Judaism: The Ultimate Counterculture

The Culture We Live In

At a recent convention of Torah-school teachers, a topic discussed at length was the problem of the textbooks used in the secular departments of their schools. There is much in these books which is antithetical to Torah and has the status of bona fide apikorsus (heresy). The discussion centered on how educators should deal with these materials, given their schools’ mission to transmit the truth of Torah beliefs and the prohibition to impart ideas which contradict Torah. Yet, solving the problem of textbooks is the equivalent of using a tissue to plug a hole in a dam, for the content of textbooks constitutes a small fraction of the anti-Torah ideas with which a young person has to contend while growing up in the Western world. Apikorsus, either overt or implicit, is ubiquitous and woven into the very fabric of the surrounding culture. Wherever we turn, from between the lines of news reports, to literature, to the messages on billboards and in advertisements, we are confronted with ideas antithetical to Torah.

The Fundamental Difference:

The most pervasive apikorsus in contemporary society regards the definition of life and its purpose. Jews believe that Man has a soul that thirsts insatiably to draw close to God. In fact, the purpose of life itself is to satisfy this thirst. Standing in the way of Man’s reaching this goal is his yetzer hora and its drives for the pleasures of the flesh and the ego. These drives set up Man’s self, and not God, as the focus of Man’s existence and make it impossible for him to draw close to God. Thus, drawing close to God requires us to overcome our yetzer hora. All this stands in stark contrast to the surrounding culture which sees as the purpose of life the enhancement of the self and the gratification of the yetzer hora drives. Success and happiness are measured by how much satisfaction of the drives for food, sex, wealth, fame and power one can attain in one’s lifetime. God, if He has any role at all, is merely an uninvolved, impotent bystander.
This secular perspective on life is based on a more fundamental assumption, namely, that there is no Creator concerned with human life, only a universe that came into being randomly and contains human life that evolved by random mutations. Based on these principles, a constant flow of messages emanates from the sources of authority in the surrounding culture—from academia, from the media and from the arts and entertainment communities—proclaiming that what happens in the world is determined by natural, autonomous forces which submit only to the laws of statistics. Accordingly, prayer is for superstitious fools who believe that God is the highest power and that they can change His mind by supplicating Him. A corollary of these assumptions is that there can be no spiritual imperative that Man should heed. God never spoke to Man nor were the Jewish people ever given a special role in history or commanded to live by the Torah. This entire view of life is, of course, in direct contradiction to the most basic beliefs of Judaism.

The Influence of the Outside Culture

We are all subject to a subtle and ongoing indoctrination in Western civilization’s view of life as centered on Man and his attainment of physical pleasure. Nearly every advertisement contains the suggestion that the purchase of a particular product will assure us of the satisfaction of physical desires, of sexual pleasure or of personal recognition and importance. These advertisements invariably display people who are happy because they tasted a certain breakfast cereal, purchased a certain car or used a certain toothpaste. Movies,television and the Internet are filled with fantasies about people’s success at winning a girlfriend or achieving wealth or fame. Power is glorified. The icons of the culture are symbols of power: sports stars, who can overpower the opposing team, and war heroes, who can overpower the enemy. Feminism empowers women by ending male domination, and the homosexual rights movement empowers those with deviant sex drives. Politicians’ campaigns are based less on noble ideals or a vision of the common welfare than on the gratification of their constituents’ desires.
If the messages with which we are inundated from womb to tomb consist of gratification, this attitude must perforce have a deep influence on whoever grows up in this culture.

Jewish Culture

In direct opposition to Western culture stand the Jewish people. We strive to emulate our forebear, Avrohom Avinu, who was called “Ivri” because he was on the “other side (eyver) of the river” in his rejection of the idolatrous views of the rest of the world.1 In the same manner, Jews refuse to accept a scale of values which has as its apex the enhancement of the self. Jews proclaim that, to the contrary, Ha-kin’a ve-ha-ta’ava ve-ha-kavod motzi’in es ha-adam min ha-olam—“Jealousy, lust and glory-seeking destroy a person’s life.”2 Life is for controlling the yetzer hora, not for enhancing it. Thus, the ideal Jew is he who controls his animal drives and who is kind, humble and giving, not one who seeks gratification of his physical desires, recognition, fame and dominion over others.
As a result, there is virtually no area of life in which Jews faithful to Torah share the perspective of the Gentile nations. Since lust is our enemy, an intrinsic part of Jewish culture is tzenius—sexual modesty—and separation of the genders, which enable us to curb our lusts. The sex drive is not a goal unto itself but a means, for bonding husband and wife and for propagating a humanity which will come closer to God. It serves as a basis for marriage, which is the framework for the family unit in which man and woman can complement each other in coming closer to God, bearing and raising children to become His servants. Money and food, too, are used to overcome privation and hunger, rather than serving as the goals of life in themselves. Children are not a vehicle for enhancing one’s personal status but embody the future of the Jewish people. Hence, the point of education is not merely preparation for a livelihood, but primarily for the purpose of inculcating the young with Torah values. Death, too, is viewed very differently in a Torah framework. The surrounding culture silently ignores the phenomenon of death, which is an inconvenient, indeed unnerving, contradiction to the notion that the purpose of life is the pursuit of worldly pleasures. For Jews, man’s eventual demise serves as a reminder that the material world is all vanity and that life is a corridor to a World-to-Come where Man is rewarded for a lifetime spent coming close to God. Jewish culture, then, is based on the perspective that life is for overcoming the yetzer hora, not enhancing it, a perspective which is, in turn, founded on the existence of a Creator who gave Man life for this purpose.

Combating the Outside Culture

If the perspectives of Jews on life are so diametrically opposed to those of their host societies, and the latter are ubiquitous, adjusting our textbooks will surely not suffice to address the problem of societal influences inimical to Torah. But how, then, are we to survive in face of a culture which threatens to undermine nearly all of our core beliefs? One solution might be to withdraw from any contact with the outside world and to live our lives on an impermeable ideological island untainted by what exists beyond its borders. No less an authority than the Rambam suggests that one who dwells among evildoers should choose the isolation of the desert to escape their influence.3 In fact there are some communities, comprised of Chassidim and Chareidim, who have chosen this option, with varying degrees of success.4 However, a vast majority of the Jewish people will continue to live and interact with the culture around them, being unable or unwilling to move into isolated ghettoes of the spirit. How are they to fend off the continuous onslaught of the contemporary culture’s subversive messages and hostile values?
The only viable solution is to become proactive, to actively combat that culture and beat back its advances. We must overcome its messages with our own. Below are several areas in which we can make particular progress, beginning with our elementary and high schools.

The Definition of Life:

Foremost, we must imbue our children with the idea that Man is not an animal, but an exalted being whose soul thirsts for closeness to its Creator. We must impress upon them the understanding that a normal, healthy human being recognizes that there is a Ribono Shel Olam—and, hence, enjoys doing Mitzvos—and that succumbing to the yetzer hora empowers Man’s lower self.
We must expose the culture which lives for the yetzer hora by demonstrating what happens to a society which lives for kin’a, ta’ava and kavod. That way of life leads to unhappiness, to drug addiction, alcoholism, disease, murder, corruption, the breakdown of the home, and the dehumanization of man. We must show our children who the idols of that culture are in all their moral decrepitude: the football star who physically abuses his wife; the basketball star who is a drunk driver; the baseball star who uses performance-enhancing medications; the movie star who is addicted to drugs and commits suicide.
On the other hand, the Jewish people’s understanding that life is about coming closer to God by striving to overcome the yetzer hora leads to human success and greatness. History cannot match the personalities produced by the Jewish people in unsurpassed numbers in every generation, such as the Rambam, the Vilna Gaon, the Chazon Ish and the multitudes of their peers.
These people achieved moral greatness and human happiness through meticulously living by the values of the Torah and its laws.

Belief in Torah:

We must clearly explain to our children why we believe and live as Jews, namely, because we received on Mount Sinai the Torah in which God commanded us in our way of life. We must clarify that we do not believe in Torah out of blind faith but because we have an unbroken tradition that God gave our nation His Torah, an event that involved millions of Jews and could not have been fabricated.
In addition to our tradition regarding the truth of the Torah, the Torah itself is its own best evidence of its veracity. Its unerring prophecies could only have been made by a Divine Being. Its inner consistency despite its infinite complexity is the greatest evidence of its authenticity. And further evidence of this authenticity is that whoever lives by the Torah experiences total fulfillment.

God:

A Jew knows that God exists because the Jewish people experienced hearing Him when He gave us the Torah. In the Torah, God teaches us that He created all that exists in order for Man to come close to Him by performing his Mitzvos, and that He rewards those who keep the Torah and punishes those who do not. It is crucial to expose to our children the folly of the worldview that is put forward as an alternative to belief in a Creator: the Theory of Evolution which posits that life evolved by chance. Our students should know that, contrary to received opinion, Darwinian theory and its later variations contain many logical deficiencies that the science establishment prefers to ignore. These issues should be addressed head-on in schools for many reasons, not least of which is that doing so will result in the strengthening of emunah in the Creator.5

The Jewish People:

We must teach our students that the Jewish people is unique. We were chosen by God to receive the Torah and to bring the world to the recognition that there is a God. Because we are unique, a special hashgachah (Providence) has intervened all through history to this very day to enable us to endure. Our history studies should include the countless miracles which contributed to Jewish survival throughout history, noting that this survival is no less miraculous than the Exodus from Egypt.

Science:

We must teach our children a proper perspective about science. Students should be taught the limitations of science. They have to know that, although science has acquired immense knowledge about nature, that knowledge is miniscule compared to what science does not know. We should teach them that scientific theories based on experiments should be accepted, but that we need not accept theories, such as those regarding the age of the universe and the origin of life, which, by their very nature, are based on speculations about the past.

Implementation

We must implement this counteroffensive by direct action. It is clear that the problem is vast and not amenable to easy solutions, but we are obligated to make a beginning. The first step is to create in our schools, beginning with the sixth grade, a curriculum that implants an awareness of the real nature of Judaism. The ideas presented here—the beliefs of Jews and how these beliefs differ from those of other nations—should be expanded upon and taught in our schools in a distinct course, for which a suggested name would be Yahadus (Judaism).6 We must provide serious time for this course even at the expense of other Torah studies. In conjunction with a Yahadus course, an intrinsic part of the professional development of teachers should include, in addition to methods of instruction in particular subjects, training in how to impart to their students the messages of the Jewish value system. Teachers untrained in the transmission of Torah values cannot possibly be expected to put a stop to the infiltration of the culture of the world into our camps.
Judaism is under attack from many quarters. The most serious and insidious attack is the infiltration, through various means, of the value systems of our host nations into our society, resulting inevitably in our assimilation of those values. We must bring to the attention of our people—and especially to our children—what true Jewish values are and why we reject the culture of the nations.
Judaism is, and has always been, a countercultural force in human society. As long as we remain steadfast in our own beliefs and values, we will flourish. It is only when we begin to adopt the cultural understandings of the other nations that we fail.
Jewish leadership must take up the battle to teach fellow Jews that our survival depends upon maintaining our uniqueness as a nation. This uniqueness is expressed in our willingness to live by a distinct scale of values, one in which God, not Man, is the focus of our existence. Jewish history began with one man, Avrohom, willing to defy entire societies arrayed against him “across the river.” The final chapter, too, requires us to act as he did, serving as a counterculture to the man-centered hedonism and nihilism of our times.

1 Midrash Rabba, Bereyshis 42:13.
2 Avos 4:21.

3 Rambam, Deyos 6:1.
4 Over fifty years ago, the Satmar Rav reportedly asked the Chazon Ish: “The Rambam says
that we have to go live in a desert rather than live in an evil society. Why are we not following
his advice?” The Chazon Ish answered: “Nowadays, the Beys haMidrash is our desert.”

5 Two recent books, among others, provide excellent support for such a project: Rabbi Moshe
Meiselman’s Torah, Chazal and Science (Lakewood, NJ: Israel Bookshop Publications, 2013);
and Dr. Lee M. Spetner’s The Evolution Revolution: Why Thinking People Are Rethinking the
Theory of Evolution (Brooklyn, NY: Judaica Press, 2014).

6 A textbook needs to be commissioned on this subject, a project which the umbrella Torah school organization, Torah Umesorah, could well undertake.