Two sides of the same coin and the metal in between

I must confess I’m a bit of a philosopher; this might not be a great shock to you if you know me or read my prose often. But I’ve been kicking an idea around lately about the nature of groups. I was thinking about the orthodoxy and its place in the context of the whole. What I mean to say is that in all groups there exist people who are more rigid, more extreme perhaps then others. This applies to all organizations. Green Peace has people who speak to others about our effects on the environment and it also has people who chain themselves to trees, who throw blood on people to get them to see things from their point of view. All groups have people in them who are more and less committed to their cause, people who are more radical about some parts of their doctrine then others, etc.

This fact forms these groups into essential living organisms, and everyone ultimately finds the place in an organization that they generally agree with but in a specific spot. So someone who wants to save the Elephants might become an advocate and go o speaking tours, writing books, trying to influence minds, while another may become a biologist and devote their energy to saving the specific environment that Elephants live in. Both people believe in the same idea, both have taken an active role and yet both have expressed it in totally contrary ways. This is amazing and necessary. It’s a stunning example of the diversity and elasticity of the human mind and of the human will. Two people with different educations, strengths, weaknesses, etc have joined together to do something outside of themselves, something greater then the sum of their parts.

I confess that this idea came to me while thinking about all the denominations of Judaism. More specifically while contemplating the role of the orthodoxy in the world and what I came up with is this. Let us think of the Judaism as an animal, in this model the orthodoxy is the spine, the bones, the structure. Without it the body wouldn’t be able to hold its shape and the animal would ultimately be a big bag of tissue. A useless lump of nothing, everything would fail and the animal would be nothing. Yet if all the animal was, was its structure then what would it really be, it would be a nothing as well. It would be a lifeless artifact on display in the Natural History museum, like all the dinosaur bones it would be gone except as a piece of hasty that has ultimately been forgotten and set aside.

So there is a complementary nature to the orthodoxy and everything else around it. Together the two (not just two obviously) help to keep the whole alive. The ‘radicals’ challenge the orthodoxy, forcing it to adapt and change to the changing needs of the people around it, the time and the place that it exists in here and now. While the orthodoxy gives the rest the structure and the security to go beyond itself knowing that there is a solid foundation within it. So there exists a symbiotic relationship, one cannot survive without the other both would be incomplete without the other and both need each other far, far more then I believe either will ever concede. I know personally I need both, I know that I need to have the flexibility to stray sometimes far, far off the path. But I also know that without a path to stray off of I would never be able to find my way. Shalom Aleichem and Eretz Israel.