Knowing why we’re here

When Rabbi Mark Wildes opens his new book, The Jewish Experience: Discovering the Soul of Jewish Thought and Practice, he does not begin in the beit midrash. He begins in Cupertino.

The framing device is Simon Sinek’s now-canonical TED talk on what separates the Apple corporation from its rivals: not the elegance of the products but the clarity of the purpose behind them. “People don’t buy what you do,” Sinek argued, “they buy why you do it.” Wildes thinks the same applies to Judaism.

It could sound gimmicky in less reflective hands – a tech-marketing slogan dragooned into service for the world’s oldest monotheism. But Wildes, who has spent 27 years running the Manhattan Jewish Experience teaching young professionals whose Jewish education effectively stopped at their bar mitzvah, is making a more serious diagnosis. Jews, he argues, have been served plenty of the what and the how of our tradition, but the why has been badly neglected.

“Most Jews don’t really spend any time learning about this kind of thing,” he says, “and then they’re kind of expected to observe the rituals and keep Shabbat and eat this and don’t eat that. But if you don’t get the whole context, it’s just not interesting to people.”

Hence the book’s structure. Each of its six chapters – on God, Torah, prayer, kindness and charity, Shabbat, and tikkun olam – gives the why an unhurried 15 or 20 pages before turning to the how. Wildes is unembarrassed about the order. “The rituals only come alive when you know the why.”

He refuses to accept that the why can be skipped on the grounds that we are a religion of doing ahead of believing. “You can’t inspire somebody to be consistently committed to a tradition,” he says, “if you don’t buy into the basic premises.”

Whether the whys themselves can persuade a secular sceptic is a separate question. Wildes does not claim a conversion rate. He claims a respect rate.

He recalls a Soviet-trained mathematician who attended his classes in his rabbinic-school years and stood up at every session to launch torpedoes at the very idea of God. Wildes referred him to a senior mentor, Rabbi Joseph Grunblatt.

Afterwards, Grunblatt rang to relay what the man had told him: “Before I started coming to Rabbi Wildes’ classes, I was convinced that anyone who believed in God was a fool. I still don’t believe in God, but now I believe that there are intelligent people who do.” That, Wildes says, is a realistic target.

“Too many people look upon it as silly and mythical and magical, but nothing really compelling for them personally. I’ve devoted my life to dispelling that.”

The argument has acquired a new audience over the past three years. Wildes calls them October 8 Jews – those who walked into his programs not because they were searching for community, but because the world had forced them to.

He tells the story of a 24-year-old who showed up at his office the day after October 7, having just had a furious row with a non-Jewish girlfriend who had taken Hamas’s side. The young man had two questions. How do I forgive her? And, more searchingly, why am I feeling anything at all?

Wildes recounts him saying, “I go to Yom Kippur services once a year. I don’t particularly like it, and yet I’m all upset about this.” Wildes offered the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s image of the pintele yid – the irreducible Jewish spark that flares at moments of love or grief or threat. The student is still attending classes.

The most provocative chapter is the one on tikkun olam. Wildes is impatient with the way “repairing the world” has been peeled off from the Torah that supplied the phrase and pressed into service for political programs that often run flatly counter to halachic and ethical sense.

He returns to Sodom, where Lot – Abraham’s nephew, who had absorbed his uncle’s gospel of hospitality – offered his own daughters to the mob in order to honour the value of welcoming guests.

“That’s what happens when you blow one value up to the exclusion of all others. That’s unfortunately what happened with a lot of the social justice warriors. They took a certain value, blew it up, and negated everything else.”

He is not, he insists, surrendering the phrase. “It would be a shame if we never used the term anymore because it had been misused by some groups. We have to take it back and bring it back to what it was meant to be.”

Wildes is sceptical of denominational categories generally – Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist – he is not against any of them in principle, but the young professionals walking through MJE’s doors simply do not carry the denominational loyalty their parents did.

“When you’re living in Manhattan, they’re not going anymore to the synagogue where they were raised. They’re going to whatever speaks to them and inspires them.”

The Judaism that wins their attention, he predicts, will be the one that addresses their lives, the technology detox of Shabbat, or the meditative architecture of prayer, not the one that wins denominational turf wars.

But he closes on the most quietly persuasive note of the interview, on the perennial complaint that Judaism is a religion of nos. The nos, he insists, are not refusals but redirections – parents saying no from love, because they know what their child needs in order to flourish. “It’s like playing soccer on a roof without a fence. The boundaries are there for very specific reasons. When you say no to one thing, you’re saying yes to something else.”

Wildes writes from and for Manhattan. Whether his diagnosis fits our smaller, more tightly woven community at the other end of the world is a separate question – and one we put to two of Australia’s rabbis, from opposite ends of the denominational spectrum.

The Jewish Experience: Discovering the Soul of Jewish Thought and Practice is published by Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers. It is the first volume of a planned trilogy.