Responding to Religulous

One of the last things I did this year to prepare myself for Yom Kippur was to see Bill Maher's movie, Religulous. The movie is not exactly a documentary, in the traditional sense, and not a narrative, although it is Bill's search for some meaning in the wilderness of religious fundamentalism. But maybe this is an unfair characterization. Bill might say that his film was an argument against religion. One also might say it was his giving the finger to religion. This is a matter of perspective. I am simply trying to let the reader understand where to position the movie relative to their own experience with movies that are not fiction, docudrama or documentary.
The movie starts in Megido, the biblical Armagedon. This really sets the tone because we understand from his choice of openings that he is going to attack the religion for its literalism. It's as if to say, “Look at this place. This is where millions of people think the end of days will start.” And he is right for having problems with the literalism, but he is wrong for being so patronizing as to say, “Millions of people have wrong beliefs,” because, by nature, beliefs are not about right and wrong. They are beliefs. If we hold them, we think we are right. If people don't share our beliefs, we tend to think they are wrong because we cannot have dissonant understandings of the world at the same time. Or maybe we can.
Maher's director, Larry Charles, who also made Borat, is very good at making people look bad, ignorant, ridiculous, but there is something unfair and unethical about making your case this way. It's very much like the current elections. One side or the other tries to invalidate the plans and approaches of the other by slandering the character of the planner. There was little wrong with Mahatma Ghandi's non-violent civil disobedience, nor with his prodigy Martin Luther King, Jr. But both men cheated on their wives. Should we throw out the baby with the bathwater because the guys who drew the bath were human and made mistakes? I don't think so. This is how I approach the subject of the elections. There is room to question the efficacy of the person with the plan, but we need to discuss the plan not the character of the planner. And what the film Religulous does, over and over again, is make the religious seem like morons, which is not necessarily the case. Furthermore, there is much less value in the discussion if it only centers on the outcome and not on the motivation. This is what bothers me so much.
Of course this should bother me. I am training to be a rabbi. I want to bring what I understand as Judaism to Jewish people and their families who want to engage with me in being a holy community as we understand the Torah and later writings. I accept that this is a very problematic statement because it puts me in the same boat as all the charlatans who use religion for their own benefit. But I am also in the same boat as Bill Maher who just wants to be guided by rationalism and ethics. For me, the rabbis left us a Talmud full of discrepancies for us to know that the answers are not final, that the debate is important and that “the Torah is not in heaven,” which is a line they use when they argue against the voice of God.
Two Shabbatot (Saturdays) ago, I sat in shul (synagogue) and heard my daughter give her dvar Torah (sermon) at her bat mitzvah in which she said that there is a discrepancy between Moses' use of the line, “it is not in heaven,” and the rabbis. Moses uses this line to tell us that Torah is not inaccessible. He says that we don't need to swim across the sea to reach it. The rabbis quote Moses in order to say that the Torah is, “not in heaven” and therefore it is ours to interpret. This is totally antithetical to fundamentalism and I still kvell thinking about my daughter sharing this brilliant teaching. Maya said that she sees the different uses of the same idea and sides with the rabbis. Torah is here on Earth for our interpretation.
The problem with this interpretation, like the problem with Bill Maher's movie, is that it leaves us open to relativism, and this is also a problem with the Talmud. In the same story, in the same paragraph where the rabbis invoke Moses, they also invoke a line from Genesis (I think) that says, “go according to the majority.” Since I'm not completely certain about this source, I won't dispute its usage here, but I definitely have a problem with this concept. On the one hand, I am proud of the Jewish source for democracy, and on the other I am fearful that a majority could be the defining of morality.
For Bill Maher, and for his nemesis, Ben Stein, who also made a movie about religion this year, science is the definition of right and wrong. Both think that if science can “prove” something than it is definite and absolute, and I am just as skeptical about this as Maher is about religion.
In his defense, Bill Maher asks us to doubt. He doesn't want a world full of atheists, I think, because that would be a different type of certainty, he just wants us to not be so certain that our beliefs are universal truths. But what I find troubling about this approach is what bothers me so much about the movie. It is what bothers me about post-modernism. They deconstruct and don't offer anything to build with.
I am quite certain that religion, as Maher points out, has been manipulated to benefit those in power. It has been the cause and justification for many wars and human tragedies. But religion, as I understand my Judaism, is also about trying to understand larger questions about our existence and our purpose. In the absence of this discussion in civic society, I turn to the tradition that has been exploring these subjects for millenia and ask, what have we been doing right and what needs to be changed. Just as I have a problem accepting that monotheism is the final answer to the great questions about morality, I have equal concerns about atheism and the absence of ritual and discussion about our role here on Earth.
In Religulous, Maher makes religion out to be a bad substitute for science, which it is. My rabbi says, when he wants scientific answers he turns to science and when he wants religious answers he turns to religion. This is a great way to avoid dissonance and make room for a plurality of answers to complex human needs. Religulous seems to replace religion with reason, which can also be a flawed absolutism. Not all things are reasonable in all times, and not all things need rational answers.
For those of us who do not take scripture to be completely literal or historical, there is nothing wrong with using the story of Adam and Eve to say that we are all part of a human family, and there is nothing wrong with having bad examples from biblical figures when we understand them to be there to show us how not to behave.
Last year, during the reading of the Judah and Tamar story, I gave a dvar Torah to the Jewish Community Relations Council on this portion of the Torah and expanded the issue to a larger question; why is there so much familial deception in the Genesis stories? I suggested that maybe we are meant to be appalled by the behaviors of our forebears and thus to not follow their bad ways. I used this to make the point that maybe the same should be applied today when we deceive ourselves about the way we treat the Palestinians under our control. Instead of finding ways to excuse ourselves, maybe we should find ways avoid doing what would normally be repugnant to our sensibilities. This type of parshanut, interpreting the Torah, is a beautiful example of how to make scripture come to life in productive ways. It is a method offered to us by the rabbis and it is worthy of praise. This is what is missing for me in the post-modern world where things are deconstructed and unpacked, but there is no room, nor tools for constructing a conjoint, progressive agenda or understanding.
Ultimately, people like Bill Maher and his director, Larry Charles, can make us laugh and get on a high horse as they patronize the faithful, but for us agnostic adherers to ritual and tradition, they offer very little and the joke grows old much too quickly.