The-Ave.US

Robert Schwartz

Tomorrow night begins the 24 hours of Yom Kippur, the Jewish fast and day of atonement.  I am writing now because the date is soon and because  a few days ago I posted an essay about Yom Kippur by relating how my sister had tried to influence me by invoking Yom Kippur as a day of atonement .   

The sad thing about my sister’s effort was that she was trying to coerce my action by invoking God in the name of my father.  She has done similar things before and apparently cannot accept  that my father, Robert Schwartz,  was a devout and out spoken atheist .  His atheism began at age 9 when he was thrown through a window by his father, a rabbi.  My grandfather, my Zadi,  was in rage because my father had become an atheist and now refused to attend cheder, Jewish religious school.  My Dad’s atheism, confirmed by this violence,  was probably strengthened not long after by an accident that took Zadi Schwartz’ life and by the effects of the Great Depression on my grandmother, my Bubbi,  who somehow raised three boys through the collapsed American economy in a Jewish ghetto of Cambridge, Mass. . Later my father, the first American medic to enter Buchenwald, had ample reason to reinforce his atheism.  I believe that he found solace in atheism when, 34 years after WWII,  my mother died at a young age of a painful cancer.   My Dad’s feelings were all about her, not about the possibility of turning to a deity for solace.

Robert had especially bad feelings toward rabbis. One story illustrates how my father felt.  He was especially angered when a particularly famous Rabbi sided with the authorities in suppressing a story of violence against some young Jews bay an Irish youth gang on a Boston elevated train.  This Rabbi found Jewish law, Hallakah, that said the story should be suppressed because this would protect the larger Jewish population from the anger of the Boston Irish community.  Hallakah, supposedly an oral tradition passed from Rabbi to Rabbi since Moses, regulates the lives of orthodox Jews, is surprisingly flexible at times like this.  It is all too easy to find a helpful Rabbi, and observant Jews sometimes see this as a way of transferring guilt away form themselves. This was also why my father was so disdainful of the cheredi, the ultra orthodox, who use their interpretation of Hallakah to avoid military service in Israel.

In short, my father went beyond agnosticism, he rejected God because of the bad behavior he saw being done in the name of God.  My own feelings are even stronger.   I was an agnostic until my mother’s painful death.  If I could not kill any person with painful cancer, how can I worship a God able to kill my Mother?  How can I base my morality on the God who just allowed the death by sarin gas of 400 children in Damascus?  I have been deeply offended at times when others have forced me to participate in settings where this God” is prayed to and praised.

So my sibs and I disagree. In his email, brother went on to equate my atheism with something quite horrible .. abandonment of the Jewish people.   I resent this greatly because I, like my father, have always been a strong Zionist. I  wrote to a devout friend asking what my brother would have to say about the atheism of Gompers, Einstein, Alinsky, or the Zionists who builft Israel on a secular foundation?  What would my brother say to the young atheist Jews who have died for the Jewish people both in WWII .. where 500,000 Jews fought in the allied armies .. and since then in Israel? Perhaps, rather than denigrating Jewish atheists, my sibs should read the great tribute made by Jews of all kinds to Daniel Pearl, the Jew, the atheist Jew, who was beheaded in Pakistan after insisting with his last words, “I am Jewish.”

I did not out my father … I showed him the respect he deserved for sincere beliefs.

I would like to believe that my brother and sister could benefit from learning more about Jewish law. What my brother and sister may not understand is that  Jewish  laws, the  “mitzvot”. are supposed to be followed with no promise of any reward other than the release from ones own suffering that one gets by dong right by others.  Fulfilling a mitvah (singular) should be done not as an atonement for any sin but because the mitzvah is the eternal, natural law.

Atheism is in noway a contradiction of this principle..  Some would date Jewish atheism to the uniquely Jewish story of Jacob/Israel’s fight with an angel. Later Jacob realizes that the angel was God.  Indeed Tacitus saw Jews a atheists because we lacked a belief in any anthropomorphic deity.  Consistent with Tacitus’ criticism, one name Jews use of God is “elohim” … a plural that seems to subsume all the forces of the universe in one word.  If the Jewish concept of God is something man can wrestle with and at the same time elohim, it is hard to see such an entity as being a manlike Jupiter or Jesus.  Later, during the Inquisition, Torquemada made similar charges that the Jewish God was not a God at all.    This “Jewish” God, the subject of Buber’s “I and Thou” is very different from the all powerful and all good Jesus or the perfect God of Islam.

This creates a problem for believers on Yom Kippur.  If God is a wrestling partner, what is gained by atoning to God  for ones sins?  Why recite ritualistic admissions of unspecified sins if Judaism  does not offer the benefit of an afterlife?  Unless  believing Jews. like fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, think God punishes and rewards.  it is hard to imagine that confessing ones sins, even under a ritual formula like those recited on Yom Kippur, could be rewarded.  The answer, for all Jews, is that Yom Kippur is not about redemption from sin.  Actually, the idea of redemption from sin is not a Jewish idea.  The Torah,teaches that the laws should be followed for their own right.  Murder, theft, adultery, lying, …. these are all wrong not because God says so but because they are wrong.  Yom Kippur is about fulfilling the mitzvot, doing good deeds.

A thousand years ago in the Khazari, Judah Halevi explained that since the Law. and God are both eternal, one could not discover the other.  Maimonides, the greatest of all Rabbis and the physician to Saladin, the liberator of Jerusalem from the Christians, taught that Hallakhah and and even Torah had to be modified if either was contradicted  by pure reason or by science.  Buddhism is based on similar thinking without even having to invoke any God.  Starting with his need for release from the reality of suffering, Siddartha Gautama arrived a laws, the Dharma, that are amazingly similar to the laws in the Torah.

Sadly these pure ideas, independent of belief in any God, have led to excommunication in Judaism.  The great Jewish philosopher Spinoza taught much the same ideas as Buddha and Halevi, i.e. that there could be no miracles, no acts of God because this would mean that there were no truths in the universe, only the whims of an ineffable Deity beyond man;’s understanding. For this very Jewish idea, Spinoza was literally excommunicated and not re-admitted to the Jewish community until a few years ago when, several generations later, the Rabbinate in Israel rules that Jewish law does no allow excommunication.

Finally, at Yom Kippur the mitzot go further than ritual confession or meditation on ones sins.   In the tradition of the golden rule,  Jews are called to fix the harm they have done. This concept, called Teshuvah, has no reward and no punishment.

My siblings need to seek Teshuvah, not atonement.

God is a bystander.