If Only: Finding America in Hasidism

A recent Newsweek article reporting on a field of study called neuro-theology asks whether our brain wiring creates the idea of god, or whether god created our brain wiring.[1] It's similar to the question linguists have been asking about the structure of language: Does language reflect the attributes of our brains because it was designed by us, or do our brains develop in childhood to accommodate linguistic structures?

I suspect the answer, if there is one, is mixed, that a little of both takes place. In my particular case, whether or not I was born with religious wiring, certainly by the time I was in my teens I should have grown into a fervent Hasidic woman, prepared to marry at eighteen, give birth to eight or ten children, marry them off, await dozens of grandchildren and great grandchildren, and consider this existence the happiest on earth.

From every angle, the circumstances of my life pointed me in the direction of a devout religiosity. I didn't follow this path, and the question is why. Why is there no religion in my daily life?

My mother's response to this question would be: If only. She believes that I would have remained religious if only the family hadn't moved to America. After years of shrugging my shoulders, I'm beginning to understand that America did have a great deal to do with who I became, but not altogether in the sense my mother has intuited.

A particular episode in my life inspired in me an acute self-awareness. It happened when I was fourteen or fifteen, and Aunt Rachel from Israel was visiting. We were in Brooklyn for the day, waiting in the car for my mother and sister, who had stepped out to purchase something at the local health food store. My father was in the driver's seat, reading from one of his religious books, psalms or mishnah, as was his habit during such stops. Taking my cue from him, I immersed myself in a novel.

Aunt Rachel, who must have been bored, tried to engage me in conversation, which I discouraged. When my mother returned, Rachel informed her that I was a child who ought to be watched, that I was dangerous.

My father was upset that this had been said in front of me, and called it nonsense. I was deeply thrilled because it confirmed for me what I had known all along, though perhaps not so clearly: that I would be someone different, dangerous somehow.

In one of his introductions to Omens of Millennium, titled "Prelude: Self Reliance or Mere Gnosticism," Harold Bloom refers to what might be a universal childhood experience, when one feels with certainty that one is not after all the child of one's natural parents. Bloom calls this sensation curious and asks whether it isn't an awakening to the knowledge (Gnosis) of something in the self that's older even than one's parents, "that cannot die because it was never born." He goes on to write of the experience of deep reading in childhood, which provides the "pleasures of excited thought, of a thinking that changed one's outer nature, while opening up an inner identity, a self within the self, previously unknown."[2]

Reconsidering the event from this late present-day perspective, various aspects stand out; for example, my father's awareness that such an announcement is in itself damaging, or empowering (depending on the point of view). More significantly, that it wasn't the mere act of reading that brought forth the criticism (though that later became a subject of debate), but the fact that I had refused to engage in what was decent social behavior, what any Israeli child, Rachel pointed out, understood perfectly. In other words, I was growing into an American. I had placed personal desire above the needs of others, thereby rebelling against the familial institution.

Daniel, in E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, describes this social responsibility, in a sentence I liked enough to memorize: "And all my life I have been running from my family, and I have been intricate in my run, but one way or another, they are what you come upon around the corner and the Lord God who is so anxious for recognition says you must ask how they are, and would they like something to drink, and what is it you can do for them this time."[3]

Recall how much is made of the biblical Abraham's generosity as a host and you'll understand the significance of offering your relatives a drink. In any case, Daniel performs precisely the type of duty from which on that particular day I exempted myself, and Rachel was able to detect, in a way my parents weren't, the impudence in my refusal to respond to her. She also knew that in taking my father's example, I, a daughter (not a son) intended only for a domestic life, had in this one brazen act elevated myself to my father's level. Something else that no one mentioned that day was the disparity of the texts in question: by every rule I'd grown up with, my profane novel should not have been conflated with the holy book my father was reading. Though she might not have articulated it in just this way, Rachel understood something significant about institutions and the individual, namely that their interests run counter to one another, that the self-reliant individual is a threat to family and community, and most certainly to institutionalized religion.

At the time, I was living with my family in a small town near Spring Valley, New York, where Greyhound left off and Red and Tan buses picked up. Kids on their way up to Woodstock roamed the area, hitchhiking to get a mile up or down Route 59, and my father, who was new to driving and knew what it was to need a ride, made a habit of picking up anyone who needed one. At the dinner table he showed us their version of a handshake, the peace sign. To the kids my father must have seemed one of them, at least from a distance, a hippie with a beard. His perpetual slowness—he was never in too much of a hurry to listen to someone's story—must also have been attractive.

The story of the hippies, like all stories my father told, had its didactic turn, i.e., the youth of America are searching for something their parents have neglected; they want more than houses and cars, they're seeking transcendence. We Jews are fortunate, we have the Torah.

I should perhaps explain that for various reasons, not least because of my father's antinomian sensibility, my family settled near, but on the outer edge of Jewish communities, and they weren't Hasidic. There were enough orthodox, reform, and conservative Jews in the town; my teachers at school were members of these communities, which meant that I often felt that I was in enemy territory, until my teens when I developed what one teacher called the proverbial chip on the shoulder.

What actually happened was that I finally understood that American Jews looked down on my family, we who still dressed like the old variety of Eastern European Jews, and spoke the old language, and, though we lived in America, were quite uneducated in American ways. We remained unassimilated, unlike other immigrants to the United States, not because we were living in an isolated Hasidic community (we weren't), but out of conviction. Our distinct way of dressing and speaking made us unintentionally flamboyant and this fact turned certain Jews apoplectic.

At the time, the accepted mode of life among American Jews was to accommodate in their lives both (this is a translation of a Hebrew phrase) Torah and the ways of the land. To this end, Yeshiva students attended college at night to study business or a professional trade. Reform and Conservative Jews of America worked at nothing as hard as fitting in, melting into the great melting pot, growing prosperous, thereby proving their worthiness as Americans.

This was the 1970s. I was coming of age, and just comprehending the various messages. The contrast between the American-Jewish disposition toward accommodation and the Hasidic insistence on remaining distinct engaged my teenage sense of right and wrong. Fortified perhaps by the era's leanings against the establishment, I considered the idea of accommodation a dishonesty.

At the same time, a seemingly airborne idea that appealed to me was the great possibility of who and what one can be, in other words, of the tremendous potential of the individual. It didn't seem to matter what family one came from: I as an individual could become anything or anyone, as if I'd sprung up from nowhere, or simply from within, a self-created self.

As it happens, this idea of self-creation isn't distant ideologically from the supreme task of the Hasid: to achieve a measure of divinity. Having grown up charged with this task of personal growth, I was familiar with the dedication necessary to such pursuits. What I didn't know then was how much these ideas resemble those of Emersonian self-reliance and rugged individualism, the foundation of what we might call, after Harold Bloom, the American religion.

I have the sense, not easily proven, that America, unlike other nations, including Israel, was able to provide for Hasidism a place to thrive precisely because it is the one country in the world that shares with the 200-year-old movement the grounding in the idea of the holy individual.

This belief made Jews susceptible to the false messiahs of the seventeenth century, Sabbatai Zevi and Joseph Frank, and later, to the charismatic leaders who became the renowned rebbes and miracle healers of Hasidism. An American variation on a Hasidic leader would be Walt Whitman. And he comes to us in our own image, complete with hat and beard.

In God and the American Writer, Alfred Kazin writes that Ralph Waldo Emerson remade Jesus "into an orphic genius like himself." Consider the words of Jesus, which Emerson quoted in his Divinity School Address: "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think."

Kazin explains Emerson's point of view. "In short, any of us can be as commanding a force as Jesus. Any of us, expanding to the full circle of the universe, may yet enjoy the jubilee of sublime emotion that Jesus knew in recognizing God in himself. God dwells in us, too."[4]

That Emerson read and appropriated ideas from Jesus Christ is not news. However the parallels between Emersonian and Hasidic (kabbalistic) teachings, with their shared focus on individual potential, are surprising. Even stranger are the similarities in the historical progression of the old-world ecstatic movement and the new world product of divinity schools, where they began and where they thrive today.

Jesus Christ's relationship with Judaism is easy enough to confirm, since his mentor was James the Just, who is believed to have been a member of the Essenes, a non-normative Judaic mystical community that dates back to 150 B.C.E. Despite rabbinic censorship, strains of Judaic mysticism existed through the First and Second Temple periods, and continued developing in the Diaspora. After the Spanish crusades, Safed became a renowned mystical center. And in the 1600s, Sabbatai Zevi initiated the messianic movement. A hundred years later, Hasidism arrived on the scene.

And where are we today? Just as Transcendentalism lost its ruggedness—the whole cult of the divine self has descended into a therapeutic New Ageism with its vocabularies of the inner child, self-esteem, twelve-step programs, self-help books, and Oprah—so too in parallel development in the Jewish world, there is the radical Jewish revival culture. A recent article in The New Republic describes a New Age Passover seder on a beach in Israel, complete with newly conceived rituals, and not many traditional Jewish ones.[5]

It's worth noting here that Hasidism only survived by turning itself into a popular movement, complete with appealing features such as the royal courts in all their ritualized grandness. Along the way, the ascetic lifestyle, which could only attract a small elite, was eliminated. Contemporary Hasidic courts are no longer so grand, nor is the lifestyle so far from mainstream Jewish orthodoxy, which is also why they're more acceptable to established Judaism. So long as Hasidism retained its non-normative character, as long as charismatic individuals, such as Nahman of Breslav, could hold sway over thousands, institutional, rabbinic Judaism felt threatened.

Which brings me back to my experience of the individual within the institution. Oddly enough, early Hasidic sages would not have found my modern project of self-development threatening; if anything, they would have endorsed it. Though I had lost the humility necessary to subordinate myself to the religious institution, I was in a sense pursuing the ecstatic's way. The writing life, I propose, is comparable to the ascetic lifestyle of the early mystics.

Readers of my books, and interviewers, who are only occasionally readers of my books, often ask whether I am religious. My response is necessarily incomplete because, for one thing, the answer isn't entirely straightforward. I say something like: it depends on the point of view. Today's Hasidim wouldn't classify me as a Hasid, nor even as a religious Jew.

That I can't even be classified as a Reform or Conservative Jew, or any form of practicing Jew, troubles some people. One interviewer, I think from Cincinnati, grew furious with me because, as she put it, she and other American Jews were spending money sending their children to Jewish day schools and I seem to be throwing it all away.

The problem: I defied standard expectations that I would develop an affiliation with a more modern Jewish institution, the reform or conservative movement, or even the revivalist and New Age fringes. But I believe the expectations were misplaced.

Having experienced at an early age both the comforts and discomforts of traditional institutions, I was unlikely to join another. Consider what happens to revolutionary movements. Nothing dissipates a revolution faster than institutional acceptance. I seem to have learned—much of this is on a subconscious level—this lesson early, and remain in my adult life suspicious of institutions. And yet, though I have emancipated myself from religion, it's not quite true to say that I am completely without any.

If you believe that the holiest project on earth is to pursue an inner knowledge and to grow maximally as an individual—in kabbalah terminology, as I understand it, this is the ultimate purpose of man—then you would agree that I am religious. Since it isn't an institutionalized religion, but a rather personal one, it doesn't have the usual constraints. What it does have, strangely enough, is a grounding in Emersonian ideas, which is to say that under the influence of American religion, I returned to an earlier Hasidism. You might say that embracing the new world, I became an old world, anti-establishment Hasid.

NOTES

1. Kenneth L. Woodward, "Faith is More than a Feeling," Newsweek, 7 May 2001, 58.

2. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 13-34.

3. E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (New York: Signet, 1971).

4. Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 40-56.

5. Yossi Klein Halevi, "Nitzanim Beach Dispatch: Inner Peace," The New Republic, 30 April 2001, 20-21.