My blog silence of the last couple of days (I missed Friday!) was due to a brief family excursion to the Boston area to attend the Bat Mitzvah of a friend's daughter. It was a marvelous ceremony with strong, though obviously unintended, Confucian overtones.
We were honored to be invited. The young girl is the daughter of a cousin of my wife's cousin's husband (get that?). In other words, we are not really related, though we sometimes use the term "cousin" to describe the relationship between our daughter and our friend's daughter. We see these people only occasionally, when we visit my wife's cousin and family in Lexington. But our daughters have kept up an electronic relationship with IMs and email. We were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves in attendance.
I was last to a Bar Mitzvah a few years ago, held in a small synagogue in Bennington, Vermont. I have a fairly good memory of it: the ceremonial first reading of the Torah, the focus on the young man coming of age, the rhythmic chanting of the Hebrew. But this most recent Bat Mitzvah struck me as having a more pronounced generational significance (I may be just not remembering the earlier ceremony all that clearly).
The rabbi set the symbolic stage by reminded the assembled of the unbroken lineage this young girl was entering into. Her grandfather had been called to the Torah (the rabbi mentioned that, in those days, girls were not so recognized but he was quite happy to expand the category of "lineage" to include girls coming of age), as had his father and grandfather and so on and so forth all the way back to the founders of the faith. Of course, as an empirical matter we can never know the truth of such claims (i.e. if the family's religious observance has been consistent through all of the centuries and millennium) but that was not the point. The point was to call to the fore the family context of the celebration.
This young girl had been given life and sustenance by her parents, who in turn had been raised by their parents. And now it was time to remember all those that went before, to keep them in mind as we find the best way forward in the world. The rabbi stressed that it was now her responsibility to make the world a better place and, given the familial context already established, this obligation was authorized by past generations. All of this made the duty more tangible, heavier perhaps but all the more important to carry forward.
This is where I thought of Confucius, of course. I found myself thinking, as the happy ceremony unfolded, that this was precisely what Confucius meant when he said caring for parents is the "root of humanity." The young girl was not being asked to care for her parents but, rather, she was being asked by her parents, and all of the previous parents, to care for herself and her world. And in the performance of that duty, she would create and extend her own humanity. She was embedded in the loving relationships of the family, now as an adult, and she was expected, in the name of the family, to cultivate goodness.
There was, of course, one large difference with Confucianism. The rabbi reminded her, and all of us, that the command to do good in the world was given by a "higher authority." It was not simply a duty to family to do good, but also a duty to God. And there is no God in Confucianism, not in the Old Testament sense at least. Rather, the family is the primary moral basis. In Judaism (or at least this is what I came away understanding) the family might be overridden by God's will. We can imagine circumstances where following a "higher authority" might contradict familial obligations.
This seems less likely in Confucianism; though, I believe, there may be moments in which the duty to foster Humanity might lead one to disobey a parent's command. Or, if the family, or parents, ignore their own duties, a child may need to seek other social relationships as a venue for the construction of humanity. But it is not clear at all, in Confucianism, when family obligations might be overridden. It seems so much easier to invoke an all-powerful and all-knowing God.
In any event, it was a beautiful day. All four of the young girl's grandparents, together with her parents, stood with her before the congregation as she completed the ceremony. It was a powerful illustration of our irrevocable embeddedness in social relationships. There was a great deal of love in the room.
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