Vampire Weekend's Surprising Jewish Stories
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Why Jewish culture encourages and celebrates contrarian thinking and doing.
Contrarian thinkers are trailblazers in business, politics, social activism, healthcare, technology, and education — visionaries who have the foresight to see hidden opportunities and the courage to lead us down the road less traveled.
But contrarians are also polarizing and sometimes teeter between brilliant and crazy. Plus, humans have a tendency to be suspicious of new ideas, many of which appear unrealistic and even unfathomable. These ideas can make us feel insecure because they challenge a variety of our day-to-day assumptions about how certain things work, or how we think they are “supposed” to.
Thus, we make judgments based on simplifying, stereotyping, and engendering cultures which limit our beliefs about what is probable and possible, and about who is capable. In our complex world, long-standing mental models allow us to efficiently make sense of things.
“It’s a natural cognitive process that by and large has stood the test of time,” according to Chengwei Liu, a professor of strategy and behavioral science in Germany.
In theory, this process should be able to accommodate contrarian ideas — if everyone builds their own model, someone ought to devise a new and better one time and again. But inevitably we benchmark “successful” models or adopt the models of people with more social leverage and clout.
As such, we often face strong social pressures to conform to the dominant culture, which is rooted in the dominant mental model. If we’re not careful, this can easily lead to groupthink, in which members of a group prioritize unanimity over more realistically appraising a given situation.
For example, Abraham’s father, mother, and all the people around him were idol worshipers, and he worshipped with them. But at the age of 40, Abraham realized that there was one God who created everything, and that there is no other God among all the other entities (known as monotheism).
The whole world stood on one side, and he on the other. Therefore, according to the midrash, he is called "Avraham ha-Ivri", Abraham the Hebrew, which also means the one who stood on the other side. The world was going one way and Abraham stood against them, carving out his own path and becoming the first Jewish contrarian
The world was going one way and Abraham stood against them, carving out his own path and becoming the first Jewish contrarian
Hence why Jewish and, by extension, Israeli culture encourage and celebrate contrarian thinking and doing, as characterized by a willingness to take risks and commit to a unique vision. This has historically allowed Jews to blaze new trails and buck the status quo, not just for Judaism and the Jewish People, but for the world.
Here are a few examples which illustrate the power of Jewish contrarianism:
Education is mainstream today, but thousands of years ago, that was not the case — that is, until Judaism contributed to schools and scholarships as we know them. Elementary school learning was regarded as compulsory by Simeon ben Shetah as early as 75 BCE and Joshua ben Gamla in 64 CE. The education of older boys and men in a beit midrash (study hall) goes back to the Second Temple period.
And the Talmud stresses the importance of education, stating that children should begin school at age six. Rabbis added that they should not be beaten with a stick or cane, that older students should help younger ones, and that children should not be kept from their lessons by other duties.
Judaism honors wisdom above everything else, which is why for millennia Jews have been obsessed with learning Torah.
Furthermore, Judaism honors wisdom above everything else, which is why for millennia Jews have been obsessed with learning Torah, despite persecution and hardships, throughout their tumultuous exile.
Judaism introduced the concept called Shabbat. It’s why we have a weekend — you know, the end of a week, to encourage rest and relaxation, a clear separation between the week that was and the one ahead.
According to Eviatar Zerubavel in his book, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week, having a fixed day of rest was most likely first practiced in Judaism, dating back to the sixth century BC. In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill, so that Jewish workers didn’t need to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
“Shabbat is a gift for all living creatures, humans and animals, Jews and non-Jews,” Zack Bodner wrote in his book, Why Do Jewish? “In a world that doesn’t stop moving, it is permission to stop. In this moment when we are charging ahead, Shabbat is our license to catch our breath.”
In Judaism, the basic information and concepts are laid out in writing, but the vast majority of the Torah must be learned orally. The give-and-take exchange from teacher to student is a key aspect of the Torah’s transmission.
Approximately 2,000 years ago, the Romans captured Jerusalem and sent its Jewish inhabitants into exile. The leader of the Jewish People, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, Judah the Prince, saw that the teacher-student method of transmitting Torah was in danger of being disrupted, so he wrote down the Oral Torah to save it from being forgotten and lost.
As the generations passed, it was necessary to write down more information to explain the Oral Torah, which became what is called the Talmud, or Gemara. Today, the basic laws of Jewish living are published in the Code of Jewish Law, or what is known as Shulchan Aruch, literally meaning “set table.”
As the “People of the Book,” our longevity is driven by our desire to debate, to dig deeper in our quest for knowledge, to question the status quo. Judaism is perhaps the only religious civilization all of whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. In the Bible, the prophets argue with God. In the Mishnah, rabbis argue with one another. The Talmud, rather than resolving the arguments, deepens them.
So, where can Jewish contrarianism take us in the here and now? Here are a few thought-starters:
The Jewish People seem to be becoming less engaged and interested in one another. Whether it’s the religious and secular communities, or Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews, the trends are heading in a worrisome direction.
Is being Jewish enough to keep this family together, today and moving forward? I would argue against the affirmative, since most of us and our families have disparate, sometimes completed unconnected Jewish journeys, traditions, customs, and modes of expressing our Judaism.
Such was also the story of Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world — all speaking different languages, from Polish to Persian, Arabic to English — during the years leading up to and after its 1948 declaration of statehood.
Yet there was one uniting force which sowed the seeds that quickly became the rich, vibrant, and diverse Israeli culture: Hebrew, which underwent revival as the State of Israel’s official language, following centuries of being conversationally dormant. Even the initial language at the Technion — the so-called Israeli MIT — was German!
Thanks to Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s pioneering efforts to restore the language, Hebrew enabled complete strangers, who didn’t look and smell and behave like one another, to form a modern Israeli society characterized by a marvelous combination of bravery, resilience, family, community, service, education, innovation, and creativity.
The language blends divinity and antiquity with the here and now, a reminder of both the surviving Jewish People and a thriving modern-day Israel. And yet, at least half of today’s Jewish population doesn’t speak a lick of Hebrew outside of Jewish prayers.
In today’s age of hyper-individualism, of more and more Jews describing themselves as “just Jewish” or relinquishing their Judaism altogether, and of increasing Jewish disunification, we must call upon Hebrew to amalgamate us again!
Sure, English is the international language, but Hebrew is to Judaism what hands and fingers are to sign language, our story of a people scattered all over the world, while remaining a single family, a nation which time and again was doomed to destruction. Some of us returned to our homeland, others remained in the Diaspora. Some of us stayed or became religious, deeply embedded into quintessentially divine Jewish life, while others assimilated into their new countries, becoming equally “them” as they are “us.”
“Only the Hebrew language links us to the past, present and future of the Jewish people, and to a specific land,” according to Rabbi Mitchel Malkus. “No other language — and Jews have spoken many Jewish languages throughout our history — bonds us to the soul of our history, textual tradition, people and the land of Israel than Hebrew does.”
Fighting antisemitism seems like it’s become an industry of its own. From purchasing billboards and television ads, to organizations who are prolific at calling out antisemitism (but not so much at devising solutions to it), we continue to throw millions of dollars and other valuable resources at the problem, which only seems to be getting worse.
Ben Freeman, author of the book Jewish Pride, calls antisemitism “a weed,” saying, “There have been those who have tried to solve the problem by cutting the weed off at ground level. This has left the roots intact, enabling them to grow back. This is why antisemitism is still a problem today. It is why historical attempts to defeat it have failed.”
One Toronto-based Jewish donor went as far as to say: “You can’t fight antisemitism. You can’t cure it. You can’t fix it. You need to have a very strong Jewish identity and a very strong Zionist identity. If you don’t have that, all of the fighting against antisemitism doesn’t matter.”
Maybe this donor is onto something. Maybe the fight against antisemitism starts with removing the fight. Maybe the more we try to fight antisemitism, the more publicity we give to it, thereby fueling the fire.
Maybe we should try a more positive approach, one that doesn’t start with words like “fighting” or “combatting.” Heck, one that doesn’t even include the term “antisemitism” itself.
If we creatively encourage and promote Jewish empowerment, we will strengthen our Jewish identity, which will strengthen our image in the world.
I’m talking about Jewish empowerment, which encourages Jews — and, by extension, our non-Jewish family and friends — to be proud of our culture and firm in our respect and admiration for our historical legacy. Simply put: If we creatively encourage and promote Jewish empowerment, we will strengthen our Jewish identity, which will strengthen our image in the world.
For starters, effective Jewish empowerment requires a focus on the individual, which is unusual in the existing Jewish world, where organizations and institutions dominate.
“Any question of empowerment must start from individual empowerment and an awareness of how it relates to the collective power … not in a linear way, hierarchical, with -ologies being delivered and discussed from the platform, but laterally, the model being a circle of people sharing their knowledge, feelings, fears,” according to Alex Pirani in The Challenge of Jewish Empowerment. “The creative power of such a gathering becomes its own empowerment.”
Yael Bendat-Appell, a Vice President at the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, concurs, writing on the website eJewish Philanthropy: “While leadership is essential in the perpetuation of strong communities, having an internal state of Jewish empowerment influences how — or, in some cases if — the people in those communities live a proactive Jewish life; having communities made up of many empowered individuals contributes to communal vitality and strength.”
“When people are empowered,” she added, “they act with great authenticity, intentionality, self-confidence and self-activation.”
For the sake of brevity, the contemporary mainstream belief among both groups is separation; two states for two peoples. Us and them. But I’m not sure this seems to be working.
What if the better solution was the contrary: engagement, collaboration, sharing. I’m not necessarily talking about physical land, but rather about learning about each other’s histories and cultures. Not to become one in the same, and not necessarily to live in one state together, but to develop a deeper understanding of one another.
Perhaps from understanding we can move to appreciation, and from appreciation to trust, and from trust we can develop a solid foundation for good-hearted negotiations.
