Is Being Spiritual Enough? What do we in the Judeo-Christian world mean when we speak of being religious?

IT TAKES NOTHING away from God to presume that religion is man made. 

Religions come and go and evolve. Fewer Americans are in the pews yet more say they feel spiritual, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. There are people "across a wide variety of religious identities who say they often feel a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being as well as a deep sense of wonder about the universe," Pew reports.

You could think of spirituality— the capacity to look beyond ourselves and to speculate about the purpose of life— in psychological terms. If spirituality is broadly synonymous with emotional health then being soulful could be rooted in hormones, genetics, nurture, and luck.

Religion is off the radar for more and more Americans. In the 21^st century it's a lifestyle choice not a prerequisite for membership in society. That may be unfortunate. It takes the virtues of discipline and devotion to practice religion. To be spiritual merely requires feeling; to practice religion entails prayer, ritual, community, time and money. The best, I suppose, is when you can combine the two. A sense of deep spiritual peace and contentedness is particularly common among evangelicals where ecstasy is an element of the church service.

Of course, the search to explain the mysterious – something that occupies both religion and science— remains intrinsic to human nature. For some, spirituality may be a way of exploring the mysterious within the bounds of 21^st century sensibilities.

Pew found that just 39 percent of Jews said they experienced "spiritual peace and well-being" on a weekly basis and about 42 percent expressed "a wonder about the universe." Just to put these numbers in perspective: Some 54 percent of atheists expressed wonder about the universe. Roughly 64 percent of Christian believers say they achieve weekly spiritual peace and well-being. 

Such comparisons may be misleading.

For Judaism is not just a religion it is a civilization. Judaism encompasses believers and non-believers, those who seek out spirited, joyous, song-filled Friday night Kabbalat  Shabbat services (called "Carlebach minyans") and those who prefer a night at the opera. Jews have their mystics and Hassidim, but also those who express their Jewishness by watching Curb Your Enthusiasm or voting Democratic. There is no catechism in Judaism. Indeed, Jews can't agree on "who is a Jew" or how the Sabbath should be observed. There are Orthodox Jews who engage in ritual without giving a thought to theology, and progressive Jews who forget that ritual can instill deeper meaning to their ethos of repairing the world (tikkun olam).

But let's put nomenclature aside.

Dominic Johnson's God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human makes the point that, "Our brains are wired such that we cannot help but search for meaning in the randomness of life." He continues, "Humans the world over find themselves, consciously or subconsciously believing that we live in a just world or a moral universe where people are supposed to get what they deserve."

In the West, moral relavatism has been taken to an extreme leaving random individuals to decide what is right. The paradigm that moral order emanates from a Creator strikes modernists as outmoded. Yet Johnson argues (and not necessarily because he is a believer) that only belief in God can help humans triumph over their own selfishness. Belief in a supernatural God is a practical evolutionary adaptation. Put another way, Religion and its belief in punishments encourages cooperation and stifles selfish behavior.

In this way, religion and life within a religious community can be a force for good.

It is easy to lose sight of this basic truth in a world torn asunder by religious violence above all within Muslim civilization. Islamist forces are also at war with Western notions of modernity, tolerance, and respect for minorities. Alas, internecine Muslim bloodletting in places like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan is a struggle between different shades of dark.

Judaism and Christianity may have their own corrupters, but they have gone through their evolutions, adaptations, and reformations. Islam has not.

Like fire and water, religion can warm our souls and quench our longing for purpose. It is essential to the human operating system even if religions—some more than others— become corrupted and require critical patches and updates.

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Elliot Jager is author of The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness. He is a senior editor at The Jerusalem Report specializing in the Jewish world. 

Please visit The Pater's Facebook page for more information.

Haaretz Watch - Friday Jan. 1, 2016

Friday's weekend Haaretz offers insight into what animates Israel's left -- and it is not liberalism.

The top story is an attack on Education Minister Naftali Bennett's decision to remove an Arab-Jewish Romeo and Juliet love story from the high school reading list. 

Personally, I have no strong feelings on the issue. 

But the paper's shrill treatment of the issue –claiming that the book is being banned – seems way out of proportion to me. There are lots of local school system's that make decisions about what is and what is not appropriate reading for teens.

And, need it be said -- no Muslim school (though funded by the State of Israel) would allow the book in question to be on its reading list.

The non-liberal left is no less upset that Bennett wants to push for a minimal level of Jewish literacy among students in the secular school system.

It is tragic that parents must decide, when their children enter first grade, whether they will get an Orthodox education or one almost entirely bereft of Jewish literacy. Either/Or.

Why can't the focus for all be on Jewish civilization with modules that would familiarize students with Jewish prayer, ritual, and tradition? Why should not every Israeli Jewish child become familiar with the canon? With how Judaism is practiced in the Diaspora?

David Ben-Gurion knew his bible as well as any rabbi. Did that make him any less left?  Why do people of the left these days disdain Jewish literacy?  Why not enable students to understand Jewish civilization so that they can make informed choices?

Paradoxically, Haaretz's other Big Story on page 1 Friday was headlined: "And Then the Boarder Police Raked My Wife's Car with Bullets." 

Readers familiar with Gideon Levy's byline could roll their eyes and turn the page. 

But what about innocent readers (especially those who see the paper in English and on the web) who might misconstrue Levy's unlabeled page one dropping for news? 

Obama's Speech: Neither he nor his Republican Critics Offer a way Forward

American politics-- like Israeli politics—too often offers citizens choices rooted in false premises. 

Any side that throws uncomplicated Trump-like solutions at a problem has the advantage in appealing to the masses. And thanks to social media – we've all become  "the masses that are asses." 

Long before we allow ourselves time to contemplate an issue, friends – real & virtual— "share" the thoughts of one or another ideological pundit and we're seduced into our designated amen corner.

President Obama refuses to reference 'radical Islam.'

That, too, is how President Barack Obama's speech to the American people has been received. 

I am no admirer of Obama's handling of the Arab-Israel conflict. 

By signaling almost from day one of his administration that little would be expected from the Palestinians, and by breaking a commitment made in writing by president George W. Bush on the contours of any future peace deal, namely, that Israel would not be expected to pull back to the 1949 Armistice Lines, Obama torpedoed all prospects for serious bargaining between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.

On the war against the Islamist menace, the president has sought to find the elusive good Islamist camp. He's looked for it in, among other places, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood -- just as Europeans have looked for good Islamists inside Hezbollah and Hamas.

But in connection with the war on the so-called Islamic State, Obama has it more right than wrong.

Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook didn't need to be card-carrying ISIS members to embrace its agenda, suicidal tactics, and call to action.

It would have been right for Obama to say that what the San Bernardino couple did was an act of Islamist terrorism – but, regrettably, the president is loath to put the words "Islam" (in any conjugation) and "terrorism" in one sentence.

Hawks believe that the US and European bombing campaign against ISIS targets is too cautious out of fear that innocents will be killed. Perhaps this is true.

But one can hardly accuse Syria's Bashar Assad, Russia's Vladimir Putin or former-Lebanon's Hasan Nasrallah with fighting ISIS with an eye to concern for innocent Sunni civilians. 

In other words, air bombing has its inherent limitations.

The president said the US will provide training and equipment to Sunni Arabs willing to fight ISIS. Obviously, most of these forces are themselves dodgy, but you play with the cards you're dealt. He spoke of his "accelerated" use of US special forces. Is he employing them efficiently and effectively?  I do not know.

Instead of condemning Turkey for aiding and abetting ISIS and, seemingly, deliberately flooding Europe with millions of Sunni Muslim refugees, Obama said lamely that his administration was "working with Turkey to seal its border with Syria." 

For Obama, Turkey's rulers represent the "good" Muslim brothers.

It used to be that if you didn't want to act or didn't know what to do you'd form a committee. These days national leaders form coalitions like the 65 countries "fighting" ISIS.

But the president is constrained by hard realities. There is no draft in America. The country has no appetite to go on a mobilized war-footing. It lost thousands of soldiers and squandered billions of dollars on a misguided war in Iraq that helped unleash ISIS and paved the way to Iran's suzerainty over parts of the former Iraq.

It sold billions of dollars worth of the most advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states yet they are helpless to battle ISIS and their populations are probably conflicted over whether they even should. The Saudis are focused on fighting against the Shiites in Yemen.

***

Conservatives in the US have made a strange fetish out of gun rights. Many US states make semi-automatic weapons practically as accessible as milk and cheese. Obama isn't wrong to suggest that Congress should make it a tad harder for US-based terrorists and garden variety thugs to get Big guns. 

***
On Sunday night Obama said, "We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want."

This is precisely what I mean by false choices.   

What he could have said is: "This is a war between America and radical Islam." And then added, "We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam."

Why? Because it is a Western strategic interest to dissociate Muslims from Islamists.

And it is not easy to do.

But Obama is wrong not to make the nature of the conflict far more explicit. Yet he's right that setting up the conflict as a war of civilizations won't help Western civilization win. Europe, for one, doesn't seem to feel it has a civilization worth fighting for.  

Of course there is a war of civilizations, but it is a one-way war with Western civilization in denial.

   

In all likelihood the president intentionally downplayed the attractiveness of radical Islam to "more than a billion Muslims around the world" including millions in the US.

He's right that "the vast majority of terrorist victims around the world are Muslim."

If this is what Muslims do to Muslims... But just imagine a scenario in which the ISIS types prevail and turn their full attentions against the West. 

It would have been proper had Obama said that the war right now is mostly within Islamic civilization for the soul and direction of Islam. It would also have been accurate for him to acknowledge that Islamist forces are ascendant.

Instead, he could only say that "an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities." That Muslims must confront "the crisis."

Actually, what Muslims need to confront is the prevailing, mobilizing, expanding Islamist menace. 

The president, sadly, refuses to be explicit.

He keeps claiming, as do many in Europe, that violence is a perversion of Islam. 

What utter nonsense.

Anyway, all religious dogma is malleable depending on the epoch and prevailing mores.

What he should have said is that the Muslim clergy and theological formulators need to find interpretations of Islam that are compatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.

In other words, in Islam's battle against modernity he should side openly with the tiny moderate minority that wants the civilization to adapt and evolve. 

He asked Americans "to reject discrimination." But when Americans say, now isn't the time to welcome en masse tens of thousands of Muslims, this stance is not bigotry, it is prudence. 

He should have said that 65-member coalition -- with the US and Russia in the lead -- ought to provide safe areas within Syria and Iraq rather than transfer the Sunni Arab population of the Middle East to the US Middle West or to Western Europe.

But if Obama's framing of The Long War disappointed there was little his Republican critics offered that suggested any of them would be more adept at dealing with the challenges posed by the long-term and complex Islamist threat.

To talk of "defeating" or "absolute victory" over the mobilizing strain in a religion of a billion people makes little sense. But that's the mantra you hear from some hawks.

"People are really scared and worried," Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said accurately. He claimed Obama appeared to be "completely overwhelmed" by ISIS. "He honestly believes that there is a coalition fighting against ISIS. This is absurd. There is no such coalition. A lot of countries that have put their names on a piece of paper."

OK. That's transparently obvious. But what in concrete terms would Rubio do? 

The Donald's strategy is encapsulated in his Tweet: "We need a new President — FAST!"  

God help America if the best it can offer to succeed Obama is The Donald.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was right that the president needs to start to use the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism."  You do need to define the enemy. He said Obama didn't lay out "a plan for decisive action for victory over evil." 

But here is the Cruz Doctrine: As president he would "direct the Department of Defense to destroy ISIS."

Well, why didn't anyone else think of that?

Jeb Bush said that the US had put "self-imposed restraints" on its intelligence and military. "This is the war of our time. It should not be business as usual. We need a wartime commander-in-chief who is ready to lead this country and the free world to victory."

This is a nice bunch of words strung together. It would have been nice to hear what his secret plan for "defeating" ISIS is. Why wait?

Injecting some unintended humor, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's solution is: "We should be advocating for more concealed carry ability for law-abiding Americans and an end to unconstitutional gun-free zones." 

Obama ended his speech with the traditional "God bless America."

I hope He starts by blessing it with 2016 presidential candidates who can do more than offer false choices and empty platitudes to what is the major crisis facing Western Civilization.

Haaretz Watch - Week of November 29

Sunday –   Newspaper's TV critic bemoans Channel 10's expose of ties between the Palestinian Balad Party— the platform of Knesset members Basel Ghattas, Jamal Zahalka, and Hanin Zoabi – and Hezbollah.

Implying that the party, which openly declares it wants to replace the one Jewish state in the world with a 24^th Arab country, is being tarred and feathered because it is strident.

The head of the party, the man who still pulls the strings and funnels Islamist money from abroad is Azmi Bishara. He fled when his role as a foreign agent was exposed. He lives in Qatar.

Monday -  There's a good piece that commemorates today's anniversary of the anti-Jewish riots in the Arab world, including the WWII-era pogrom in Iraq. 

All this obviously well before the 1948 establishment of Israel.

But there is also an article in which a parallel is drawn between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. 

Both, writes Zvi Barel, are insincere in their apologies, both refuse to pay compensation (he means for the Mavi Marmara ) and both refuse to put the guilty responsible on trial. 

You don't have to be an admirer of our Napoleonic-leaning premier to find such an association revolting.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Look for my December 14th cover story in The Jerusalem Report
Have Reform Jews given up on Israel? 
You may be surprised to learn that...well, let me keep you in suspense.
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Tuesday - Last night Channel 2 led with a report that there was a very big story involving the police and Shin Bet but they couldn't tell us what it was about due to a court order.

This morning Haaretz heds with same report but adds that what they can't tell us involves Jewish terrorism.

In his column Moshe Arens argues that the best way to help Palestinian Arabs is not by granting them work permits to labor within the Green Line but to develop and expand industrial zones in Judea/Samaria where they can earn Israeli-like salaries and benefits. Of course the EU is against this approach and is undermining West Bank economy in the hope of pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines. The real victims of EU policy are the Palestinians who suffer from high unemployment and low pay in the WB. Naturally, the Palestinian Authority and UN could help them but easing the situation would indirectly benefit Israel so they'd rather see the Pals suffer.

Pals in Gaza are complaining that Gazans aren't getting enough visas to enter Israel for free medical treatment. No these complaints aren't directed at Hamas for creating a state of war but at Israel for not ignoring the state of war.

Finally, Haaretz reports that now that they've been paid more money by EU, Turkey limiting some illegal migrants from entering Greece.    

Nothing outstandingly outrageous today in section one today.

Wednesday - Not much to kvetch about in today's Haaretz front page.  The lead is again about the news they can't report connected to the Jewish terror gang that carried out the murders in Dura.  The page 1 main photo shows the smiling dimwit responsible for the arson attack on a dual Hebrew-Arabic school in Jerusalem. He's shown in court for his sentencing. I suppose Haaretz's message is that Jewish terror is no less a threat than Arab terror.

And in a sense they're right. In fact, Jewish terror while on the margins of Israeli society and claiming few victims is nonetheless a frontal assault on Zionist values and institutions from within. A sort of fifth column.

There's no point in quibbling about today's editorial and op-ed pages which are best simply skipped.  Haaretz has two pages of out-and-out opinion articles – on page 2 and on page 15 –wrapped around a viewspaper that also carries straight news.

Goes back to the beginning: I find myself surprised to be in agreement with the paper's TV critic who is smitten by the opening music to the Danish hit The Bridge. I also liked the dark serial and the sound of its music. Not sure I understand the lyrics. Sounds like a bunch of words strung together, as my buddy Gershom Gale used to say when he read copy that made no sense.

Incidentally, Israel Today (Wed) covers what The New York Times reported Tuesday about the extent of the butchery carried out in 1972 by a Palestine Liberation Organization squad that attacked Israel's Olympic athletes in Munich. Preceding the Islamic State by decades the Palestinian Arabs tortured and castrated some of the Israelis.  None of those who carried out the attack lived to collect their PLO pensions (saving EU taxpayers some money).

Thursday - Haaretz is back in its groove today after an off-day yesterday.

Page One carries a story about how ostensibly pro-Israel German lawmakers are worried about bilateral relations should groups funded by Berlin, Europe states, and the EU be required to report their activities and finances because these organizations basically serve as agents of foreign governments.

Groups like Peace Now would have to reveal their sources of income under some bills now before the Knesset.

Obviously the money defines policy. The policy is to drive israel back to '49 armistice lines.

Also on page One is a campaign waged by Haaretz columnist and Channel 10 advocacy journalist Raviv Drucker to use the courts to undermine distribution of the country's only non dovish/non populist, non-demagogic tabloid Israel Hayom.

So-called leftish Knesset members tried to essentially outlaw the paper via legislative action and failed,

So much for freedom of expression.

I know I said that I don't read the official leader / editorial on page 2, but today's supports another foreign funded lobby called Breaking the Silence in its efforts to undercut Israeli morale in the war under the guise of helping soldiers report illegal or immoral behavior by their comrades.

The UN which has done so much to spread peace around the world has a fellow stationed in Occupied Palestine to solve the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Haaretz reports that he's concerned that the Jewish terrorists responsible for Duma have not been brought to justice. 

Speaking of which, Silverstein, the (ahem) self-described pro-Israel  blogger reported the names of the terrorists in custody -- he's often given stuff by leftish Israeli journalists barred by court order from reporting sensitive details of ongoing investigations.

He's supposedly funded by his readers. I know it because a fellow I bought a bridge over the East River told me so. 

Anyway, and more importantly, now the question arises: are we dealing with another Avishai Raviv cock-up. Was the Shin Bet running a sting operation that got away from it?  That's what's being openly talked about on TV.  Time may not tell.

Is There a Future for The American Jewish Diaspora?

Dear Readers,

I have a piece in The Jerusalem Report  dated Nov. 16 entitled Is the Diaspora dying?

Demographic trends notwithstanding, Jewish leaders in America insist that the Diaspora is here to stay – no matter what the future holds for Israel.

While the piece is behind the magazine's paywall -- do contact me if you'd like a preview.

Shabbat shalom

Elliot