Don't Look There: Introducing this Blog

This is an uncomfortable Biblical truth from which the Jewish community for the most part turns away: Jews are called on to be priests, ministers, teachers and counselors. Just to each other? No, there is a special hereditary caste of Jewish priests (kohanim), descendants of Moses' brother Aaron, for that. The Jewish people as a whole are meant to minister to the world.

That's not just my interpretation. The classical commentator Ovadiah Sforno (1475-1550) gives it as the plain meaning of that verse, explaining that Jews are called on to teach humanity about God. Not later. Now. This idea comes out again and again in the commentary of another highly relevant, later interpreter, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), of whom you'll hear a lot about in this blog.

There's much, much more to say on the theme of the Jewish mission to the world, and please God, I'll have an opportunity to get into it with you in detail in the future. For the time being, it's enough to say there is such a mission, that it's what makes Jewish existence meaningful, and that it has been grossly neglected. I hope, to some small extent, to remedy that.

Certainly, the world is ready for it. The world's need for Hebrew wisdom meets me at every turn in my daily and professional life. I work at the Discovery Institute, a think tank well known -- or maybe better to say notorious -- for its support of intelligent design theory and for the scientific critique of Darwinism. The debate about Darwinian evolution confronts us with nothing less than the question of what it means to be human. 

Rabbi Hirsch lived to see Darwin's influence spread rapidly across Europe in the decades after the Origin of Species appeared, exactly 150 years ago. In his Torah commentary, Hirsch was scathing on the morally disastrous effects of Darwinian thought. Ideas, he knew, have consequences for the way we live. 

Commenting on the idol Baal Peor, worshipped in the most grotesquely animalistic fashion (mixing defecation with sexual intercourse), Hirsch wrote that it illustrates precisely "the kind of Darwinism that revels in the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of its divine nobility, learns to consider itself just a 'higher' class of animal" (Numbers 25:3). 

Yet observations like these, that leap from the pages of the classic interpreters of the Hebrew Bible, are precisely those from which most of our communal and religious leaders prefer to turn away. They assure us that between God and Darwin, there is no radical choice to make.

It's funny, as I am writing this, I've just received an email from a fellow in Israel who wants me to read over his essay titled "Jews and the Invention of Consciousness." He addresses me as "Dear Rabbi Klinghoffer."

Let me be clear. Although I write about the Hebrew Bible and its view of the world, I'm a journalist and I do so as a journalist.

I'm not a big fan of the populist, apocalyptic conservative radio and TV talk host Glen Beck but something he said in an interview with the New York Times this week resonated with me. "When it was suggested in an interview that he sometimes sounds like a preacher, [Beck] responded, 'No. You've never met a more flawed guy than me.'"

Nor than me. Yet I've perceived for a long time that there's something rabbis for the most part don't do today, though Hirsch would if he were alive. First, with a few exceptions (like my friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin), they don't seek to minister to non-Jews. Second, again with precious few exceptions, they don't wrestle in a serious, public way with the worldview implications of Biblical tradition, implications that speak to humanity rather than merely to our tiny Jewish community.

The Mishnah, the fundamental distillation of the Jewish oral tradition that explains the Bible, instructs us that, "In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man" (2:5). In a place where the class of religious scholars is busy with things other than preparing Jews for their role as a kingdom of priests, that responsibility falls to a mere journalist and, frankly, in many ways, a disappointing Jew. So be it.

I don't mean to come down hard on rabbis. Not at all. In this disenchanted secular world of ours, clergy and laymen of all faiths and none are basically all in the same boat. We live in a culture that has been largely cut off from the automatic transmission of wisdom from generation to generation that used to be the norm. That process of transmission has been damaged by modernity and secularism.

This is what the phenomenon of "religion-switching" is all about. A 2008 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that 40 percent of Americans have switched religions from the time they were children. That is a huge swath of folks who have rejected the faith of their fathers. Perhaps they found that their parents had already lost that precious link with tradition, so there was nothing to reject. Perhaps the spiritual connection had been lost generations earlier, as in my own family.

The Bible warns us again and again to care for the widows and orphans in our society: "the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates" (Deuteronomy 14:29). I know literal widows and literal orphans, but the truth is that in a spiritual sense, many, many of us are in that position -- alienated from ancestral, inherited tradition. We need special care from our religious communities. Sometimes we get it. Sometimes not.