Most issues worth writing about can be approached from multiple perspectives and thus any single column is likely to present only a partial view. I was reminded of this last Thursday when I participated in a panel on state and religion in Israel sponsored by the Israel Government Fellows Program of the Menachem Begin Center. My co-panelists turned out to be the current director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) and a teacher at a Jerusalem “secular yeshivah” who is also a blogger on New Age spirituality.
In her opening remarks the IRAC director spoke of the need for equal treatment for the various Jewish “denominations.” That provided the opening for me to attack the very notion of “denominations” in Judaism. I noted that Paul the founder of Christianity came to free mankind from the yoke of the Law and that Reform which denies any binding halachah is on the Christian side of the divide between Christianity and Judaism.
And similarly when the New Age blogger predictably started with the usual airy-fairy paeans to each person’s need to define his own relationship with G-d I pointed out that his focus on the subjective religious experience comes straight from German Protestantism out of which Reform grew and even before that to Greek paganism. And thus it is no accident that so many of the New Age festivals quickly degenerate into Dionysian bacchanals.
Does that mean that the Torah negates the individual? Quite the opposite. Each Jew has a unique mission in life a particular song of praise to Hashem that only he or she will ever be in a position to sing. But that unique relationship with Hashem takes place only within the framework of the mitzvos He has commanded.
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