After the View from Nowhere (draft)

I have to decide what to teach my children about Judaism before I've settled my own questions about it. They are already learning from the way we live at home and the people we spend time with. Putting off religious decisions affects their upbringing too.

For years I thought I needed a complete justification for a tradition before accepting its demands. When I found one incomplete or compromised, I kept looking for one without those problems. That expectation resembles what David Chapman calls eternalism: the belief that meaning is fixed and definite, even if we haven't found it yet.

We celebrate Shabbat on Friday evening, celebrate the holidays, and go to shul. I still care whether Judaism's claims are true. I also think I owe something to the people and tradition that formed me.

Knowledge and Obligation

Accounts of radical doubt often begin with an isolated observer, certain only that experience is happening. I have called this abstraction homo nullius loci, a person with no place or history. It leaves out much of what I actually experience. I think in a language I learned from others. I remember my parents and have responsibilities to my wife and children. Being Jewish has shaped me, including the person who later began to question Judaism.

Those relationships deserve examination. I don't see why they should be excluded from the starting point, while an imagined independence from them is treated as neutral. I already belong to a family and a people when I begin asking what I owe them.

My own judgment also has a history. In Madhyamaka Buddhism, “emptiness” means that things have no independent essence; they exist in dependence on other things. That applies to the person criticizing a tradition as well as to the tradition. The standards I use to judge Judaism also came from people and institutions, and I can examine them too.

An obligation can depend on a particular relationship without being arbitrary. What my daughter needs from me changes as she grows, and no definition of good parenthood settles every case. That doesn't make a responsibility such as picking her up optional. Chapman's description of meaning as “patterned and nebulous” helps me understand this: an obligation can be real even when its limits are unsettled.

Belonging after Criticism

Robert Kegan's stages help me distinguish returning to a tradition from giving up my judgment. Using his account loosely, at stage three a person judges by the standards of a family or community. At stage four, she develops principles of her own. At stage five, she can examine the limitations of those principles too. Reconsidering my principles may give me reasons to listen again to people whose authority I rejected.

Some people in TPOT, the online community known as “This Part of Twitter,” have become Catholic. Kitten Beloved's account of returning to religion interests me because taking his children to Mass changed his understanding of the faith he was considering.

In what anger and shame are for, I used the phrase “stage-five honor culture” for being answerable to a community whose standards I can also examine. The community may be right that I have failed in an obligation, even if I can explain where that obligation came from. I need to distinguish a valid obligation I dislike from a demand I should reject. My ability to criticize either one doesn't settle which it is.

Some demands should be refused. Families can be abusive, and communities can ask people to do harmful or unjust things. A demand's age or communal acceptance doesn't excuse the harm it causes. I remain responsible for judging the consequences of either obedience or refusal.

Truth and Religious Practice

My family and history give me reasons to participate in Judaism, but they don't establish that Torah was revealed at Sinai. A tradition can sustain a community while preserving false beliefs. David Deutsch's account of knowledge helped me understand how explanations can improve without becoming certain: we propose them, criticize them, and try to correct errors. Religious explanations should be open to the same scrutiny.

Jewish law addresses a related practical problem: people who disagree still have to act together. In Bava Metzia 59b, a heavenly voice intervenes in a legal dispute, and the rabbis refuse to let it decide the case. They invoke lo bashamayim hi, “it is not in heaven.” In this story, Hashem has given human beings the authority and responsibility to interpret Torah through the legal procedures they have received.

The Talmud preserves disputes and minority opinions alongside rulings that govern practice. A decision can bind people without resolving every objection. These procedures can also preserve mistakes, as Jewish institutions have sometimes done.

Aseh lecha rav, vehistalek min hasafek, “make for yourself a teacher and remove yourself from doubt” (Pirkei Avot 1:16), advises finding someone whose judgment I can rely on. I read it as a way to make decisions with help from someone who knows more than I do.

Na'aseh v'nishma, “we will do and we will hear” (Exodus 24:7), places doing before full understanding. I can find out through participation what a practice asks of me, how it affects other people, and whether my objections to it hold up.

Passing It On

This is also how my children will learn what Judaism asks of them. They need people to practice it with, as well as explanations of what it means. Our Friday evenings, holidays, and time at shul are part of their education. Other Jews give them examples and relationships that I cannot provide on my own.

A community capable of doing this needs people who make time for it and take responsibility for its work. Prayer, teaching, and helping other people all require effort that could have gone elsewhere. Robin Hanson's account of costly commitment helps explain why accepting those costs can give others reason to take a commitment seriously. I want to belong to a community whose members can rely on one another, which means accepting some claims on my own time and resources.

Lo alecha hamelacha ligmor, velo atah ben chorin lehibatel mimena: “it is not your responsibility to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16). I understand continuing a tradition as work of this kind. I received it from other people, and my children will have to decide what to do with what I teach them. My responsibility is to take part in Jewish life with them and teach them what I can.