Between Metaphor and Metamorphosis: Humanism and Transcendence in Jewish secular thought.

 

Between Metaphor and Metamorphosis:

Humanism and Transcendence in Jewish secular thought.

 

While religion has tended to attract scorn and criticism from many secular thinkers, it has also brought a kind of positive envy from others. The writer Alain De Botton, in his work, “Religion for Atheists”, sets out the ways in which Religion can teach secular culture about how to promote the good of society and the welfare of the individual, without any resort to a belief in G?d. De Botton’s approach is not far from what most adherents of “liberal” religion today would identify as their own practice. Certainly the end game is the same – a better, more perfect world. In the liberal Jewish lexicon, this is known as “Tikun Olam”, a slogan which has become ubiquitous and, certainly in the eyes of many critics, clichéd and meaningless. But the essence of this idea is very simple – it is what unites “liberal religion” with the rest of the ideological descendants of Enlightenment philosophy – the simple idea that our purpose in this world is to serve each other and the world – to make the world better. Proponents of Liberal Religion will assert that this service is one and the same as serving G?d, while the secular/atheist understanding posits this purpose as a replacement of traditional religion.

The humanist understanding of the world, which has deeply influenced all liberal religion posits that humanity is at the center of creation and that (whether or not a divine exists), only that which exists within the human realm should determine our actions and our motivations. While many within communities which profess Liberal Religion would argue strongly for the importance of the divine, the vast majority would not disagree with this basic principle: Our actions should be determined by what is in the best interests of humanity. (We shall leave aside for now the more recent development of a greater awareness of our responsibility to other species and the world as a whole – an important extra step, but one which does not fundamentally impact this issue). This secular, humanistic ethic, descended from the thought of Spinoza and Kant;  guides most liberal religious thought on ethics today. In this sense, “Liberal Religion” is much closer to “Secular Ethics” than it is to conservative or fundamentalist religion. Ethically, Conservative, Traditional or Religious communities are Theistic (G?d determines morality) while Liberal Religion and Secular Humanism are Humanistic (Human reason and experience determine morality).

Within this understanding – what is the need for Religion at all? Why do professors of Liberal Religion (those who profess it, not those who research or teach it) need “religion”? And what is “religion” for those whose ethics are not theistic? Within this modern context, it is possible to see that religion was always about far more than belief. It could be argued that without true belief (i.e. without the belief that there really is an omniscient, omnipresent, beneficent, omnipotent G?d), then religion is not religion. In this sense, “Liberal Religion” would be oxymoronic. But if we accept that religion was a machine of many parts – belief, ethics, practice, tradition, literature, ritual, community, etc….. then we can posit that religion can continue to function and thrive without one of those parts (even if it must adapt). The leaders of Liberal Religion essentially posit that the absolute faith of the fundamentalist in a G?d who created the world revealed their will to humanity and will judge and redeem humanity towards some endpoint is not necessary for religion to continue to thrive. Nevertheless, unlike the secular humanist, they desire the continuation of religion because, as De Botton points out, while we may have lost the faith in an Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Beneficent G?d, Religion can still be effective in framing our lives with meaning and purpose. In order to do this, Liberal Religion essentially takes the beliefs of traditional religion and creates metaphors from them.

The myths, which were understood as history within the context of traditional religion, become narratives or parables of meaning.  G?d goes from the Creator to a creation – a metaphor used to exhort us to our best possible behavior. Instead of “knowing” G?d – feeling G?d’s presence or being aware of (not believing in) G?d’s existence and demands of us, we “posit” G?d. Within the liberal religious paradigm, we “understand” (in a narrative, metaphorical sense) that G?d demands of us ethical behavior, without it being important if there really is a G?d who could make such demands.

The central axis of Liberal Religion, therefore, is Metaphor – but an unadmitted metaphor. The leadership of Liberal Religious communities are unwilling to admit that the G?d of their prayers is not real, or rather that the reality of this G?d is immaterial – what is important in Liberal Religion is not that G?d receives our worship or our sacrifice, but that we are changed by that worship or sacrifice, and in turn we change the communities around us and improve this beleaguered world. For this reason, Liberal Religious leaders who have dared to withdraw the curtain and reveal the metaphor have been largely shunned and exiled. Within the Jewish world, figures such as R. Mordechai Kaplan and R. Sherwin Wine are good examples of leaders who were often personally rejected for dangerously flirting with the idea of trying to wean their congregants from mythology, while the practical ideas that they advanced were widely accepted. Of course, choosing to take that giant leap, and cross that divide is liberating, and the widespread application, particularly of Kaplan’s practical advice to the Jewish community among religious leaders of all denominations shows just how valuable his theological audacity was. By freeing him to re-imagine Jewish community and Jewish creativity, Kaplan’s liberation from the mythological understanding of G-d ended up giving the world Reconstructionism (the idea, rather than the movement), which transformed Jewish community in North America, even while those who apply his thought deny its origin.

But even if Liberal Religion is willing to use G?d as a metaphor, and even if that metaphor is often protected, so that it uses the old mythology, while knowingly rejecting the old presuppositions of that mythology, to truly succeed, Liberal Religion must still acquire one more aspect of traditional religion which requires an old-school belief. Namely, Transcendence. Or Metamorphosis. The end-game of traditional religion and traditional Jewish religious belief is redemption. In Christian terms, this is usually understood as “Salvation”. In Hebrew “Geulah”. Geulah / Redemption is not subject to metaphor since it cannot be truly understood or posited but is a promise of an experience. The Jewish Liberal Theologian Hermann Cohen solved this problem by understanding Geulah, Redemption, or the Messianic Era as a receding horizon – something which was to be strived towards but not actually reached.

In a pre-shoah, pre-climate-crisis  world, where a belief in the progress of humanity towards a collective messianic age could still offer hope, Cohen’s receding horizon could work to grant Liberal religion a solid ground to promote a complete answer to a modern, cynical Jew who still wished to take part in religion without accepting the unacceptable. Cohen’s version of redemption promised a version of transcendence for those who were willing to buy into an optimistic understanding of the future. Between the horror of the shoah and the sobering reality of the climate crisis, no such optimistic understanding of the future exists, and as such, true, full, belief seems very difficult for the non-fundamentalist without offering some option of the transcendental.

For this I suggest a return to the roots of Liberal Religion – humanism. The journey to full humanity, the process of becoming fully human, of becoming the best possible version of ourselves is the religious goal. Metamorphosis is achieved when the process of liberal religion – of using the rituals and traditions of our people allow one to genuinely change oneself. Psychology and the liberation of the self from the “Klipa” (a Kabbalistic concept meaning the untrue shell) are in fact the redemption which is sought in liberal religion. We do not pray for the coming of Messiah or the rebuilding of the third temple, but rather that we should each rise again – within each of us there shall be a resurrection of those parts of us that have died – the desire to see good in the other, the belief in our fellow human beings. Each of us is our own Messiah – within each of us is the potential to redeem ourselves from the malaise of the physical world. Franz Kafka, in his work, Metamorphosis, begins with the image of his hero as a huge bug. This profound image of alienation – of an individual cut off from all that grounds them is an exact critique of the atomized reality of the late 58^th century. The beginning of this Jewish century began with the Shoah, and while the foundation of the state seemed to be an immediate response which restored order to the Jewish world, it was not the solution that many hoped it would be, and rather, we have seen the continuation of many terrible trends which have weakened communities and created a painful reality in which many individuals are more in need of salvation than ever before.

 

And so transcendence can be achieved – not just a posited transcendence forever receding on the horizon, but a bodily transcendence – a feeling of true transformation within the individual – a metamorphosis, achieved by becoming one’s best self. This is achieved through the use of ritual, in community, in reference to the nourishing myths of our tradition. None of these need to be accepted unthinkingly. All can be used while fully engaging our critical faculties, but we also need not block off the possibility of a secularly understood redemption. A redeeming of the individual from pain, sorrow, depression and torpor, not just through ethical acts, but through an honest engagement with the rituals and traditions of the people which can allow for a sense of relief in the individual, a sense of salvation, a metamorphosis.