The Struggle for the Soul of Faith

In the days of penitence before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year marking the birthday of the universe, it is not unusual to see on our city buses kerchiefed young women silently mouthing the words of the Psalms and bearded young men in black fedoras studying ethical works about how to increase humility and curb a gossiping tongue. While the Israeli media focus on the deepening confrontation between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews, for the ultra-Orthodox it is a time of self-confrontation, a season of introspection and personal improvement. That genuine piety--perhaps as much as the clout of its political parties--is a key source of ultra-Orthodoxy’s increasing power and self-confidence in Israeli society.

Thousands of once-secular Israelis, disillusioned with consumerist culture and searching for spiritual meaning, are now wearing the kerchiefs and black fedoras of the ultra-Orthodox, indistinguishable from those born into that insular world. They include former movie stars and combat pilots and artists and university professors, and especially young people fresh out of the army who went backpacking in India and there became convinced that the physical world is only one facet of reality. This variety of “refugees” from secularism helps account for the astonishing rise of ultra-Orthodoxy, which for many Israelis has been transformed from a vanishing remnant of pre-Holocaust Jewish life into a dynamic threat to this country’s secular and democratic identity.

The tragedy is that some of our most sensitive and intelligent spiritual seekers are finding their home in fundamentalist ultra-Orthodoxy, rather than in more moderate forms of Judaism. The appeal of fundamentalist Judaism is precisely the kind of unapologetic spirituality exhibited on Jerusalem’s buses. In Judaism today, there are few addresses outside of ultra-Orthodoxy where one can experience devotional rather than merely formalistic prayer; where controlling one’s physical appetites is seen as the precondition for achieving intimacy with spiritual reality; where the goal of religion is understood as living with the constant sense of God’s presence. The success of fundamentalist ultra-Orthodoxy is the failure of liberal Judaism to offer a vital spiritual alternative.

The growing charisma of fundamentalism is hardly a problem restricted to Judaism alone. Almost every religion has become a battleground between fundamentalists and pluralists--that is, between those who insist that theirs is the only true faith and those who believe that the Creator of the universe is vast enough to accommodate all who sincerely seek him.

How that clash is resolved will affect not only the future of religion but of the planet. Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of creation, has lost its innocence: We have mastered the technological power to undo creation, reverse the big bang. And, as we Israelis learned this past year through the suicide bombings by Islamic fundamentalists, there is no passion more dangerous, more likely to lead to our collective suicide, than fundamentalist-inspired holy war. Not all fundamentalists, of course, are identical: Ultra-Orthodox Jews, for example, shun armed violence. But an exclusivist mentality does unite fundamentalists of all faiths.

In recent decades, pluralists have repudiated religious triumphalism through interfaith dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, within Christianity itself, and now a tentative attempt at “trialogue” embracing Judaism, Christianity and Islam. That movement has created a theology of humility, which sees in each religion a particular and eloquent language in the dialogue between humanity and God. Interfaith dialogue is religion for the nuclear age, a celebration of our commonality as a prerequisite for our survival.

But for the dialogue movement to effectively challenge the fundamentalists, it needs to deepen beyond its current preoccupation with essentially social issues. We need to learn from each other how to cultivate a sense of the sacred in daily life, learn from each other’s experience in spiritual inwardness not by blurring religious distinctions but by encouraging our appreciation of religious diversity.

For the pluralist trends within each faith to prevail, they must begin attracting the seekers now being drawn to fundamentalism. The tools meant to grant a person a sense of intimacy with God--meditation and focused prayer and a relentless process of self-examination--are the essence of religious experience and cannot be abandoned to the fundamentalists. In the struggle for the future of religious faith, it is time for liberals to reclaim a commitment to the life of the soul.