Belief, Ideology, and Practice of Frum Judaism

The Orthoprax Bible

I have been engaging frum ideology for a long time, struggling, then agonizing, then adapting and developing a belief system that works for me.  I started this blog in hopes of reaching people who are a few steps behind me (I am older than I care to admit) in squaring personal ideology with frum ideology and in hopes of starting a conversation that re-conceives the way that we have grown accustomed to think about frumkeit.  More than the simple discussions though, about the age of the universe, the societal demands of frumkeit, the wisdom and earnestness of the rabbinate, it has become clear to me that we think wrongly about what Judaism is on a systemic level, and that in so thinking we have evolved into a religion that is increasingly untenable for a growing proportion of its adherents. 

The Arguments and Beliefs

The first thing that you have to realize if you are frum and have trouble believing frum ideology is that you are not crazy.  You have probably asked a lot of questions and had a lot of conversations that ended with the other person looking more satisfied than you felt, or with the other person saying that just because you have questions doesn't mean that there is no answer.  You may have come to assume that everyone can't be wrong and that you're just missing something that everyone else gets.  Worse, you may think that your failure to understand what everyone else does is your fault.  It's not. 


The conversations I describe above can be on any of hundreds of topics: the age of the universe, religious history, women's rights in frum Judaism, rabbinic behavior, etc. As this blog continues (b'ezras Hashem!) I hope to address these topics in detail. A few short assertions for now:

• There is no meaningful argument over the age of the universe, or evolution vis a vis religious "young earth" doctrine. The lack of argument has nothing to do with reliability of fossils or discovery of missing links. The scientific version of the past is not only the correct one, it is the only one. Nothing in the Torah indicates that it was even intended as a literal history, and even if it was so intended, nothing outside the Torah indicates that it might be remotely true. Approaching the Torah as something other than empirical fact does not undermine the validity of the Torah - it respects it for what it was always intended to be. Moreover, if the scientific "old world" theories were disproved, the biblical story would not return to primacy, because it doesn't work as an empirical account.  Thus, any discussion about the flaws in evolutionary theory is a red herring, and it might interest us someday to figure out why kiruv organizations focus on it at all. 
• Orthodox Judaism as we know it today is not very old.  Exactly how old depends on which parts of it you consider central to Orthodox Judaism today.  But Litvaks in Lithuania didn't go to gedolim for brachos, let alone advice on how to invest their money.  Almost nobody learned Torah full time or thought they ought to.  There were almost no halachic proclamations that purported to have worldwide effect. Further back, there was no "letter of halacha" because it hadn't been written, and slightly further back, that was a good thing because people understood that halacha wasn't the sort of thing that ought to be written. Despite the undeniability of all of the adaptations that led to Litvishe gadol-worship, the kollel default, text-based halacha, etc., today's frum community sees the slightest deviation from the current model as enough to be written out of legitimate Judaism. 
• The last two examples in my list above, women's rights and rabbinic behavior share a thread that is involved in almost all of frumkeit's shortcomings: magical thinking. It's wrong because Magic is not real.  When something seems inequitable to you, it is most likely inequitable.  Rationales like, "you're excluded because you're more special," are patronizing and unhelpful. The same is true of rabbinic behavior.  When rabbis facilitate crime, it is not wrong to hold them culpable. The impulse to give them the benefit of the doubt because "they know more than we do about the facts" is justifiable the first few times, but when events continually repeat themselves the way they have, no amount of deference can logically justify some behavior. 

If it's true that you are right and frumkeit is wrong, what now? If the disagreements are constant or fundamental, can you be frum? This question refers both to whether it is practically possible for you to "opt in" to frumkeit and sustain frum life indefinitely, and to whether you can choose to be frum if you want to or if you're by definition un-frum.  Most would agree that regardless of what mitzvos you keep, at some point along the continuum of ideological disagreement, you are by definition not frum. In my opinion, this is wrong.

The Nature of Religious Adherence 

Most frum people assume that the basis of religion is a set of ideological beliefs. That assumption is some version of this: If you believe, that is to say that you think it empirically true, that Hashem gave the Torah at Har Sinai, then you ought to follow its tenets, and if you don't believe it, you'd be an idiot to avoid cheeseburgers and promiscuous sex.  The problem is that this syllogism doesn't work. 

Religious belief and religious practice are related, but the practice motivates the belief as much as the belief motivates practice. Even the most fervent believer would agree that you have to work on belief in order to sustain it. If that's the case, where does it start? Why should someone work on their belief, unless there is some reason to be frum outside of belief? 

 Additionally, belief itself is a flexible, malleable concept. It can be used to mean different things. It can mean accepting something at face value, holding a strong opinion, knowing something for certain or having a particular sentiment. Which definition of belief is required in order to motivate religious adherence? Which definition lends itself to the requirement of belief, and regarding what set of premises? Moreover, the different definitions (or even the same definition) can support contradictory beliefs. I can be of the sentiment that the world is less than 6000 years old while accepting scientific depictions of the earth's far older state at face value. Perhaps most importantly, beliefs are constantly changing - imagine someone who has accepted the charedi version of creation who comes across a book about dinosaurs. Does he, or ought he, immediately cease any religious practice because he has not figured out how to square the accounts? And now that he has "doubts" in (in big quotations) does it even make sense for him to reinforce his belief? After all, to the extent he has doubt, he has nothing pushing him to believe anything. In short, there must be a reason other than belief to be frum, and therefore work on your belief. 

What is that reason? It can be given different names - convenience, comfort, identity, habit. On the cynical end, one might envision the rasha from the Ma Nishtana, disbelieving everything, but hanging around to get a piece of the afikoman. On the other hand, as we've pretty much established above, everyone is frum at least partially because of something other than belief. Empirically, most people who grow up with an intense connection to frumkeit remain that way, and most people who grow up without it remain that way as well; so it's true that the motivation seems strongly practical. Less cynically, people are frum because this is their identity.  At its root this is internal - I choose to observe frumkeit because everything about me, my past, my name, my habits, my tastes, my experiences, my family, is tied up in frumkeit. But it extends to the entire community, which is a group of people who choose to be frum because that is who they are.  

Identity (or non-ideology) based frumkeit

Once you accept that frumkeit is caused by identity, we need to address whether identity alone, without accompanying belief, is enough to support frumkeit. For people who were raised with the notion that frumkeit is based on ideology, it may be hard to conceive of frumkeit in any other way. Why would you shake a lulav if you didn't believe that God wants you to and will reward you for doing it? I believe that there are two potential answers, a mediocre one and a good one. The mediocre one is pretty straightforward - if you don't want to lose your family, friends, and status, you make some sacrifices to keep them; up to and including showing up to shul on occasion and preparing a vort on the parsha for your (parents/friends/wife/kids). The good one has more potential for satisfaction but is not as concrete and is therefore harder to articulate: Having accepted that religious practice is a matter of identity, it does not need to rely on ideology. One practices religion because one is religious and religious practice is how religious people relate to and experience the world. As I continue writing, I hope to explore these options and flesh them out, and with any luck, enough people will read this blog that we can have a useful conversation about the nature of frumkeit and its relationship to ideology and non-ideology.