Rushkoff wants us all to become hackers, or at the very least metagamers, and treat Judaism like an open-source code. But let's follow the metagaming metaphor more closely. An advanced gamer continues playing the game while conscious of the hidden codes and the program's inner workings. It's still Tomb Raider, still Lara Croft, still about shooting snakes, finding one's way out of the maze, and recovering objects. Indeed, you hack both for the joy of hacking and changing the code, and in order to play the game better. And children can learn their way in by playing, taught by their older brothers until they, too, can learn to code. Judaism, likewise, has its forms, colors, and general content, rituals, concepts, beliefs, rules. This content - including Shabbat, messianism, tribalism, the idea of chosenness, fasting, strange and troubling Biblical stories and liturgical passages - is constitutive of the 'game.' Yet even if were accept Rushkoff's dubious claim that Judaism isn't about the code but rather the process of changing the code (something belied by almost all Jewish practice, and impossible to cultivate across generations), practicing Judaism right requires at least knowing the difference between C++ and BASIC. Rushkoff, however, gets the code wrong again and again.

I would urge both Rushkoff and those who are excited by his ideas to turn instead to three Jewish thinkers who have already argued pretty much the same thing as Rushkoff but have either said it with more credibility or offered more substantive help in figuring out how to save Judaism by playing the metagame.

The first is Mordechai Kaplan, whose absence from Rushkoff's bibliography is shocking, for Rushkoff would enjoy him a lot and learn a great deal from him. Kaplan is arguably the most important American philosopher of Judaism, and it is he who taught American-Jewish intellectuals to shelve the assumptions that Rushkoff wants us to shelve. Specifically, he wrote with astonishing confidence about how the 'truth-claims' of rabbinic Judaism are all false. He also elaborated a sober sociological approach to religion that disassociated it from positive theological concepts and regarded in purely functional terms. He arrived at the conclusion that Judaism was not a religion but rather a civilization, meaning that he placed religious ritual on the same level as everything else that makes a distinct civilization a civilization. Kaplan made his claims on the authority of both an exhaustive knowledge of Jewish tradition and real intellectual rigor.

[1]       [2]       [3]       4       [5]       [next->] Image: Dead or Alive 3 (XBox)