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T o r a h ! T o r a h ! T o r a h !
Erica Jong is in a tizzy. "They'll put 'zipless fuck' on my tombstone," she cries, "but anyone who can read knows this is something I've always been concerned with." "This," for the woman who helped turn female sexuality into a religion, is Judaism. Jong's long-standing religious interests recently intensified: To write her latest novel, "Inventing Memory," Jong took up Yiddish as a second language and -- husband in tow -- studied everything from Proverbs to advice columns from turn-of-the-century issues of the Jewish Forward. And this year, she joined a group of New York media poohbahs, lawyers and intellectual luminaries who meet over lox and melons to delve not into constitutional questions, bestseller standings or political controversies, but into the ethical questions raised by Deuteronomy. One morning a month, Jong and a group of fellow Jews gather for moral power breakfasts in Manhattan -- one month on the East Side, the next on the West. The group includes former White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, Ms. magazine founder and author Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Nation magazine publisher and editor Victor Navasky, novelist Esther Broner, First Amendment lawyers Floyd Abrams and Victor Kovner, and husband-and wife writing team Martin Sage and Sybil Adelman ("Northern Exposure"). The participants take the sessions very seriously. "I missed only one session, I do my reading in advance," says Kovner. "I pay attention, come prepared and ready to engage, if not do battle." Though Jong complains that there are "too goddamned many lawyers in the group" (her husband among them), the purpose of the meetings is not battle but study aimed at self-understanding. Guided by a teacher from a Jewish outreach program called CLAL, group members meet at a time Sage describes as "that early part of the morning when people tend to be more vulnerable." The year-long curriculum, which wraps up in December, examines the moral questions raised by Deuteronomy, in which the dying Moses offers his vision of an ideal Jewish society to his people. The book offers guidelines for a new nation's survival: Occupy a piece of land, marry within the tribe, eschew other gods for the laws of the One. It finds the Jews on the banks of the Jordan contemplating a divine commandment to "smite the inhabitants" of the future land of Israel and "utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy." The text raises big questions, which the group tackles in discussions that range from intellectual to personal: Why should generations of Jews pledge to uphold the religious promises made by their parents? What's the fuss over marrying out of the faith? And what about Deuteronomy's command to kill all the enemy, including civilians? Such issues are particularly vexing for a group largely composed of die-hard 60-something leftists who were nursed on a mixture of American liberalism and nonreligious assimilation. "Our house essentially ranged between nonreligious and anti-religious," says Abrams, whose parents were "turned off" by the "foreign-ness" of the religious Jews who shared their Lower East Side neighborhood. Jong is the daughter of atheists and the granddaughter of "an anarchist who declared that religion was the opiate of the masses." And Kovner recalls that as a boy he insisted that his family allow him to have a bar mitzvah in a synagogue, and then, "like hundreds of thousands of my predecessors, did not return." "For those people growing up in the post-war years, Judaism seemed to be 50 percent what they would have called the ignorance and low social class of the Orthodox and 50 percent the obscene suburban strivings of middle-class Jews -- and all of it disgusted them," reflects Abrams' cousin Elliot Abrams, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative religious think tank. The idea of Floyd attending a Torah study group, he says, would have Floyd's father "rolling over in his grave." Not surprisingly, some of the participants have difficulty accepting the sternly exclusionary message of the text. "Deuteronomy is full of exhortations to not mix with the other; it raises the eternal questions of universalism vs. exclusivity," reflects Kathleen Peratis, a member of the group who has practiced civil rights and women's law for 30 years (she was president of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project following the tenure of its founder, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg). "Those ideas are particularly challenging for people with progressive politics, and I think that many of us are very disturbed by the text." "Do I find my values reflected in Deuteronomy? Often I do not," says Kovner, who had been active, with Pogrebin, in the liberal group Americans for Peace Now. "I don't find 'showing no mercy' a value that is admirable ... All my secular activism derives from my Jewish heritage ... and the universalist wing as opposed to the nationalistic wing of Jewish tradition." The moving force behind the creation of the group was Pogrebin, whose friendship with many members was key in bringing them in. It wasn't easy, she says: "I heard many, many excuses about why they shouldn't do it." Unlike her peers, Pogrebin was "out" as a practicing Jew "when people still didn't know what a progressive, identified Jew was. [I remember] sitting at a dinner party and saying I believed in God and then waiting for the arrows to fly." Just what is attractive to these secular-leaning, progressive Jews about Torah study remains something of a mystery. Nearly all the members admit that 20 years ago such study would have held no interest for them. One suggested that maybe the difference is growing older; another that "identity politics in the larger world" have touched Jews as well; and a third, that this represents a "cyclic need to identify our personal culture with our public work." Asked for comment, Victor Navasky growled, "Publicity somehow has a way of tainting things." CLAL president Rabbi Irwin Kula, who taught the first class, thinks the participants are drawn to retell the story. Calling the group members "story tellers," he says, "The point that I made was that Deuteronomy is Moses' retelling of the initial Jewish story to the generation that didn't live through it. They immediately grasped the challenge. To use all of their varieties of expertise and be like Moses and retell the story." But Kovner's explanation, almost a verbal shrug, seems to suffice for most: "It's important to me."
Sarah Blustain is an associate editor at Lilith Magazine and a contributing editor at the Forward. |
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