Crash Theory
Rabbi Benay Lappe is not a professional historian. Nevertheless she has introduced a piece of historical analysis that is very useful in relationship to understanding at least one major event in Jewish history. You can find the video of her Eli talk where she elaborates on Crash Theory here.
She bases her model of Crash Theory on the rise of Rabbinic Judaism. Briefly, the Israelites centered their cultural understanding on religious life centered on the Temple in Jerusalem. When the Temple was destroyed the survivors exercised three ways of dealing with the catastrophic failure of their understanding of the world. They could try to hold onto their original beliefs despite their failure, they could abandon their previous beliefs, or they could adapt their beliefs in a way that communicates continuity, but is ultimately would be unrecognizable to a person who knew what things were like before the crash.
Rabbinic Judaism is what makes us Jews rather than Israelites. The rabbis replaced the sacrifices of the Temple with the various prayer services. They replaced the authority of the priestly class with their own authority which they based on their role as interpreters of the laws enumerated in the Torah. The structure that they built to sustain that new cultural approach was the bodies of Jewish legal interpretation beginning with the Mishnah. The Talmud is a super-commentary on the Mishnah. At the same time as the Mishnah and Talmud were being composed, there was a separate stream of additional texts such as the Tosefta (an alternate version of the Mishnah) and a body of Midrashic texts that focuses on Jewish Law rather than narrative. Although the next 1600 years would see the creation of much of the body of Jewish prayer, poetry, philosophy and mystical texts, the legal texts were the primary (and largely unchallenged) replacement for the real world architecture of the Temple.
Rabbi Lappe describes this model for us so that she can make the case that crashes are inevitable and that the continuity of the culture experiencing the crash can survive, but their survival depends on the group that adapts. She believes in the removal of the restrictions on which (adult) Jews can do which things and radical egalitarianism that normalizes Queerness within the Jewish community. This is a direction that she believes that the adaptation will include. She is not so chutzpadik to believe that she actually knows how things will shake out, just that it will seem unrecognizable to us, but normal to those who come after us. Up to this point, I accepted her assertion that we are experiencing a crash moment. This is part of the reason that I wanted to see what could be done with the idea of Judeo-Futurism. However, I realize now that I don’t have a clear idea of exactly what the crash is.
One minor problem with Rabbi Lappe’s presentation is that when she gives the example of Rabbinic Judaism, her summary of events that took hundreds of years to take shape and take hold can effectively give us the feeling of how long it took to transition from old normal to new normal for it to seem altogether “normal.” If we want to identify what we are referring to if we claim that we are responding to a crash, we might find that the crash moment is recent or that it is much earlier than her discourse might place it.
In the larger field of Jewish Studies the likeliest crash moment is the Enlightenment. The Jewish Enlightenment begins with Moses Mendelssohn and his generation of Berlin Jewish intellectuals. They believed that rationality rather than rabbinic authority should be the way we guide our conduct. Rather than being separate from the majority cultures in the lands where Jews lived, they should mix with those people and be able to speak their languages. This challenge which existed as a pressure from without became a pressure that came from within. It precipitated a crash moment within the German Jewish community. Within three generations the traditional culture of absolute leadership based on rabbinic authority had essentially disappeared. The double-down approach died out. The exit approach drew many Jews away from their faith into conversion or atheism. However, a variety of responses were adaptive.
The Wissenshaft des Judentums movement was a very intellectual response. It responded to the rise of German nationalism and the volkisch movement which sought to create a mythology of essential Germanness. Wissenschaft studied and made accessible traditional Jewish texts, both ancient and medieval, in order to support the idea of a Jewish national culture heritage. However, this was a movement that saw these texts as historical relics rather than sources of contemporary Jewish guidance. The Wissenschaft movement is no longer a force as such, but it is the foundation that the academic field of Jewish Studies grew out of. Within the Wissenschaft group, but separate from the academic work that they did, some of the leaders within the group pioneered innovative liturgical practices and altered the way that the Jewish prayer service was organized. They were a significant force within what evolved into the Reform movement.
Zacharias Frankel, who parted from the group of Rabbis that formally organized the Reform Movement, founded the Historical Critical school which is the basis of the Conservative Movement. Frankel parted company with the Reformers over their willingness to accept prayer in the vernacular, rather than the traditional Hebrew liturgy.
Samson Raphael Hirsch rejected the openness to critical thinking with the Historical Critical School and can be considered the founder of Modern Orthodoxy.
The German Jewish world also produced some of the most influential political movements. Karl Marx’s communism includes a strong strain of sublimated Jewish messianism. Moses Hess, who was an associate of Marx later wrote his work “Rome and Jerusalem,” which I discussed earlier this year. It is the first clear expression of modern Zionist thought and also harbors unexplored messianic tendencies.
The consequences of the Jewish Enlightenment as a crash moment continue to reverberate and by this point have left no Jewish community untouched anywhere in the world. It is possible to view this as the crash that Rabbi Lappe refers to, although I don’t think this is how she sees it.
Other events have a claim to be crash moments. We can look at these subsequent events as elements of an evolving crash moment that will be apparent after the evolution in response to the crash has matured, or as crashes unto themselves. I am not committed in my own thinking on this aspect of the subject.
The rise of Political Zionism and the issue of the negation of diaspora is a kind of crash moment. The idea of the Land of Israel, and later the State of Israel, as the center of Jewish living and Jewish thought is still an unsettled issue. The degree to which it dominates Jewish minds today and the failure of that controversy to subside that continues well into its second century could be its own crash or an aspect of the earlier crash. The rise of Zionism is part of the original crash, but it also rises out of events that could be viewed as separate from the event that caused the original crash.
Also simultaneously to the rise of Political Zionism was the rise of Modernism. Modernity is the world that exists at our time. Modernism is a wave of critical thought that has entered every aspect of thought in our time, beginning in science and mathematics, but closely followed throughout academic and cultural thought and practice, that recognizes the impossibility of objectivity. Prime examples of Modernist expressions are the Theory of Relativity, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Cubism, Eisenstein’s montage technique, Freudian psychoanalysis, the prose of James Joyce and the abstractions of Vassily Kandinsky. Modernism challenges the idea of moral absolutes, and this is a challenge that impinges on the way that many traditional Jews accept rabbinic authority. Our relationship to Modernism is, as Madge the Palmolive lady used to say, “you’re soaking in it.”
The Holocaust is widely see as a crash moment for both Jewish and Christian belief. The strain that it puts on the way that we reconcile our belief in a benevolent God with the existence of evil in the world is unbearable for all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time. While some within the Jewish world believe that the Holocaust is an event without comparison in human history, we see now that the modern world is struggling to provide contradictory evidence.
The modern concept of human rights begins in the invention of the idea of civil rights that came out of the Enlightenment. As a response to the Holocaust and many other injustices that had been experienced around the world one of the earliest efforts of the United Nations was to codify and ratify their Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this we see an international recognition that the rights of women, children, cultural, national and religious minorities are now recognized as the ideal aspiration of just societies. This is a fight that has been going on in the United States since our founding, and despite the devastation of the past few months, vast but uneven and imperfect successes have been achieved. While these advances have been arbitrated openly in the secular world, within the religious world it has been more challenging to address baked in aspects of status that contradict the forward movement of universal human rights and civil rights.
Rabbi Lappe believes that Judaism cannot survive without responding to this challenge as a crash. For her, this crash may be THE crash. While I was willing to accept this at one point, I no longer am capable of seeing it that way. I still accept her large premise of this being a crash moment, but I now see the crash as more complex in character. As a result, I see any adaptation as responding to more factors that I had imagined.
The way I see the responsibility of those “leading” the Jewish community now is not the same as it was largely understood in previous generations following whenever the crash moment occurred (at some point over the past two hundred and fifty years). Rather, our role is to help the great mass of Jews, regardless of their degree of connection to any Jewish organizational life, scroll through the broad mass of Jewish belief and culture. As a whole we need to challenge our fellow Jews, all of them, to examine how they actually feel about the depth of our heritage. The more thoughtful we can help them become, the deeper the quality of the new version(s) of Judaism can become.
Afterword
Among the crash moments I identified above, I did not include the enormously damaged condition that the State of Israel now finds itself in. After nearly thirty years of the baleful influence of Benjamin Netanyahu, I believe that Israel has entered into a crash moment. The road back to a more ideal Israeli polity now seems impassible. Hopefully I am wrong. Nevertheless, this crash moment in Israel has provoked a crash moment in regards to Israel within the American Jewish community.
For a very long time, American Jews have formed a large part of their Jewish identity based on the State of Israel. This could be a positive identification or a negative one. Either way, the foundation they have chosen for their American Jewish identity, Israel, is a place that is largely out of their control. Clearly, this practice is in a crash moment. I hope that we, as a community, can adapt and find a more self-empowering foundation for ourselves as American Jews, one that will break down the unhelpful divisions that so weaken our community.
