A Skeptic's D'var Torah

 I made a bas mitzvah for my daughter this past weekend - the same daughter whose birth I wrote about here. The following is the speech I gave at the event. I don't know if he was right, but a friend of mine told me afterwards that if my yeshivish family had any idea what I was talking about, they would have been upset. Which is, among other things, an indicator of how far I've come from where I was as a teen and young adult.

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Thank you everyone for being here to celebrate with us.

A bas mitzvah is, among other things, a celebration of the continuation of Judaism. It marks the transition from childhood to young adulthood, of another generation carrying on the mesorah. But what, exactly, makes something “Judaism?” Some things are clearly not Judaism. Birthday parties, for example. Most Jewish people celebrate their birthdays, but that celebration isn’t “Judaism.” It’s just a nice thing that people like to do. And some things clearly are Judaism. Celebrating bar and bas mitzvahs are “Judaism.” Why, though? Why are these particular birthday celebrations “Judaism,” while any other birthday celebration is not? What is the difference between something that is a part of Judaism and something that isn’t?

The easy answer is that everything that is purely Jewish without influence from outside sources is Judaism, while everything else is not. Bar and bas mitzvahs are “Judaism” because they come from Jewish sources, like Pirkei Avos, while birthday parties are not because they’re a  late 19^th century product of Western culture. But this is simplistic, and ignores the historical reality that Judaism has always been syncretistic. Jewish people have never lived in a bubble, and we have always influenced and been influenced by the cultures we’ve found ourselves living among.

We find syncretism everywhere. Even the Torah uses stories that are also found in the mythological traditions of other peoples of the Ancient Near East. Perhaps the most well-known example of syncretism in the Torah is the story of the mabul. There were several near-identical flood stories in circulation, the oldest of which is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian epic poem that is at least 4,000 years old. In that version of the story, the survivor of the great flood, named Utnapishtim, is warned by a god of an upcoming a flood that will wipe out all life, is told to build a boat and gather all the animals, and rides out a flood that wipes out all life not on the boat. His boat stops on a mountaintop, and he sends out birds three times to see if it is safe to leave. When it’s safe to go outside, he brings a sacrifice to the god who warned him.

Lots of cultures from around the world have flood myths, because people tend to live near water, and that water tends to flood every now and then. Pittsburgh is here because this is what used to be called the “forks of the Ohio,” where the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers meet. The first year the British spent here, in Fort Pitt, the river flooded. Water got into the storage rooms and ruined all of their food. The Flood myths from around the world tend to have little in common beyond revolving around a big flood, and share maybe one or two other points in common with the story of the mabul. But the stories of Utnapishtim and Noach are almost identical.

There is one notable difference between the stories: the reason for the flood. In Gilgamesh, it's because people were noisy and annoying the gods, so the gods decided to get rid of them. While I can sympathize with that – people can be noisy and annoying – this isn’t exactly edifying. In the Torah, the Flood happened for moral reasons, and the story teaches us a moral lesson. The people were doing bad things, and the mabul was their punishment.

Torah takes cultural elements that were common in the Ancient Near East, the stories that the Bnei Yisroel would have been familiar with as part of the sort of general cultural knowledge that everyone just kind of knows, and uses them for Jewish purposes. Where the stories were used in Mesopotamian or Egyptian mythology etiologically, to explain how those societies came to be the way they were and how they were supposed to function, in the Torah they carry the moral lessons that have shaped the Jewish people.

For anything we find in the Torah, the question “is this “Judaism” is easy to answer. Of course it is. But syncretism in Judaism is found also in later eras. That the Torah might have chosen to be syncretistic is one thing. The influences of the wider cultures in which they lived on Jewish people of later generations might be different. Are those influences foreign intrusions, or are they also “Judaism?”

There are midrashim that are adaptations of Greek legends. Greek or Greco-Roman Empires had been ruling Judea for 600 years when the gemara was written, and Hellenistic culture left an imprint on Judaism. For instance, in Plato’s Symposium, Plato has his characters discussing the nature of love. He puts a story in the mouth of a comedian about humanity having started as two sided creatures, one side male and one side female, which were then separated. He says that love is when the separated of one of these original two-sided people find each other again. Eight hundred years later the gemara repeats this story of the origin of humanity, and says that the word “rib” in the story of the creation of Chava should be understood as “side” - that Hashem separated off one side of the androgynous Adam, and in doing so, made men and women separate creatures.

 I learned about the two-sided Adam Harishon as a kid when I was learning Bereishis. Is this story, the earliest record of which is from Plato, “Judaism?”

I think it's safe to say that anything that's in the gemara is Judaism. Just like the Torah did, we find here that something that was also in circulation in the wider culture is being used for a specifically Jewish purpose. In the Symposium, this story is meant to silence the philosophers who were pontificating about love. The point was that all of their elaborate ideas weren't necessary. It was simply two halves coming together to form a whole. In the gemara, the same story is part of a discussion about how to understand the way the Torah describes the creation of humanity. It is an element of the wider culture in which the amoraim lived, filtered through a Jewish lens and adapted for a Jewish purpose.

This sort of adaptation has happened throughout Jewish history. It happens with small-scale, relatively inconsequential things. For instance, dreidel comes from a Christmas-time children’s game called T-totum. The game originated in England in the Middle Ages, where it was played with a top that had letters indicating the actions of the game written on it: T for take, N for nothing, H for half, and P for put in. It became popular in Germany, and then was picked up by Jewish children. The words indicating the game’s actions were the same in German and Yiddish, which made for an easy transition from German Christmastime game to Jewish Chanukah game, and the top acquired Hebrew letters and a Yiddish name. In time, it also acquired a Jewish interpretation. The story about Jews hiding from the Yevanim to learn Torah and pretending to be gambling with dreidels if they were discovered is first recorded in a sefer published at the very end of the 19th century.

This sort of adaptation also happens on a large scale, with entire approaches to Judaism. In the 1700s Chassidus, which is now an accepted part of Judaism, began as the Jewish version of Pietism. Pietism was a Christian movement that was reacting to the application of then-new scientific principles to religion, and was deliberately trying to bring back a more mystical and emotional version of religion. The movement started in Western Europe, was picked up by groups in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and became popular in the area around the Carpathian Mountains, where the Baal Shem Tov began his career.

Bar And Bas Mitzvah celebrations are also examples of influence and adaptation. Bar Mitzvah celebrations are relatively late. There's no reference to them in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, either in formal works or in records of day to day life like those discovered in the Cairo Geniza. The major life cycle event for boys between their bris and their wedding was a now defunct ceremony on their first day of school. The boy was carried in a procession from his home through the streets to the cheder, where he was given special foods and was ceremoniously read the alef beis forwards and backwards.

Ideas about childhood and personal responsibility were changing in late medieval Europe. People came to feel that one should voluntarily take on religious convictions as a conscious choice, and that young children are incapable of making such a choice. One consequence of that conceptual shift was that Christian monasteries stopped allowing parents to decide that their infant sons would be monks. A boy now had to be old enough to choose to become a monk before he could move into a monastery. Another consequence of the shift was the phasing out of the then nearly thousand-year-old first day of school ceremony in favor of a new importance given to and celebration of a boy becoming a bar mitzvah.

Bas Mitzvah is even later, and is a product of early 20th century feminism. The first Bas Mitzvah celebration on record was in 1922, only a year-and-a-half after women in the United States won the right to vote in federal elections. It was explicitly about recognizing that women are as important as men, and so girls’ life cycle events deserve the same recognition as boys’.

Are these celebrations “Judaism?” Despite being relatively late, and regardless of the influences that lead to their creation, they are, in a way that typical birthday parties are not.

So what is it that makes something a part of Judaism? It's not that it’s been considered a part of Judaism since the beginning of time, nor is it that it comes from purely Jewish sources, with no influence from other cultures.

I think the answer is that whether something is “Judaism” depends on its purpose, not its pedigree. Something that is shared by another culture or was influenced by another culture becomes “Judaism” when it disappears into its role. That the depiction of Adam as a two-sided creature or the importance of understanding to religious conviction didn’t have their origins in purely Jewish sources is irrelevant to the role they currently play. Today they play a role in our understanding of our mesorah and our experience of Jewish practice, and this makes them “Judaism.”

Judaism continues to change and grow, its mesorah shaped by the people who transmit it from generation to generation and the circumstances in which they find themselves. It is my hope that [redacted], too, will continue to grow, both personally and as a member of the Jewish people; that she will take the best from whatever circumstances she finds herself in and be enriched by it.

Thank you again to everyone for coming.