Ritual and Belief in the Military Model

In the previous post, I argued for the importance of ritual for the military model. Here I would like to explore the contrast between ritual and belief. Since the military model does not operate with a complex set of beliefs, it requires ritual to stand in its place. Ritual creates a kind of social ideology. One believes in the community of believers, mainly that one is part of a community with true beliefs. What the community of believers actually believes in is beside the point. 

Like all forms of socialization, the military model works best to the extent that it can sell itself not as something to be intellectually accepted, but as something so obvious that it is simply impossible for there to be another way. Much of the power of this social ideology is that it can sell itself as not being ideological at all, but the simple unbiased reality accepted by all “reasonable” people. Such “non-thinking” is effectively accomplished through ritual, which serves to “remind” people of that which they should never need reminding of.  Instead of discussing ideas, in the hope of building a community upon the foundation of an ideology that everyone actually agrees on, ritual uses a “false consensus effect” to create the illusion for the believer that all other participants are like them. The superficial act of a ritual, such as waving a flag or eating unleavened bread, allows a community to exist, despite the fact that members of the community might actually have little of substance in common with one another.  

Using people’s heart-of-heart beliefs, as opposed to the motions of a ritual, as the basis for a community is simply impractical. Humans are not equipped to read minds to decipher other’s true intent. Even if they could, belief is something so particular to each person that no large group of people could ever truly agree about anything of substance. It is much better to simply use the acts of ritual as a substitute. Ritual has the virtue of keeping things very simple. One can see thousands of people practicing a ritual and know that every one of them is part of a common religion of practitioners of that ritual

Ritual should be seen as the counter to belief with the two locked in a zero-sum game in which what benefits one must, by definition, harm the other. Ritual obviates the need for belief and, by extension, any attempt to insist on the importance of belief, certainly of the monotheistic kind, is implicitly a rejection of ritual. For example, the God of monotheism, who is perfect, has no need for the flesh of animals to be burned on an altar. As such, belief in one God implicitly means to reject the sacrificial cult. Clearly, it is man, whether as an individual or as a collective, and not God who needs sacrifices.    

Because it is the community that needs ritual, the best way to demonstrate a commitment to the community above all else is through ritual. On the other hand, a commitment to a purely intellectual belief can be demonstrated precisely through the antinomian violation of ritual. This serves to declare that the community is not of absolute importance. Thus, the practice of ritual demonstrates a willingness to place community before belief and a statement of belief implies a willingness to turn against the community for the sake of that belief. Either the commitment to community or the belief in a god must come first and trump the other. They cannot both be first and, since they regularly come into conflict with each other, one is forced to make a very stark choice. 

I mentioned earlier that it is impractical for communities to seriously push belief because, unlike the practice of ritual, which is readily visible to all, personal belief is something beyond the evaluation of others. There is a further problem because the very attempt to consider what people in the community might believe actually undermines that very community. To value belief implicitly raises the specter that, in the absence of the ability to closely question all of one’s co-religionists, not all practitioners of the religion are believers and that one’s true community is not the same as one’s visible community. One thinks of the example of the Protestant Reformation, which was brought about by a crisis of faith that the visible Catholic Church really was the community of people saved through their faith in Jesus. The problem was not whether Jesus saved but whether people baptized as Catholics actually believed that Jesus saved.  

The fact that ritual stands in opposition to doctrinal beliefs does not negate the fact that military model religions might develop catechisms. Admittedly, this will be under the influence of the other models. While catechisms may, on the surface, appear to be statements of beliefs, their real purpose is just the opposite. By transforming beliefs into a series of statements to be repeated by members of the community, members are saved from actually having to believe in anything. Such a catechism serves as a password to indicate membership, no different from any other ritual or for that matter from a secret handshake used to gain admission into a club. Like messianism, catechisms are a useful means for the military model to absorb the other models into itself and use them for its own ends. 

Social ideology provides an effective means of holding on to believers. There is no need to write works of theology to educate believers. There is not even a need to argue with believers to convince them that the religion of their birth is the true one. Furthermore, the believer will serve as their own guard to keep themselves in the “faith.” Having already identified themselves from birth with the religion, to reject the religion means not just to reject some outside community, but their very being. Having absorbed this military model thinking, they will fear that their doubts do not just make them heretics, but also insane.  They will therefore drown their doubts by redoubling their commitment to fortifying their communal reality through ritual. 

Introducing the Military Model of Religion

In the previous post, I started blogging my dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. In this post, I wish to begin outlining the military model of religion. A fair criticism of the dissertation is that, arguably my dissertation was never really about Jewish messianism. What I am really writing about is the military model of religion, with the missionary and esoteric models as foils. Furthermore, not only do I go for long stretches without talking about messianism, but I am often not even talking about Judaism at all. As readers of this blog can appreciate, this is the product of my rather eclectic manner of thinking. It certainly did not help matters that I was forced by my advisor to attempt to write large-scale history, including Christianity and Islam. In essence, instead of making sure I stayed focused on something narrow, he pushed me to follow my tendencies that were most likely to cause me to fail.  

In the military model, your religion is obviously right because the armies of your religion are crossing borders and defeating other religions. Imagine that you are an early medieval Muslim. It is obvious to you that Islam is true. How could a band of tribesmen from Arabia have defeated both the Byzantine and the Sasanian Empire, conquered the Near East, and marched all the way to Spain unless this was the will of Allah? Obviously, Allah wanted to spread pure monotheism so he used his beloved Arab people, who were the first to embrace the divine teachings of the prophet Mohammed, to accomplish this. The promise of a heavenly reward for Muslims can already be glimpsed by the fact that Arab Muslims, in this world, have achieved such political power. If you want to be rewarded in this world and in the next, you need to become a Muslim. On the flip side, much of the story of modern Islamic thought comes down to the question of how is it that Islam stopped being successful. This only serves to underscore how important Islam's early military success was to its self-understanding.  

Behind the armies leading the military model to victory, lies a political entity such as a state. The religion’s political sponsor will come to dominate other religions and their respective political sponsors, presumably through military means, causing competing religions and politics to fall away. In the ancient world, this was understood in very literal terms with the god (or gods) of one people defeating a rival god.  Underlying this worldview is a sense of being on the right side of history. Even if the hoped for final victory has yet to come, the political victories scored by the religion, even small ones, indicate the inevitability of that victory. Military model religions have little need to engage in apologetics or even develop a complex theology. The argument for the religion is the observable fact of the existence of the community of the faithful and its political success. Such a religion contains little in the way of universalizing ethics. On the contrary, its only concern is the advancement of the community so that it dominates all others, regardless of how unjust such a state of affairs may be. 

It is important not to overemphasize the role of physical violence in the military model. The military model of religion might also be labeled the community model in that it starts from the perspective of a community and not, as we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, individuals. It should be understood that the military model does not have to use a literal threat of force to achieve its aims. On the contrary, it is most powerful in the form of a warm surrounding community, full of friends and family. There is a close connection between the coercive power of overwhelming armed might and that of a community in that overwhelming armed might in its most extreme forms (like in the relationship between a state and an individual) can paradoxically appear as if no force is being used.  Such force is so obvious that it can pass unmentioned and become part of the unchallengeable reality surrounding a person. Thus, the person being subject to such force may come to “willingly” comply out of the sense that this is the only “reasonable” option. It is hard to distinguish it, particularly for those subject to it, from the soft pressure of the social expectations on the part of a surrounding community. Thus, community pressure and the threat of physical force merge together. The most powerful sorts of communities will be established states with the ability to exert social pressure that is not so incidentally backed by physical force.    

Considering that the military model works best when it can use a perceived sense of reality rather than physical force, its chief weapon is ritual. This creates a perceived sense of communal reality in which a body of individuals performs the same action.  The ritual act allows the community to conquer physical space. By integrating ritual into the calendar, the community can also conquer time and extend itself to both past and future generations.  In this sense, the ritual community consists not only of those living in the present but also of past generations, who performed these same rituals and passed on their traditions to the present. Of particular importance here are rituals performed for the sake of the dead. Beyond possibly aiding those who have passed to the next world and gaining their aid in return, rituals for the dead strengthen the sense of the community existing through time. Similarly, rites of passage use ritual to extend the community into the future as a new generation embraces the identity of the community. 

Ritual also serves a practical purpose of gaining the aid of supernatural beings. Thus, military model religions tend have strong magic components, offering the direct physical aid of a god, as opposed to ethical religions, in which a god offers moral teachings that allow one to live a better life. There is something distinctly amoral about magic in that its sole purpose is to subvert normal cause and effect. Thus, it allows the practitioner to gain things they did not work to earn and have no just claim to. As we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, one of the primary criticisms of the military model, in addition to the fact that it lacks theological depth, is that it does not encourage ethical behavior. As such, military model believers can be attacked for caring little about god or man. 

A classic book that I recently read that does a fantastic job of encapsulating what is essentially the military model is Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. The first part of the book gets us into the lived experience of late medieval Catholics in England before this world was destroyed by the English Reformation. Catholicism was built into people's daily lives. For example, the calendar was dominated by saints' days and the cycle of Jesus' birth and passion. While I am skeptical about Duffy's claims as to how well lay Englishmen actually understood the particulars of the Catholic theology that lay behind such holy days, Duffy is a valuable voice in that he is sympathetic to popular religion. It is easy even for scholars who are personally religious to look down on such religion as superstition. (I am often guilty of this myself.) As intellectuals, we are going to be naturally inclined toward the missionary and esoteric models. These are intellectual models of religion. Their criticisms of the military model, essentially any popular religion, are going to be our criticisms. As such, instead of simply pointing out the obvious problems with the military model, our job becomes to understand why the military model has not simply been conquered by its critics. On the contrary, as we shall see, it is the military model that generally manages to convert its critics.       

Don't Worry If You Are Saved, Just Do a Mitzvah: A Thought for the High Holidays

 

The following should be read less as an attack on Christianity than as a defense of prax-based religions. Much of what I say could be used by Muslims or even Catholics. It should be taken as a given that those better read in the intricacies of Christian theology should feel free to correct my explanations of how different Christians understand justification. 

One of the big surprises for me, when I began to seriously study Christianity, was the discovery that Christianity is actually a much more difficult and demanding religion than Judaism. Obviously, it is very easy to be a casual Christian. It is not a challenge to go to church for an hour a week and mumble platitudes about loving your neighbor. The picture changes once we start dealing with committed Christians. Catholicism does place serious demands upon the minority of its practitioners who take the Church's teachings as obligatory as opposed to mere suggestions. Where things get really interesting is when you turn to various branches of Protestantism, which is premised on the rejection of any demand for works and instead relies on faith. (The Arminian tradition can be seen as an attempt to smuggle works back into Protestantism.)  

Eliminating works for faith does not make it easy to be an intellectually serious Protestant. On the contrary, not being able to point to ritual practices to demonstrate that you are a good Christian means that you are completely reliant on your ability to gain the precisely correct frame of mind in order to be saved. It seems simple to claim that all you need is to have faith. The problem is that faith, within Protestantism, does not only mean that you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and part of the Trinity. Having faith means that you believe that Jesus dying on the cross and nothing else is the only way you are saved. You cannot even believe that your good deeds play a role in salvation. Jesus is not going to say: that person performed a few meritorious actions and so I will save him as opposed to the really bad people in the world like the thieves crucified next to me. Everyone is completely depraved and unable to perform even the smallest act of righteousness by themselves. 

This sets up Martin Luther's contrast between faith and works. If you are going to believe that doing the right actions can save you, there is no end. No matter how much a person minimizes their pleasure, there is always a more extreme form of asceticism. What is really devious about this is that the more one practices asceticism the less one is thinking about God. The logical end of asceticism is for a person to turn themselves into an idol. Can you believe how righteous I am? For Luther, faith and works contradict each other. If you believe in works, even a little bit, then you do not have genuine faith. 

Keep in mind that Luther started off as a highly ascetic Augustinian friar before he left Catholicism for marriage, kids, and beer. More important than possibly nailing 95 theses to a church door was Luther's spiritual crisis as a friar. Did being a friar really save him? Did the fact that he had doubts about whether he was saved prove that he did not really believe and was therefore not saved? The human mind has a particular talent for turning in on itself. Do I really love God or am I just using him to get into heaven? Am I subconsciously trying to convince myself that I love God because I know that I could never fool God into believing that I am sincere? Luther may offer an effective counter to asceticism by eliminating works from the process of salvation but he only makes the problem of internal mind games worse.  

Luther's position is only going to drive believers into moderate levels of insanity. According to Luther, faith in Jesus requires that you hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. You must believe that you really are a totally depraved sinner incapable of doing any good deed and, at the same time, that it does not matter because Jesus is willing to save you as long as you have faith. You must simultaneously feel guilty for your sins and serenity for your salvation. Of course, how does a person stop himself from thinking, even subconsciously, that if Jesus is so willing to save him perhaps his sins are not so terrible and he can be saved through his own merits? On the other hand, if his sins really are so terrible, perhaps Jesus will not save him unless he earns his forgiveness with good deeds. If you ever step out of this Lutheran box, you lose your salvation and need to start over. The terrifying reality for Lutheranism is that even if you are saved now, you can lose everything in a few minutes with just the wrong thought. Lutheran religious practice is an ongoing exercise of using humility to constantly get back to that proper balance necessary for salvation and hope that you die at the right moment before you lose your faith again. 

All of this makes Calvinism look downright healthy by comparison. If you are willing to accept supralapsarian double predestination that God decided before creation who was going to be saved and who was going to be damned, the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints logically follows. This means that, if you are one of the lucky few elect, you cannot possibly lose your salvation and, therefore, do not have to worry. If you are not one of the elect, you also do not need to worry because it will not help. God decided even before you had a chance to sin to send you to Hell for all eternity.

I have recently learned how to descend to new levels of insanity with Protestantism. In his work Fear of God, John Bunyan (of Pilgrim's Progress fame) argues for the existence of two kinds of "ungodly fear of God." The first is that one believes that he is such a terrible sinner that Jesus would never agree to save him. In this, Bunyan's choice of emphasis differs from Luther's. With Luther, the primary concern is that a person might believe that they are righteous enough that they do not really need Jesus. It is probably not a coincidence that Luther started off as a friar while Bunyan started off as a lay Christian who liked to have a good time on Sunday. 

So far so good. Bunyan's second kind of ungodly fear, though, is that, once you have accepted Jesus and have been saved, you might go back and question if your conversion was sincere and really valid. According to Bunyan, before a person is saved, he certainly needs to believe that he is not saved but after being saved one is not allowed to doubt their salvation. To do so commits the ultimate Protestant crime of not having faith. 

Imagine Bunyan's Christian. He realizes that he is a terrible sinner, who needs to accept Jesus as his savior. Christian prays to Jesus to save him, acknowledging that he has no other means of salvation, not even a lifetime of good deeds. Christian realizes that he is saved and rejoices in this knowledge. Five minutes later, though, Christian begins to think to himself: did I really accept Jesus as my only possible savior or, miserable sinner that I am, simply pretend to accept him? 

If Christian was not sincere the first time then he is obligated to question his salvation as he is not yet saved. But if he was sincere the first time, he is not allowed to question his salvation and, by doing so, has thrown himself back into the category of being unsaved. This would mean that Christian needs to accept Jesus a third time unless he was right the second time that this first time was not sincere. Clearly, a doctrine designed to stop people from obsessing too much about whether or not they are saved actually makes the problem even worse.   

From this perspective, Judaism is remarkably reasonable in that it avoids this agonizing over whether one is saved with the inevitable question of "Are you really truly saved?" Judaism can do this precisely because it embraces a doctrine of works wholeheartedly. Judaism does not ask "Are you saved?" Instead, Judaism asks what mitzvah can you do right now. It does not matter if you are righteous or wicked; there are always mitzvot to be performed. From this perspective, asking whether or not you are saved is a question that one has no business asking. It has nothing to do with fulfilling your purpose in this world so it wastes time better spent doing mitzvot. Since Protestantism does not have an endless stream of mitzvot to perform every minute of the day, committed Protestants have no choice but to spend their time thinking about their salvation until they drive themselves up a wall going in circles wondering if they really have faith.  

Belief is still important to Judaism but you come to faith by performing mitzvot. They teach you what to believe and grace you with the ability to persevere in your belief. Furthermore, the very nature of mitzvot precludes radical asceticism. For example, you are obligated to eat a good meal on Shabbat and are not allowed to fast. You must get married and have children. You are not allowed to practice celibacy. You are not allowed to give more than 20% of your wealth to charity so apostolic poverty is forbidden. Anyone who says otherwise is a heretic and can be ignored

It is Judaism's emphasis on ritual as opposed to theology that allows it to avoid the pitfalls that will send Christians, if they take their religion seriously, into either the insanities of asceticism or of trying to think their way to salvation. Jewish practice both protects it from trying to earn salvation through asceticism or from trying to simply gain the right beliefs ungrounded in deeds. As much as I find Chabad's theology objectionable, they do get one thing right. They do not care what kind of Jew you are. However religious or not religious you are Chabad will tell you that Hashem loves you so why not thank him by doing a mitzvah right now? 

The Antinomian Implications of Gedolim: Are You Willing to Put Your Traif Where Your Mouth Is?

A prominent feature of Haredi society today is the belief in the infallibility of their rabbinic leaders, the Gedolim. These Gedolim are supposed to be miracle workers, whose knowledge supersedes that of ordinary mortals like you and me. In essence, Haredim took halakhic Judaism, premised on textual authority, and replaced it with charismatic authority in which religious leaders are assumed to receive some kind of divine revelation. There was a good sociological reason for this. It was charismatic authority, ironically, that was best suited to defend religion against modernity's challenge to religious authority. As a simple Jew, why should I not listen to the Conservative rabbi, who says that it is ok to drive to a synagogue on Shabbat if I live far away and would otherwise not be able to celebrate Shabbat as part of a Jewish community? Even to make a halakhic argument against driving on Shabbat will be counter-productive. You might fail to convince me and I will, therefore, go drive. Even if you succeed this time, you will have implicitly conceded to me the premise that, in the absence of any religious authority with coercive powers, I am my own ultimate halakhic authority and am free to rule however I wish.

The Haredi solution was to declare that there was a body of men whose opinions, a priori, cannot be challenged. It is not just that these Gedolim are really smart and have good arguments for their positions. I like to think that I am a smart person too so tomorrow I will come back with even better arguments, at least to my mind. The Gedolim must not just be smarter than me, their intelligence must be of such a different kind that I could never imagine being in the right against them.

A large part of the Haredi success has been due to its ability to claim for itself the mandate of being the defenders of Jewish Law; are not Haredim the strictest in terms of religious observance? This is in large part due to the Haredi world's clear lines of authority. But as with any Faustian bargain, the price to be paid is high. Part of what of I find fascinating about the Haredi use of Gedolim is that their practical use in the defense of ritual orthodoxy does not change the fundamentally antinomian implications of charismatic authority and may come to serve as the perfect cover to destroy halakha.

For those who would defend the absolute authority of Gedolim and also claim to be loyal to halakha, I propose a thought experiment. Imagine that the Gedolim were to call you into a secret room and order you to eat the ultimate traif sandwich. Would you listen to the Gedolim or would you, in your "arrogance," dare to place your limited understanding that there is such a thing as kosher over their wisdom and refuse to eat it? Some simple Jew, who recalls that, according to Leviticus, a pig is not kosher as well as stories about Maccabean martyrs, is going to think he has the right to lecture the Gedolim about kosher and accuse them of not following the Torah? Does he not know that without the Gedolim we would all be lost like sheep without a shepherd, prey to Reform and Conservative Judaism with their women rabbis?

Note that there may be a very good reason for the Gedolim to want you to eat traif. Eating traif is a useful signaling device as to who really is loyal to  Haredi Judaism. A person who is not willing to listen to the Gedolim and eat traif, but prefers to follow his own understanding of Judaism today might turn around tomorrow and not accept that Judaism opposes women rabbis. Alternatively, a failure to eat traif on the command of the Gedolim might endanger Judaism by opening up the possibility that some Jews might, at some future point, question the rulings of the Gedolim regarding kosher and refuse to eat in the homes of other Haredi Jews. An Orthodox Judaism in which members are not united in eating each other's food is liable to fall apart. Such a divided community would lack the moral standing to defy the liberal denominations on women rabbis. Clearly, it is better to eat a pig than to accept women rabbis. (Or at least that is the impression I get from the OU.) We can even add "who made men and women in their places" in addition to the traditional blessing for traif: "who permits the forbidden." Only a godless heretic could be against saying more blessings when we all know that a single amen has the power to change worlds.

One might take support from the story in Rosh HaShanah in which R. Gamliel forced R. Joshuah to violate the day of Yom Kippur as he calculated it. Allowing there to be two Jewish calendars risked destroying the religion and needed to be stopped at all costs, even violating the religious consciousness of R. Joshuah. (Perhaps the Dead Sea Sect supported women rabbis in addition to their solar calendar.)  I should note a distinction between R. Joshua violating his Yom Kippur and our traif case. R. Joshuah had every reason to believe that R. Gamliel was acting in good halakhic faith, adhering to the principle that one is not allowed to travel with a stick and a money belt on Yom Kippur. R. Gamliel might be wrong in his astronomical calculations, but he made his mistake as part of a legitimate halakhic process based upon textual analysis and not charismatic authority. In our traif case, the Gedolim want you to eat what they acknowledge to be a pig on the assumption that they are not bound by any text-based halakhic process. In fact, their goal is to destroy the practice of text-based halakha as a heresy that would allow any person with a Judaica library to become their own halakhic authority.

A Judaism in which every person is free to do what is right in their own eyes as long as they can point to a Jewish source cannot be called Haredi. A Judaism in which it might be ok to eat traif, even in secret antinomian rituals, cannot be called Orthodox. Take your pick, text or charismatic authority. I vote for there to be such a thing called halakha even if that puts me in charge of my own religion.

Staying in the Fold: Does Belief Actually Matter?

Rabbi Yakov Horowitz is in the process of writing about keeping Jewish children "on the Derech" (in the fold). So far he has written a top ten list of things parents can do to have a decent chance of being able to pass on their values to their children.


1. Belong to a kehila [community] with a Rov [rabbi] who can guide you, and live spiritual, meaningful and inspired lives where you are true role models for your children.
2. Create a happy and nurturing home environment; avoid corporal punishment and refrain from sending them to settings where it is condoned.
3. Spend quality time and nurture your relationships with your children and seek help should you find yourself exuding negative energy with them.
4. Be flexible – treat them as individuals and allow them to chart their own course in life.
5. Protect them from abuse and molestation.
6. Live in a forbearing community where the members have good Torah values and guide your children to develop friendships with peers who have good middos [character traits] and share those values.
7. Provide them with a good and broad-based education – in Judaic and general studies.
8. "Stay in the Game" – never give up on them no matter how bumpy the road educationally or socially, and professionally identify and address any learning disabilities.
9. See to it that your values and those of their schools are consistent and maintain congruence between your words and deeds.
10. See that they exercise (very) often and have varied hobbies and interests.
And … always and above all, daven [pray] to Hashem [God] for siyata dishmaya [heavenly assistance].



These are things that apply to any faith. I do not think the fundamental issues of passing Judaism along to children in this country are really that different from parents trying to pass along Christianity or Islam. What is of particular interest to me here is that nowhere on this list does Rabbi Horowitz say anything about belief, sitting down with your kids and convincing them with "powerful" arguments that certain things, like God's existence and the Exodus from Egypt, are True.

This illustrates a basic problem with how our society engages the question of religious belief. Both sides, religious and secular, like to maintain that religion is about belief. Both sides make the pretense of fealty to this myth because each side finds it useful. Religious people would have us believe that they are religious because they believe specific claims while secular people claim, as rational people, to have refuted such claims and moved beyond them. Can we be honest with ourselves that the decision to follow a religion or abandon it has nothing to do with belief? How many people have actually become atheists from reading Spinoza or even Richard Dawkins? Religion is a way of living and a society in which one chooses to live. If you wish to pursue a certain way of life and live in a certain society then you will "believe" in the accessory religion. If not then you will not "believe" and find yourself another way of life, another society, and accept their "beliefs."

Now the issue is muddled by the fact that religious people claim to believe things and secular people claim to not believe certain things and, in a certain surface sense, this is true; most religious people and their secular counterparts, in their own minds, honestly do see themselves respectively as believers and non-believers. The question is what is the basis for such beliefs. To put it simply, most people are social thinkers, not idea thinkers. Abstract ideas such as universal principles of right, wrong, true and false are not real to them and, therefore, have no meaning. What is real and meaningful to most people are relationships; you live in a specific society according to a specific code of conduct. One does not "believe" or "disbelieve" in God; one believes in parents, siblings, friends, Saturday morning Kiddush, or the Sunday church social. There are no "big questions" to be answered; people need to be born, become adults, married, and put in the ground with due ceremony and reverence. Once the decision to "believe" is made, it simply becomes its own reality, true by definition. If it so happens that this reality is challenged then arguments will be mustered in a fixed game of formulating arguments to suit a given conclusion; in essence, drawing targets around the arrows. Since most people do not have a concept of universal principles, they cannot be tied by any notion that arguments have consequences; that accepting an argument means accepting its underlying principles and their potentially undesirable conclusions when applied in other places. (See My Search for Meaning.)


Would it really be so bad if we could be honest and straightforward about things and take belief out of the picture? In the case of Orthodox Judaism, this would mean Judaism as envisioned by Moses Mendelssohn. If you are willing to make an honest effort to keep halakhah (both as to pertains to human beings and to God) you can be part of the Orthodox community. For the sake of practical argument, as with Mendelssohn, I will even throw in a general belief in God and divine providence.