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Unifying the Self through Halacha

By Shaina Sara Handelman (Sh'ma 11/217, September 18, 1981)

Every Rosh Hashanah the Jew experiences a strange paradox: to begin is to return. At the New Year, we make amends for all that has been, resolve to do better, and begin afresh. Unlike other religions, however, we do not call this movement "Repentance" (haratah) but "Return" (teshuvah). The difference in terms is most telling. "Repentance" implies that one is somehow innately bad and must remake himself entirely. "Return" on the other hand implies that one is somehow innately good, and has merely wandered away from his true, original self. As the Talmud tells us, "No man commits a transgression unless the spirit of folly enters into him." One need not, then, be "Reborn" or converted or saved, but rather re-find, return to himself.

Today, however, many Jews are not waiting until Rosh Hashanah to search for what is popularly called their "Jewish roots "-or perhaps we should better say Jewish "life-style." The use of the term "life-style" was for a long while perplexing to me. In my mind, "style" connoted "ornament," decoration secondary to the substance. But I then came to perceive the profound unconscious psychological insight of popular jargon: we desperately search for life-style because we have no real life-substance. Style becomes a substitute for content. And so we try to pick and choose, amalgamate and discard, imitate and absorb bits and pieces of other people's lives, cultures, religions, politics, philosophies-from the Orient, or from America of the 30's, from the West Coast or from Manhattan, from the movies or from Madison Ave. and so forth. We each struggle to sew some patchwork of ideas together and garb ourselves in an appropriate life-style.

More importantly, as Jews we have done the same with Judaism. In search of a Jewish life-style, we are all too often "repenters" rather than "returners," having wandered so far away that in our discontent we avidly attempt to remake ourselves through the various contemporary forms of "salvation" (most lately known as "self-fulfillment") preached in politics, sex, religion, medicine, etc. We are reborn through jogging, feminism, vegetarianism, careers, meditation, divorce -- the list is endless. Then we mix and mingle any variety of these into our own individual recipes for "Jewish identity" and proceed to snip, cut, and tailor the Torah to keep up with the prevailing styles. For we are convinced that we must keep up with what is "new," we must change Judaism to fit the modern world and to change it, to make it new, means precisely not to return to what it originally was.

Halacha at First Seems Extreme

For when we do return and take a look at what the Torah itself, so to speak, defines as Jewish life-style that is, at halacha, we are shocked. It seems impossible, extreme. Here in the Shulchan Aruch we have all manner of strange prescriptions for daily life including which shoe to put on first, and when to wash one's hands, what to wear and how much of our bodies should be covered, when and when not to touch one's spouse, how to sleep, eat, drink, evacuate, and talk; in addition to the minutiae of laws concerning the holidays, prayer, kashrut, civil litigation and so forth in such unwieldy detail.

No one will argue about the need to strengthen Jewish "identity" "culture" "values"-but that we need to exert ourselves to strengthen and abide by Jewish law is another matter. It is halacha, above all, that is the object of contention in modern Jewry. A product of the ghetto, many protest. Trivial-what does it matter which shoe one puts on first, or whether one drives to shul on Shabbat as long as he gets there, or how much of the body is covered, or when one has sexual relations, etc. Justice, morality, being a good person, supporting Israel-these are the true components of Judaism. Shabbat, kashrut, perhaps even Mikveh make for a nice life-style, but let's not go too far, let's not be irrational; fanatic, and above all let's not call it "law."

In fact, halacha comes from a root meaning not "law" but "walking," the path, the way to walk (or style one's life), the way to be Jewish everywhere, at all times-when one is tying one's shoelaces as well as when one is being ethical. Moreover, halacha in a way presupposes that being ethical is somehow bound up, oddly enough, with the way one ties his shoelaces. How strange a notion to us, but our attitude belies our deep and thorough-going estrangement from our real Jewish selves. For the Torah teaches us that nothing, literally nothing is trivial for the Jew; that there is utterly no aspect of his life which is unimportant; no action, word, thought, or deed that he can afford to be insensitive to. There is no aspect or minute of life which the Jew does not seek to elevate and sanctify and permeate with his Jewishness. (And Jews know only too well how easy it is for men to separate their ethical ideals and religious sentiments from their daily lives so that the most sophisticated culture can spawn barbarism.)

That is why in Judaism, soul and body, idea and action, the most metaphysical and the most mundane realms are not separate-as is the case with Greco-Christian culture. To the Greeks, the Torah was neither beautiful nor rational; its prescriptions for behavior were strange and tortuously legalistic. To the Christians, halacha was an absolute anathema. The "letter" was pitted against the "spirit," with Paul arguing that the law was in fact the very source of sin. One needed, instead of following halacha, only to "believe," feel, and be reborn of the spirit-to follow not the discipline of a burdensome law but the illuminations of one's inner heart.

The Tendency to "Modernize" Halacha

Ironically, as we attempt to return and search for Jewish identity and life-style, we are so thoroughly indoctrinated with non-Jewish ideas that we, too, have unwittingly Hellenized and Christianized those very "roots" we seek, and have rejected halacha for our own "inner light." No, we don't outrightly reject halacha; instead, we comfort ourselves with all manner of theological rationalizations and profess that, after all, halacha is "dynamic," always changed and we are really following in the footsteps of tradition and our greatest sages when we "Modernize" it. Until, finally, halacha has all but disappeared and it's a matter of every man for himself. Each must decide for himself, according to his own individual conscience what is right, wrong, appropriate or non-appropriate behavior. How Protestant we have become. Or to misuse Shakespeare, how has "conscience made cowards of us all."

We are left with some abstract, ineffectual spirituality or vague ethical monotheism and have created a Judaism in America that is body-less, content-less, and a style without substance that has been alienating young Jews in droves. Can halacha be attractive today? Yes, because halacha it the very concrete expression, the very ground and bedrock of Jewish "identity," "culture," "values" and all the other abstract words which don't even exist in the Bible-because the word "Torah", meaning "..instruction...teaching...law," "religion," "ethics" includes and indissoluably binds them all together. To separate these realms reflects non-Jewish thinking which is why for the Jew there is instruction about putting on one's shoes right along with instruction about acting justly, mercifully, ethically. One can't separate them, for as soon as one separates halacha, Jewish law, Jewish action from Torah, one separates the Jew from Judaism. That is why our greatest mystics were also our greatest halachists-the combination of law and mysticism, a phenomenon unique to Judaism. R. Yoseph Caro, the author of the Shulchan Aruch was also one of the prominent Kabbalists and mystics of the Safed circle. The most spiritually sensitive in our tradition were also the most attentive to the minutiae of halacha for halacha is the body, the very concrete expression of the soul of Torah. Those who reached the highest levels sought not to abolish, or alter or "modernize" halacha, but to reinforce it.

Discarding of Halacha is Destructive

Why do we so desperately search for "expressions" of our Jewish identity? Because Judaism in America has on the whole abandoned halacha, truncated Torah to fit the latest "isms," life-styles and ideologies that are constantly arising. Discarding halacha has taken the task and the excitement of being Jewish out of the hands of the individual, out of his home, and out of his daily life and left it only to the rabbi, cantor and select elite at the synagogue. So we search for "roots," ways to anchor our Jewishness somehow to ourselves, our families, and the reality of our lives.

In this season of beginnings, however, let's take another look, a Jewish look at Jewish law. We need not be "reborn" to new ideologies or values nor need we despair over the "problem of Jewish identity." We need instead to take Jewish action, to give body to our vague yearnings, and the "way," the "path" has been marked by the best and most holy of our sages. We need only to turn aside from where we have been wandering-to re-unite ourselves with ourselves, our souls with our bodies, our ideals with our actions, halacha with Torah, and Torah with God. Let us begin by returning.