But Don't Tell the Jews (A Sermon on Heretical Truths)
But Don’t Tell the Jews
(A Sermon on Heretical Truths)
I’m going to share with you a strange piece of advice I was given once, by a very well-respected halakhic thinker on Kashrut. We were learning about materials of vessels - which materials receive the status of food, which don't, what happens with admixtures - and he had just said something that caught my classmates and I off-guard. We asked why everyone seemed to know a different, more strict version of that rule, and his response was this:
“This is the halakhah (the rule), but don’t tell the Jews.”
I think about that advice probably more than it warrants, certainly more than the actual halakhic question warrants. I understand what he was trying to say - that should we teach the more lenient-and-complex version, then people are more likely to end up doing it incorrectly. Sometimes, being stringent-and-simple might be the safer option.
But it sat badly with me - it still sits badly with me - this idea that I should know something to be the halakhah, but should deliberately, in his words, “not tell the Jews”. I would always rather point to the complication than to pretend things are simple, especially in cases of Torah. I feel that to do otherwise is to advocate for esotericism, a restriction of who gets to have knowledge of Torah, when Torah belongs to all Jews.
Fortunately, I’m in the right place for that kind of thought process. New London Synagogue was born due to Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs z”l teaching what he understood to be true - even if it made the orthodox establishment uncomfortable, and even when it made his own life more complicated. We were not born to be a community of “this is the truth, but don’t tell the Jews”.
This is the place I’m starting in: truth is better than simplicity. It is, I must say, an increasingly difficult line to hold in a world that seems to champion the simple and neat and black-and-white.
However, there is a specific problem with holding truth above simplicity. The problem is that truth might sometimes be genuinely dangerous.
I’m not playing a rhetorical game about the term truth. I’m not now arguing about truth-telling in the scenario where the man with the knife asks where his victim is hiding. I still mean the kind of truth that is intellectually honest, that is willing to say “this is complicated”, instead of pretending that the answer is simple.
So where is the danger in intellectual honesty?
I’m in the middle of teaching a four-part shiur in the New London Academy about the history of “heresy” in Jewish thought. "Heresy" is not a Torah concept. It developed in the rabbinic era, interestingly alongside the development in Christianity, but for very different purposes. The church fathers were using the concept of “heresy” to shape a faith: to decide what people needed to believe within a religion that was all about belief. Not so for the rabbis. For the rabbis, the concept of “heresy” was not about carving out the shape of religious belief, it was about danger.
There were just three things that the rabbis declared outside of what they could handle in the broad marketplace of Jewish ideas. One is “being an Epikoros” - which they don’t define, but from Talmudic examples, seems to mean “disrespecting the rabbis”. The other two are more distinct ideas: saying the Torah is not min Hashamayim (from Heaven), and saying there is no t’hiyyat hameitim, resurrection of the dead, from the Torah itself.
It is that third of the forbidden ideas that is the most revealing. The problem is that the Torah does not mention the resurrection of the dead. The Torah includes barely a nod to life after death. That is a rabbinic idea, which they read interpretively and creatively in the Torah. But nonetheless, denying that the resurrection of the dead is in the Torah puts us outside the system, on par with denying that the Torah is divine at all.
To understand why they considered this idea so crucial, I think we need to consider who the rabbis were and what the project of Rabbinic Judaism really was.
The Temple had just been destroyed. The foundation of Jewish unity with one another, and of connection with God, had been destroyed. The rabbinic project was the survival of Judaism. Their genius, after the loss of the binding nature of the Temple and the Land, was refocusing on the binding agents that we still had: Torah; community; Shabbat. (The that still bind us together today.)
They denied a place to very few ideas. After all, the rabbis thrived on dissent and argument. They denied a place only to the things that would threaten the endeavour. If they were going to make this work, they needed Jews to respect rabbinic leadership, and they needed Jews to accept divinity in the Torah. Those two elements were the basis upon which the rabbis were going to keep the Jewish people together.
And t’hiyyat hameitim, resurrection. It became so fundamental because the Torah’s promises of reward and divine justice could not be reconciled with what they had just lived through, with the destruction of the Temple, with the grotesque martyrdom of leadership, with the heavy hand of Rome upon them. The rabbis already believed in life after death. But maintaining that this understanding was vital, that rejecting it outright was outside the scope of acceptable discourse, was because the whole project was otherwise doomed to failure.
If Torah was going to be what held us together and in relationship with God, it could not contradict our own lived experiences in such a visceral and soul-shattering way.
The stakes were unbelievably high; Judaism could very easily have become extinct. If the rabbis failed, we would be a people read about in history books to explain the advent of Christianity and nothing more.
Some two thousand years later, that same framework became the basis of the rejection of Rabbi Louis Jacobs. Biblical academia, with its hypotheses of multiple authors of Torah, was seen to undermine the fundamental principle that Torah is min Hashamayim (from Heaven). Of course, Rabbi Jacobs didn’t think so. He had no problem seeing Torah as divine despite the complexity.
But that urge is fascinating. The urge to jump on anything that might seem to skirt the edges of central ideas or ask the “wrong” questions is, I think, based on a world we do not live in anymore. It is a survival instinct against a danger that is not in front of us, like we’re frozen in fear that there might be a tiger behind the couch.
Threats to the survival of Judaism do exist, but they are not as existential as they were just after the destruction of the Temple, when we had lost the place of Jewish unity and connection with God. We do ourselves and the Jewish future no favours by living in the ruins that way. Not when the rabbis worked so hard to build us out of that place.
And certainly not when the biggest danger to the survival of Judaism in our era is apathy. Passionate engagement is a benefit in our landscape, even if that passionate engagement asks difficult questions about Torah, or expresses doubt about afterlife, or even occasionally scoffs at rabbis.
I believe that we are capable of prioritising intellectual honesty in our perspectives on Torah.
And it is my hope that we can likewise avoid succumbing to the call of simplicity in life more broadly. We are so often guided into a survival mindset, by media which benefits from our fear, by those who wish to broaden the divide between us. But we aren’t there; we are not picking up the pieces of the broken heart of our civilisation. The simplicity we’re being presented with is not an attempt to bring us together, as it was for the rabbis - on the contrary, it is more often an attempt to pull us apart.
So let’s not add to a list of untellable truths. Let’s engage with complexity, even when it makes us uncomfortable. Or decide when we’re not arriving at a conclusion, because we understand the time and energy it would take to get there.
In the unfolding of our futures, communal and individual, we are all best served with passion, curiosity, and integrity. The more of that we can bring into the world, the better.
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