I’ve never felt myself to be at a disadvantage, not knowing anything about the royal family. Generally speaking, the file cabinets in my head – or should I say the folders in my database – are arranged as follows: general knowledge, trivia knowledge, Jewish knowledge, cooking expertise, jazz knowledge – and then miscellanea. There is no data entry about who’s married to whom in the House of Windsor.
Yet… having said all that, I do love watching The Crown, a Netflix series that I find utterly captivating. If you’re one of the last 500 people who haven’t watched it yet, get to it! The plot revolves around Queen Elizabeth II, from her childhood to the present day. It is genuinely captivating, filled with drama and intrigue and more than a little humor. In the end, of course, it’s a TV series, not a documentary. It’s historically accurate – most of the time. Like all docu-drama, there’s plenty of imagined conversations and spiced up dialogue and additional color for the sake of a show that runs an hour at a clip. It’s only a TV show.
A viewer of The Crown, who is not a royal family groupie, may have nonetheless raised an eyebrow upon hearing that a British royal, Prince Harry and his American, divorcee, wife of color Meghan Markel, were calling a royal time out, stepping away from any official duties as royalty. I admit to pausing as the story played out on NPR. I haven’t read anything about it.
I think Harry has red hair and a child named Archie. I’ve never seen the beautiful Meghan Markel in a movie or TV show. However, I love their courage and their élan. After all the catty British tabloid articles, some racist in nature, defaming Meghan Markel, and then all the ridiculous empty rituals and the intense pressure of being a royal, they bagged it.
When does tradition for tradition’s sake go into an entropic death spiral? When ritual becomes a Monty Python skit, when various conventions become foolish and unnecessary, well then, why bother? This is where Prince Harry and Meghan Markel’s decision gets interesting to a nice Jewish boy like me.
When the fundamentals of a strict culture or tradition begin to chafe, something’s got to give. Humans don’t do well over the long haul when a system blocks access to the process of evolution. Daring to change brings out the best and the worst in people. It’s “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” and it’s the guillotine.
In the 18th century, some Jews experienced the hegemony of a strict, unbending system of theology and sociology to be stultifying and opaque. They experienced Jewish Law as it was practiced from the Middle Ages to be empty. It’s not like they wanted Judaism to disappear (to be honest, a few did want that to happen, but that’s a different article…); they just wanted to reinterpret it. They wanted to use a different lens through which to view Jewish life and ritual and obligation. Once that started to happen, it changed everything. One response was Hasidism. Another was Reform Judaism.
We Reform Jews are the inheritors of a courageous decision to step back from the assumption that we must observe the same laws and traditions in the same way they have always been practiced. Our current practices are fluid, morphing over time and experience. This is a good thing – and sometimes, not so good.
It seems that in our rush to change, to adapt, we sometimes drop the ball. We’ve surrendered certain values that have defined us over time. Shabbat, the sacred presence of God, the holy dimensions of Jewish life as an ever-present part of our worldview – these things have been compromised or completely lost.
The fact is, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Humpty Dumpty is broken. Period. It may well be that the decision Prince Harry has made will be the dramatic act that poked a gaping hole in the zeppelin that is the royal family and its overripe history.
In the meantime, Reform Judaism is still looking to the horizon, still attempting to find just the right combination of traditional life and secular life, between Jewish law and Jewish ethics. Evolution makes life interesting. Daring to push the envelope, to go for something big and different, is courageous. I genuinely admire Harry and Meghan for that. I love the rebels with a cause.
Before Shabbat 