For three years, I have been running PunkTorah. And in this time, I have come to realize that our issues as a greater community, not as PunkTorah, but as Klal Yisrael, have nothing to do with Reform, Orthodox, Hareidi, Reconstructionist, convert, born Jew, gay, straight, black, white or anything. It has to do with a fundamental question: who has the authority?
I am going to make a startling statement, but I believe it is true. I believe that for many in the Jewish community, the worship of God has been replaced with a worship of academia. And I have a sense that instead of directing our hearts at the Divine, we direct our hearts instead at substitutionary idols like Jewish continuity and education-for-the-sake-of-nothing.
I don’t blame any one group or person for this. Rabbis aren’t to blame. Institutions are to blame. But a system wide epidemic is to blame. I call this collective social disease Meritocracy.
Meritocracy, in its simplest explanation, is the belief that those who have achieved the greatest amount of merit are the ones who should lead. On the outside, this makes a lot of sense. Why would you want someone who doesn’t know anything and hasn’t accomplished anything to become a leader? It sounds like the antidote to all the things we hate: inherited leadership, financial oligarchy, etc.
The problem is this: how do we measure merit? Judaism has some interesting insights into this.
God chooses people to lead, and not because they are especially meritous. Noah was a “righteous man in his time” (Genesis 6:9). Rabbis of old thought this was a bit of a “stab” at Noah. Remember, the whole world is about to be destroyed for being evil. Noah wasn’t righteous. He was righteous for his time. He was good enough, given the world he lived in.
The same is true for Moses. Midrash Exodus Rabbah 2:2 says that God picked Moses to lead the Hebrews because he was a shepherd. He cared for his father in law Yitro’s animals and the kind of qualities that brings out in a person, such as love, patience and leadership, are the kinds of values that a hero needs. Moses was otherwise a murdering stutterer who often rebuked God and suffered from wild anger and bouts of depression.
There are many other examples of this. King David was such an unlikely candidate for leader that when the prophet Samuel asked Jesse to bring his sons so that God could decide through Samuel who should be the next king, David was not even included. When Samuel questioned Jesse how many sons he had (since God didn’t want any of his other songs), Jesse seemed confused. He says something to the effect of “well, I do have one other son, the youngest one. But seriously? He’s out in the field somewhere with the sheep. Why would you want that son?” (1 Samuel 6). I could continue on, but there are many more issues to discuss.
While Judaism teaches that we should find a teacher and a friend (Avot 1:6), in practical terms, most of the knowledge we gain is not from time spent at a desk, learning what we need to know before we act. Most learning, the learning that makes us who we are, comes from experiencing the moments when everything we know fails us! This is why, I believe, the Torah says that we should “do” and then “learn” (Exodus 24:6-7) as opposed to learning, then doing, which seems to make more sense.
Or does it? If we sat around all day learning how to act, we would never have the time to actually do something and learn from our mistakes. This is part of the reason why converts to Judaism are not supposed to be overwhelmed with learning before conversion (see Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 47b). If we told people to learn, learn, and learn some more until they are Jewish enough, they could never convert, because learning is life long.
God, it seems, trusts this “do first, then learn” process, which is why God chose us to be a nation of priests (Exodus 19:6). Judaism does not say that we should be a nation of a few priests, with everyone else underneath. This is a distortion of the kohanim, who by the way, were not the intellectual elite: they were men who happened to be born into a family whose job it was to tend to sacrifices. While this would have been a point of honor, the honor of tending to the dead, to butchering meat, to teaching others, are all on an equal level. Bottom line: there is no one better in Judaism. We’re all the same, no matter what our job title.
Spiritual meritocracy is one thing. But there is another issue that may be more important, given the fact that fewer and fewer Jews are going to synagogue. What do we make of the people in “secular” Jewish institutions, which many of us feel removed from? Again, the same rule applies: there is no one greater or lesser in Judaism. It’s also important to look at the motivations of these organizations. I had one non-profit organizer tell me, “we don’t care what Jews do. We just want them to identify as Jewish. We want to know that fifty years from now, today’s Jewish children won’t be Catholics.” The idea of Jewish continuity, that Jews are an ethnocultural group devoid of anything else is more heretical than anything I have ever posted on PunkTorah. But for many, it is the operating mantra.
The Torah warns us many, many times about this kind of attitude. God does care what we do (the incident of the Golden Calf being a fairly straight forward example). And frankly, the belief that we are a closed off society that needs to be protected from itself is ahistorical. Midianites, Moabites, Canaanites and many others (including the mixed multitude of Egypt) became part of the Jewish people. Your ancestors at Mount Sinai were not just Hebrew slaves in Egypt, but all the other people who wanted to take part in the creation of a new civilization based on the One God. And our messiah comes from one of those people, Ruth the Moabite. While Jews are meant to be or l’goyim, the light to the other nations, it is a bizarre and frankly shocking idea that the way to achieve this is through a desperate pseudo-racial paranoia that removes Judaism from Jewish life and Jewish life from any context other than survivalism.
What does this have to do with meritocracy? Simple put, many wealthy organizations operate under this false, non-religious, ahistorical attitude. It creates a meritocracy where a wealthy elite are in charge of preventing the annihilation of the Jewish people that seems to always be lurking around the corner. Out of our deep seated fear of our own destruction, which blamelessly comes from the horror and shock of the Holocaust, we have put a lot of stock into this lowest-common-denominator way of maintaining Jewish community. But since it is not based on God, the Torah, the Jewish people as having anything to contribute to the world or anything else in Jewish principal, it is over time doomed to failure and frankly is transparent.
So if you agree with anything that I have stated, we are left with one question: what do we do to stop it? I have a few simple ideas:
Take Action – when you see a situation where elitism is being used to deny someone’s Judaism, stop it. Fight. Be a rebel. If you read PunkTorah, I assume this isn’t a problem for you. But fear, including the fear of being the lone voice of reason, can be intimidating. Don’t give up!
Use Love As the Litmus Test – when you consider putting your faith into someone or something, ask yourself what the motivation of that person or organization is. Are they interested in the kind of open, dynamic Jewish life that you believe in, or are they appealing to something else, like fear? When love, and not power, control, and anxiety becomes the pillar on which Jewish life is built, it will stand until Eternity.
Make Demands – Jewish leaders and organizations belong to the Jewish people. Rabbis don’t lead synagogues: they are contract workers, like the person who paves your driveway. You are in charge. So demand that elitism be taken out of your community
Support Goodness – there are hundreds of wonderful Jewish leaders who believe what we believe. The ones that live on the margins of Jewish life, the ones doing the grunt work to make Heaven on Earth, are the ones that we need to cling to. These are the outsiders, the freaks, the independent thinkers, the people that are not occupying the high seats of Jewish academia or prestige. Find these people, and love them.
Ditch the System – there is a belief that we can “work within the system”, building bridges, and trying to make the world better with the resources that others have. I am convinced this will not work. All radical movements that work manage to do it because they offer something else, something unique, and people will awake from their collective slumber to the reality of its shining beauty. So ditch the system. Don’t repair something that, when fixed, still won’t work. Do something new. If you must work in the system, or you see something good about being in it, then don’t let it white wash you. I have seen this happen. There are; however, many resilient personalities that do buck that trend, and I am proud to see these people band together.
Radically Love – people are not to blame for the meritocracy, the system is. And once we ditch the system (and that can mean different things to different people), we need to radically love. Love always attracts others. Fear, hostility, exclusion, and a superiority complex are no way to gain friends or influence others long term. But intense, passionate love for humanity and for God always win.
Ken yehi ratzon. May it be HaShem’s will.
