Coming of Age
Last week I attended the Bat Mitzvah of my cousin’s daughter. This is the occasion in Jewish tradition (recent tradition for girls) that marks a person’s coming-of-age, and is celebrated around the 13th birthday. The ritual consists of the young person reading from the Torah in Hebrew and offering thoughts and commentary on the portion.
The Torah is, of course, the first five books of the Bible, and in addition to all of the familiar stories about Adam and Eve, Joseph and the Pharaoh, and the escape of the Jews from Egypt, it includes lengthy sections of detailed commandments about everything from worship rituals to the preparation of food. While these commandments have passed into Jewish tradition mostly in the form of the highly-annotated commentaries of the Talmud (where two millennia of Rabbis have given their opinions of the proper meaning and interpretation of them into daily life), it is instructive to read them in their unvarnished form, especially in light of the current problems between the revealed religions of the Middle East.
The reading at the Bat Mitzvah ceremony was Deuteronomy 21-28, known somewhat euphemistically as the “miscellaneous commandments.” In this section, ancient Israelites received instruction on the religiously-sanctioned procedures for the rape of female slaves captured in war (wait 30 days for them to grieve, then “go to them”), means of verifying the virginity of brides (display the bloody sheet from the wedding night), punishment for children who disobey parents and teachers (death by stoning), punishment for women who are raped within the walls of a city (death by stoning, because obviously they didn’t scream loud enough), punishment for women who defend themselves in a fight with a man by reaching for his nuts (cut off her hand and show no mercy), and the proper method for taking a dump when in camp (go outside the camp, dig a hole, cover up the hole when you’re finished).
All of this was chanted out in the synagogue, some of it by a 13 year-old girl, in a spirit of celebration (it sounds better, or at least more mellifluous, in Hebrew). The Rabbis and the young initiate did their best to explain away the harder edges of the teaching, but really, the plain language was there on the page for all to read.
Unlike the creation myths and slanted history in the Bible, the Law of Moses is rather specific and difficult to dismiss as allegory. If you believe it is from God, then there really isn’t much for the believer to do except obey it. And if it’s not from God, then why is it being read from the pulpit in a house of worship? Unspoken was the question of what possible relevance could be the civil and criminal code of a barely civilized bronze-age society, unless it bears some direct connection to divine? It seems much more sensible to view these passages as a strict set of social guidelines given to a disorganized rabble of freed slaves by an educated Egyptian prince, but doing so would deeply compromise their essence as theology rather than philosophy or historical curiosity.
In a mainstream, progressive Conservative congregation in San Francisco, it was possible to ignore these contradictions in the name of “tradition.” Here in America, where there is a clear separation between secular and religious law (at least for the time being) there is no need to be much concerned with the interpretation of a few troubling Scriptural verses. The Bible to Americans – Jews and Christians alike – is the long-ago story of a far-off place: a remote set of teachings, events and traditions that believers must stretch and interpret to fit a completely foreign context. It’s this very distance, I think, that makes the certitudes of Biblical faith so attractive to many Americans.
But in Middle East, blind faith in savage ancient customs is getting a lot of people killed. The Bible and the Koran aren’t just from the Middle East. They are of the Middle East. They are the products of the culture, geography and history as much as they are the shapers of it, and it is the persistence of the factors that gave rise to the stern and militant commandments of the revealed religions that is making the current-day problems of the region so hard to comprehend, much less solve, for the West.
There are a lot of possible reasons why the politics and culture of the Middle East revolve so much around notions of shame and honor, family loyalty rather than civic responsibility, and unquestioning observance of both religious and secular authority. David Pryce-Jones makes a convincing case in his magnificent book, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, that the root of the problem is an almost pathological fear of complex human sexuality, which perpetuates itself through family and social institutions that deny the legitimacy of basic healthy relationships – even friendships or collegiality – between the genders. This fear and anxiety permeates family structures, producing emotionally-starved people who cling to rigid external support structures to replace the missing direction and intimacy of their personal lives. These types of socially-transmitted psychological conditions often manifest politically as authoritarian governments of one type or another – a dynamic described in Wilhelm Reich’s prescient 1931 classic, The Mass Pyschology of Fascism.
The modern state of Israel, founded in 1948 by mostly European and American Jews, was initially the product of a completely different tradition, and for the first 30-odd years of its existence, both its internal social conditions and external relations were the product of unsustainable artificial circumstances. But as succeeding generations of Israelis have been born on Middle Eastern soil, Israel has begun a transformation (or regression, perhaps) into a Middle Eastern society. The rational Europeanized center of Israeli society and politics has been, for over 50 years, daily eroded by the steady drumbeat of violence and attritted by the passing of its leaders without adequate replacement. Meanwhile, the dynamics that drive the rising numbers of fundamentalist and ultra-nationalist Jews in contemporary Israel are not so different from those that inflame their counterparts on the other side of the Green Line. These are the people who look uncritically toward the brutal teachings of Deuteronomy and the Book of Judges (which details the bloody conquest of ancient Israel) for their guidance, and if their methods aren’t as offensive and nihilistic as those of the suicide bombers, one could argue that that is simply a matter of situational needs, not morals.
This is an extremely distressing conclusion for me, since I count myself as a Zionist and believe strongly in the rights (and rightness) of a Jewish state in Palestine, not to mention the safety and well-being of all the people living there. But the Israel I support is one that strives to live in peace and justice with its neighbors as a modern state, not one that seeks to aggrandize its territory according to some crackpot Biblical agenda. The situation in Israel is not yet beyond retrieval, but those seeking a peaceful and just solution are doing no good by providing aid and cover for the most unreasonable elements of Israeli society and their cynical backers in the political establishment.
10:59:40 AM 
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