Elementary Forms of Religious Life

2012 marks the one hundred year anniversary of the publication of one the most important volumes in the study of religion – Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. One can rarely say that a single book defines a discipline, but in this case there is consensus that the entire field of religious studies may be understood as an extension of and reaction to Durkheim’s book. Admittedly, to the world at large, the centennial of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life may not be in the same league as the 100th anniversary of the Oreo, but for those of us in the business, this is a very big deal.

In studying everyone from the Australian Aboriginals to the Pueblo Indians Durkheim sought to understand the essential nature of the religious experience. His research is not only descriptive, but also a bit prescriptive. As he states in his introduction, in turning to these primitive societies, we may “arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.” (14) For Durkheim, religion is an essential and permanent aspect of humanity. The “elementary forms of religious life” that he identifies are common to all religions no matter what era or context.

So why is this French book of religious sociology so important? Durkheim’s most famous and debated claim is his contention that more than being about belief, the core of the religious enterprise is its social nature. Durkheim’s defines religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” (62) For Durkheim, it is the collective and communal nature of religion that is key; the supernatural or spiritual dimension of religion is not his concern. All religions are equally true…and false; faith is not the point. Religions share the basic goal of giving communities the structures, rites and rituals to respond to common human emotions: joy, grief, thanksgiving, awe and so on.

All this, if you took an introductory religion class in college, you may already know. What you may not know is that Emile Durkheim’s name at birth was actually David Emile Durkheim and that he was the fourth child of Rabbi Moses and Melanie Durkheim, the son and grandson of rabbis. Durkheim’s adoption of his middle name and his journey from a meager rabbinic home to the prestigious Sorbonne paralleled the intellectual and economic acculturation of much of French Jewry in the late 19th century. As the historian Deborah Dash Moore argues, Durkheim’s scholarly contributions can best be understood in this context. It is altogether significant that Durkheim’s intellectual coming of age took place when it did, in the wake of the Dreyfus trial in 1894, in which the French Jewish captain was falsely accused of treason. For Theodore Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, it was the Dreyfus trial that spurred him to reject the promise of emancipation and turn to the establishment of a Jewish State. Durkheim’s scholarship, concurrent with Herzl’s activism, provided French Jewry with the language and tools to express their particularity as full participants in the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. To attack a French Jew was not just an act of anti-Semitism, but an attack on the very values enshrined in the French constitution. In words eerily applicable to the news out of France this past week, Durkheim wrote, “Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honor inspires us with a feeling of horror, in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned.” Durkheim was no friend of the supernatural; he was a thoroughly assimilated Jew. With his antipathy for theology, for the ancestral rites and beliefs of his Jewish heritage, his is a religion for atheists. Yet, it was Durkheim’s focus on the communal character of religion which, no less than Herzl’s state, reflected an effort to help Jews, in their own eyes and the eyes of the world, integrate into the modern world without shedding their particularity. It is the rites, rituals, and ceremonies of religion that give any church (or synagogue) its sense of cohesion, its sense of purpose and place in civil society.

A case in point is our parashah, Va-yikra – the sacrificial system of Leviticus – which, while not receiving full treatment by Durkheim, would readily find a home in his schema. The rites, the cult, the sacrifices of animal and fowl, gruesome as they are, reflect a wide variety of celebrations and occasions for worship, both public and private. Thanksgiving, sin, forgiveness, festivals, purity, birth and death – all of the ages and stages that make life, life – these are the rites that defined the Israelite community, these are the elementary forms of Israel’s religious life. Of course, in a community of faith, these rituals have God at their center – an allowance that Durkheim would see as secondary at best. But even the great sage Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed sounds like a precursor to Durkheim when he explains that the object of Israel’s ancient religion could not have been God, who we are told neither desired nor needed the sacrifices. The sacrificial system, according to Maimonides, bore no intrinsic significance; rather, it was only because God understood ancient Israel’s need for communal worship and association that the sacrificial system was instituted and allowed. (Guide 3:32)

As interesting as all this may be, given that we are in a synagogue and not a university classroom, the question is not about Va-yikra, Maimonides or Durkheim, but about us, a community of believers. As contemporary Jews, do we maintain our rites, rituals and practices merely for the purpose of engendering group consciousness and intergenerational continuity? Is it conscionable for us to entertain a Judaism whose teeth derive not from an attachment to God, but an attachment to common folk practices?

Before I answer the question, you should know that such a Judaism actually has a name and a spokesman. It is called Reconstructionist Judaism and its primary spokesman is Mordecai Kaplan. Durkheim would have never believed in reincarnation, but long after Durkheim died, he did come back to life, as it were, in the thought of Kaplan, whose book Judaism as a Civilization repackages Judaism in Durkheim’s language. Worship is not for God, but for common consciousness; religious ritual is not commanded, but a shared set of folkways; the Torah is not given by God, but a narrative passed down through the generations; tallit, tefillin, shofar and lulav are all objects of the cult, denuded of their metaphysical significance. For that matter, Kaplan’s book, written some forty years after the Dreyfus trial, reflects a sociological move similar to Durkheim’s book in. By framing Judaism as a system of folkways, Kaplan effectively announced American Jewry as full participants in the project called America. As evidenced by the JCC movement that his legacy, Kaplan’s articulation of Judaism bears the potential to let American Jews retain their particularity, and, at the same time, lay claim to being full participants in the diverse landscape of American life.

Durkheim, Kaplan, Maimonides. These are serious names. A little humility is in order before taking issue with their claims, especially in the last few paragraphs of a sermon. And I must admit they do have a point. Every one of us who will be sitting down in just a couple of weeks for a Passover Seder knows that the power of ritual need not be contingent on the presence of God or on confirming the historicity of the event being commemorated. The rituals, liturgies and traditions of our people have a hold on us, in our homes and as a people. In so much of what we do, it is the social dimension of our Jewish practice that binds us – past, present and future.

And yet, it is not enough. As I have said many times from this pulpit, if Judaism is presented merely as a set of folkways, functionally equivalent to any other faith or lifestyle choice, then I am not exactly sure what makes Judaism worth preserving. If my turn to religion is merely an effort to find vehicles to express joy, sorrow, awe, commitment, serenity, sin and forgiveness, Judaism is very good, but there are certainly other religions that do it as well if not better. In addition, times are different. It is neither 1894 nor 1934. Unlike Durkheim or Kaplan, we do not need to justify ourselves as Jews to America. Rather our problem is that we need to construct a compelling argument for Jewish identity in an America all too willing to help us shed our particularity. Our faith, unlike that of Durkheim and Kaplan, needs to be assertive, confident, bold and with a touch of the supernatural. Jewish life must not be understood as a reasonable option among many, but as an expression of our covenantal relationship with God, the core of who we are, and we can’t imagine it otherwise. Embracing our own faith tightly need not interfere with someone else’s ability to do the same with theirs. If anything, I think the only thing impeding American Jewry’s full-throated commitment to Judaism is us – Jews.

For all this, we could say Dayenu, it would be enough. But the best reason I can give why Durkheim and Kaplan may be good for the classroom but not for the sanctuary is that in the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a believer. This is my being and my heritage. Kaplan and Durkheim fail the kishke test. From my religion, I seek the gentle caress of the sacred, the awe of standing before God, the belief that there is in this world a set of demands that God asks of me as a Jew and as a human being. And while the totality of God’s will may ever elude my reach, reach I shall – through prayer, through practice and through study. The forms of my religious life may be elementary, they may be advanced – I don’t know. But they are mine, given and asked of me by God. A God both near and far, past and present, particular and universal, a God that I set before me always, in every step of my life.