Judaism and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

When I heard of the sad passing of Robert Pirsig last month at the age of eighty-eight, I decided to once again pick up my copy of his first and most famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, having not touched it since college. The book, which was something of a culture-bearer for the 1970’s Zeitgeist, describes a seventeen-day motorcycle trip taken by the narrator, his son Chris, and two friends, John and Sylvia Sutherland. The story alternates between a travelogue of the American landscape, the wrestlings of the narrator’s own soul, and long philosophical meditations – what he calls “Chautauquas” – on human nature, metaphysics, science, and otherwise.

In Pirsig’s memory, this morning I want to pick up on one particular and central “Chautauqua” of his book, one that I believe has profound implications not just for Zen and motorcycle maintenance but for Judaism and Jewish life.

On the subject of human understanding, there are, in the narrator’s view, two ways to look at motorcycles and, by extension, the world. The first, represented by the narrator, is the “classic” understanding. The second, represented by his traveling companion John Sutherland is the “romantic” understanding.

One with a “classic” understanding seeks to understand and master all the component parts and assemblies of a motorcycle. The ignition, the cam chain, the camshaft, the clutch, transmission pistons, and connecting rods: every part and, equally important, how they all fit together. Such a person has a deep appreciation for the intricacies and minutiae of motorcycle maintenance and is attentive to every variable as conditions demand: how altitude impacts oil pressure, heat impacts tire wear, all of it. The details matter, they must all be attended to; they all contribute to the “Zen” of the experience. In the classic understanding, the allure, appeal, and uplift of the motorcycle come by way of, not in spite of, such attention to detail.

In the “romantic” understanding represented by John Sutherland, the romantic is interested not in the minutiae, but in the artistry writ large, the broad brushstrokes that collectively make up the thrill of riding a motorcycle. In Pirsig’s words, the romantic proceeds by “feelings, intuition, and esthetic conscience.” (p. 62) If the motorcycle breaks down, well, that is what  mechanics are for, let them fix it. Those details not only don’t matter, but they are an impediment to the greater goal of the wind blowing in one’s hair, the sun warming one’s skin, the freedom of the open road. It is these things, not the spark plugs and valves, that provide the “Zen” of the romantic.

Two ways of seeing a motorcycle, two ways of seeing the world. One is all about the big picture, the aesthetic, the experiential, the emotional. The other makes no less of a claim to spiritual uplift, only here it will be found by way of attention to the very small stuff. It is a dichotomy that could be applied to so much of life. Those chefs who take pleasure in every ingredient of every recipe, and those people who just want to serve a good meal. Those who keep score, counting balls and strikes when watching a baseball game, and those who are happy just to enjoy a ballgame on a summer’s day with a hot dog and beer in hand.

As Jews, we may choose to adopt the language of today’s double parashah B’har-B’hukkotai. The romantic we may call the “b’har” approach. B’har – meaning “on the mountaintop” – is about the big picture, the awe-induced sense of God’s presence from ten thousand feet up. The other, the classic approach, we may call the “b’hukkotai” view. Im b’hukkotai teileikhu, if you walk in my laws. It is in the observance of the details – attention to each component part and their relationship one to the other – that is where uplift is to be found. Two ways of seeing the world, two wirings of the human soul – one neither better nor worse than the other, simply two pathways, for our purposes, towards finding God’s presence.

I grew up, as many of you know, in a physician’s household, my father seeing his patients in the hospital both after the office closed on Friday afternoon and then after shul and Shabbos lunch on Saturday afternoon. Shabbat, we know, starts and ends at very specific times based on sundown – early in the winter, and last night for instance beginning with candle lighting at 7:52 pm and concluding tonight at 8:59 pm. And yet, in the Cosgrove house when I was growing up, Shabbat always began at the sound of the door closing shut signaling my father’s coming home, and it ended when he left to go see his patients sometime on Saturday afternoon. Whatever the calendar said candle lighting or havdalah time was supposed to be was simply not a relevant data point in our home. Now, for reasons of both historical accuracy and because my mother would kill me if I didn’t say it, I must note that I did grow up in traditional Jewish home, kosher both literally and figuratively. And yet, as I grew up to be more observant of Jewish law, as I look back in gratitude at the home in which I was raised, it is clear that there it was the “b’har” view of Jewish life that mattered most, not the “b’hukkotai” view. We were not following “the letter of the law.” We were “romantic” in our approach: my father coming home, the family being together, the sight of the Sabbath table, the smell of the food, and the expectation that while you would go to synagogue, as long as you got there by the Torah service, the heavens would not crash down.

What is interesting about this dichotomy is that our people has felt it from the very beginning. Today, we concluded the book of Leviticus, the book that more than any other book of the Torah is all about ritual, the punctilious observance of specific rites at their prescribed time and season. And yet, we know, the lynchpin that holds the book together is the mountaintop injunction k’doshim tihiyu, you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. Shall we sweat the small stuff, or is it the heartfelt aspiration to imitate God that matters most? Some of our people’s most famous debates have been on this very subject. The prophetic rejoinder that, contrary to the claims of the priestly law, God’s concern is not the particulars of any sacrifice. Or the eighteenth-century split between the Hasidic and Misnagdic movements, or the debates between Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber on whether or not the observance of law is an impediment to holy living, or the nineteenth- and twentieth-century denominational splits between Reform and Orthodox. It all comes back to the same question. It is that famous story of the little boy sitting in the back of the synagogue, who, unable to follow the prayers, plays his flute to the dismay of all present, who subsequently learn that it was the melody of his instrument, not the scrupulous dispatching of their prayers, that turned God’s heart from judgment to mercy.

It is a question and tension that play out every day in the life of this synagogue and, for the matter, among American Jewry. I would contend that whenever the clergy talk together about the future direction of our services, it is this unspoken balancing act that is actually framing our discussion. Are we driven or obligated to provide a service that in both content and music accurately reflects the received traditions of our people? Or, shall we take a romantic approach, in which we no longer check off whether every stanza of every prayer is recited, but rather concern ourselves chiefly with the aesthetic experience of the worshipper, the grand arc of what takes place during these few hours in this sanctuary, our success measured by the extent to which we have provided a communal service of spiritual and intellectual uplift. It is a question we ask of our prayer services, but it is really a question we ask of all we do as Jews. Is the substance and soul of our faith, our Zen if you will, to be found in the faithful performance of every particular ritual, or rather in the larger aesthetic intent? Is the mandate of communal leadership to be “kosher” or “kosher style”? It is a question to which the answer is not any single response, but a continued vigilance lest we err too far to one side or another.

Friends, it would be an egregious misread of the last two thousand years to act as if attention to the particulars of Jewish law as “studied and lived, analyzed, and rhapsodized” was not fundamental to the inner power of our people. It would be an equally egregious misread of the condition of contemporary Jewry to think that to continue business as usual will guarantee the next two thousand years of Jewish history. Our approach must be twofold. For far too many American Jews, the language of Jewish ritual is an inaccessible black box. It is incumbent upon Jewish educators to warmly embrace the seeking soul of American Jewry, opening up the riches of our tradition, teaching that God’s presence may be found through the observance of Jewish law and the fulfillment of Jewish ritual. So too, it is the task of Jewish educators to tap into the romantic ambitions of those who are not yet engaged in the motorcycle maintenance of Jewish living and boldly write the next chapter of our people’s history. As the great scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Sholem once noted, Judaism can be defined as what every generation of Jews “chooses from the past, subtracts from and adds to, and redefines as the essence of Judaism as perceived by that generation.” We must, in the words of Rav Kook, be willing to renew the old, and at the same time, be courageous enough to sanctify the new.

I am only about halfway through Pirsig’s book this time around, and I can’t remember how it ends. So not knowing how he himself resolved the tension, I would only say that for Jews, the dichotomy he posits at the outset is not as irresolvable as it sounds. I can recall with great clarity walking to shul as a child with my father, and him saying to me something to the effect of “Elliot, all week I treat my patients, I perform surgery, I prescribe medicine, I put to work all the biology, the chemistry, the science that I have learned in all my years of being a doctor, and still Elliot, there are mysteries of the human body, the gift of life, and the human soul that neither I, nor anyone, can answer.” I think, though I am not sure, he was somehow trying to tell me that no matter how deeply we may probe, no matter how much we do, no matter how much we know, there will always, always be strivings of the spirit and murmurings of the heart that are left to be answered. It is these questions that bring us to our Judaism, today and every day. Through study, through prayer, through ritual, both received and still yet to be written, we respond to our innermost yearnings, as the journey of our people presses forward into the far-off horizon.