Can God’s Mind Change? God’s Second Book (Part 2)

Posted on June 26, 2011 | 5 comments

Isn’t it possible for authors to change their minds between books? Even if (as I argued in the last post) both Torah and the universe are products of the same divine author, it does not follow (as I thought it did) that the two books cannot contradict each other. So argues Rabbi Rick Block in a thoughtful note that I greatly appreciate.

Let’s rethink the issue, using a test case, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century. In 1921, he wrote Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus, a densely argued study of the logic behind language. Following the school of thought that we call logical positivism, he limited meaningful sentences to statements of fact that are ultimately rooted in evidence from the senses. That excludes religion, ethics, and aesthetics, none of which is open to empirical proof. Statements about God, goodness, and beauty are neither true nor false: they are simply meaningless.

Later, however, his Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) seemed to contradict the Tractatus, in that it included religion, ethics and aesthetics as meaningful. Language, he now declared, was like a toolkit, that can be used to do different things: promising, hoping, describing (as in science) and so on. He called each of these things “a game.” The Tractatus described the game of science; but not the games of theology, ethics, and art, which are “meaningless,” perhaps, but only according to the game-rules of science. Investigations pointed out the need to describe the rules for these other games.

The Investigations does not disprove the Tractatus. It just limits its applicability and goes beyond it to include that part of reality for which the Tractatus did not work.

Like Wittgenstein, God too, we may say, has two books: Torah is God’s book of religion; Nature is God’s book of science. They are about different things; they cannot disprove each other, because they operate as different games with different rules of meaning..

Scientific knowledge works in mathematics, the language of Nature, it seems. When we translate those formulae into prose, we get sentences that follow Wittgenstein’s rules in the Tractatus. When we shift to religion, we change the game — and with it, the context in which to understand the sentences. Two sentences that seem to say contradictory things (“God created the heaven and earth,” from the Book of Torah, and “A big bang created time and a universe,” from the Book of Nature) sound like opposites because their syntax is similar. But they may both be right, because they operate in different realms of thought. In that way, they are like Wittgenstein’s two books. They complete, rather than deny, one another.

One more analogy is in order: fiction. Fiction is an art, much like painting, where Monet, for example, can paint several versions of haystacks, all of them equally accurate. A composer of fiction may, similarly, write two novels that contradict each other but be equally true. Insofar as scientific authors write metaphoric explanations of nature’s phenomena, they may do likewise, but when they try actually to frame nature’s laws, they may not make two contradictory claims, without one of them being wrong.

We can liken God’s two books to a nicely boxed set of two volumes, one on science and the other on what we loosely call religion. God’s first book, Torah, is the religious one. It is a work of art, containing such things as fiction, poetry, aphorisms, laws, ethics, values, and a subjective view of Israel’s history. Like any work of art, it regularly attracts new readings. The second book, Nature, is scientific. We change our readings there as well, but contradictory readings of Nature must refute one another, because the Book of Nature (as measured by mathematics) is changeless and, unlike art, a zero-sum game of “true or false.”

I do not mean to say that any reading of Torah is as possible as any other. Some interpretations of art are just wrong — as I said in an earlier blog, Hamlet cannot be a Marxist spoof on Capitalism. Also, ethics, unlike stories, poetry, and such, are absolute, so, like science, cannot admit two absolutely contradictory claims.

But comparing Torah with Nature, we can say that Torah and Nature are God’s two books which cannot refute one another. Like Wittgenstein’s two books, they represent extensions of one another – what we can call a dual extension of God’s mind.

When we look back at great authors, we call it a retrospective. Think of Torah and Nature as God’s retrospective, which we array with awe and reread with care.

5 Comments

Posted in belief, philosophy, religious language, science and religion

Tagged , , , , , ,

God’s Second Book: The Most Valuable Jewish Value

Posted on June 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

Why be Jewish – other than the fact that you like it, of course? The most common answer is, “For its values.” But what exactly are Jewish values? I don’t mean grand generalizations like an affinity for justice and an insistence on learning – although these are not irrelevant. I have in mind something very specific, some single teaching that elucidates the Jewish outlook on the world.

My choice for today is ein mukdam um’uchar batorah, “There is no chronological order to Torah,” a teaching used to explain the fact that some things in Torah seem out of order. Implicit in this principle is an insightful understanding of the role of sacred scripture.

Scripture has become problematic in the modern world. On the one hand, acknowledging something as sacred writ is enormously enriching. That is why so many people insist on it even though they no longer believe that it was dictated by God. Scripture provides us with spiritual ballast, connection to times past, a text around which to ritualize a community’s present, a vocabulary for intergenerational discussion, and a sacred story that becomes the center of conversational gravity generation after generation.

But Scripture can also be a problem. Much like a national constitution, it serves its believers as a foundational document, but unlike a national constitution, it cannot be emended. It is, by definition, canonical, and, therefore, unalterable through time. It easily becomes a rival to such other sources of truth as science and reason.

The Rabbis, moreover, believed scripture came from God, making it all the more unalterable by mere human beings. Yet they knew also that some of its claims couldn’t possibly reflect the divine will. Stoning a “stubborn and rebellious son”? Extracting “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”? Impossible. So they erected the legal fiction of an oral law, a commentary that had come down from Sinai alongside the written Torah and been passed along as an interpretive guide to each successive generation. Jews could now read Scripture selectively.

The Bible’s most morally reprehensible elements, they held, had never actually been acted upon — they were there for other lessons they contained. Even the chronological sequence of the Bible was not actually the way it presented itself: ein mukdam um’uchar batorah.

I understand that as (among other things) a subtle recognition that Scripture cannot collide with science, not even the soft science of history, let alone the hard sciences like geology, chemistry, physics and astronomy. Maimonides (among others) affirmed that understanding. Accepting the consequences of ein mukdam um’uchar batorah allows me to lead my life with the certainty that nothing science finds can conflict with what Judaism has to say.

Galileo said, of his own scientific curiosity, that he was simply investigating God’s second book, nature; the first book, of course, was the Bible. I, similarly, see Torah (my Scripture) as God’s first book, and the universe as the second one — each of them created and revealed in its own way. It seems, at the moment, that the universe was formed from a cosmological singularity that brought time into being; it seems also that the Bible evolved from a historical process conditioned by that very flow of time. If opinions change on either of these realities, so be it. Since both “books” are by the very same author, they cannot contradict one another. I can rest secure that as new scientific findings arrive, my reading of Torah need not conflict with those findings.

In no way does that make Scripture irrelevant. Scripture was never intended to define scientific reality. It provides other benefits, like the ones outlined above. When I want to know how the world works, I go to science. When I want to know what the world means, I go to Torah. We need them both, and ein mukdam um’uchar batorah prevents my having to choose one at the expense of the other.

This insistence on a dual source of truth has been a Jewish hallmark through the ages. In an age of renewed insistence on Scriptural inerrancy, and a time when reasonable people can easily find religion antediluvian, I nominate ein mukdam um’uchar batorah as the most valuable value in the Jewish lexicon.

Leave a comment

Posted in belief, liberal religion, science and religion, theology, values

Tagged , , ,

So Near And Yet So Far

Posted on June 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

Passover 5771may be past, but its lessons return in last week’s parashah (B’ha’alot’kha). Of all our holidays, Passover ranks supreme in that we were delivered from Egypt specifically with Passover in mind. Whatever else we do as Jews follows from this singular event in our past. In Temple days, therefore, the Passover sacrifice was the sole calendrical obligation whose purposeful neglect merited a form of capital punishment called karet – the divine sentence of being “cut off” from family ties after we die.

That point is moot now that the sacrificial cult is gone, but the Talmudic debate on it remains instructive.

Although everyone was supposed to offer the Passover sacrifice, not everyone could – hence the stipulation “purposeful (!)” neglect. Among the circumstances that exempted a person from offering it was being “a long way away” (derekh r’chokah),” too far distant to get to the Temple on time.

But what counts as “a long way away”? How long is “long”?

The Mishnah provides two views: either as far away from Jerusalem as the city of Modi’in with not enough time to make the journey by Passover; or at the very entrance to the Temple, but not yet inside it. The first is logical; the second is not. If the individual is already just outside, asks the Gemara, why don’t we say “Come in!” and expect the person to cross the threshold or suffer the punitive consequences?

At this point, the appearance of the word “long” (r’chokah) in the Torah becomes relevant. In antiquity, and all the way through the Middle Ages, there was no way for a scribe writing with indelible ink on parchment to erase an error. A common convention for noting the mistake was to add a dot or other superlinear mark above the mistaken letter. Now it happens that the Masoretic text (the way the Torah is pointed) displays the word “long” (r’chokah) with a dot over the final heh. The Yerushalmi, therefore, considers the possibility of treating the heh as a mistake, thus reading the word as rachok, the masculine equivalent of r’chokah. Read as a masculine adjective, it can no longer modify the noun “way.” It must, therefore, modify the only other noun in question, not the “journey” that the individual is on, but the “individual” who is on the journey! The Yerushalmi’s conclusion is profound. “It is the person who is distant, not the way.”

Now we understand the Mishnah’s second interpretation. We do not say to those standing right outside the door, “Just come in!” because it would sound more like a threat than an invitation, the assumption being that if they refuse, they will be punished by karet. In actuality, however, they are not sinners; they are just too alienated to take the final step inside. The gemara describes them as “able to do the sacrifice but not doing it” – not out of ill will but (in Maharam’s words) “because of some impediment” that gets in the way.

This rabbinic reading of halakhah effectively removes the punishment of karet altogether, since anyone can claim “some impediment” that gets in the way. Anyone at all can thereby opt instead to keep the second Passover one month later. But the second Passover (unlike the first) is optional. So even if the individual misses the second Passover too, no punishment results.

By analogy, we may say that today, the obligation to hold or attend a seder is absolute – the single most telling expression of identification as a Jew. But Jews who do not keep it should be understood as suffering from “some impediment” that psychologically distances them from their people, not as sinners who deserve our scorn.

If that is true of the seder, which most Jews love attending and for which so many opportunities exist, all the more so is it true of the rest of Jewish life. Take Jews who belong to no synagogue, even though we reach out and say, “Come in.” We should be that welcoming, and many of us are, but when they fail to take us up on our offer, we become defensive and blame them instead of seeing, as the gemara does, that even though they are at our doorstep, they may still be a long distance off.

The most important lesson here is to drop our self-righteousness and keep the door open. Jews with complex relationships to Judaism deserve our support as they figure things out. Passover will come round next year and who knows? Maybe if we are patient, their psychological distance may lessen and they will come in then.

Leave a comment

Posted in synagogues, Torah In Our Lives

Verbal Stretching, Word Rustling, and the Fate of Religion

Posted on June 12, 2011 | 3 comments

Words live in fields, where they stretch, grow, and expand with the reach of human inquisitiveness. Take “fishing,” a word some ancestor must have coined many eons back, upon successfully spearing a swimming thing in the water. When fishing became a leisure-time activity instead of a means to procure food, “goin’ fishing” came to mean the blissful inactivity of watching a fishing line bob in the water – fish or no fish on the other end.

The New York Times of June 5 testifies to the freedom with which “fishing” still circulates in its verbal field. A stock broker accused of insider trading proclaims his innocence by calling the investigation “a fishing expedition.” That’s a verbal and a metaphoric stretch, or, at least, it was once. Now it’s too commonplace to count; it is, if anything, a dead metaphor. So too is the idea of “stretch” in “metaphoric stretch,” but “stretch” is a good word, because calling the FBI’s actions “fishing” stretches linguistic use, and, therefore, the imagination, as well as the world itself. The world now comes with potential “catches”: the “little fish” who get thrown back into the street, and the “big fish” whom the little fish help the FBI to hook.

A second article describes the scam by which emails from seemingly reputable corporations, like our banks or employers, request personal information that can be manipulated for identity theft. It’s called “phishing,” another stretch of the imagination, not just conceptually this time, but visually too, because of the clever substitution of “ph” for “f” – like the rock group PHISH.  It turns out also that China has been phishing for American diplomats. This is not just a mass email going out randomly to millions. Its targeted nature earns it the name “spear phishing.” The high profile of the would-be targets may even make it a case of “whaling.”

Words and the world work in tandem. Simply by opening our senses to the changing world around us, we stretch it into more than what it was. Like an animal hide stretched out to dry, this expanding world requires pegs – verbal pegs — to stake out the new territory. It is easier to use old words than to make up new ones, because old ones come with meanings we can borrow. So metaphors become the very best pegs with which we stretch our consciousness of what the world is newly made of.

Words aren’t allowed to roam completely wild, however. Technical language is guarded by linguistic police who fence off the field where the words have grown up and demand they be used properly. Biologists, for example, mean something specific by a virus. Still, viruses attack computers and web messages can go viral; so even technical vocabulary can be hijacked for general use.

It’s a good sign when linguistic rustlers multiply; it means your words are prolific, doing well enough to be desired for the light they can shed on someone else’s corner of the universe. When linguistic rustlers no longer care enough to carry off stray words from their technical holding pens, the words in question may as well be dead.

That seems to be the trouble with religion. Nobody wants to carry its words away captive any more. We still have echoes of when they did: “revelatory finds” once harked back to revelation from Sinai; “redemptive moments” recalled the parting of the Red Sea. But nowadays, the religious verbal police can relax: no one wants our words any more.

Words are also like currency. When no one wants them, their value goes down. Ours is an era of theological currency debasement. Take even the word “God.” People use it all the time, but, God knows, it doesn’t buy the serious attention it used to.

The easy theological answer is for religious personnel to hunker down in their theological verbal fields and continue making sentences to each other about things that no one else cares about. I imagine the alchemists did that at some point or other. Religion too can aspire to becoming alchemy. A better course is to head out into the world, riding our theological verbiage with wild abandon, and showing people how poetically our religious vocabulary can get at the very heart of things. We can even do a little rustling of our own, showing the theological implications of such secular words as “pattern,” “purpose” and “promise” (see “Ya Gotta Believe – Something [Part 2],” May 15, 2011).

The world will go on no matter what, stretched by whatever verbal pegs people find useful. Whether it gets stretched religiously depends on how well the keepers of religious language provide powerful religious metaphors to do the stretching. The alternative is to retire from the task and go fishing.

3 Comments

Posted in religious language, theology

Tagged , , , , ,

“Clearing God’s Bad Name”: Did I Go Too Far?

Posted on May 31, 2011 | 3 comments

Did I go too far in my recent post entitled “Clearing God’s Bad Name”? I was discussing the way we read Torah portions in which God threatens dire punishment for human disobedience. It was time, I said, to “dispense with the childish belief in a God of simplistic reward and punishment.”  The God in whom we ought to believe can hardly be vengeful, I argued. It is time we cleared God’s name.

I published the piece separately in a couple of newspapers to which I submit regular articles on Torah, and received a thoughtful critique from a reader who took me to task for going too far. We may not, he cautioned, “excise portions of the Torah because our timid intelligence has deduced that we are so much more ‘enlightened’ than previous generations.” The letter arrived privately, so I will not divulge the author’s name – suffice it to say that his objection is that I was “preaching against the text,” the “sin” of sermonizing contrary to what the sacred text actually says.

Preachers do it all the time, of course, but use midrash, Talmud, or commentaries from somewhere else in the tradition as their justification — as if to say, “The Torah looks like it says such and such, but it really doesn’t; it really means something else (even the opposite of what its surface meaning appears to be).”

To some extent, I did that. But I went farther and did indeed leave the bounds of normal interpretation by denying a basic understanding of God that we find in most of rabbinic literature.

My critic finds that too much to take, and as I say, I take him seriously enough to want to think the matter through here as an instance of a machloket l’shem shamayim, what the Rabbis call “an argument for the sale of heaven.” Why don’t I think I went too far?

For starters, let us ask how Jews read Torah.

We read it so closely that every word and letter counts – but we do not read it literally. And we read it interpretively, the whole point being to come up with a chiddush, a novel insight that speaks to the situation of the reader seeking meaning in the text.

It is generally presupposed that whatever meaning we find is drawn out from the text, not read into it. The idea is to be properly objective in interpreting a passage so as to arrive at what the text really means. Now, it is not 100% clear that we can ever be absolutely objective about any text; sophisticated theorists know there is always some degree of subjectivity in the way we read. But in any event, sermonic interpretation, for sure, doesn’t work that way. “Meaning” here is always subjective, dependent on both the text and the reader, a sort of pincer movement back and forth between the two.  It is not so much “what the text means” as “how the text becomes meaningful to the person reading it.”

There are some limits of course – as there are for interpreting every piece of literature. If I say that Hamlet, for example, is about indecision, or moral outrage, or the oedipal complex, you will at least entertain the possibility that I am right. But suppose I say it is a Marxist spoof on capitalism. For lots of reasons that is utter nonsense. In making that claim, I lose all credibility. If no one even thinks my claim is sensible, I get read out of the reading community as a crackpot.

What, then, counts as the limits to sermonic interpretation? We would like to imagine that the interpreter always interprets Torah by citing other pieces of Torah – quoting the Talmud to elucidate the Bible, a medieval authority to interpret the Talmud, and so on. But it is never that clean. The twelfth-century Spanish commentator Ibn Ezra doubted that Moses had written the entire Torah. Afraid to come right out and question his received chain of tradition, he used allusion: hamevin yavin, he said, “The discerning reader will understand what I am getting at.” He got away with it.  Spinoza came right out and said roughly the same thing and was excommunicated. Spinoza had no readers willing to go as far as he did.

Ibn Ezra was more careful; but even he risked going over the line. He knew most readers would not follow his half-heretical suggestion. But he knew also that he was not the only reader who lost sleep over a traditional claim that no longer made sense to his growing historical consciousness. Rather than  risk positioning the Bible so that no one would respect it altogether, he went out on a limb and argued against the text.

I am no Ibn Ezra, and certainly no Spinoza, but in our time too, we dare not shy from confronting the real questions that people have – especially about God. Otherwise, we risk speaking to a shrinking audience of people who are already insiders in the Torah game we play – but alienating everyone else. Especially when it comes to hurtful images of God we too must sometimes preach against the text.

3 Comments

Posted in belief, liberal religion, liturgical insights, ritual, theology, Torah In Our Lives

Tagged , , , , ,

Escaping May 21 — Big Bang to No Bang with No End in Sight

Posted on May 22, 2011 | 1 comment

If you are reading this, you somehow escaped the predicted end of the world yesterday. It was not the first of its kind. In 1956, sociologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter infiltrated an end-of-the-world cult to see what would happen when the doomsday date came and went (When Prophecy Fails, University of Minnesota Press). The prophet (“Mrs. Keech”) and her hard-core loyalists did not despair; they just returned to the books to calculate better.

This week’s prophet is Harold Camping. His specific May 21 date may be idiosyncratic, but millions of Americans expect the world to end with a “rapture” that will transport believers to everlasting salvation and leave everyone else behind for a cataclysmic war to the end. The idea goes back to nineteenth-century Nelson Darby (1800-1882), who divided world history into eras of special divine dispensation, the last of which is in process now. Believers differ in details, but if you doubt that this is, in general, mainstream doctrine all over the United States, check out the best-selling “Left Behind” novels that portray the rapture and the cataclysmic “tribulation” (the accompanying wars) that follow, to see what everyone else is reading while you are reading this.  As of this writing, they have sold over eleven million copies!

Ironically, Christian fundamentalists like Camping deny a big bang at the beginning of time and affirm it at the end: they have the big bang backward.

Belief in a sudden and violent end to history is not just a consequence of biblical literalism – in fact, it is anything but literalism. The May 20 full-page warning in USA Today placed by “Timehasanend. org” cites I Corinthians to the effect that,  “No man… not the angels… nor the son” knows “that [final] day and that hour.” It then takes great pains to disprove the literalism of that.  “The son” cannot mean Christ because I Corinthians  also tells us, “The spirit of God knows all things.” Surely Christ is coterminous with the Son. But Satan is widely called “son [of perdition]”; hence “the son” who does not know the final day and hour must be Satan!  That’s not literalism; we Jews call it midrash.

So biblical inerrancy alone cannot explain the attractiveness of big-bang endings. More significant is the psychological discomfort people have with the alternative: no end in sight. It takes courage to persevere in the drudgery of history. Until modern times, Jews too universally expected God to bring time to an end with a passion. Rabbis warned against reckoning the end.

Modernity funneled messianic expectations into faith in human progress. God wouldn’t end it all, but humans might. Triumphalist Reform rabbis like David Einhorn (1809-1879) suspected that history was finally cranking down to its end, with a messianic era right around the corner. Rationalists today are less sanguine, but they apply the kabbalistic doctrine of tikkun olam to social justice, with the faith that we just need to work harder at moving history along: that’s all.

I am all for social justice, but do we really think a thousand or even a million social action projects will some day break the back of evil?  Even this contemporary form of historicist hopefulness seems hard to hold. And it is dangerous, since unreal expectations are easily dashed and dashed expectations produce apathy. Recall the lessons of When Prophecy Fails. The real insiders to the cause, the true believers (as it were) went back to the books to revise predictions. But the movement rank and file abandoned the whole enterprise. And that is what will happen to social justice, if we promise more than it can deliver.

There is no big bang ending: not by God and not by us. If scientists are right, entropy is going to win: some tens of billions of years from now the stars will burn out but a darkened lifeless cosmos will continue, as galaxies go on endlessly expanding into the void anyway — without us in it.

That does not mean we should give up making life better in the meanwhile. It does mean that we should revise our theology to make the personal good we do sufficient satisfaction in and of itself. There may indeed be moral progress even within the entropy, but it doesn’t matter. All we need to know is that we have been thrust into a world where people are tortured, starved, and suffering, and we have the capacity to relieve their anguish: one by one.

This is no world-altering messiah waiting in the wings to save us. It is not even a messianic movement of the masses taking to the streets or to the ballot boxes. But it is all we’ve got; and it is enough.

The day after May 21, the world is still spinning; we are still on it; and there is no big bang in sight. There is just you and me, armed with goodness and the ability to help. It is “little-bang messianism.” And we are the messiahs.

1 Comment

Posted in belief, theology

Tagged , , , , ,

Clearing God’s Bad Name

Posted on May 18, 2011 | 1 comment

This week’s Torah portion (B’chukota’i)  is the kind of thing that gives God a bad name. It is one of two sections in Torah known as “curses” (k’lalot). The better known one arrives at the end of Deuteronomy. This one is smaller, but it does the trick. So frightening was it for Jews of times past that they named it, euphemistically, parashat b’rakhot “the reading of blessings,” just the opposite of what it actually is. People read it quietly, barely loud enough to be heard. The Chofetz Chayyim knew places where congregants left the room rather than have to contemplate the terror of God’s wrath that the sedra warns against.

It starts off positively enough: if we follow God’s mitzvot, we will get abundant crops, peace in our land, and God’s presence among us.

But it quickly shifts to the opposite pole of possibility. In return for disobedience, says God, “I will wreak misery among you. Consumption and fever.” We will have “skies like iron and earth like copper,” so that no rain falls and nothing grows. Wild beasts will eat our children, enemies will ravage us. Our cities will fall and we will be carried off captive. God mitigates the punishment in the end. Enslaved in exile, we will repent and, humbled by chastisement, we will find God returning to us again.

But that is poor comfort. We finish this final sedra in Leviticus as we do the other four books of Torah, by shouting together, chazak chazak v’nitchazek, “Be strong, be strong; let us be strengthened.” We hardly need that cry elsewhere, but here we do. We’d better be strong if parashat b’chukota’i has its way.

The objection that we can avoid punishment by being obedient to God misses the deeper point, namely, the very idea that we ought to believe in a God who rewards and punishes like a petulant parent. Insisting on that childish view should be a sin because it only encourages atheists among us. On occasion, tradition itself wondered about this view – asking, for example, why God promises reward for mitzvot which ought to be considered sufficient reward in and of themselves. The reverse should be true as well: if the mitzvot  are good for us, then failure to do them should be punishment enough.

But by and large, critique of the biblical notion of such a zealous God is the result of modern temperament. To begin with, the world patently does not work the way the sedra assumes. Good people are not universally rewarded and bad people are not always punished. More important, modern sensibilities reject this ancient notion of human beings as perpetually backsliding children and God as all-powerful disciplinarian.

If we read it in a whisper, it ought not to be because we fear the curses coming true, but because we find the reading an embarrassment to God, who must surely be objecting, “I don’t work that way.  That’s how they understood Me 2000 years ago, perhaps, but it’s time to abandon this fourth-grade picture of Me.”

We still read it anyway, I know. As with any sedra, there are lessons to be learned from individual verses within it. But here is the global lesson from the reading as a whole: it reminds us of how far we have come from our mistaken beliefs of years gone by.

We generally recall our less-than-lofty past to prevent our easily returning there – when, for example, we thought mental illness was madness, or hysteria a women’s disease that could be cured by hosing the victim down with ice-cold water. Similarly, we remember slavery in America or Nazism in Europe to make sure neither ever happens again. Remembering old theologies is no different.

I know it is unfashionable in academic circles that call themselves post-modern, but I still believe in a steady march of progress toward a more enlightened day. I read our sedra to recall our childhood beliefs and see how far that march has taken us in the way we look at God. As the species created to be at the cutting edge of the evolutionary spiral, we are responsible for standing in the long line of philosophers from Saadiah and Maimonides to Martin Buber and Mordecai Kaplan, and re-conceiving God as a live possibility among us.

Chazak chazak v’nitchazek. We need strength — not to get through the curses without them happening, but to emerge from the reading committed to dispensing with the childish belief in a God of simplistic reward and punishment. The issue isn’t God’s dispensing justice to us, but our doing justice to God.

1 Comment

Posted in belief, theology, Torah In Our Lives

Tagged ,

Ya Gotta Believe — Something (Part 2)

Posted on May 15, 2011 | 5 comments

The most familiar statement of Jewish belief is the section of prayer we call the Sh’ma and its Blessings. The Sh’ma affirms the absolute oneness of God. But most major religions affirm monotheism, so accompanying the Sh’ma are three surrounding blessings that delineate the nature of this one God whom Jews affirm. We believe in a God who a) creates all things, b) reveals Torah to Israel, and c) promises redemption.

So far so good. But here’s the problem. The minute we make those statements, we are in danger of evoking an image of some old man who creates the universe the way Geppetto created Pinocchio; who dictated Torah to Moses the way Donald Trump instructs his executive assistant to “take a letter”; and a military genius who foiled the Egyptians at the Red Sea the way the Duke of Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo.

These are exactly the “humanized” versions of God that most moderns reject as childish. Is God some super combination of Geppetto, Trump and Wellington? Is creation like Pinocchio? The Torah like an executive memo? And the Red Sea like Waterloo?

Of course not. What we have is a liturgical set of metaphors for God, the rabbinic attempt to envision God in a way that would stretch people’s imagination. Ever since then, Jews have struggled with these metaphors, making them over into new ones of their own, if need be, so as to express the inexpressible essence of the Divine.

The best-known modern effort to do so avoids saying anything about God at all. Instead it names the processes in which God seems here to be engaged. God, we have been taught to say, is a God of creation, revelation, and redemption.

Again, so far so good. But literalists then try to translate process back into person. God, they conclude, is a creator, revealer and redeemer — which puts us back at square one, likening God to Geppetto, Trump and Wellington again. Besides, creation, revelation and redemption do not resonate for us the way they did for the nineteenth-century philosophers who came up with them. No one these days is likely to encounter a discussion on any one of them.

If we are to believe in anything sustainable, we require more up-to-date metaphors that capture best this three-fold insistence on creation, revelation and redemption; which are, therefore, equally true to the original intent of the prayers; but which speak to our time. I suggest a metaphor that combines time, space and history.

What astounds about the universe is the aesthetic and scientific miracle by which the finely-tuned network of natural law accords so beautifully with mathematics. For modern Jews, therefore, the doctrine of creation is best translated as the affirmation that the universe has pattern. It runs by an amazingly small set of universal laws that never ever fail.

Revelation describes our faith that this cosmic order is not without human purpose. We humans can matter in a grand scheme of which we know almost nothing but into which we have been thrust.

Redemption is the realization that over the long run, purpose within pattern gives us the right to hope.

Pattern, purpose and hope are the contemporary equivalents of creation, revelation and redemption. They sustain us on the tiny bridge of time called history.

If the age of the universe were a line in space equal to the distance from New York to Los Angeles, Jewish history since Abraham and Sarah would cover only ten feet, and human existence, prehistory and all, would encompass only part of a single span of the Golden Gate or George Washington Bridge. The Holocaust, therefore, in all its unspeakable horror, is insufficient to shatter optimism. The State of Israel is a similar, albeit positive, tiny step in time, an outpost of hope we must defend, but hardly a sign of imminent messianic victory, as some extremists imagine. Life is lived in the narrowness of bridge spans. Faith is the insistence that the bridge goes somewhere, connecting past and future in a present that has meaning.

For the bridge is not without direction. Creation pulses forward toward ever-increasing freedom. If God is the power behind universal pattern, the guarantor of purpose and the ground for hope, we can say, in short, that God (as it were) wants human freedom; has designed a universe that invites it; and summons Jews to champion it. The Jewish People’s moral purpose is to tell our story of servitude and freedom; to act it out in ritual that revives our vision and steels our nerve; and then, in all we do, to demonstrate our faith in freedom as the redemptive end of history.

5 Comments

Posted in belief, liturgical insights, spirituality, theology

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Ya Gotta Believe — Something!

Posted on May 7, 2011 | 20 comments

When it comes to religion, Jews have trouble believing things. The American population as a whole still widely believes in religious realities: 93% believe in God or a Higher Power; 86% believe in heaven; 73% believe in hell. There are rarely enough Jews in these polls to be sure just what the Jewish parallel would be, but it surely isn’t anywhere near these figures. When it comes to God, 93% may be high – the question included belief in a “higher power” which skews the results upward — but another poll that limits the question just to “God” shows that 90% of Protestants, 79% of Roman Catholics but only 47% of Jews believe in God.

Another way of looking at it is to compare percentages of believers across countries, including Israel, where the majority is Jewish, When asked to affirm the proposition, “I know God exists and I have no doubt about it – as strong a statement as one can imagine (I mean, no doubts at all??) 62.8% of Americans answered yes. Israelis scored 43%. Even that seems like a lot, but somewhere around 19% of Israel’s population is Orthodox. Discount that 19% and you get a whole lot fewer Jews who believe in God! Orthodox Jews everywhere are likely to be believers; it goes with the Orthodox territory. The belief gap (a bad term, as we shall see, but usable for now) affects non-Orthodox Jews, specifically.

But why is that? Why do non-Orthodox Jews register so low on religious belief scales? In part it is all about “territory,” not geographical but social. It is not the case that we believe something and then learn to say it; we start by saying it, and then get so used to the sentences coming out of our mouths, that we profess to believe it, even though we may not be absolutely clear on what it is that we have said we believe.

What determines our ability to make belief statements is the territory, the people we hang around with. If they regularly say they believe this or that, the odds are we will too; and whether they say they believe or not (in the first place) depends on the institutions that hold them (and us) together. Even relatively lapsed Christians who nonetheless attend church on occasion (for social reasons, perhaps, or even out of nostalgia or habit) get used to making statements of belief, which, as I say, go with the territory. In conversation afterward, they may hedge their statements so as not to sound too literal (“I do believe in God, but what I mean by that is…”) but they are apt to have little trouble making the statements, without which, they would have to forego association with the church they still attend.

The same is true of Orthodox Jews. To be sure, people who believe strongly in God are likely to belong to synagogues where other people believe as well – belief sometimes does come first – so more believers come to Orthodox synagogues in the first place. But lots of people join Orthodoxy for reasons having nothing to do with God. They then get used to hearing (and making) sentences about God. Orthodox Jews are not more naïve, less educated, or less critical as thinkers. They just belong to language communities that take God seriously. Non orthodox Jews do not.

Belief is socially constructed. The organizations we frequent generate certain kinds of conversations, which, in turn, generate certain sentences that we get used to hearing – and then saying. Jewish organizations are good at making sentences about Israel, anti-Semitism, the state of the world, other Jews, and charitable causes (to name but a few things). But not God. Even if you are on a synagogue board, you can go for years without hearing anyone say a sentence about God.

When I consult with synagogues, I find that people have great difficulty wrapping their heads around a sentence with God in it. It is not so much that they do not believe in God, however, as it is that they do not think of themselves as people who talk about God. God-language embarrasses them. They yearn to believe in something, but they don’t know how to go about figuring out what it is.

More on this is a later posting. Suffice it to say that we suffer less from lack of belief than from inadequate language to express the beliefs we might have. The way toward belief lies in broaching conversations that are out of our comfort zone; listening to what we say; and then trying to determine what we might have meant when we said it.

The Jewish “failure to believe” is a misnomer. What is at stake is not a belief gap but a conversation gap, and for reasons I will get to later, it is time we changed the conversation.

20 Comments

Posted in spirituality, synagogues, theology

Tagged , , , , ,

The Royal Wedding: More Than an Unrehearsed Sing-along

Posted on May 2, 2011 | 6 comments

What is it that attracted so many to the royal wedding Friday morning? An estimated three billion people tuned in to it. It averaged 67 tweets and 74 facebook mentions per second. Within an hour, the Washington Post’s Royal Wedding Blog listed “25,820 articles” on it! What was that all about?

The Los Angeles Times lamented “the hoopla” as “a lesson in just how many hours some of the highest-paid television journalists in the world can spend discussing a bridal dress they have not seen while watching people they do not know mill about in Westminster Abbey wearing large hats.” But the wedding was more than that. It was a reminder of nobility, not just the nobility of the British monarchy, but the nobility of human aspiration that most of us have forgotten we have.

I surveyed my own register of liturgical experts on both sides of the Atlantic. Rabbi Charles Middleburgh, an editor for the Liberal Jewish liturgies of Great Britain, spoke for many when he said, “The ceremony was a deeply traditional one, with some of the greatest hymns being sung and stirring music being played.” Dr. Paul Bradshaw, a British liturgist and priest in the Anglican Church himself, explained that “Prince Charles, the bridegroom’s father, is a lover of traditional language rites.” The couple therefore chose “our traditional language marriage rite, not the one authorized in 1662 which describes marriage as a remedy against fornication so that we should not be like the brute beasts of the field, but a slightly cleaned up version of that.”

Good thing they cleaned up the “remedy against fornication” bit, but, mellifluous language aside, the rite had other problems that left some carping. Haven’t we given up the antiquated notion of giving the bride away? Lutheran liturgist, Dr. Gail Ramshaw of Philadelphia, thinks they “missed an opportunity for Christians to witness meaningful contemporary liturgy. When I hear ‘wilt,’” she says, “I wilt! And, really, ‘man and wife?’”  Indeed, try saying “woman and husband” and you get the idea.

Still, Middleburgh is spot on (as they say across the pond) when he applauds the old language as “being so much finer than its deeply prosaic modern versions.” The soaring lines of Westminster Abbey reverberated with it — and with the sung words of William Blake’s Jerusalem.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

This is a far cry from what we usually get in worship: folksy settings, dress-down gatherings, a guitar or two, and language by lesser lights than Blake. For one brief hour, the British Empire was resurrected from the dead, but without its imperial exclusivity. The Anglican liturgy once sought God’s mercy on “Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics.” At Westminster, on Friday, Jews and Muslims joined Christians as equals, marveling together at religious ritual’s reach into the heavens. The wedding “expressed respect for monarchy, the Church [and] marriage,” comments Dr. Brigitte Sion, a liturgist in New York, “transcending race, class, religion and geography.”

“Monarchy, church and marriage,” mind you, none of which is doing very well right now. Bradshaw notes that it is “commonplace for couples in the UK to live together without marrying at all, or to marry only after their children are old enough to be bridesmaids at their own parents’ weddings.” Religions in the west have spent half a century downsizing rituals to the point where people may not think they are worth doing any more.

I understand that downsizing. It is part of the baby-boomer revolt against the sterile liturgies that relegated congregations to passivity and erected social distance between people at a time when they sought just the opposite: community, connection, and a God who meets and knows us intimately. But intimacy is one thing; sloppiness, even slovenliness, is another. People in charge of contemporary liturgies tend to forget the artistic care that even informal liturgies require.

In any event, our problem today is that public life in general has become slovenly — and not just aesthetically, but morally. Public debate has cheapened into mean spiritedness. Politicians become little thinkers who shrink our purview of the possible until whatever seems worth doing cannot be done. We are bereft of heroes to call us to our higher selves.

But on occasion, the human spirit whispers within us that it wants to soar again. And the wedding let us soar. Vicariously, at least, we all dressed up for a fairy-tale ending, prince and all; and celebrated it in something other than an unrehearsed sing-along. There is more to a calendar than holiday sales, more to the world than box stores and malls, and more to life than choosing between burgers and burritos. As the midrash puts it, we are all princes and princesses, all children of a divine ruler. On Friday we got a glimpse of royalty – not just the royal family’s but our own.

6 Comments

Posted in Christian worship, liberal religion, liturgical insights, ritual

Tagged , , ,