Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past

5. Teshuva: Returning as Reimagining

99 chaPter 5 Teshuva returning as reiMagining There is a Jewish problem which is humanly soluble: the problem of the Western Jewish individual who or whose parents severed his connection with the Jewish community in the expectation that he would thus become a normal member of a purely liberal or of a universal human society and who is naturally perplexed when he finds no such society. The solution to his problem is return to the Jewish community, the community established by the Jewish faith and the Jewish way of life—teshubah (ordinarily rendered by “repentance”) in the most comprehensive sense. —Leo Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion In this caricature by Leo Strauss, the Jew is a cliché—the last believer in the idea of the universal society and desperately eager to join it, only to discover, in a moment of great disenchantment, that it does not exist. The grass only grows greener outside the imposed Shuva 100 or self-imposed ghetto. Strauss’s objective in this essay is primarily political, and speaks to the dislocation of the Jew amid the complexity of the twentieth century. Although he makes reference to the religious phenomenon of the repentant, his message speaks more directly to the emerging voice of Jewish particularistic nationalism that we know as Zionism. After all, Zionism was a movement predicated on the idea of return. This metaphor of teshuva, however, usually defined as repentance , has religious and behavioral implications beyond collective political identity; and Strauss’s portrayal of the Jewish experience of modernity is suggestive. When Jewish texts talk about returning, when we think about teshuva and especially the ubiquitous modern phenomenon of the ba’al teshuva—literally “master of repentance,” but simply describing the repentant person—we observe a strange paradox: this notion of returning tends to primarily reflect a process experienced by those who never themselves “left” anywhere. This calls to mind our earlier discussion of children born into idolatry , and how the rabbinic tradition imagines that they are innocent of wrongdoing because they have never been inculcated with the memory to know that they are transgressing. We refer to people who make radical life changes toward religious observance as “returning,” and in doing so, we become aware of the fundamental covenantal core of what it is to be Jewish. As old an idea as the Torah’s teaching that the generation of the golden calf, punished with circumambulating the wilderness for forty years, could not enter the land of Israel but rather yielded to the subsequent generation —who neither experienced the revelation nor rebelled against it—our tradition teaches that historical distance from an event or from a set of choices has no bearing on our intrinsic relationship to its commanding and binding elements. To reacquaint ourselves with knowledge and to rebuild a relationship with a past is a process of returning, even if it seems entirely new, and even as the old becomes new in our eyes and in our hands. These past two years have provided me with many opportunities to talk to many people about memory. When I speak publicly, my presentations tend to take an academic tone, and purport to be about Jewish collective memory; but I know very well that memory Teshuva: Returning as Reimagining 101 is one of the most personal of subjects for all of us. Our personalities are defined by our memories, by the conscious and unconscious ways in which we take the stuff we experience, process it, and allow it to define our goals and our self-understanding. We all wrestle with our need to both hold on to painful memories and not let them define us, and to grasp firmly the warm memories that we cherish of people and moments we have lost. So I have known in all my lectures and teaching that I am projecting my own wrestling with the past as I espouse this framework, and that the same goes for all my students and conversation partners. I struggle with the realization that using a rigid paradigm like Yerushalmi’s, and the focus on collective and shared memory, often obscures the intensity of the individual experiences of alienation and attachment that characterize how we relate to and stand in relationship with those who come before us. A few encounters from the past couple of years stand out. Once when I was teaching a small group of Jewish adults, I asked...