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June 30, 2006
Is it a culture or a religion?
Rabbi Kaplan tackles one of the most fundamental Jewish questions.
BAILA LAZARUS
Despite a perfect, warm Vancouver evening that usually draws the
hordes outside, rather than inside, about a dozen or so individuals
were happy to sit indoors to hear Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan of Or
Shalom discuss the topic Is Judaism a Religion or a Culture? at
the Roundhouse Community Centre Sunday night. Kaplan was invited
by the Vancouver Downtown Jewish Community and was the second guest
in their ongoing Inspirational Speakers' Series.
Kaplan got into the complexity of the issue right from the start,
by saying, "On the one hand, it's really obvious. It's both.
But it's also a lot more."
Kaplan asked members of the audience to give their ideas of what
comprises Jewish culture. Responses ranged from music and theatre
to latkes and laughter.
Audience member Izzy Fraeme said, "I think it's a little more
serious than latkes. I would like to say that religion keeps Judaism
going. Culture is here and there but it disappears too. We are [existing]
for thousands of years because of religion."
Turning to the same question for religion, lecture attendees said
it conjured up ideas of prayer, Torah, Shabbat and the Ten Commandments.
Reading some general dictionary definitions garnered from a Google
search, Kaplan said, "You can see how the definitions of religion
and culture begin to have a conversation with one another."
This "conversation" was the basis of most of Kaplan's
discussion, as she related examples, read from texts and put forward
her own ideas of how Jewish religion and culture actually influence
each other.
"What we do socially is informed by our Jewish religion,"
she said, pointing out how Jews often prefer to socialize with each
other, whether because of shared tastes, similar manners, common
history or a kinship based on similar childhood experiences.
Often at turning points in our lives, such as a birth or marriage,
"people who don't even feel a strong religious connection want
to say, 'I have some kind of anchor in tradition,' " Kaplan
said. They might decide on circumcision for their baby, give a child
a Hebrew name, insist on a bar mitzvah or say Kaddish to remember
a loved one. It offers a bit of a root for people, said Kaplan.
"We want to hang on to something that gives us comfort and
makes us feel part of a community and some of those resources are
religious resources. Religion helps us find expression in thoughts
and feelings in some very profound ways that structure our lives."
Turning to how religion is shaped by culture, Kaplan said, "You
may not know that a Jewish prayer book is an anthology of great
religious literature that spans 3,000 years.... In a very real sense,
our prayer book is a record of our changing intellectual and literary
culture over the centuries."
She gave the example of Adon Olam, which is attributed by different
people to two different writers who were known for experimenting
with Arabic styles of poetry in Hebrew. The prayer works with so
many melodies, Kaplan explained, because it's written as metric
poetry.
"It tells us that Jewish poets in the 1200s were familiar with
Arabic poetry," she said. "It tells us that our religious
tradition is responsive to bringing in new works of culture and
new works of religion."
More recent examples are new Holocaust-related prayers that have
been added to High Holy Day prayer books.
"Just as our culture gets its vocabulary and material from
our religious tradition, our religious tradition gets its vocabulary
and material from our cultural experiences," Kaplan said.
Unfortunately, some of the contributions from Jewish culture to
religion get obscured because of the way religious tradition give
us cultural expression and self-understanding, Kaplan said.
To prove a point, Kaplan asked the audience to list some Jewish
events in history that they were very "clear about." People
suggested the Exodus, the destruction of the First and Second Temples,
the delivery of the Ten Commandments and the Holocaust, among others.
Kaplan pointed out that many famous historical events that we claim
to "know" have been taught to us through religious texts,
rather than historical ones.
We remember the events that are re-enacted symbolically through
our religious holidays and our more famous works of religious literature,
said Kaplan.
"The way we preserve our history is through these rituals and
through these gatherings. The history that comes down to us comes
so much from religion and we're so much in the habit of saying this
is our history, that we forget that there has been so [many] cultural,
historical and social journeys that the Jews have gone through.
"What's put forward in the religious tradition [is] usually
beautiful works of poetry and literature and that holds our hearts.
And because they are associated with rituals that we perform and
re-enact; that is what really saves them."
But today's religious texts are now also being changed, as content
starts to reflect current historical events, such as bringing Holocaust-related
prayers into observances for Tisha b'Av.
Asked whether she thought these new occurrences of culturally informed
prayers would retain a foothold in our religious texts, Kaplan responded,
"If people love it, it will stay in. If people don't use it,
it won't."
Baila Lazarus is a freelance writer, photographer and illustrator
living in Vancouver. Her work can be seen at www.orchiddesigns.net..
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