Jewish learning is easier than ever, and still vitally necessary

Christianity, surprisingly, is not Judaism, and two millennia later we do still need to know this sort of thing

A certain David Brooks opinion piece dropped in the New York Times on 19 December. I’m writing something on AI and something on being basic and things on other far more fun topics than responding to a NYT opinion piece. However, I feel a need to address this piece for my own conscience, or something.

David Brooks presents himself in this opinion piece as somewhere between Judaism and Christianity. However, he converted to Christianity a decade ago. He mentions the year 2013 in the new piece as central to his spiritual revival, but he’s spoken of that year before as when he full-on converted to Christianity. Apostatised, if you’d like to phrase it that way, hypothetical reader. As Mark Oppenheimer points out in his astute rebuttal:

But over time, it became clear Brooks was some sort of Christian. In 2022, he came out and said as much, at a conference on faith and religion (you can watch it here). “I found [Christianity] so deep and beautiful,” he told the audience. “I would read Reinhold Niebuhr and [Tim] Keller and all these people, and I just found it convincing and beautiful. And then gradually it seemed true … they went from beautiful to true. I became a Christian around 2013, 2014 (a transition I liken to investing in the stock market in 1929).”

So yes, Brooks’s new piece is coming from a Christian perspective, not Jewish. Oppenheimer and friends of mine also point to Brooks’s lack of accuracy in interpreting the few passages from Jewish writers whom he cites.

Further - and I could go on for a long time about his quotations - Brooks quotes this from St. Augustine:

“The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing,” Augustine once wrote. “That is our life, to be trained by longing.”

It should shock nobody to know that Augustine’s idea of Christianity is not Jewish. Well, duh, my hypothetical reader thinks - Augustine wasn’t Jewish! What I mean is that this passage is a distinctly Christian one. When Augustine states that he’s referring to the “life of a good Christian,” he’s being specific for good reason.

Brooks’s whole piece is about a spiritual awakening, as seen in a genre of Christian literature that he references. He almost solely quotes Christians.

I can’t help myself from making a few specific points, but I’ll refrain from going on for too long.

• If there is a mystical experience in his piece, it is that of a St. Paul or a St. Teresa. Jewish mysticism works quite differently from that. Simone Weil was far from unqualifiedly a Jewish mystic. She was not a kabbalist.

• Judaism has paradoxical ideas of depths and heights, light and darkness, etc. even in some of its most influential texts. One doesn’t need to read the Puritans to find those notions. Go to a Chabad House, hypothetical reader, and you will find that these ideas are familiar from Jewish sources.

• Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian clergyman.

I half-regret my own hesitance to post a full rebuttal. Brooks’s piece is something like a narrative Gish gallop. It would take a long time and a lot of citations to go into why every Christian he cites is a Christian. Most of them would be displeased to see themselves presented as if their writings aligned with those of modern rabbis. I’m devoting a full refutation to Candace Owens on Frankism at some point, but not to this, since I’m deciding to respond pretty much on the spur of the moment.

I’ve seen a lot of Jews respond with just resentment toward Brooks’s piece. My Orthodox friends have been the most attuned to Brooks’s slippery citations to some of the most famous recent rabbis, in his few Jewish references.

My friends’ critical response has not been universal among Jews, however.

Seeing as Phoebe Maltz Bovy posted a familiarly academic and indirect response, I’ll do something of an academically-oriented response, too. The directly-countering-Brooks part of this post is out of the way, I promise.

Slippery citations, example one: Frankists at that disputation

We Jews have had a long history of educated evangelists presenting themselves as insiders - whether to convince us to apostatise, or to convince antisemites that the rest of us are evil. I’ll start with an infamous instance of the latter misuse of Jewish learning.

A group of Frankists in the 18th century engaged in a disputation with their former Jewish community, at the behest of Christian Polish authorities. They used their knowledge of the rabbinic tradition, particularly Talmud, to present Christian authorities with false evidence that Talmudist Jews (Rabbinic, mainstream Jews, in other words) engage in ritual child sacrifice, as per the blood libel. This episode created a new antisemitic angle of attack to this day, based on antisemites’ total lack of Talmudic literacy.

It may shock antisemites to know that Talmud is not a list of laws we follow - it contains many aggadot and many dissenting and discarded arguments - and that the actual legal code followed by most Jews for a long time has been the Shulchan Aruch. I worry that some Jews would be shocked by this, too. More on that anxiety below.

Again, I’m writing a longer rebuttal of Candace Owens, so (hypothetically) expect much more on Frankism later. The situation that culminated in some Frankists’ libel of Talmudist Jews was not simple, although I would never claim that their actions were justified. The blood libel was not a central belief of Frankists - it couldn’t be, given that they came from Jewish communities and would know better firsthand. The longest-time leader and central figure of Frankism, who reversed much of the movement’s weirdness, was not relevant to that grim moment. She was a small child at the time. Anyway, I’ll stop myself; more on that another time.

My point in referencing the Frankists is to note that warping the words of actual Jewish works can lead to horrific conclusions. As Slavoj Zizek (himself some kind of semi-Christian) writes:

The most efficient lies are lies with truth, lies which reproduce only factual data. … There is nothing “relativist” in the fact that human history is always told from a certain standpoint, sustained by certain ideological interests. The difficult thing is to show how some of these interested standpoints are not equally true - some are more “truthful” than others. (Page 104)

Slippery citations, example two: Eliazar bar-Isajah

Also known as Paul Isaiah, Eliazar bar-Isajah wrote extensively about his conversion. Knowledgable in Jewish tradition, he used his educational background to evangelise and to condemn Jews to an antisemitic Christian readership. To quote a few passages from his work, A brief compendium of the vain hopes of the Jews messias (1652), without much unneeded commentary:

Wherein (gentle Reader) you shall understand more largely and plainly the Occasion of this my Conversion, who am a born Jew, and who drunk their superstition from out my mothers brest, and from my Childhood untill my Manly years, have been instructed in their Synagogues, and strengthened in their Talmuth books, which are by them in use; and have been much exercised especially in Jewish Questions out of those said Talmuths against forreign Rabbies, and what such like they in their dreams expound and learn.

Moreover I will plainly declare and make notorious unto all Christians, as well to the learned as the unlearned, that they may both see, hear and understand, how these poor Jews do expound the holy Scripture, Prophets and Testaments, in their Talmuds, Fables, Dreams, Dialogues, and such like foolery, even as wicked carnall men, or a lewd drunken woman, who seeketh not after that which is pure, or the truth, but do visibly more and more bring the curse of God upon them…

I hope that through this my writing, Christ shall cure them of their blindness, open their ears, and soften their hard-hearted hearts with this my writing: And I do not only speak unto them, but also pray them, that they will do so much as inquire and seek into the holy Scripture which they have altogether rejected, and they will find it will appear, if they seek they shall finde, and if they knock it shall be opened unto them; and verily they shall see and finde, that my Instructions and Exhortations are most true; but with this condition, they must set aside their dreamings, invented humane Talmuths, together with the method of their Rabbies expounding; then may they be brought out of the captive and dark Aegypt, into the right way and bright shining light of Christ our right and undoubted Messias, and belong unto the truth, and be transfigured: even as I have already been enlightned through the assistance of the holy Spirit, thanks and praise be to God therefore: Then shall they all perceive and understand, and our joy shall be compleat; for the time is now at hand, but not as they hope for.

This treatise goes on to demonstrate bar-Isajah’s admirable degree of Torah learning. Notice (hypothetical, though perhaps not gentle, reader) that his purpose is twofold: to inform Christians of the woeful errors of the Jews and to inform Jews of the same. However, notice, too, that he writes to Christians in the second person, and to Jews in the third person. He’s directly addressing Christians, not Jews. Curious, isn’t it?

Bar-Isajah’s claims to authority (ethos, we might call it) appear to be his Jewish upbringing and his Jewish learning. The latter, however, was shared to some extent by a few early modern Christian scholars who had studied Hebrew. Bar-Isajah’s claim to authority, then, pretty much comes down to his being Jewish and growing up as such.

Some ex-Jewish writers have attempted to pull this rhetorical manoeuvre, too, albeit without the additional ethos of having engaged in serious study.

What I’m nervous about, and what we can do about it

To be clear, and to cut the euphemism and the snark, I absolutely do not mean to suggest that Brooks is doing a hecking Frankism. He isn’t throwing Jews under the bus. (I guess I’m throwing millennials under the bus with my phrasing, there.)

I also don’t think Brooks is consciously evangelising like bar-Isajah. He doesn’t engage in any kind of apologetics for Christian dogmata. It’s just that when I read his piece, it occurred to me that he had dipped into a tradition that I study.

Brooks simply launched me into reflecting on the broader implications of his type of writing. He doesn’t singularly worry me, at all. Under secular law, Jews are fully allowed to become Christians and are allowed to disagree with the entirety of Jewish tradition, even to misrepresent it. I like the First Amendment, and I like dialogue rather than cancellation. Hanukkah approaches, and its story comes from a body of work with a discomforting stance on apostasy that I have no intention of endorsing even in the abstract manner of cancellation efforts.

What does worry me is that many Jews outside the Orthodox world do not have enough background in the tradition to know Christianity from Judaism, let alone to counter the likes of bar-Isajah or the Frankists who promoted the blood libel. A few questions based on my points above:

• How many of us are familiar enough with Shulchan Aruch, let alone Talmud, to go to bat for Judaism and Jewry against people who slander us?

• How many of us would know how to counter someone like bar-Isajah regarding midrashim and our dearest prophecies?

Further:

• How many of us know the standard Jewish ideas of the messiah? Bar-Isajah certainly did. We should too. How many of us are well-versed in what the Rambam means in even his Thirteen Principles?

• How many of us are acquainted enough with kabbalah to know that “Christian Cabala” or “Hermetic Qabbalah” are misnomers, because kabbalah cannot be torn from rabbinic Judaism? Trying to rend it from its basis is like citing the Mishneh Torah to make a point within New Age spirituality. How many of us know why that is?

As I often hear repeated, and as I believe, Judaism is not just about fighting antisemitism. I’m sick of letting non-Jews, including well-meaning ones, determine what Jewishness is, or should be.

Yet the simple fact here is that Jewish learning is essential in defending ourselves. If another disputation were to happen with the likes of those particular Frankists, and you (hypothetical Jewish reader) were inescapably assigned to defend rabbinic Judaism, think of whether you’d be able to crush them on the fly with textual counter-evidence. If your Judaism is most centrally concerned with combatting antisemitism, which I won’t try to dissuade anyone from, you still need Torah study to get the job done.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Jewish learning is a significant part of what our ancestors fought to preserve. Now that we have thousands of works at our fingertips to study, including many in English and other translations, it should be easier than ever to motivate ourselves to learn. We have shared schedules, resources, and online communities for reading through Tanakh and Talmud. We have SO. MANY. RESOURCES.

My own suggestions as a layperson

Here are my concluding tips to a hypothetical reader. I’m not a rabbi by any means, so take my advice with a big grain of coarse, pink salt.

Open Sefaria on your phone in a waiting room or when you’re bored at work and read from the Nevi’im or Ketuvim. Click around in the commentaries on difficult passages. Make it a habit. Google terms you don’t know and learn to discern Jewish sites from Christian ones.

Do this for our prayers, too. Where are they from? What do they mean, and why do we say them all the time? Why does your denomination say only parts of one prayer or another?

Chabad.org also has a lot of free resources even for heterodox learners. Check their digital library out - some works they make freely available stand out as particularly useful and personally enlightening.

Watch a Miriam Anzovin video or a dozen. Maybe try to follow along with Daf Yomi for yourself. Listen to Jewish podcasts that aren’t just on current events and popular culture. 18Forty comes to mind, and some series put out by Tablet (the one on Reform Judaism might be of especial interest) do, too. There are too many podcasts to list, including many on each week’s parsha, but they aren’t difficult to find.

Try to move beyond introductory and pop-nonfic works; fall back on them when needed. Don’t think that Torah is in the heavens when it’s at the tap of a touchscreen. As we read in Deuteronomy:

Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.

We know from our tradition that the Tablets could be read from both sides. As we read in Zohar, for instance, “Rabbi Chiya said, "When the letters were engraved on the tablets, they could be seen on both sides, from this side and from that side…” Perhaps your own iPad is one side of the tablets.

You and I have far more access to Jewish education than our ancestors could ever have imagined. In the days when burning Talmud was a government pastime, could our foremothers and forefathers have dreamt that we would have Talmud, in our own language, on an object we can carry in our pocket (or in our purse, because clothes designers hate humankind and don’t give us pockets)? When our ancestors secretly studied Torah in dark caves, they could not have dreamt that we would have it backlit. With commentaries. Not all Jews now have such an abundance of knowledge available. If you’re hypothetically reading this now, you do.

We should not take for granted our unprecedented opportunity to learn who we are, and less importantly - but still importantly - who we are not.