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(JTA) — There’s an previous joke in regards to the Jewish atheist who is happy to satisfy the Nice Heretic of Prague. He arrives on the nice man’s home on a Friday evening, and is instantly instructed to shush whereas the Heretic lights Shabbat candles. Then they sit down for the Shabbat meal, throughout which the Heretic says the motzi over the bread and the kiddush over the wine.
The atheist customer can’t take it anymore. “You’re the Nice Heretic of Prague and also you comply with the Shabbat commandments!?”
“In fact,” says his host. “I’m a heretic, not a gentile.”
The joke is in regards to the hole between Jewish perception and Jewish apply, and the previous chestnut that perception in God is much less necessary to a spiritual Jew than performing the mitzvot, the commandments. In fact, essentially the most observant Jews are usually essentially the most God-fearing, however the joke celebrates a worldview that I solely lately discovered really has a reputation: fictionalism.
Fictionalism, based on the philosophy professor Scott Hershovitz, means pretending to comply with a set of beliefs with a purpose to reap the advantages of a set of actions. In a latest New York Occasions essay, he asks why he continues to quick on Yom Kippur and observe Passover when he doesn’t imagine in God. The brief reply, he writes, is that this: “It’s simply what we Jews do, I may need mentioned; it retains me linked to a neighborhood that I worth.”
The longer reply is a protection of, nicely, pretending: “When it feels just like the world is falling aside, I search refuge in non secular rituals — however not as a result of I imagine my prayers will likely be answered,” he writes. “The prayers we are saying in synagogue remind me that evil has at all times been with us however that individuals persevere, survive and even thrive. I take my children [to synagogue] in order that they really feel linked to that custom, in order that they know the world has been falling other than the beginning — and that there’s magnificence in making an attempt to place it again collectively.”
The British thinker Philip Goff describes fictionalism this fashion:
Non secular fictionalists maintain that the contentious claims of faith, reminiscent of “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the lifeless” are all, strictly talking, false. They nonetheless suppose that non secular discourse, as a part of the apply wherein such discourse is embedded, has a practical worth that justifies its use. To place it merely: God is a helpful fiction.
Ethical character is cultivated and sustained, at the very least partly, by way of emotional engagement with fictional situations.
The fictionalists I do know are maximalists in relation to Jewish behaviors and minimalists in relation to God speak. As a synagogue buddy as soon as put it, “I don’t imagine in God, however I wouldn’t wish to disabuse my fellow worshippers of the notion.” And it appears he’s not alone: Based on the 2020 Pew examine, 47% of Jewish adults say faith may be very or considerably necessary to them, whereas solely 26% imagine within the “God of the Bible.”
My hunch — backed up by zero knowledge — is that Jewish fictionalism is strongest the place deep Jewish engagement meets liberalism. By that, I imply within the extra observant Conservative (and Conservative-adjacent) congregations and the extra liberal Orthodox congregations. A couple of years again, in a Commentary essay, the lawyer Jay Lefkowitz described himself as a “Social Orthodox Jew”— that’s, a Jew who practices Orthodoxy however isn’t “actually positive how God match into my life…. I actually wasn’t positive if Jewish regulation was divine or just the results of two millennia of rabbinical interpretations.”
“And so for me, and I think about for a lot of others like me, the important thing to Jewish residing shouldn’t be our non secular beliefs however our dedication to a set of practices and values that foster neighborhood and continuity,” he writes.
For some, this would possibly sound like Humanistic Judaism, a motion with a small however devoted following. However Humanist Jews eschew deism in favor of “human motive and human energy.” The important thing to fictionalism, nevertheless, is that God stays very a lot within the image, because the “helpful fiction” Goff describes or as a form of organizing precept that units the boundaries of the neighborhood. Hershovitz fortunately calls it “pretending,” which “breathes life into tales, letting them form the world we reside in.”
Humanism, in that sense, is the extra “sincere” method; fictionalism is principled self-deception. Fictionalism can also be a rebuke to the “New Atheists” of some years again, who discovered faith to be meaningless ritual centered on a non-existent deity. In contrast, Alain de Botton, in his e-book “Faith for Atheists,” described the sorts of issues atheists may really study from religions. Faith provides “morality, steering, and comfort.” Religions construct a way of neighborhood, create enduring relationships, provide means to flee the fixed appeals of media and consumerism, and create rituals and establishments to handle our emotional wants.
“The error of recent atheism has been to miss what number of sides of the faiths stay related even after their central tenets have been dismissed,” he writes.
I’ll admit that fictionalism hardly has the attraction of secularism. Getting somebody to tackle a collection of demanding and infrequently inexplicable behaviors within the identify of “neighborhood and continuity” is a tough promote. However I do know of at the very least one fast-growing and profitable Jewish stream that gives fictionalism as a lure: the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic outreach motion.
I doubt I may get a Chabad rabbi to agree with me, however the Chabad outreach mannequin (versus the apply of its core followers) is centered on Jewish motion, not perception. That’s the impulse behind all these mitzvah tanks and commercials imploring ladies to gentle Shabbat candles. The youngsters on the road providing tefillin ask if you’re Jewish; they don’t ask in the event you imagine in God. In an ethos that’s half mysticism and half pragmatism, Chabad holds that doing precedes believing.
“Apart [from] the intrinsic standalone worth that every mitzvah has, mitzvah observance will also be contagious,” is how one Chabad rabbi as soon as defined the “one off” method. “Agreeing to choose in, even simply as soon as, can have far-reaching results. There have been untold hundreds of Jews who’ve made everlasting adjustments of their lives for the higher, simply because they agreed to attempt it as soon as.”
He would possibly even agree with Hershovitz, who says that “pretending makes the world a greater place.”
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Company. He beforehand served as JTA’s editor in chief and as editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish Information.
The views and opinions expressed on this article are these of the writer and don’t essentially mirror the views of JTA or its mum or dad firm, 70 Faces Media.
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