Water Cooler Dialogue

January 21, 2015 - Shevat 1, 5775

Frum At Work

I work in Israel’s high tech industry as a technical writer, a job which seems to be perfect for me, thank God. Given that the majority of Israeli’s in this industry are not religious, I work regularly with secular Jews. 95% of the time my interaction with them is positive to the extent that every once in a while, somebody will bring up some sort of religious topic with me. I find this to be very encouraging and, within boundaries appropriate for the workplace, I am more than happy to discuss Judaism with them.

Having said that, while I was listening to someone today explain his view on Judaism to me, it occurred to me that no systematic view of Judaism exists among secular Israeli’s. What I mean, in my past discussions I’ve observed that every person has his own personal take on Judaism. This view is compiled of a variety of elements such as individual sentiment, breadth of knowledge, personal experience, and in some cases influence by the media.

I will momentarily recap the dialogue I had with this individual, but in this particular case I did not get more involved in the discussion due to the subject matter. It seemed to me that this individual was making a fundamental mistake about the topic he was discussing. Given that we had not previously established a rapport, he would have probably been put off if I tried to present a more accurate view, and so I left it alone (which was hard for me to do).

I should also add that this individual is an intelligent, astute person who is sought after by other employees for his expertise. What shocks me is the contrast between intelligence and professional knowledge on one hand and relatively little knowledge of Judaism on the other. Without trying to insult anybody, what it does teach me is that a person can be highly developed and refined in one area and quite lacking in another. The ideal state of a person is development in both the spiritual and the physical arenas.

I wanted to go into arichus and say to him that the Torah speaks about God as real and not imagined, and that it is also impossible to create something that is greater than you. I decided to leave it alone; I could sense that it would have challenged him in a way that he wasn’t ready for, which would have made things awkward. I find that there are certain golden rules when discussing Yiddishkeit with secular coworkers, and this would have violated one of them. If we had worked together more or the environment was different, such as outside, I would have said what was on my mind.

The complexity of this type of interaction is that secular Israeli’s often expect religious Jews to be sensitive to their beliefs and not pushy. Some do not understand that expressing ideas based on whims and cultural impressions is somewhat patronizing to people who take it seriously. Judaism is not open to free interpretation any more than the medical or legal fields. One of the realities of this type of discussion is that it is complicated by perceptions of Orthodox Jews in the media (part of which is our doing). Overstep your “right” to your opinions and you’ve fulfilled the intolerant Orthodox Jew stereotype.