After
reading an essay by Emma Green in The Atlantic, I resolved to read The
Benedict Option, a brand-new book by Rod Dreher published just a few weeks
ago. (Readers
may be familiar with his 2015 book, How Dante Can Save Your Life, which
was very movingly written in the wake of his sister’s untimely death—and which
I liked very much—or with his essays for The American Conservative, where
he is currently a senior editor and weekly blogger.) Since it’s a book unlikely to land on
the night tables of most of the people who read my weekly letters, but more
importantly because it inspired me to think about our Jewish world in a new way,
I thought I’d use this opportunity to bring the book and its author to your
attention and to explain why I found his work so relevant and so personally
challenging.
The book is a flawed work in many
ways, and not only in terms of the author’s apparent inability to believe that
“regular” people (i.e., citizens who are specifically not members of
some vast conspiracy devoted to the furtherance of its own secret agenda) could
simply believe in marriage equality and in the unambiguous right of gay people
to be treated fairly, decently, and equitably in the marketplace and the
workplace. That, along with his remarkably harsh view that in vitro fertilization
should be outlawed as a version of mass murder no less heinous than abortion
itself (the author’s other major bugaboo), would be more than enough to make
most of us outside his world want to distance ourselves from the man and from
his judgmental, harshly unforgiving worldview. But that would be a mistake,
because he has something remarkable to say anyway…and it is something I think
we should all feel challenged to consider honestly in terms of our own
precarious place in the world.
The basic principle behind The
Benedict Option is that the war between traditional Christians and their
secularist enemies for America’s future is over and that, because (in the
author’s opinion) the good guys lost, American Christians who believe in the
principles that underlie their faith—and in the pursuit of a society rooted in
its values and its time-honored sense of virtue—should abandon the fantasy that
they can influence American social policy at all, and least of all merely by
voting for Republican candidates. The author’s estimation of President Trump in
this regard is particularly insulting, but what he has to say about the rest of
the President’s party is only slightly less disparaging…and the bottom line in
both cases is in any event the same: the author believes that the nation has
turned decisively and irrevocably away from its Christian roots, the people
have abandoned the only kind of Christianity worth preserving (which is, of
course, the author’s own), the liberal churches have sold their birthright for
a mess of tasteless (in both senses of the word) porridge that can neither
sustain nor even really nourish them, and the secular/humanist/pro-LGBT (these
are all used as roughly synonymous terms) forces that exist, as far as the
author is concerned, in a permanent state of war with the spiritual heritage of
“real” Christianity have won the day and will not relinquish their victory
easily or, to speak realistically, ever.
It’s a harsh appraisal of our world. And
it follows unsurprisingly that the author idolizes the monastic life—and
particularly the version of that life connected with the sixth century CE
saint, Benedict of Nursia, revered by Christians as the patron saint of Europe
and famous both as the founder of a dozen communities for monks in Italy and also
as the author of the Rule of Saint Benedict, a work in 73 short chapters
about how to live a rich Christian life in retreat from the secular world.
Dreher does not, however, think that the real solution to the modern
Christian’s problems lies in retreat into secluded monasteries and convents—or
at least not for those not personally called to the cloistral life—but rather
in a different kind of withdrawal, one that entails a permanent retreat, if not
from the entire public square, then at least from those parts of it that make
it impossible for the faithful to remain true to their ideals while in it. He
takes this idea quite far—strongly recommending that Christians withdraw their
children from public schools, that Christians undertake to the greatest extent
possible solely to patronize each other’s businesses, that efforts to influence
those outside the Church be abandoned while congregations instead work on
strengthening their devotion to their own heritage without the risk of
pernicious outside influence, that parents severely limit their children’s
exposure to television and particularly to the internet, and that, at least
ideally, Christians withdraw from the urban nightmare that prevails in
America’s godless cities and retreat to smaller towns in out of the way
places—just like the author’s home town in rural Louisiana—where the world will
just leave them alone and in peace. That, in a nutshell, is the Benedict
Option.
From a Jewish point of view, there’s a
lot to say. Here and there throughout
the book, the author nods to the success of certain communities within the
larger world of Jewish Orthodoxy in achieving that kind of separation from the
world. And, indeed, we all know of communities in Williamsburg and Crown
Heights that function roughly according to Dreher’s plan by avoiding public
schools, living in closed communities, doing business solely or at least mostly
with each other, denying their children contact with the world via television
or the internet, etc. What Rod Dreher would actually make of such communities
if he were actually to have to live in one of them for a few months is not hard
to imagine. And also amusing is the author’s apparent belief that the specific
lifestyle he so admires is how all Orthodox Jews live, not the lifestyle of a mostly
marginalized subset within the larger Orthodox community. But those are just
details, and the larger, more important challenge laid down at the feet of
Jewish readers by The Benedict Option has do with us and our future, not
with the author and his or his community’s.
I am not particularly interested in
asking how specifically Jewish Americans fit into the author’s plan for the
future, although that would surely be an interesting question to hear him
attempt to answer without sounding regretful that we even exist in
his—our—country. On the other hand, the chances that American Christians are
going to embrace the author’s proposal, let alone embrace it holus-bolus
and retreat from the world in order to have the time thoughtfully to
re-acquaint themselves with the works of the earliest Church fathers are nil.
Individuals might well be inspired by reading the works of John Chrysostom, the
fourth-century bishop of Constantinople…but we simply do not live in the kind
of idea- or principle-driven world in which the author’s idea could
conceivably—in my own opinion, at any rate—gain serious traction.
But what does interest me is the
kernel of Dreher’s idea: that, instead of endlessly beating their heads against
walls they cannot possibly break down, spiritual communities would do better to
focus inward and devote themselves to the cultivation of their own gardens. In
some ways, we have led the way in doing just that: although I’d be hard pressed
to find a way to describe the inclusion of Christmas on the list of federal
holidays as anything other than an egregious offense against the separation of
church and state, most of us have long since stopped caring or worrying about
it. The same could be said of the off-putting presence of Christmas trees in
federal post offices and in countless other governmental venues, but we
certainly haven’t followed through with the other part of the equation, the
part that calls upon us not solely to ignore that which we cannot alter,
but also to turn within and work at fostering the kind of Jewish
community that would thrive within its own boundaries precisely because it would
derive its energy from its own inner life and not by campaigning endlessly for
the approval of others.
Like Rod Dreher and the people for
whom he’s written his book, we too are not called to the cloistral life. And,
indeed, the idea of securing a Jewish future by retreating into closed
communities in out-of-the-way hamlets (like Kiryas Yoel, for example, except
seriously more remote) would interest almost none of us. But what does
appeal to me is seeking the Jewish future not by endlessly campaigning for the
approval of the world, but by strengthening the community from within.
In other
words, the Jewish version of the Benedict option would have us giving up the endless
moaning and groaning about our numbers—and, even more to the point, our ability
to manipulate those numbers to get the world’s attention—and instead turning our
attention to the propagation of a kind of Jewishness that was once basic and
ordinary…and which has, in our day, become—to say the very least—rare. Most of my readers will never have heard of
John Chrysostom (just for the record, one of the originators of literary
anti-Semitism)…but neither will they have heard of Bahya ibn Pakuda or Joseph
Albo, just to name two of our greatest and most profound authors and thinkers
almost completely forgotten by “regular” Jewish people outside the world of
academe.
The most
basic skills of Jewish life—being able to participate easily in Jewish worship,
for example, or having enough Hebrew to read and understand basic classical
texts…or even to follow along in a Ḥumash when the Torah is read aloud in
synagogue—skills that were once the bread-and-butter abilities of any educated
Jewish soul have become the province of the especially trained. Nor is this a
problem merely of the masses: we have acknowledged leaders in our communities
who have more or less no familiarity with the classic works of Jewish
literature, no visible allegiance to Jewish ritual, no knowledge of Hebrew…and
who don’t seem to feel even slightly burdened by their own ignorance. More to
the point, perhaps, we have undercut out own ability to be in awe of our own
culture heroes by tolerating a Jewish world in which those heroes are not only not
revered in Jewish circles but are almost entirely unknown, their very names familiar
to almost none.
If Dreher is
right about his world, could he also be right about ours? Could the future of
Jewish life in America end up having solely to do with our ability to create a
kind of Jewish cultural milieu so rich with meaning, so suggestive of spiritual
possibility, and so endlessly alluring both intellectually and emotionally that
by ignoring our numbers we paradoxically end up increasing them? Dreher laments
the degree to which the most foundational classic works of Christian theology
and spirituality are largely ignored even by people who self-define as
enthusiastic Christians. The same could surely be said of the Jewish community,
but what I took from Dreher’s book is the thought—the siren, endlessly alluring
thought—that it doesn’t have to be that way…and that the way forward could
well be the way backward, the way out could well be the way in, and the way to
grow could surely be, at least in the long run, not to care particularly if we
grow at all. Now that would be an innovative approach to the endless questions
we never tire of asking about our future but that none of us seems able
cogently and convincingly to answer!