Classicism vs. romanticism

EUGENE KAELLIS

Both Judaism and Christianity are now experiencing holy days that clearly mark the very essence of each religion and highlight their fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable, differences.

A Presbyterian friend once informed me that Christians fall into two groups: one seeing Good Friday (commemorating the Crucifixion) as the more important, the other seeing Easter Sunday (marking the Resurrection) as more significant, cheerfully claiming that she belonged to the latter. Jews, too, differ on what is their most important religious holiday. Often, it comes down to Yom Kippur or Pesach.

The Resurrection, the essence of Christian belief, is marked by reaffirming acceptance of Jesus as one’s personal savior who, by his vicarious sacrifice for all humankind, redeemed the sins of the world, including, among many Christians, the “original sin” – that of manifesting as material beings. Confessing Christians are forgiven and saved and, on dying, will be welcomed for an eternity in Heaven. Indeed, a Christian can say, to paraphrase Descartes, “I believe, therefore, I am saved.”

For Jews, on the other hand, the Passover celebration of the Exodus and beyond, marks their deliverance from slavery as evidence that God offers opportunities for personal and communal freedom and moral fulfilment, which can lead to individual and social alleviation, but not necessarily to other rewards, personal or communal, in one’s lifetime or, indeed, for eternity. Evidently, compared to Judaism, Christianity offers a far more attractive “deal.” (“Schwer tzu zein a Yid,” “It’s hard to be a Jew” – as I heard so often in my childhood.)

Even conceptually, Christianity offers a God that, as part of the Trinity, took a human shape and form; whereas Jews cannot “perceive” God, except as a, perhaps frustrating, conceptual abstraction, but Who, nonetheless, communicates through the “still, small voice” within people. That “He” is taken as a noun and, moreover, has a masculine “gender,” is a measure of our perceptual and linguistic limitations (and biases). This key aspect of Judaism is exemplified in Exodus 3:14 when God, responding to Moses’ question about what is His name, replies with the ineffable, “I am that I am,” the Tetragrammeton, from which “Yahweh” is derived. While God is forever a mystery, how we see “Him,” is subject to our own cultural parameters; “Almighty time and eternal fate,” Goethe’s Prometheus says to Zeus, “are my masters as well as yours.” In contrast to the practice among Christians, to underscore this, many observant Jews will never write the word “God” and even in speech will refer to “Him” as “HaShem,” “The Name,” acknowledging that “He” is hidden from our perception.

Some commentators, in examining the content and style of religions, have described Judaism as being in the “classical mode” – emphasizing objective standards of behavior rather than subjective and personal sentiment, as in Christianity, which they consequently refer to as in the “romantic mode.” In practice, the two modes are, of course, quite inseparable; but their emphases and proportions vary.

I remember an extended discussion I once had with a Baptist minister who, as our conversation evidently neared its end, threw up his hands in (mild) frustration. “Where is the love in Judaism?” he demanded. Evidently, he placed more, much more, emphasis on emotion or, more precisely, on alleged emotion, than on observable, objective behavior. The difference between alleged emotion and real behavior enters into all our intimate associations. For years, my late wife and I taught couples relationship courses. At the very first session, we repeated several times that people know one another only through their behavior, no matter how subtle or fleeting. Anything beyond that was speculative. Consequently, we never used the word “love.” People, after all, profess to love God, Canada, the Canucks, pizza and their pets. Love is evidently a promiscuously used and degraded word. I killed her because I loved her, insists Don Jose after stabbing Carmen to death, sadly not an uncommon circumstance in the “real world.”

It is quite likely that an omniscient God would indeed know our motivations, so arcane, so fleeting in their exposure that they may escape even our own notice. Moreover, since motives rest on yet other motives, which, in an endless regression, rest on still others, they are ultimately unknowable and, moreover, usually inconsequential. To my Baptist friend, fixated on the primacy of love, I forwent the temptation to paraphrase Don Jose.

Indeed, if one applies the essential elements of classicism and romanticism, one would have to conclude that Christianity can be demonstrated to be a highly romantic religion, especially as it revolves around love and death, the two most evident themes of romanticism, which Wagner handily combined in the Liebestodt (the final aria of Tristan und Isolde), perhaps musically unsurpassed for highly moving sentiment. On the other hand, Judaism has the imprint of classicism – an extensive and detailed format, a relative disregard of (real or alleged) motives, in other words, an emphasis on objective, verifiable behavior, as in: “Don’t tell me you love me, just take out the garbage,” which, indeed, we used as a title for one of our relationship courses (“garbage,” having both literal and figurative meaning).

On the other hand, Jews are often “accused” of being “too schmaltzy.” If this is true, it may be a “reaction formation,” which we understandably need to create a little “distance” between what may be an essentially classical disposition and the human tendency to, now and then, display more than minimum sentiment in our lives. Remember when Tevye, exposed to his daughter having “fallen in love,” repeatedly asks Golda, “Do you love me?” and she simply cannot understand his question, evidently because, for her, it is inconsequential. Indeed, one can hardly imagine a more abused, sullied and misapplied word than love. Again, we love pizza, rock music and, of course, God, Canada, the Canucks, our pets ... and our spouses. Of course.

While the definitions of the terms classical and romantic are broad and varied, romanticism evidently tends to emphasize subjective factors in Christianity – personal acceptance of a creed, including (stated) belief in one’s redemption through the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus, and, contrariwise, in Judaism, by objectively verifiable ethical behavior and ritual observance.

Sentiment, expressed in stated belief, is necessarily imprecise and significantly dependent on contemporaneous modes of expression. The terms classical and romantic, initially specifically referring to music styles, appeared around the end of the 18th century, with Beethoven, for example, significantly spanning the transition from one to the other as the dominant mode. An emphasis in the classical is on objectivity, hence form, while in the romantic, on subjectivity, hence sentiment. The latter becomes strikingly evident in Christianity, which, while expressed in various doctrines, essentially offers salvation based on stated (possibly only alleged) belief (as, for example, in the Apostle’s Creed) exposed, for example, even if only once and on one’s deathbed after a lifetime of cruelty and violence, the case, for example, of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor. Judaism, however, demands continual adherence to the mitzvot, that is, behavior, the most fundamental being ethics expressed in the Ten Commandments, supplemented by ritual observance.

In line with this increasing emphasis on realism and objectivity, in Jewish scripture, the last frankly supernatural episode is in Joshua, while, in the much later-appearing Gospels, 35 miracles are attributed to Jesus, 21 in Mark alone, including the miracle of the loaves and fish, the turning of water into wine and, most spectacularly, the raising of the dead. At the seder, we commemorate the 10 “miracles” of the Exodus, yet all but the last can have naturalistic explanations. The last, the death of the Egyptian firstborn, without reaching, demands a human explanation, however unpleasant it may be. This is not to say that the scribes were completely committed to naturalism; evidently exercising their “religious imagination,” they weren’t and, moreover, they did not know the bounds of naturalism (and neither do we). But it does mark a slow but steady acceptance by Jews of the distinction between Natural Law and God’s prerogatives (in this world), an understanding essential to the progress of science and one that is sharply reversed in Christianity.

Although the contrast between Christianity and Judaism has been the subject of countless polemics and disputations, almost invariably instigated by C have historically found the “stubbornness” of Jews irritating, challenging and, ultimately, incomprehensible, therefore attributing to Jews the “defect” of “stiff-neckedness,” most Christians have by now become reconciled to the persistence of Jews and Judaism and for many more, largely secularized, it is simply no longer an issue.

For some Jews, the temptation of “belonging” to the dominant culture – enjoying not only its social benefits but the certainty and evidently more-easily-attainable promise of “guaranteed,” if vicarious, redemption – still attracts them. Yet, in our largely secular environment, it turns out, for most people, whatever their formal religious persuasion, redemption is no longer a pressing issue.

Eugene Kaellis has written Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.

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