons: 1) “The
performance of a mitzvah is a one-time act whereas the preparation is for all
eternity.” Preparing oneself to be in an appropriate frame of mind in order
properly to do a mitzvah is an on-going, full time enterprise.

2) While it is impossible to fulfill a mitzvah properly (mi yukhal le-kayyem

ha-mitzvah ki-mishpatah), feeling the desire to follow the will of God and
engaging in the preparations to do so are always proper and appropriate.
“Mitzvah thoughts which a person thinks and, through which, desires to
fulfill the commandment of God, may he be blessed, is better than the
mitzvah itself,” he writes.

Here, once again, while the mitzvah act is scripted and defined, one’s
hakhanah for it is not. There is no given or prescribed way of preparing for a
mitzvah; each person does so in his or her own unique and individual way.
And, in this case, the author of the Sefat Emet goes so far as to say that the
unscripted is even “better,” more exalted, than the scripted!

Indeed, the fundamental awareness that multiple “pockets of autonomy”

exist – and even flourish – in the world of divine halakhic authority will lead
to a greater ability to submit to God’s will and accept the yoke of His
commandments.

R. Jacob J Schacter