RAPPING with RIM

October, 2007

by Jon Dreyer

As an atheist Jewish child of an atheist Jewish mother, I have always struggled with what it means to me to be Jewish. I knew I had come to the right synagogue when Rim told me, “I love atheists! They are so sure of everything!” But still, at Shir Tikvah, we read the Torah, a book I am uncomfortable with, and say prayers to a god I do not believe in.

I have met many members of our community who are also atheists or agnostics. I wanted to discuss my struggle with Rabbi Rim with the hope that our conversation might help others in our community who are in a similar situation.

I started the conversation by wondering why I am uncomfortable reading the Torah but not uncomfortable reading other classics that I might not agree with, like Shakespeare.

He answered, “Both of us acknowledge that Shakespeare and the Torah or the prayer book come from a worldview that isn’t exactly ours. There’s no gender equality in the Torah; democracy is not a value… As a young rabbinical student I realized that the Torah does not say everything I agree with automatically. So it’s within that fight and that tension that I’ve actually found my joy. Because if I just want something to endorse everything I already believe, what’s the use of it?”

Later he asked me how I come to terms with “the fact that the Torah and God are somewhere in the heritage of that group that you want to belong to.” I had no good answer. Rim, being Rim, responded with a foray into Heidegger: “Geworfenheit is one of my favorite words. It means ‘thrownness’…you are thrown into a certain time, a certain place, a certain sexuality, a certain people… Living authentically means you choose which parts of your thrownness to affirm.” (I later found that Heidegger also used a term that means “being there,” which made me understand the film of that name in a new way!)

The conversation leaped from Heidegger to Mordecai Kaplan, the [more or less atheist] founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, who said that Judaism is an evolving religious system. “One of the things that’s crucial in the history of Judaism,” said Rim, “is the ability to interpret the past and to connect ourselves to the past through interpretation.” Over time, the body of the community’s interpretations evolves.

I challenged the word “interpretation.” The only discussions of Abraham and Isaac that resonate with me totally ignore what I consider to be the story’s central point: a dangerous celebration of religious fanaticism.

“The conflict in Abraham’s life,” Rim replied, “is not the one you see on the surface. It’s that God has promised Abraham that his son would be the progenitor of a great nation. Abraham is called upon to do something that some of us have to do sometimes in our lives, and that is to bring something that we care about to the brink of destruction in order to save it. I wouldn’t know the wisdom of that if it weren’t for the wisdom in those pages…

“The Torah is the centerpiece of the Jewish people… If I want to be connected to the Jewish people, I have to be connected to that book. And that connection is interpretation within community. It’s both private and public. I could interpret the three matzohs you have on Passover to be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; but that would bring me outside of the community.

“Once an interpretation gets decided by a community, all kinds of things happen. Interpretation is a very powerful tool for allowing those civilizations which are founded on written documents to continue to evolve.”

This discussion filled me with more questions than answers, which is one reason I love Rim and love being Jewish.

—Jon Dreyer