I’m Proud To Be A Heretic

At the very least, the Mayor might have said something.

Well, OK – it’s not exactly his issue.

Here’s what happened. Last week, at a fundraising gala for the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, its head, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, said, in the presence of Mayor Bill DeBlasio, that “The Reform and Conservative movements have disintegrated themselves, become oblivious, fallen into an abyss of intermarriage and assimilation. They have no future, they almost have no present.” And then he continued by saying that the Open Orthodoxy movement is “steeped in apikorsos” – filled with apikorsim, heretics.

To which Emily Hauser retorted, pugnaciously and appropriately: “I am not a heretic! You ultra-Orthodox Jews have no right to judge me and/or my way of doing Judaism!” “>http://jps.org/product/978-0-8276-0931/the-gods-are-broken

I tend to cling, albeit in a decidedly non-Orthodox way, to many traditional Jewish beliefs. So, perhaps I am not really a bonafide apikoris.

Maybe I am merely “api-curious.”

Going all the way back to Elisha ben Avuya, the rabbinic heretic and hero of Milton Steinberg’s classic As A Driven Leaf, some of our best Jews have been apikorsim. Apikorsim are, at the very least, interesting. They are decidedly un-boring. Who would you have rather hung out with – Spinoza or the rabbis of Amsterdam who excommunicated him?

There are worse things in the Jewish world than to be an apikoris.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

A young man from Minsk decided that his life’s goal was to be an apikoris. And so, he went to Pinsk to meet the great apikoris of Pinsk. 

The apikoris of Pinsk asks him: “Young man, have you studied Torah?”

“No,” admitted the young aspiring apikoris. “What about Talmud?” “Also no,” the young man said. “Maimonides?” “No.”

“Young man,” the older man thundered, “you are not an apikoris – you’re an am-ha-aretz!”

Translation: “Young man, don’t congratulate yourself on thinking that you are a heretic and a free thinker! You’re not! If you’ve never studied Judaism in any depth, you’re not an apikoris! You’re worse than that! You’re an am ha-aretz! You’re a person of the earth. You’re an ignoramus!”

Ignorance is far more dangerous to the Jewish community than heresy and spiritual rebellion. At the very least, the rebels are thinking. And if they are not thinking, then what are they rebelling against? It often occurs to me that the Judaism that many people reject is a caricature of a badly-taught, barely-remembered version of Judaism that they last encountered when they were thirteen, if that. Sheesh.

Or, let me put it to you this way: You can be a free thinker. But you can’t be a non-thinker.

Heretics? Maybe.

Ignoramuses? Never. 

An erev Shavuot plea: Fight the dumbing down of Judaism. Battle for the smarting-up of Judaism. Reject simple and simplistic answers about Judaism.

If you must (and I am not advocating this, but if you must): be an apikoris. Some of our best Jews are.

But whatever you do, don’t be an am ha-aretz.