I confess to being in retirement for the past month. Now Deuteronomy 4:4 is back, after its eponymous verse was read in synagogues across the world last Saturday. But why the long break to begin with?
For a period of seven weeks, I was studying and working at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Steiner Summer Internship ensured a full experience of Jewish Eastern Europe in both its language and culture classes, as well as in its music nights and movie screenings.
Concerning this column, up until this point I have largely ignored cultural religion, instead choosing to focus primarily on theological grounds. Did this internship enlighten me so that I realize that culture bound to a religion is as important as belief in a Higher Power?
Most certainly. There is an imbalance in choosing to focus entirely on a religious component. Having been in an Orthodox Jewish sphere myself, I should say that a purely culture-less religion, especially a variation of one like Judaism or Islam that focuses on precepts, ensures that you are constantly telling yourself “You’re not doing enough” or “Other people are better observers of the law than you are”
But a secular culture and a secular language bound to a religion—and Yiddish fulfilled both—ensures that all of us within that culture can share it equally. Anyone who speaks even a little Yiddish feels Jewish.
Ecclesiastes teaches that a threefold cord is not easily broken (4:12). Religious subcultures enable add one more cord to the twofold cord of religious dogma and religious community life, and anything that can strengthen, even marginally, religious belief is a good thing. I admit that I have underestimated this good of cultural Judaism in the past.
Cultural religious manifestations also allow for everyone within the society to be understood as holy and part of a godly society. Reading “The Thousand and One Nights” gives an Arab and Persian culture picture that is heavily Islamic but also worldly. Characters from all walks of life get a turn in the stories, and the way in which religion is balanced with functioning and admirable people is something that many fundamentalist regimes of all colors could do well to emulate.
Yiddish Culture for me, in particular, has ensured that I have felt a communion (excuse my word choice) with everyone who has spoken the language. The songs we sung and the stories we learned reflected a world in which peasants can become holy and rabbis debauched. Everything could be upside down from the way we expect it to be, and despite the fact that literature generally portrays worlds that never were, the sentiments equalizing the many Jews of Eastern Europe as equally Jewish I wish were more present in our own day.
It is no surprise that institutions that wanted to carve out separate and sectarianism have targeted and seclude Yiddish Culture. Without it, the threefold cord becomes a twofold cord, which endows an advantage to some, while the whole of religious should be a blessing onto all. To paraphrase the Prophet Haggai, cultures like these are a gift, we should not turn away from them.