Which comes first: belief or action? In Christian terms, the choice would be between faith and works. Is the essence of commitment a firmly-held ideology, or is it living and acting as if one had a commitment? These are some of the questions posed in The Believers, by Zoë Heller (HarperCollins 2008). Heller’s book depicts all kinds of believers, not just religious ones: communists, sensualists, addicts (and their NA support group counterparts), and others. Her point seems to be that there are many types of commitment that function like faith as all-encompassing worldviews within which to live. Her characters have a variety of belief systems which, either consciously or unconsciously, dictate their behaviors and habits of mind.
I tend to agree with Heller regarding the ways in which our “ultimate concerns” (to allude to the German-American theologican Paul Tillich) function as god or the deity in our lives. She masterfully portrays the hypocrisy of her characters—that is, their failure to fully live out their beliefs—and this is where much of the humor of the book comes from. Heller’s one traditionally religious character, Rosa, is the most absolutist and unyielding of all the characters in the book, yet also the most interesting. She has a religious experience that leads her slowly into Orthodox Judaism. Her family sees this as a radical departure from their left-leaning social activism, given Orthodoxy’s limitations on women’s roles and opportunities. Indeed, Rosa’s grandmother Hannah declares that her own immigrant mother threw her headscarf in the water when she saw the Statue of Liberty. Despite Rosa’s attendance at “shabbatons” (whole weekends of Shabat!), and her notable success at the Torah Shul for women, she is not an observant Jew. Her private conflict over fulfilling rules that seem arbitrary and anti-feminist, is illuminating. After a visit to a mikvah she wonders: “Was this . . . what the millennia of Jewish wisdom came down to? A group of women sitting in a bathhouse parsing Iron Age blood taboos and fretting over stains in their panties?” (226). Heller presents the Orthodox response to such questions in a sympathetic manner, although she probably would not persuade skeptics. The stakes in Rosa’s decision are high: she wants the truth, even if it isn’t the truth she would like to find. By the end of the book she seems to take the advice of the rabbi, who tells her that God wants commitment and actions. This counsel reflects the Jewish emphasis on orthopraxy—right practice—over the Christian emphasis on orthodoxy—right belief. I’m not sure we can say orthopraxy is exclusively a Jewish outlook, however. After all, Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared that “Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.” And Heller would agree: it is only in the living of our principles that we find out what they truly are. Zoë Heller. The Believers. New York, 2008. Comments are closed.
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Author Rebecca Moore is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. She is currently Reviews Editor for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions and Co-Director of The Jonestown Institute. Archives
December 2021
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