Rabbi Janet Burden

Do You Feel Commanded?

The language of commandment is a stumbling block for many people who otherwise are quite comfortable in the Jewish religious framework. I was discussing this problem recently with a couple of colleagues, and I was actually a bit shocked at their reactions. “It’s because we have created a society in which the self is the primary deity,” one suggested. “Yes,” the other quickly agreed. “People are quite comfortable with the Creator God – that God doesn’t require anything of them. But God as the One who commands, God as the Metzaveh – well, that’s really all a bit too much, isn’t it?”

Hand on heart, I couldn’t say that similar thoughts hadn’t crossed my mind. We do live in a society that encourages us to think increasingly only of our own wants and needs. Furthermore, our culture manufactures wants and needs endlessly through advertising and its obsession with the cults of celebrity and wealth. The immediate gratification of our desires is presented as the chief and highest good. I recently read what I thought was a rather good description of the ethos. “Does it melt your butter? If not, find something that does.”

Hmmm. I can see a bit of a marketing problem for us here. Somehow, I don’t think the concept of commandments, of mitzvot, was designed to melt anyone’s butter. It’s pretty low in the feel-good factor generally. But, to return for a moment to my colleagues’ analysis, I can’t help but wonder if they have identified the symptoms, instead of the root, of the problem. Their core argument was that people today have become petty and selfish. But are we really so morally inferior to previous generations that we reject anything that might require us to think beyond our separate selves?

Frankly, I just don’t think so. People today are very much like they were a generation ago, or even a hundred generations ago. Elders perpetually despair of “the youth.” Ascetics and puritans are always appalled at the excesses of the hedonists. The writer of Ecclesiastes could have penned the words today, “Ein chadash tachat hashamesh.” There truly is nothing new under the sun. That is one of the reasons that the Biblical stories can still speak so strongly to us. It doesn’t require too much of a stretch of the imagination to think of Adam and Eve as the first victims of artificially manufactured desire…. We are hot-wired to pursue gratification, it is part of the human condition.

So, if it is not a profound shift in human nature, what is making it so hard for people today to accept the notion of commandment? Rabbi Elyse Frishman suggests that it has to do with a paradigm shift. Commandment, she says, is the language of hierarchy: God is up there, infinitely removed from us, judging us and ruling over us. In previous generations, this was the sole image that many people had of what God was, or could be. But this, she argues, is only part of the picture of God in the Jewish tradition. It is the part that men, in particular, understand best: clear boundaries, set roles and expectations, tick lists to check off – in short, a neat control and command structure. Whilst I have some reservations about her gender-specific analysis, I can see her point. Certainly, those who shaped our tradition over the past millennium, almost exclusively men, were striving primarily for two things: clarity and consistency. You need think only of the writings of great rabbis like Maimonides and Joseph Caro to understand my point. And, on the whole, their models of God and the systems they created for the governing of Jewish community served us well for a long time. Perhaps, however, they are not the most helpful frameworks for us today.

I remember well when I personally first encountered the problem of the language of commandment. I had long before made a decision that, as part of my own spiritual practice, I would try to always say berachot, blessings, over my food and before performing mitzvot. I found this practice deeply meaningful and felt that it enhanced the quality of my life enormously. I started paying more attention to my actions and became more grateful for things that I had long taken for granted. The one thing I didn’t pay much attention to was whether I actually believed the words I was reciting. I used them more as verbal cues for what Buddhists call, “mindfulness.” Then once, after saying the blessing over candles, I was asked, point blank, “Do you feel commanded?” The question hit me hard. Did I feel commanded? Was that the right word? After a moment’s pause, I knew I had my answer. “No,” I said flatly. “I feel compelled.”

In a previous generation, that would have been a very disturbing answer. It certainly doesn’t fit into the command and control structure very well. Yet it was the only true response I could give. For a long time after that, I couldn’t help wondering if that made me a bad Jew. Eventually, I came to realise that it just made me a different kind of Jew. My models of God were different from those of previous generations, but no less valid for that. It just meant that my way of hearing God, and also of speaking about God, would equally be different. And I wasn’t alone. Over time, I have met many people with whom the phrase “I feel compelled” resonates as a description of their own relationship to the Divine. I have come to believe that this is the hallmark, the call-sign if you will, of the paradigm shift of which Frishman writes. She argues that we need to tap into other images of God in the Bible, other patterns for relating to God. Otherwise, the many good Jews out there who struggle with our classical framework of “commandment” and “obedience” will exclude themselves from the community of faith.

I hope that in the course of your busy lives, you can each take some time to reflect on your own way of hearing God – and of interpreting what you hear. I would ask you to sit in silence for a while and just listen. Don’t be too quick to decide that you don’t hear anything, just because the communication doesn’t take the form you have been led to expect. You just might be surprised at what you do hear.