I’ve wondered for a while now about the utilization of the term, klal yisrael — perhaps best defined as the value of keeping the whole Jewish people in mind. It’s a slippery concept often invoked to appeal to a sense of unity, but in practice sometimes used to discourage difference or discord.
What does klal yisrael imply or assume? It surely entails having an awareness of peoplehood, but as Rabbi Deborah Waxman reminds us in her important “Covenantal Community” and Classical Reconstructionism essay, in classical Reconstructionism Jewish peoplehood was meant to be a means to an end and not an end in itself. In other words, and this feels like a profound challenge to consider, the experience of community can be a positive thing, but it is not necessarily a value in itself. The value is how the existence of the community serves and sanctifies within itself and beyond itself. Waxman writes that for Mordecai Kaplan, covenantal community was a description of what a catalyzed peoplehood with a mission could look like. Even if we know that, in our dizzyingly diverse Jewish world, there will not be agreement about how we instrumentalize covenantal community (and this is a good thing), is it still possible/desirable to try to articulate a shared foundational purpose for klal yisrael?
Last month, the weekly Torah reading of parashat Terumah in Exodus corresponded with Shabbat Shekalim. A colleague, Rabbah Gila Caine, pointed out that in the beginning of Terumah the people are asked to give to the construction of the tabernacle as their heart so moves them, while the maftir reading for Shabbat Shekalim (Exodus 30: 11) describes a flat-tax style injunction where everyone is required to bring half a shekel for the upkeep of the Tent of Meeting. There are similarities between these two instructions; each offering goes to support something holy that is shared in common. Additionally, one might imagine that communities need both offerings — one voluntary and uniquely reflective of each individual, one mandatory and fixed in form. Caine asked (and I’m paraphrasing), in a time of such rancor and division within the Jewish community, particularly around Israel/Palestine, what is our symbolic equivalent of the half a shekel? Could there be a shared conviction we must hold in common in order to be part of this covenanted community?
I was curious what the students I serve at Bard College would say about contemporizing a version of the flat tax, and I was heartened by their responses, which ranged from a suggestion that a shared Jewish conviction could be the commitment to the intention of sanctifying each moment, to the suggestion of idol-smashing as the common thread. But the prevailing sense that emerged among the students as to what a baseline requirement could be was obligation. To be part of Jewish community, they said, one must know that one is obligated.
To be obligated to another person means that we are open to being surprised by them; possibly changed by them; inconvenienced by them; that the way we are going to be called to love and serve is not how we would script it.
I remember Rabbi Ira Stone coming as a scholar-in-residence to our shul in Ashland, Ore., years ago, and one congregant saying, in effect, I love what you are teaching here about Mussar, but I’m struggling with the language of obligation and burden. Is there a way to soften that language or to find other words? And I remember Stone responding (kindly, but firmly), no.
To be obligated does not mean to be obligated in theory. There’s an insistence here that what we are talking about is not a vague or general obligation, but an obligation specifically understood and applied — an obligation to another person. This one, and then this one, and then this one, infinitely extended. And this other person, whether it is our partner or our ideological foil, is a mystery to us, not reducible.
What does it mean to be obligated to another person? I think it means we are open to being surprised by them; possibly changed by them; inconvenienced by them; that the way we are going to be called to love and serve is not how we would script it. Of course, even with this baseline, we will disagree radically within the peoplehood at large about the extent of our obligation and who exactly we are obligated to. For me, an application of this that feels overly, or absolutely, tribal is maddening. The Jewish idea of obligation is meant to bring us beyond the filial and the unending impulse towards self-preservation. Otherwise, we are just stuck in peoplehood, uncatalyzed. But maybe we can agree upon obligation as an existential reality that points to the necessity of moving beyond our self-absorption.
Emmanuel Levinas reads “Israel” in the biblical text not as an ethnic designation, but as the description of someone who has realized the awesome extent of their responsibility to their fellow human beings.
It made me smile to see a friend’s social-media tagline recently: I’m religious, not spiritual. I think there is something to this. The last 50 years has seen an extraordinary recovery of Jewish spiritualities. We had brilliant reasons — trauma, immigration, acculturation and antisemitism among them — for the largely arid Jewish spiritual landscape of mid-20th-century North America that many of us (or at least our parents) may have experienced. But then Judaism was reintroduced to itself through the work of an amazing generation of teachers, with this renaissance sometimes deeply impacted by an intersection with other spiritual traditions. Now that Judaism has re-infused itself (and, of course, this is an ongoing act), perhaps we can not only be religious again but even be entitled to articulate some measure of suspicion about unanchored, uncommanded spirituality. I am speaking about religion in its original etymological sense, as a ligamenting phenomenon. As an obligating phenomenon.
In the Mussar language of Stone and Dr. Beulah Trey, the ideal stance vis à vis the other is a semipermeable one. If our nefesh (boundary of self) is closed or overly porous, it will not survive. They employ this metaphor in terms of the individual, but I imagine it is also a way of naming a community’s stance. How a particular community comes to see itself as obligated is mysterious. In my experience, it is not something you can convince someone of intellectually or ideologically, but rather it is something to be lived into. It’s slow.
Whatever our context of Jewish community, one way of naming the process of recognizing obligation is that each person is initially drawn for personal reasons to belong. In my experience this is often because of our own suffering, our own longing, our own personal needs. The mystery is that we begin by practicing for ourselves and over time, we realize that we are practicing for others. In this way, covenantal community happens to us. It unfolds — maybe aided by identifying shared values of how we understand our obligations along the way — but also with no small amount of grace.
And this is challenging, as Rabbi Megan Doherty points out, in a community like a college campus where there is a 25% turnover rate each year. At Bard, we decided to call our campus minyan, which is the only option on campus, Kehilat Erev Rav, the mixed multitude. As is true for many campus communities, there are Jews and non-Jews, Jews from every kind of denominational background, Israeli Jews, Jews who are strongly aligned with other campus groups working for Palestinian rights and justice. In a way, it is easier for us, as there is no other Jewish community at our college, and to make it work, we have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. We don’t have the luxury for a litmus test, even if we desired one.
Each person is initially drawn for personal reasons to belong — because of our own suffering, our own longing, our own personal needs. The mystery is that we begin by practicing for ourselves, and over time, we realize that we are practicing for others. In this way, covenantal community happens to us.
Even if it feels like a tiresome thought experiment, the question of contemporizing and metaphorizing the flat tax feels important to consider, especially if we feel like klal yisrael is a term we can still reconstruct. Just asking the question feels like a leap of faith in this climate.
