My Stance on Mitzvot

One of the chief reasons I felt ready to leave the Conservative Movement once I reached adulthood was that I always felt as though the Movement was instilling within me a sort of “Good Jew – Bad Jew” complex. What I mean by this is that, even in the worldview of Conservative Judaism that has embraced critical scholarship and things like the documentary hypothesis, there was a way to ‘do Jewish’ right and a way to do it wrong. This dichotomy was drawn on halakhic lines—if you were a USY regional board member and you were caught on Facebook on Saturday, then you were “setting a bad example.”

Reform Judaism offered me a different pathway—one that placed integrity as the highest principle. I fell in love with the notion of informed choice. I feel like Reform Judaism approaches life so much more realistically: We all have autonomy and power, even if it’s limited, and God does not zap people God thinks are doing it wrong with divine lightning anymore (probably never did; what can I say, I’m a bit skeptical there). So the great challenge of living a Jewish life is not impressing some transcendent being that has hung the weight of Mount Sinai over our heads like in the midrash, but rather it is to live up to our communities expectations of each other, and our expectations of ourselves.  I think that if we all took the V’ahavta seriously, and bound up mitzvot both between our eyes (in our thoughts/belief systems/values) and on our hands (in our actions) we would get so much more out of living Jewish lives.

As a Jew, the Torah has a claim on me. I am a member of this covenant community, and I, along with the thousand generations before me, have made a commitment. But that claim is not a vice grip, and I was not around when my ancestors wrote the Torah. They could not account for my particular historical situation. So in the current day as I reckon with my tradition, informed choice becomes the way to incorporate mitzvot. Using certain rubrics handed down to me by my teachers, I make a conscious choice whether or not to engage in a particular mitzvah by considering the tradition, my current situation, my community, and my conscience. Nine times out of ten this involves actually trying it out in real life, not merely a thought experiment. If a mitzvah can bring meaning to my life—be it tzedakah, kashrut, tefillin, bikur cholim, shmirat Shabbat, or hachnasat kalah (all of which I engage in in some form or another with varying degrees of traditional stringency)—I will give it a try. I’m not obligated to the actions, but I’m obligated to the process.