Nothing Sacred

Douglas Rushkoff’s Nothing Sacred is rather all over the place (as one might say if one had a thickly superior British accent). The Judaism he favors isn’t a “traditional community with concrete values and well-defined rules” (1) but one that “stresses transparency, open-ended inquiry, assimilation of the foreign, and a commitment to conscious living.” Above all, Rushkoff argues, “it invites inquire and change. It is a tradition born out of revolution, committed to evolution, and always wiling to undergo renaissance at a moment’s notice” (2).

In fact, it’s a Judaism whose iconoclasm is so radical that it has little interest in God: “If God cannot be conceived in any way, if his existence is utterly out of the reach of human systems of belief and intellect, then for all practical purposes he does not exist. The evolution of God . . . is from the real, to the ethereal, to the inconceivable. This is why the spiritual crisis of the twentieth century, precipitated by the success of the scientific model and rationality that came with it, need not threaten one’s spiritual foundations. As long as faith finds its foothold in something other than the authority of God or the testaments of those who claim to have encountered him, logic and spirituality are not at odds. God is just not something Jews are supposed to worry about” (29). 

What he calls “abstract monotheism” isn’t a path to God but “the path through which they get over their need for him” and by which they come to assume responsibility for one another. Not much of a loss: Who wants to find a path to an abstract God in the first place?

It’s no surprise that Rushkoff considers “lapsed Jews” to be “the keepers of the true flame” (5). But this leads him not only far afield from anything that looks like Judaism but into self-contradiction. One of the virtues of Judaism as Rushkoff defines it is its “modernity.” Yet in the next paragraph, he complains that Judaism hasn’t resisted the cultural challenges of economic and cultural globalization: “instead of contending with . . . the impact of market culture on our children, Jewish outreach groups are hiring trend watchers to help them market Judaism to younger audiences” (3). It’s not clear why he’s unhappy with that. Perhaps this is just the most recent evolution of the flexible, modern, burnished Judaism he celebrates. And, perhaps, it takes something like devotion to God, and to “concrete values and well-defined rules” to resist the pressure.

Still, Rushkoff offers some nice readings of some biblical stories. What is slain in Egypt is not, he says, only the firstborn of Egypt, but the “firstborn civilization”: “Throughout the Torah, it is firstborn sons who meet terrible fates and their younger brothers who carry on the Israelite civilization. From Cain and Ishmael to Esau and Reuben, firstborn sons in the Torah get a bum deal, missing out on blessings, enduring God’s wrath, and getting banished. But to early Israelites who understood that Egypt was the firstborn civilization, the elevation of the second-born sons symbolized the ascendance of their emergent new society” (18–19).

He suggests that Yahweh’s charge that Israel is “stiff- necked” has a more complimentary subtext, referring to Israel’s “deeply seated iconoclasm” that prevents it from kneeling before man or icon (21).  He traces the expansion of Moses’s sense of justice in the early chapters of Exodus—from defending a brother Israelite from an Egyptian, to saving on Israelite from another, to defending the daughters of Jethro (who are strangers when he meets them) from shepherds: Moses’s story shows “how for Jews the definition of social justice has an ever-expanding radius” (34–35).

Helpful observations, but not enough to rescue a book whose central thesis is rather all over the place.