I was going to excoriate Rabbi Eric Yoffie for his comments about secular Jews in the attached article, but I won't. Inspired by my friend Chana, who writes at The Merely Real, I am making an effort not to participate in a call-out culture that is fundamentally counterproductive to the projects of humanity and understanding. Instead, in an effort to steel-man R' Yoffie's argument, I have tried to understand him to be calling for solidarity among progressive Jews. R' Yoffie is the former head of the Union for Reform Judaism, and is invested in securing the Jewish future, and securing the voice of progressive Jews as a part of Jewish continuity.
NB: I do not subscribe to the binary of secular vs. religious. Nor do I subscribe to the binary of atheist vs. religious. In order to simplify my take on R' Yoffie's position and cultivate a charitable attitude toward his arguments, I am borrowing the binary of secular vs. religious for the sake of the below alone. There are plenty of people who consider themselves secular who have deep religious sensibilities and vice versa. Please also note that R' Yoffie equates atheism with secularism in his article. Although I find that a much more problematic standpoint, I use the term secular below to denote secular atheist when not obvious from the context.
On the face of it, R' Yoffie argues that community involvement and cultural identification are tantamount to believing in God. Perhaps he just didn't have the benefit of a great class on Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life like I did, because he confuses what is holy with what is sacred. Read the book for the background; I promise it's worth it. Religious folks can learn much from the way secular folks and atheists revere religious spaces as sacred in the Durkheimian sense. Secular folks view religious practices as set apart, or sacred. They view cultural and national identities as important, like most people. And they know that part of identity is not determined by them, but by the society around them. Rather than fight against a Jewish identity, secular Jews claim the term Jew, almost better than their religious counterparts, because they choose to maintain a problematic, persecuted identity without believing that Mr. Deity will have their back. Many secular Jews not only participate in Judaism through national, ethnic, and cultural identity but also through the system of ethics that comes out of what religious Jews see as religious Judaisms. Of course, there are secular Jews who are assholes, but there are also religious Jews who are assholes. R' Yoffie sees identification with the Jewish people as a form of belief in God because it takes strength and a belief that maintaining that identification, especially in the face of persecution, is important and more beneficial in the future. But that belief is not equivalent to believing in a supreme being. It is rather akin to the belief that the high probability that the earth will keep revolving around the sun and not spin off its orbit can be translated effectively to an always. However, I digress. And to get distracted by R' Yoffie's conflation of the two ideas is to miss the good point he could have made if he weren't so distracted by theology.
Judaism and Jewish culture are meant to be progressive. If you don't believe me, ask my teacher, Rabbi Benay Lappe, who will gladly explain how radical the early rabbinic tradition was. The ultra-orthodox voice in Judaism has a voice much bigger than its market share in America and Israel, the biggest centers of Jewish life. Progressive religious Jews and progressive secular Jews should not see themselves as opposed but rather as a joint force against the coopting of a radically interpretive tradition by those who would like to see it stay static and oppressive. R' Yoffie is right that secular Jews and progressive religious Jews aren't so different, but it isn't because secular Jews actually believe in God like religious Jews do. It's because secular Jews act similarly and care about similar things as do progressive Jews. The common view of mentschlichkeit and of viewing Judaism as valuable and meaningful beyond an all-or-nothing list of rules including not mixing wool and linen is something that progressive Jews, religious or secular, should unite in promoting. Then will we be able to put our actions where our mouths are in terms of pluralism.
So, Rabbi Yoffie, if you were intending to deride the practice of secular Jews as inconsistent, recognize that inconsistency is part of the human condition. But if your aim was to say that we need to talk about Judaism in all the ways it manifests, then I join you in saying:
יש יותר מדרך אחד להיות יהודי
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