Rather, [this] thing is very close to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can fulfill it.
Devarim 30:14
One of the strongest longings of human beings today is for authenticity. We want to be ourselves, or to become ourselves. We admire children’s spontaneity, because they do not yet know how they “ought to be.” They are still impulsive and natural.
More and more, we distrust “objective” information because it is distant from our inner lives. It reasons too much and makes us forget what our real lives are all about. It has straight-jacketed us into the mainstream. What we want is to recapture and hold on to genuineness. Otherwise we choke. We even need to purchase pure butter and natural foods without artificial additives. We have been overwhelmed by the artificiality in our lives, and we crave authenticity.
The more we are suffocated by this disingenuousness, the more our emotional relationships with ourselves and others require space, because we have learned that neither science nor modernity can offer us a spiritual sanctuary. They are unable to teach us the stuff of life. Science is a shell surrounding what is real.
The Longing for Candle Light
In our complicated existence we are still romantics searching for candlelight instead of simply using electricity. But even romanticism has succumbed to rules. It began prescribing its own set of laws and decided how authenticity should be expressed in art and even music. Suddenly we were introduced to ambiguity.
Place Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man next to the poetry of the romantics and you discover the difference. Poetry becomes suggestive rather than literal. In the knowledge of this ambivalence we recognize that the world is not really what it appears to be. As in Plato’s world of Ideas, we discover a world much more real than its mirror image, which we mortals consider to be our world.
And so it is with us. We are not who we appear to be. We long to be ourselves, attentive to our subconscious and unconscious spiritual urges and experiences. But we are limited, bound by pressures and needs that we cannot escape because they are inherent to the outer world we live in. They make this world possible, and consequently unbearable to live in as untainted and real human beings.
And so we recognize that authenticity reflects a paradox. What, after all, is it? Is it dealing with our inner lives, or is it our sincere attempt to live in the outer world? Or maybe both simultaneously?
Perhaps we human beings are genuine, but we also play the part of being genuine. We may be good, but we love to impress others with our goodness; and we don’t know where one ends and the other begins. There is artificiality in authenticity.
L’Homme sauvage and L’Homme Civilisé
To use a French expression, we have cast aside l’homme sauvage, the natural, wild, and free man, and replaced him with l’homme civilisé, the civilized man of today. We have become estranged from ourselves, abandoning the paradisiacal purity of the natural man. Through the incessant “ought to” education of norms, the childish innocence has systematically been suffocated and ultimately destroyed. We are caught up in social conventions and behavior patterns. So, real love, friendship, and even good citizenship are frustrated.
The ideal of authenticity is like Adam and Chava’s before eating of the fruit in the Garden of Eden. Once one has bitten into the fruit of genuineness, artificiality emerges. Then man is in need of laws to restrain him so that he may survive, but his inner self pays the price. We, like millions of other people, sit in front of our computers that have opened new worlds for us but have made it more difficult to see the other. And so we long for more contact . . . more love . . . more human trust.
But within this lies an aspect of narcissism as well – the yearning to be with ourselves. This longing clashes with the needs of the other, social conditions, family, and society at large.
So, does real life not include social tradition and the “ought to,” despite the tension between authenticity and the needs of the society? It is this constant paradox that we must accept, however difficult it may be. Real life is the clash between our inner needs and our outer conditions. To choose one and reject the other is no longer life. To be sure, all this is the irony of our existence, but it should not be confused with cynicism. Since the time of Adam ha-Rishon (the first human being), it is the acceptance of paradox that gives life substance.
Halacha as Paradox
Halacha is built on this paradox; it is the impetus behind its call for authenticity as well as for the norms and behavior patterns it dictates even when they do not agree with the inner human being. Halacha is full of seeming contradictions that sometimes cause us deep frustration. One day it asks for inner authenticity; the next day it demands conformity. It refuses to inform us why in one case it asks for a genuine, personal inner experience, while in another it disturbingly demands compliance with rules and standards.
The great halachists battle over what should have priority, because they themselves are part of the “problem.” Since they are human beings, not angels, they reflect all the dimensions of human limitation and are therefore highly competent to decide on matters of Halacha, because Halacha deals only with a life of paradoxes and constraints.
Great halachists do not possess absolute knowledge. They are not scientists who deal with impartial conditions. They deal with human life. And once they or others start to believe that they are infallible, they have left the world of Halacha and succumbed to radical inauthenticity. It is for this reason that God gave the Torah to man. Torah lo ba-Shamayim hi – the Torah is no longer in Heaven.[1] Halacha is and needs to be unfinalized, since life can never be perfect. It is unable to conclusively solve all problems because this world is a place where romanticism and its own artificial rules clash with the external conditions of society. Life consists of tradeoffs: equality vs. liberty; justice vs. mercy; kindness vs. truth.[2]
All Halacha can do is offer guidelines when absolute answers do not exist. But it converts arbitrary solutions into demands, because loyalty to these guidelines needs to become part of the worship of God. It is God who set up this ambivalence and demands from man to live under these conditions.
Halacha makes rules where rules should not exist, but need to exist lest chaos ensue. But it is these very rules that create unsolvable problems that are inherent to our existence.
The Near Collapse of Halacha
In trying to ask for both religious authenticity and conformity, Halacha nearly collapses in its attempt to satisfy both, and consequently builds bridges that dangle loosely and are then declared by Halacha to be castles of security. Halacha is constrained by man’s need to look after his own spiritual wants: the playfulness and innocence of the child in all of us – our real I – and the fact that we have consumed the “fruit” and must now conform because we could not deal with the tree.It is this balancing act that becomes beautiful once the Divine Will declares it holy and teaches us that life’s absurdity has meaning.
Notes
[1] Bava Metzia 59b; Temura 16a.
[2] See Ramin Jahabegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Halban, 2007), 142–143.
Questions to Ponder
- Is authenticity really a Jewish value? Is it taught as a value in your Jewish circles, and if not should it be?
- Should we be aiming to return to authenticity we knew as children, or rather to an adult form of authenticity – and how do the two differ?
- Is it absolutely true in your experience that “neither science nor modernity can offer us a spiritual sanctuary”? And if not true, in what ways do they offer this?
- “Real life is the clash between our inner needs and our outer conditions” – but should both of these be granted equal weight, or should one outweigh the other
- What do you feel about the portrayal of halacha as “unfinalized” and “unable to conclusively solve all problems” – does that idea make you feel uncomfortable, delighted, comforted, or something else?
