That’s Me In The Corner

I am a secular Jew.  What that means is not always clear to people, particularly if they are not Jewish themselves.  What I mean by it (and others who identify the same way may mean different things) is that I come from a Jewish cultural background, I participate in what I consider the most important Jewish rituals, and I generally think of myself as part of the worldwide Jewish community, but at the same time I don’t believe in God, I don’t follow all 613 commandments, and I don’t think of my Judaism as being the most important aspect of my identity.  I consider myself both secular and religious in different ways, and the two sides come out primarily in different contexts.

There are a lot of people like me within the Jewish community in the US, and we cause endless amounts of trouble for people who look at “religion” from a Christian-centric perspective that privileges belief and faith over ritual and community as essential attributes of a religion.  The comments to this Unfogged post give an example of the kind of mess this leads to.  Is what I practice really a religion?  I’d say it is, but that does indeed make it hard to rigorously define “religion” since faith plays essentially no role in my religious practice; ritual, particularly shared ritual, is all there is.

One way that people often try to fit this kind of thing into a paradigm where religion requires faith is to say that people like me only practice the rituals we do because other people around us do believe, and we want to fit in with them for various community-centered reasons. So, the argument goes, if there were no believers around, no one would practice the rituals.

I think this kind of argument shows a serious misunderstanding of how Judaism works.  For one thing, I wouldn’t even know which people at my synagogue believe in God and which don’t; it just doesn’t come up.  Jews, even religiously observant Jews, don’t tend to talk about this stuff nearly as much as Christians do.  But even setting that aside, I maintain that a hypothetical congregation composed exclusively of Jewish atheists would still conduct services.

The main reason for that is that Jewish rituals are what Jews do, so if we’re Jews, and we identify strongly enough with Judaism to belong to a synagogue in the first place, of course we’re going to perform Jewish rituals even if none of us believes in the literal truth of any of the words we’re saying.  It’s about community and tradition, not belief.

One important distinction to make here is between what we might call “Jewish atheists” and “atheist Jews.”  The first would mean atheists who happen to have Jewish heritage but don’t feel any particularly strong attachment to it, don’t go to services, and don’t live their lives any differently from their counterparts who have Christian heritage.  There are lots of these people, and they generally don’t belong to synagogues.  The second would mean Jews, that is, people who identify strongly with Judaism as an important part of their identity, who happen to not believe in God and may or may not attend services or belong to a synagogue.  There are also lots of these people, and I am one of them.  I don’t think there are many people like this in most Christian denominations; with faith-based religions, if you don’t have faith, you’re out.  Lapsed Catholics may be the closest analogues.

I don’t particularly care if what I do counts as “religion” or not; I’m increasingly inclined to the view that the word isn’t very useful anyway.  But I do think it’s important to point out that rigorous definitions of concepts like this need to take into account all the phenomena that are popularly grouped under those concepts, and if something doesn’t fit the definition, it might be the definition rather than the phenomenon that’s to blame.