Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007
Our Stories, Ourselves
Towards An Aggadic Judaism
By Rami Shapiro
Let me begin at the end: the future of Judaism depends on the vitality of her stories and the genius of her storytellers. In addition to anything else we may do to secure a vibrant Jewish future, we should be pouring serious thought, money, and effort into training, supporting, and promoting maggidim, Jewish storytellers.
Now that you know where I am going, let me share with you how I get there.
Rationale
We are the stories we tell. If there were no Jewish stories, there would be no Jews. Story is at the heart of Judaism, and has been ever since Torah opened with Bereshit, "Once upon a time." Stories provide us with history, identity, meaning, and purpose. Story is how we make sense out of the world.
Normally we think of the Jewish future in terms of numbers: how many Jews keep kosher, make Shabbos, join synagogues, marry other Jews, and send their kids to Jewish schools. As important as these factors may be, they are contingent upon a more fundamental dynamic: the capacity of the Jewish story to capture people's hearts, minds, and spirits.
When our stories fail us, or when they are lost to us either through theft or neglect, we either die or invent new stories. The genius of Jews has been our ability to tell new tales. Indeed rabbinic, kabbalistic, hasidic, and even Zionist expressions of Judaism are, at their core, new stories offered to either reinterpret or replace older stories that no longer spoke compellingly to then-contemporary Jews. One might argue that we are in need of new stories today, especially stories that integrate science with spirituality. While I look forward to hearing these new stories, my concern here is with the revival of story itself.
I Place before you Story and Fact, Therefore Choose Story
In the past we believed that our stories were not stories at all, but facts. God created the world in six says and destroyed it in forty—fact. God spoke to Abraham and chose Sarah's descendents as his chosen people—fact. God plagued the Egyptians, divided the sea, wrote the Ten Commandments, promised his chosen a land flowing with milk and honey rather than oil—all facts. Fewer and fewer Jews accept these facts today. We see them as story rather than history. This is the inevitable result of the postmodern mindset, and this is why every religion seeking to hold onto its stories as facts is at war with the postmodern world.
For premodern thinkers (whether ancient or contemporary) story is history, history is the will of God, and war determines whose god is God. Modern thinkers claim to separate history from story, relegate theology and religion to the sidelines, and fight wars over things that matter such as oil, trade, and empire. The Israeli-Arab conflict is a premodern war of gods and stories: the land is valuable not for what it contains, but for what it is—land as Land. The war in Iraq is a modern war of empire, using the premodern narratives of religion to mask the true motives of oil and influence. Sensing this is so, modern critics of both premodern religion and of its abuse at the hands of modern powers have argued that if we can only get beyond the stories each religion tells, we would see that all religions are saying the same thing.
Postmodern thinkers understand, however, that there is no getting beyond the story: story is who we are. This does not mean there is no Reality transcending our stories, only that we cannot step outside of story to experience it. Our stories are the lenses through which we look to see what reality is. New stories can sharpen our focus and extend our sight, but we cannot put the lens aside and see directly what is so.
The postmodern condition is about knowing that we cannot know, and this not-knowing is profoundly liberating because it is deeply humbling. When you imagine you know the truth, or worse, that you somehow own it, you are easily seduced to cruelty and violence in defense of your story. When you know you don't know; when you know you can't know, you cannot be manipulated by those who pretend to know. Fear gives way to a fearless and gentle humor that allows us to live gracefully in the face of uncertainty.
The postmodern Jew lives consciously in story as story, and is thus free to retell and reinvent her story. The postmodern religious awakening is not about discovering the uber-story that all religions share, but about the humbling realization that the story that can be told—that we must tell, since we must tell some story—is not and can never be the Eternal Story.
I am a postmodern Jew. I cannot live without attending to fact, but I cannot thrive without attending to story. Story carries archetypal truths from the unconscious to the conscious. Story is a map to territory so deeply imbedded in the human psyche that facts alone cannot grasp it. If Judaism is to have a creative future, if it is to be something more than a nostalgic fantasy, our stories must be revealed for what they truly are: maps to meaning, timeless vehicles for carrying the deepest spiritual yearnings of the human psyche into the realm of consciousness where they can be fulfilled through acts of justice, kindness, and humility.
Despite all rhetoric to the contrary, postmodern Jews are not hungry for tradition, they are starving for life—for meaning and spiritual experience—and these come not through law but lore, not through halacha but aggadah. The future of Judaism lies not with her lawyers and judges, but with her storytellers and shamans. The future Judaism is an aggadic Judaism.
An Aggadic Judaism
Aggadic Judaism honors story as story, and embraces myth and metaphor as the best tools we have for pointing beyond the idols of the known toward the reality of the unknown and unknowable. To get a sense of what this Judaism may be like, I have engaged in an exercise of the imagination, asking and answering a few key questions from the aggadic perspective to give you a better sense of what I imagine the future of Judaism to be.
What is Judaism? Judaism is the ever-renewing story of the Jewish people's quest for wisdom, justice, compassion, and humility. It is true to the extent that it points beyond itself toward these universal principles; it is valuable to the extent that it aligns each individual Jew with them.
Who is a Jew? A Jew is a person whose personal story is shaped primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by the Jewish story, whether these be the stories of Torah, Midrash, Zohar, Hasidic Tales, or others stories in the Jewish tradition that have been widely acknowledged to meet the answer to the question, "What is Judaism?" A Jew is one who turns to these particular stories when seeking meaning and life-purpose. Jewish identity is rooted not in genes, but memes, the carriers of culture among which story reigns supreme.
Who is God? God is the Unknown and Unknowable. God is the True North toward which every authentic compass points and which no compass contains. God cannot be defined, but godliness can be lived: doing justly, loving mercifully, and walking humbly. Aggadic Judaism aligns with God by informing our lives with stories of godliness. Our stories show us how to be godlike in the various situations we find ourselves.
What is Torah? Beginning with Bereshit, embracing rabbinic, kabbalistic, and hasidic tales, Yiddish and Ladino stories, the stories of Kafka, Singer, Agnon and others, and reaching beyond these to the as yet unspoken voice saying, "Once upon a time," Torah is the open-ended creativity of the Jewish imagination.
What role will rabbis play in Aggadic Judaism? Unlike halachic Judaism, aggadic Judaism is not a proprietary code written by a learned elite, but an open-source narrative continually tweaked by anyone with the passion for doing so. Variations will spread and catch on if people find them meaningful, and there will be no one to say, "This is authentic and that is not." Hence the rabbis' role as arbiter and judge of Judaism will become obsolete in the postmodern period. Rabbis may continue on as masters of ceremony, but the maggid or storyteller will be the creative force of aggadic Judaism.
The maggid will also act as darshan, interpreter of tales, not only telling stories, but helping people find meaning through story as well. Notice I said "through" rather than "in." The story is not the end, but the means. Maggidim will be trained in the art of the story, both listening and telling, both remembering and inventing. The maggid will be a postmodern shaman who knows how to mix just the right tales to help you heal what haunts you.
What will happen to synagogues? Storytelling is intrinsically communal, and Jews will need places to gather to share their stories. Synagogues may serve this function. They will be small and intimate, with circular seating around the flames of Shabbos, Havdallah, and Yom Tov (what is a story without night-time and fire?). People won't join a shul, they will gather for a story.
I imagine people sitting in a circle chanting and singing niggunim. The singing will naturally give way to silence, and silence will give way to stories. A question will present itself, and a story will arise to address it. One story will lead to another surrounded by silence and singing as the stories are given time to sink in. And when the telling is over, hugs and food.
What will draw people to aggadic Judaism? A longing for meaning and purpose they cannot find anywhere else, and a desire to share stories in a way that invites meaning and purpose without suggesting that they are that meaning and purpose. Halachic Judaism is an end unto itself; aggadic Judaism is a means only. It has no teaching per se, but simply points godward in the direction of wisdom, justice, compassion, and humility.
How will aggadic Judaism raise the next generation? Just as the Passover Haggadah says we should: by inviting them into the story. The stories of halachic Judaism were stories we grew out of; the stories of aggadic Judaism are stories we grow into. The more life experience the listener has, the more depth the story reveals.
Will Hebrew be taught? Yes. Jewish stories of the future will draw on Jewish stories of the past, and those Jewish stories were written and spoken in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino. Maggidim will lace their tales with these languages—bringing the languages alive in story, and the story alive in its language. Listeners will learn a working vocabulary that will, along with the stories themselves, shape their identities as Jews.
And Bar and Bat Mitzvah? I imagine aggadic Jews becoming bat or bar mitzvah by mastering the ability to share and enter into the core stories of Judaism. And this would be only the beginning. Teenagers would spend time preparing for a late-teen lech lecha experience, allowing themselves to hear God calling them to leave the conditioning of tribe and family and venture boldly into the unknown (Genesis 12:1). Twenty-somethings would devote years preparing for a vision quest for Jacob's Ladder, experiencing the unity of all opposites in the greater nonduality of God (Genesis 28:12). Adults would take up the story of Jacob/Israel and set out for Jabbok's Ford to wrestle with the angel of God, accept the wound of their own imperfection, earn a new name, reconcile with their enemies, and learn to walk at the nurturing pace of the nursing mother (Genesis 32:24-33:14). Elders who have finished their walk will prepare for death by learning to sit unmoved through the wind, the earthquake, and the fire of life's closing years until they hear the Fragile Voice of Stillness that is God's call (I Kings 19:11-12). In other words, our stories will become living paradigms for spiritual practice.
Next Steps
If we are to shape a vibrant Judaism that reclaims her stories without falling into the trap of nostalgia, we must do three things, and do them soon.
1. We must identify the core stories of our people. This is already well underway. The Ein Yaakov, Berdyczewski's Mimekor Yisrael, Hayyim Bialik's Sefer Aggadah, Martin Buber's Hasidic Tales, and Howard Schwartz's Tree of Souls make finding our stories easy.
2. We must train storytellers to recast these tales for telling in a variety of media: "live," print, and digital. In addition, the maggid must become a darshan, not only a teller of tales but also a miner of meaning, capable of helping the listener find herself in the tale in a manner that brings purpose and meaning to her life. Here Kurtz and Ketchem's The Spirituality of Imperfection, Buber's The Way of Man and Maurice Friedman's Dialogue with Hasidic Tales are excellent guides.
3. We must subsidize our maggidim and seed them in our communities so they are financially able to tell our stories and help our people find their way to them. Storyteller-in-residence programs funded by federations could be offered to synagogues and Jewish community centers, and individual maggidim could apply for grants from various Jewish sources to establish independent storytelling programs in their communities.
Conclusion Redux
Our future belongs to our story and depends upon the creative skill and imagination of our storytellers. If you care about the former, you must do something to promote the latter.
Postscript
It is one thing to call for something new, and quite another to actually build it. The former allows me the luxury of blaming others for failing to act; the latter provides the true challenge of having my ideas tested in the real world. So I will make you a promise: Within the next six months I will establish a training program for maggidim. I will find the teachers, set up the curriculum, secure a space, and invite you to learn. If you find aggadic Judaism compelling, contact me. If you can help financially, good. If you wish to enroll, also good. I can't set forth the program or its costs, but I can say this: our maggidim will, if you let them, become indispensable resources for your community. They will know the range of Jewish story, and how to make them speak to people in their communities. They will become the new shamans of Jewish life, fanning the fires of meaning and quenching the flames of madness. They will spark a renaissance of Jewish spiritual creativity as story steps beyond words to film, music, dance, and art. If our maggidim are the next step, we need not worry about last steps.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro is director of the One River Foundation and author of numerous books including Hasidic Tales, Annotated and Explained, and The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness. He can be reached at rabbirami@rabbirami.com
Source Citation
Shapiro, Rami. 2007. Our Stories, Ourselves: Towards An Aggadic Judaism. Tikkun 22(1): 56.
