Spirit and Story Archive

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Seeking a Sense of Mitzvah

By Irwin Kula

As Jews living at the end of the 20th century, we struggle to find a way in the space between the commanding tradition on the one hand and our individual needs for personal authenticity on the other, neither of which can continue to claim our unquestioning obedience. We try to be true to ourselves, as the modern world has taught us, while still responding to the values and limits imposed by the community, the tradition and God. Our dilemma is: can Jews like us have a true sense of mitzvah or a halakhah infused with real weight and realized in our life experience and the life experience of our families and communities?

I think we can, but only in rather new and different terms. What follows are some brief strategies for developing a sense of mitzvah in our age.

Our Story/Ourselves

Recent work done on the narrative context of all human identity and actions can open up new ways of thinking about halakhah. Human beings are essentially storytellers. Within every person, family and community is a rich heritage of stories that supply a stock of roles, frames, plots, models and metaphors that are our way of having a world, understanding it, reasoning about it and acting within it. We are born into a web of narratives. We enter human society with roles into which we have been drafted. But to make sense out of our lives, to know who we are and what we are to do, we need to answer the prior question of what story or stories do we find ourselves a part?

Listen for a few minutes to the voices that run through your mind, and you will hear your father, mother, brothers, sisters, children, lovers, friends, enemies, teachers, heroes and ancestors acting out their dramas on your stage. In this theater filled with scenes and characters, the stories we hear are interpretive frameworks that authorize who we are and what we do.

Story as Mirror and Lens

Human life is a narrative enterprise. We live surrounded by our stories and the stories of others and we see everything that happens to us through them. As a people, we have a rich heritage of stories that we tell. Stories that were formative in our emergence as a civilization and that continue to distinguish us, motivate behavior, inspire us and generate a sense of belonging and continuity. These central narratives are the cultural DNA that govern the way we see reality and the way we behave. They profoundly shape us; and as much as we may author our stories, our stories have authority over us.

The Jewish Narrative

Our narrative begins with Creation and continues with stories of our founding families, the Exodus from Egypt, the encounter at Sinai, the journey through the wilderness, the conquest of land, the building of the Temple in Jerusalem, the temptations of idolatry, the destruction, the centuries of exile, the wandering, the Holocaust, the return to and rebuilding of Israel. These stories provide the interpretive framework for Jewish identity and Jewish action.But most important, each of these stories contains within it halakhah--performative implications, prescriptions, action directives that tell us how to live.

The story of Creation calls us to celebrate with God the weekly recreation of the world. It asks us to be grateful and responsible for God's creation and to have reverence for life. It demands that we work to preserve the world, protect the environment and increase the quantity and quality of life.

The story of the patriarchs and matriarchs and their agonizing struggle to have and raise children makes a demand upon us as Jews to have children and love our children as God's most precious gift. The stories of Isaac and Ishmael at long last reunited at their father's grave, of Jacob listening to his parents, of Esau crying out for his father's blessing, of Joseph failing to contact his father and causing such pain compel us to honor our parents in ways far more weighty than the command to honor our parents.

The Narrative Continues

The Exodus story makes demands on us to fight all forms of oppression and slavery; to overthrow Pharaohs; to care for the stranger, widow and the orphan; to move the world from slavery to freedom and to hope in redemption. It should not surprise us that a community that tells this story for 30 centuries defines itself as an Exodus people, feels metzuveh-obligated to redeem hundreds of thousands of Jews from the far cor-ners of the earth and performs the thousands of detailed tasks necessary to fulfill this obligation. As much as we create our stories, our stories create us.

The story of the building of the Temple calls upon us to create sacred space for ourselves. The tales of temptation and consequences of idolatry compel us to say no to absolutizing ideologies, call upon us to be idol-smashers and demand that we fashion reminders/signs of our relationship to the one God. The stories of wandering in exile, of Holocaust and of return to the land, each makes demands upon us regarding how to act in this world.

The mistake is to make our sense of mitzvah and the authority of halakhah completely dependent on one part of our narrative, i.e., the divine command at Sinai, which does not work for many of us. Each of these narratives has normative implications and a compelling halakhah emerges only from the full range of our collective story.

Meaning Emerging from Narrative

To peel off halakhah from its narrative context is to undermine its meaning and compelling quality. No halakhic prescription exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. Halakhic behavior derives its intelligibility and validity only within the horizon of a framing narrative plotted upon reality by God, our community, our imagination. Halakhah gives our narrative depth by placing parts of it in a lived-out immediacy. It is a bridge between our central narratives and the present world. At any point, halakhot are summaries of the developing insight of our tradition as to how to live out our story. But they cannot stand alone, independent of our shared sacred story. Once halakhah is detached from the narrative which gives it meaning, it becomes trivial and idiosyncratic and it shrivels up and dies. But once understood in the context of our narratives, halakhah becomes not merely a welter of rules to be observed, but a world/way in which we live. To recover a sense of mitzvah and halakhah in our age, we need to remember that it is the narrative that undergirds the halakhah and to trust that our story can guide our course and to reconnect our law to our central narratives.

Bringing Law to Life and Life to Law

Moreover, we need to renarrativize our legal texts, both biblical and rabbinic, if they are to have meaning. Halakhah needs to be seen as a maaseh shehaya, as the tale told around the fire late at night: Do you remember Sammy? He had a fight with David and knocked out his two front teeth. You should see how much he owes. It is the story told around the kitchen table: Did you hear about Judah who fell into an open ditch or Sarah who found a wallet on the sidewalk right outside of Miriam's Metziah Shop? It's the story told by a group of expectant parents: What did you think about the ceremony Devorah and her husband had to celebrate the birth of their daughter?

The narrative context enables us to explore imaginatively what it might mean for us to perform this or that action. Unless we can enlarge our own perspective through an imaginative encounter with the experience of others; unless we can participate empathetically in the experiences of Abraham and Sarah and Miriam and Moshe and R. Yohanan ben Zakkai and Maimonides and Herzl and Sammy and David...their suffering, pain, frustrations as well as their joy, fulfillment, plans, hopes and dilemmas; unless we can let our values and ideas be called into question from various points of view, we cannot develop a halakhah.

We need to invite the stories and experiences of our people into the way law is made. In this respect, all members of the community are halakhah-makers. My task as a teacher is to help link our personal biographies to the central narratives of our people until there is a dance of meaning between the two. As we see our personal world through the lens of our Jewish story, new halakhah will emerge and old forms of halakhah will be relayered with meaning and reappropriated. The old will be made new and the new made holy.

Mitzvah as Discovery

A second strategy I use for developing a sense of mitzvah is to not be overly concerned that the community can only survive if it has formal norms. I am more interested in arousing the Jewish will to act in response to "God's commands." In this respect, I am powerfully drawn to the language of kedushah (holiness) and love.

Our people have been experiencing the sacred and creating forms to express and recapture those experiences for centuries. These forms include rites of passage, words of prayer, dietary ways, sacred time celebrations, etc. These forms are sacred and compelling (they are mitzvot) not so much because God literally has commanded them, but because the Jewish people has invested them with holiness over the centuries. These forms help us uncover the sacred experiences we all have by naming and shaping them. They serve as signposts along our life journey to help us discover the deeper dimensions and richness of our journey.

When my children were born, I powerfully understood that my wife and I were not alone in the creation of our children. Brit, Simhat Bat, T'filah, Birkhat haGomel were compelling forms that sculpted the passage and drew out its fuller meaning. Blessing my children on Friday evening with the blessing parents have offered for centuries sets my parent-child relationship in a deep and richer context.

When I travel to Israel (an act that is becoming a yearly mitzvah for me, a contemporary aliyat ha'regel), and stand on the tarmac at Ben Gurion, witnessing a plane load of Russian Jews being carried on eagle's wings from slavery to freedom, I cry and feel my body shudder with the excitement of participating in the miracle of kibbutz galuyot. At that moment, saying the blessing, ga'al Yisrael (Redeemer of Israel), has the compelling quality of mitzvah and enables me to uncover the hidden presence of God and to discover the reality of redemption. Moreover, when the opportunity arises to say the blessing in the daily or Shabbat liturgy, having reconnected the sacred form to a living event, the blessing now resonates with renewed meaning.

When I get up in the morning and the sun is shining and my wife is beside me, I am enveloped by a sense of security, rootedness and warmth. I am compelled to thank my source of life, modeh ani, and to praise ha'mehadesh be'hol yom tamid, my creator who renews life daily. These sacred forms enable me to walk on the way toward God--they are halakhah.

Mitzvot call us not so much to immediately observe them, but to seek and discover the kedushah within them. My task as a teacher is to link these sacred forms with the appropriate moments, times and events in people's lives so that they become compelling experiences for discussion, transmission and reaffirmation of meanings that both comfort and disturb. By reconnecting rite and passage, experience and kedushah, these forms become mitzvot.

Commitment Emerges From Love

Finally, if we hope to develop a consciousness of mitzvot, of the conditions, obligations and duties entailed in being a Jew, we need to remember that the ground for such consciousness is a sense that as Jews we are unconditionally loved. There are two poles that mediate Jewish identity: mitzvah/demand and hesed/grace, the conditional and unconditional aspects of being Jewish. Mitzvah is nurtured in the ground of unconditional love and acceptance. Without unconditional love, without unconditional affirmation of worth, the mitzvah side of Jewish identity seems onerous, burdensome and judgmental.

Paul claimed that mitzvah shatters the human-divine relationship because the inability to live up to the demand creates permanent guilt, so Christianity opted for unconditional love/grace as the mediator of Christian identity. Judaism's insight is that we live in profound tension: law/demand within grace, responsibility within unconditionality. It is precisely un-conditionality that invites us to exercise our will of responsibility.

Yes, there is in Judaism an overwhelming level of responsibility and obligation (as Leonard Fein has said, even a Jewish atheist knows exactly what the God he doesn't believe in demands of him) because it is a demand born from the depth of relationship. Jews could live with a demanding God of Sinai because with it came the unconditional all-loving shekhinah. In the deepest recesses of their identities, they knew God's love was prior to demand.

Why did Exodus precede Sinai? It is like a wise king who before he assumes the throne protects his people, cares for his people, loves his people, and then is confident that his people will respond. Mitzvah follows relationship, sh'ma Yisrael follows haboher b'amo Yisrael b'ahava (God chooses God's people Israel with love). Human beings need to experience the world, their life, their community as hesed for expectations and demands to take root. The demands then regulate, normalize and clarify the full dimensions of the love. This is precisely the way of human development. Parents prepare an infant's bedroom, crib, clothes to the last detail, all before they can make any demands on their child. A parent cares for and loves an infant unconditionally, and it is this sense of unconditional love and acceptance that nurtures the child's will to be responsible. Hesed is the context of demand.

Israel as Symbol of God's Love

I am convinced this is why Israel is so significant in contemporary Jewish identity and why trips and missions to Israel generate support for Israel, in a myriad of forms that seem to have the status of mitzvah. In some fundamental way, after 1,900 years of being told that our exile and wandering were the result of divine rejection--that our weakness and suffering were because of our sins-- the return to the land has reaffirmed the deeper intuition that our people's role in history will never be rejected by God no matter what. That we are still beloved by God, banim lashem, God's children. That we are worthy to be Jews even if not always worthy by our living as Jews. This sense of being unconditionally accepted/loved is given legal expression in the law of return. All Jews are welcome: worthy, unworthy, good, bad, connected, disconnected. This is the ground in which demands make sense and why so many feel a sense of mitzvah towards Israel.

Too often, the Judaism we teach and the institutions that we run appear to be speaking exclusively to the demand side of Jewish identity. We ask people to observe "x" or "y", we solicit people, we make demands of them before we create a ground for response. We need to remember that Jewish identity is dialectical. It is demand and promise, mitzvah and grace, conditional and unconditional, Sinai and Zion. As a teacher, I try to keep the dialectic alive.

Voluntary Mitzvah

At the end of the 20th century, to say that we have to do mitzvot because God so commanded is no more adequate a statement than to say mitzvot are whatever one says they are. If there is one truth about the era in which we live, it is that we live under conditions of unprecedented freedom in which choice and the voluntary nature of commitments is given. Freedom and choice are now the motivating forces for doing mitzvot. Perhaps they frighten those of us who want to create halakhic communities because we have not yet grasped this new situation of choice. We tend to think that actions taken on voluntarily somehow are less committed than those taken on out of obligation. We tend to trivialize voluntary commitments because we confuse choice with fashions and fads.

Since, in the past, traditional values and norms were presented as given by God, commanded in the literal sense, grounded in necessity, the recognition of the right to choose is equated with lack of commitment. This equation is a confusion of freedom. Voluntary commitments are not necessarily less committed ones. Free societies request and get a much higher level of loyalty and sacrifice than dictatorships. People will voluntarily take on much more obligation than anything they are forced to do. Just look at the work ethic and quality of products produced in democracies compared to totalitarian regimes. We all know people who worked eight hours a day for someone else and then started their own business so they could be free. They then work for themselves fifteen hours a day and call themselves free

I have to believe that this is what God really wanted when God created us as images of God with the freedom to choose how to live. The logical conclusion of being created free to choose is the voluntary nature of the mitzvot. This was intrinsic at the very moment of the creation of human beings. Our challenge is to fashion a Judaism compelling enough for people to choose and a community loving and good enough for them to voluntarily join. Voluntary fulfillment of mitzvot is fulfillment in the best sense of the word.

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