Tribalism

Here are some gems of wisdom from the Chabad website's "Ask The Rabbi", Tzvi Freeman. Read the whole article and you'll gain a better understanding of Jewish reasons for Torah Observance, as well as some insight into aspects of sociology. This is a must-read for missiologists, emergents, anyone who wonders about the importance of culture ...

Here is but a small quote...

Sociology became a science with the publication Emile Durkheim's monograph on suicide in 1897. Durkheim was a nice Jewish boy who had studied in yeshiva to become a rabbi, as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, but then left to think for himself and challenge his teachers at the Sorbonne. In his paper, Durkheim blamed most of society's woes (especially suicide) on the abandonment of tribalism. He coined the term anomie, which means a state of society where nobody knows who they are, what they have to do with one another or what on earth they're doing here. Durkheim demonstrated, through the first methodological, scientific study of a social phenomenon, that in turn-of-the-century France, suicide was the realm of the tribeless—meaning the Protestant and the agnostic. Catholics and Jews rarely committed suicide. Because they felt no anomie.

What this runaway-yeshiva boy ironically demonstrated, and others after him confirmed is that a human being without a tribe is like a polar bear without ice—he can survive, but he'll be awfully confused. It's through his relationship with the tribe that a human being knows that the earth beneath his feet is solid ground, that tomorrow is a day like today, that he is who he is and it's okay to be that way. Take the tribe away and none of that remains necessarily true.

There's a lot more. Read it for yourself...

How Traditions Start

Here's a story I heard once, that probably speaks for itself:

There was a monastery where the abbot and the monks would take in stray animals. They loved the animals, but they had problems with one particular cat. Every day, during the hour of prayer, the cat would come into the chapel and begin meowing loudly, making it difficult for the monks to concentrate on their prayer and meditation. The abbot found an easy solution. He ruled that every day, before prayers, someone would be assigned to take the cat and tie it to the front gate so it couldn't wander into the chapel during prayer time. After prayers, it was, of course, released.
So it was that day after day, before prayers, the cat would be tied up, and prayers went on peacefully, without interruption. Years went by, new monks came, old ones either moved on or died, and finally the old abbot died. He was replaced by one of the newer monks, who was a good leader and knowledgeable in religious matters. Still, the practice continued of tying the cat to the front gate before prayers.
One day, the cat died.
What did the new abbot do? He went out and found another cat to tie to the gate during prayers!