NOT IDIOTS...:

The Littlest Rebbe?: What a boy with Down syndrome tells us about belief: a review of Praying with Lior (Stuart Klawans, Nextbook.org)

To the self-image of American Jews, as found in the thick center of the bell curve, Lior would seem to present a double threat: first because he has Down syndrome, and second because he is energetically pious. A wobbly and bespectacled kid with the face of “a Chinese frog” (so says his older brother), Lior likes nothing better than to chant the traditional Hebrew liturgy, at full voice though in no settled key, while pounding out the rhythm on any handy flat surface. Secularists might see him as a figure from a horror movie: a boy in present-day Philadelphia, grotesquely inhabited by the ghost of a shtetl Jew. Professional scoffers at religion—a group whose books have lately been doing a brisk trade—might take him as cruel proof that only idiots believe in God.

But during the months when Trachtman’s documentary was gaining popularity on the Jewish festival circuit, it became clear that Lior arouses sympathy in viewers, not discomfort—and often something more than sympathy. Surprising numbers of moviegoers have been speaking of “the little rebbe” as if he were in communication with a real spiritual force. If this candid, guileless boy davens so hard, the reasoning goes, then maybe there is a God to daven to.

This response deserves investigation—and not just because Lior’s simple faith moves even people who otherwise cherish neither faith nor simplicity. The leap toward theology ought to be questioned, I think, because the movie itself doesn’t encourage you to make it. [...]

I’m sure the modern Orthodox on average are more likely than my kind of Jew to believe in the God they pray to, and that for black hats the rate runs higher still, but maybe if I earned the confidence of enough people in these groups I’d hear doubts from them, too. All I know is that some sociologists contend that the Orthodoxy flourishing in America today is both a tradition and an invention—the reconstruction, you might say, of a European past that is largely imaginary. If so, then whatever fervor you now find among the Orthodox might be as manufactured, as willed, as their stringency of observance. They force belief, while Conservatives and Reconstructionists defer it indefinitely, and the Reform offer hymns primarily to their own values.

If these people were Christians, we’d be discussing three modes of hypocrisy. Fortunately, though, no such sin need be alleged against Jews. We’re allowed to study our texts, and follow their instructions, without much caring whether they’re based on fact. We might even get away with being atheists, on the grounds that we haven’t put any god before Him. And yet, living within a Christian culture that pervades our sentiments, our language, our very categories of thought, those of us who still pray may understandably grow uneasy about lacking the most basic feature of religion, as this society commonly defines it. As Jews, we have no indwelling spirit. Human emotions? You bet, in surplus. An inner experience of the divine? No.

Yet we long for immanence, as Christianity has taught us to do, and so Christianity, I suspect, is the influence behind much of the current movement toward Jewish spirituality. An unacknowledged influence, of course: Nobody is going to celebrate the Eucharist in front of the Ark, or wrap herself in a prayer shawl and converse in her heart with Jesus. But convinced that we’re meant to feel something, we do what we can, short of idolatry.

...but, only the Stupid.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 3, 2008 9:55 PM