Jewneric: A New Platform for the Jewish Voice

Posted May 13 2008 by David Gertler

Sports, Religion & The Catskills: Part 3

In the past few articles, I’ve postulated that people who follow pro-sports do so to try to be part of a team. I’ve also postulated that people holding on to old Jewish culture (such as Yiddish, the Catskills or gefilte fish) as an essence of Judaism are living in the past. If anything I said in those two article offended your sensitivities, I suggest you rethink your priorities. If what I say below does not offend or disturb you or at least make you reflect heavily on who you are, I again suggest you rethink your priorities. I say that assuming that my readers belong to some theological group be it monotheistic, atheistic or polytheistic. Agnostics are either cop-outs or people who are on their journey.

The suffix of the word theology demands thought.¹ Theos, for those readers who never wondered, is the Greek word for god. Thinking about god, gods or the lack of gods. This seems to be separate from claims of religion. Certainly only after you want to put your chips down on one god or group of gods would you want to follow the religion carried out in its (/their) name(s).

I am a firm believer that most of my readers do not believe in a god. I don’t believe my readers are atheists and I don’t believe my readers are agnostics. I believe my readers and the majority of people are lazy. I am going to skip the belief in a god and deal with the religion, which is what people tend to worship anyway.

A few thoughts to ponder for those of you who are offended: If you were not born into the religion which you subscribe, do you think you would have chosen it? For converts and those of you who lied and answered in the affirmative: If you were born into a society without your religion do you imagine you would have left your society in search of it?

If you answered yes to the last one, you are a liar. The real focus of the article is not that last question, because it is not an intelligent question. If you were born into a world where people ate only animals and worshiped plants, you couldn’t possibly become a vegetarian out of anything short of rebelliousness.

But the question remains, why do you follow your religion? There are entire communities of elderly Jewish individuals who never practiced their religion until they were retired. Before they met their friends at work, now they meet them at shul. They go to shul to be part of a team and because they have nothing else to do.

There are similarly followers of a religion because they know nothing else. They follow what their parents do, not out of an intellectual decision, but out of the respect for their parents’ nostalgia of their grandparents. They do as they are told following a line of thought similar in origin to “when in Rome do as the Romans do” without caring to realize the implications of the cliche.²

Similar in form to the nostalgic reason for religious observance, you have the iconic argument to which many subscribe. Both destroy any possibility for actual thought. The iconic argument is the belief that the religious icons have thoroughly investigated their beliefs. This is not a belief in a god or a religion it is a belief in a “great” human. We do it all the time in science, why not do it in religion too? For those who believe (as I do) that dinosaurs actually existed and weren’t a huge conspiracy to sell science fiction that stuck, have you seen the evidence first hand? Did you do the carbon dating? I haven’t. If someone were to come along and somehow prove the whole thing was a sham, and it became the accepted belief, I’d be able to accept it. How much would it change my life? Not in any way at all.

If it comes out, through means unknown, that your entire life was based on misplaced assumptions: you aren’t Christian/Jewish/Zoroastrian; the Baal Shem Tov/Rabbi Akiva/Whomever never existed and was a fictional character to the tune of Castle of Otranto³; a voice from God comes out and tells you there is no world to come and there is no messiah- would you continue on your beaten path, because it is the only path you know?

There are so many motivational speeches throughout every religious community that one can wonder how many people follow because they believe they are supposed to. How many of the speakers are just great speakers, inspiring others on matters which they don’t honestly believe?

If we were to examine the individual origins and the continued reasons for our beliefs and observances, would anyone be proven to be true? Do we all just relive the past because everyone else is doing it?⁴

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1 It doesn’t mean thought. It comes from the word logos which means speech. Not any kind of speech- discussion. It has come to mean study.
2 While the belief that Romans was as Sodom to the world may not be historically accurate, that doesn’t diminish the seven deadly sins image conjured up by the word “Roman.”
3 Castle of Otranto is a work of fiction that in order to offer believability the author claimed he had discovered a historical document printed 200 year earlier of a story more hundreds of years prior.
4 I am here referring to the big picture of religious beliefs. Each individual practice can be scrutinized and some will survive some will not. This is not a question of variant/bizarre custom, it is a question of belief in orthodoxy (a shared belief), whatever that orthodoxy may be.

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