Obligation: Discipline and Devotion

early thoughts on the notion of "chiyyuv" for the Jewish left

The below is an initial attempt at articulating a case for taking obligation seriously on the Jewish left. I would love to think it through with you — please comment and respond!

If living through polycrisis feels like a slog, we need tools for moving forward through that slog. It’s one horror after another, and we act and act and act without it seeming to make much of a difference. (Or at least, this is what those in power want us to feel). So we need tools – emotional tools, moral tools, spiritual tools – that acknowledge that feeling of endlessness. If we mobilize on issue after issue without seeing transformation, we will exhaust ourselves.

This is why I think the Jewish left would benefit from an engagement with chiyyuv – obligation.

The philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote of halakhic life, and its attendant framework of obligation, that:

The Mitzvoth are a norm for the prosaic life that constitutes the true and enduring condition of man…Halakhic praxis is oriented to the usual and persisting, not to the exceptional, momentary, and fortuitous. The Mitzvoth require observance out of a sense of duty and discipline, not ecstatic enthusiasm or fervor, which may embellish one’s life but do not tell how to conduct it. Resting religion on Halakhah assigns it to the prosaic aspects of life, and therein lies its great strength. Only a religion addressed to life’s prose, a religion of the dull routine of daily activity, is worth of the name….Only in full awareness and intention does one compose poetry, and such awareness and intention occur only at rare moments, A religion of values and concentrated intention is the religion of life’s poetry, which can only adorn it.

(“Religious Praxis: The Meaning of Halakhah” in Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, page 12)

In other words, if we build meaning-sustaining structures out of heightened moments, moments of total presence and focus, we will find a lack of tools for the rest of the mundane days of our lives. Leibowitz contends that it is in the “duty and discipline” that we will find sustained nourishment.

Chiyyuv often gets a bad rap because of its association with “the dull routine of daily activity.” Chiyyuv, in this view consists of refraining from pleasures and doing boring tasks for the sake of a God who, if She is as powerful as is claimed, is not affected one bit by our actions. But chiyyuv is devotion. Chiyyuv is insisting that what we do matters, that it makes a difference if we show up: in our relationships with ourselves, with the people in our lives, with the people around us, with the people we don’t know – and yes, with the Divine.

chiyyuv in pink and purple

One of the meanings of “chiyyuv” is to owe. Someone who owes someone else money – a debt, damages for an injury, etc – is “chayav.” They are on the hook to give the other person what they have promised. What if we looked at chiyyuv like that, as the articulation of what we owe to one another?

We can spend as much time as we want defining our principles. But it is the showing up for them that makes them real. I value prayer – but chiyyuv, obligation, is the engine that pushes me out of bed and into my tefillin every morning. Chiyyuv is what keeps me from taking a “week off” from shabbos because I have something I’d like to do that day. Chiyyuv is what sits me down on senators’ floors and chiyyuv is what makes me stand near armed agents of the state threatening my neighbors instead of listening to the screaming of my nervous system and walking away to the safety that is an option for me but not for everyone. Chiyyuv helps me build the muscle to do all of this again and again.

Chiyyuv at its best makes community happen. It is a week of shiva minyanim where nobody ever has to recruit a tenth, it is cooking for a neighbor even though I had a long day. It is the discipline and commitment that overrides momentary discomfort, making the world better and making me more of the person I want to be – and who will choose the right thing next time.

Chiyyuv also reduces choice. When I think Hashem wants something from me – because this is how I think about chiyyuv – I spend less time wondering if I can find a reason to not do it. I spend less time asking myself if it REALLY matters if I show up on time for minyan or show up at all to an action. Adrienne maree brown teaches that “we become what we practice.” The more we do something, the more we become people who can do that thing.

I have just let “chiyyuv” slide into “practice.” For many lefty Jews, “practice” is easier than “obligation.” “My morning prayer practice” lands easier than “fulfilling my obligation to daven Shacharit.” “My daf yomi practice” is more palatable than “making sure I learn Torah daily because that is what I believe Hashem wants from me.” But practice, devotion – these are all ways of getting at chiyyuv.

The artist Yumi Sakugawa teaches courses on developing creative discipline. She encourages artists

to reframe discipline as devotion. What does it mean to be devoted to your creative practice? That completely changes the energetic frequency of whatever activity it is that you’re doing. When you replace discipline with devotion, it becomes an ongoing journey, a curiosity, a relationship. The other thing that really helps me in reframing discipline as it pertains to creative practice is that ultimately it’s about deepening your relationship to yourself, as well as your creative practice, as well as the art that you are generating.

We need chiyyuv because we need to get better at devotion. We need structures and commitments that sustain us when anger or excitement or hope are flagging. Indeed, suspicion of obligation as a framework is in no small part inflected by a Christian anti-Jewish bent – these silly Jews focus on the law rather than the spirit. But it turns out that we need the day-to-day, mundane guidance of the “law.”

Leibowitz directly ties his opposition to the project of religious nationalism to his view of halakhah and obligation. He writes that the religious Zionist uses “Judaism to endow nationalism with the aura of sanctity attributed to the service of God. He therefore makes desperate efforts to ignore the obvious about Judaism, that it is actually a system of halakhic praxis, a program giving detailed arrangements of the everyday, and that the effort to carry out of this program is what constitutes its ‘faith.” (“Lishma and Not Lishma, in Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, page 73.)

A robust engagement with chiyyuv, with obligation, with praxis, with what we build into the “detailed arrangements of the everyday,” with what we do not because we are moved to do so but because we must do so as part of our broader commitment – this is the opposite of destroying lives as part of a grand nationalist vision.

If we re-engage and re-value chiyyuv, we can grow the muscles of our devotion. And we can show up and show up and show up, because we are trying to be of service to that which is of ultimate importance.