Post by Rabbi Neil on Sept 30, 2017 0:50:27 GMT
On Erev Rosh Hashanah, I spoke of the need for the Jewish community at large to create an authentic, world-building narrative that holds together past, present and future, and my sermons since then have started to point to ways that I believe this can be achieved. One approach was prompted by the horror story in which Abraham nearly sacrifices his son, and we were reminded that ein anu mashgichin b’vat kol – we pay no heed to a heavenly voice. In other words, the authentic, world-building narrative has to come not from permission and information from above, but from within. For over two thousand years, authority in Judaism has come from above, which meant that personal decision-making and spirituality was, at the very least, strongly guided. First, the priests guided the people’s spirituality and religious practice by appeasing a potentially volatile God with offerings of animal sacrifices. Then, after the Temple was destroyed and the priesthood was made irrelevant, Rabbis came to the fore and told the people that God no longer wanted the offering of animals, but the offering of the heart, which was prayer and study. Of course, with most people illiterate, this placed them firmly in charge of interpreting God’s word. The Rabbis could provide solid Scriptural justification for the change, which was unquestionably necessary or else Judaism would have died out. A number of prophets in the Bible rallied against meaningless sacrifices. We just heard in our Haftarah the prophet Isaiah’s stinging rebuke of vain sacrifices without meaningful social change. And Isaiah wasn’t alone – through the prophet Amos, God said “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me.” Why? Just like Isaiah, Amos makes it very clear that God’s main concern is not that people offer up animals but that they “let justice roll down like a river, righteousness like a never-ending stream.” Unfortunately for them, the Rabbis were powerless politically to bring about the transformation of society because of Roman domination. So, in the absence of meaningful social change, the Rabbis turned Torah study itself into the way of redeeming the world. In fact, they even went so far as to say that “were it not for Torah, Heaven and Earth would no longer survive.” Torah study took on cosmic significance, more important than anything else, and that’s how it remained for nearly two thousand years. Then along came the Enlightenment and the authority of Torah and of the Rabbis, which was all manifested through halakhah (the legal process of authority that regulated every aspect of the Jew’s life) crumbled. Two hundred years ago, Reform Judaism presented itself as the new authentic narrative holding past, present and future together. Current demographic trends suggest that unless changes are made, that may not be the case, and that we need to reexamine that narrative in order to reverse those trends.
On Shabbat Shuvah, I suggested that while Reform Judaism celebrates individual choices, that embrace of individualism also threatens the communal narrative, and that if we are to create a communal destiny then everyone needs to ask what they as individuals can do to contribute to that communal destiny. Last night, I suggested that while Reform Judaism celebrates the necessary intellectual critiques of the Bible and indeed all aspects of Judaism, it has to particularly foster the emotional connections to Judaism. Instead of Reform Jews focusing on what they no longer feel is relevant to Judaism, we need to be intellectually consistent and at the same time focus on what fosters a strong emotional connection to Judaism. So, how do we create an authentic, world-building narrative that comes from us, that focuses on community and that fosters a lasting emotional connection?
I believe the answer to that can only be given after we address another question - “what does God want of you?” Now, I appreciate that putting God in a question about the Jewish future when so many contemporary Jews don’t believe in God, or at least in an anthropomorphic God, might initially seem problematic. But I believe that if part of the community’s authentic answer includes disbelief in an anthropomorphic God, that is an essential and healthy part of the communal response. For so many years, we have focused on us asking questions of Judaism – is this still relevant? is this offensive? – that we have interrogated Judaism to the point that no answer can satisfy. As Abraham Joshua Heschel said, religion consists of God’s question and our answer. This question is not new. ‘Mah Adonai elohecha sho’el mei’imach? What does the Eternal your God ask of you?’ asks Deuteronomy. ‘Only to fear the Eternal your God, to walk in God’s ways, to love God and to serve the Eternal your God with all your heart and your soul.’ ‘Mah Adonai doreish m’imach? What does the Eternal your God require of you?’ asks the prophet Micah. ‘Only to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ And I want to be absolutely clear that I’m not talking about being asked by a bat kol, a heavenly voice booming from heaven. I think I was fairly clear about that on Rosh Hashanah morning. The focus of the creation of an authentic Jewish narrative cannot be an authoritarian voice from above. Nonetheless, I do believe that if we can stop always asking the questions and instead just be asked, then the answer is already there. Heschel again – “To be implies to stand for, because every being is representative of something that is more than itself.” If that is the case, as I believe it is, then what do we stand for? That’s the question that is asked of us, and that’s the question that helps form a new narrative. Jewish being in and of itself is not sufficient for a narrative. The call that Heschel quite rightly states resonates in every generation, the call of God to the first human beings – “ayeka – where are you?” has to be answered differently by differing generations. Ahad Ha’am said that “every generation has its own needs, its own truths. It was right for the ancients to think and act as they did in their time; it is equally right for us to think and act as we do in the different conditions of our own time.”
So, we need to use new metaphors and new vocabulary to create a new, authentic narrative. For example, the Jewish community has for generations interpreted the word teshuvah as repentance, atonement, or a return, meaning a return to God. But how can we return to a patriarchal, authoritarian, dominating, judgmental, transcendent God? Why on earth would we want to? No, we have to understand that word anew, in its other translation, as an answer, a response. Today must be a day of us answering the question asked of all of us – where are you… an answer that may well include repentance but doesn’t necessarily have to. And if the Jewish community responds to the question “Where are you?” with “Here! We are here, where we’ve always been, the same traditional place we’ve been for generations” then we’re not being authentic to our ever-evolving needs and beliefs. How can we be in the same place as the Rabbis of the Talmud, who believed in a flat Earth at the center of the universe covered by a domed firmament that held back chaotic waters? How can we be in the same place as the Rabbis who had not experienced women working towards egalitarianism in society? How can we be in the same place as the Rabbis who had not witnessed the inhumanity of the Holocaust? How can we be in the same place as the Rabbis who knew nothing of wave-particle duality or of ecology or of the fact that human beings can now permanently alter the planet’s entire weather system?
These changes are so profound, so shocking, and demanding of such a strong shift in language and metaphor that we have to ask ourselves if the creation of a new narrative requires mere evolution from previous narratives, or if it requires a total revolution? There are advantages and disadvantages to each answer. Evolution may be comforting for today’s Jewish community, it might shift the boundaries and metaphors of the past slowly and therefore in a more palatable manner. At the same time, it may not be bold enough to meet the demands of a totally different Jewish community. Revolution, on the other hand, may more honestly address the needs of today’s community but may struggle to form an authentic link to the past. But Judaism has for so long been authoritarian spiritually and practically that we have to wonder, is it possible for a democratic Judaism to arise and still authentically claim a link to the past? Perhaps it is, but only tenuously. But that shouldn’t actually be a problem because tenuous links are not unknown in Judaism – for example, the Rabbis knew that the laws of Shabbat as they interpreted them from Torah were so extraordinarily tenuous that they described them as being “like mountains hanging by a hair.” They knew what they were doing. The Rabbis knew that the transition from Biblical to Rabbinic Judaism was nothing short of a revolution, but that it had to be couched as evolution in order to be palatable to the masses. So, now, we must do the same, based on the same sources that were available to the Rabbis, such as the words of the prophets I mentioned before, or the book of Psalms which adjures us to “seek peace and pursue it,” not because it’s a nice thing to do but because it is the thing to do. That is the foundation of the Jewish narrative. That is the answer to the question “Where are you?” – “We are seeking peace in Your Name.” If that’s the case, why does God seem so distant to us in the current narrative? God tells us clearly through Isaiah – “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the orphan; plead the case of the widow.” This is the only authentic narrative that can today hold together past, present and future, which is revolutionary in its obsession with action but is evolutionary due to its basis in particularly prophetic wisdom.
As it is, open revolution would be too traumatic. As Rabbi Barbara Borts says, “the synagogue should not be a battleground; it is, rather, to be a place of essential existence, of harmony and contentment, a world without boundaries between man and woman, the world and the Jew – humans and God.” There are enough battles to be fought in the world, often as a result of our negligence and self-interest. Our new Jewish narrative needs to challenge us against that self-interest, and it needs to be real with how terrifying humanity has become. It needs to address our simultaneous power for good and power for evil, our capacity to improve society and our capacity to annihilate the entire human race. It needs to balance our ideals of equality and our simultaneous tendency for oppression and domination. It needs to simultaneously hold our mastery over all other species while acknowledging our total dependency on the web of life. It needs to comfort us in the isolating loneliness of modernity while simultaneously rebuking us for our complicity in global oppression and bloodshed. And, to be clear, our Yom Kippur liturgy certainly does that – it certainly holds us to account for our failures, and therefore still remains relevant today, even if the metaphors of God therein speak little to many of us and merely act as our theological grounding in the past.
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the new narrative is that for God to be relevant in the 21st century, God must exist in our narrative as a verb, not as a noun. We need to transform our theology and flood it with new metaphors of God so, to quote Rachel Adler, we can “bridge the gap between the impoverished world of meaning we currently inhabit and the richer and more vital worlds that might be.” We live in a time of impoverished, outdated metaphors littering our narrative which we pass onto the next generation and are then somehow surprised that they form no emotional connection with that narrative even though we have little connection with it ourselves. If we are to live Judaism of today, we have to stop living Judaism of the past. And that means that as a community, we need to create a new narrative. We cannot do that as isolated individuals because that way chaos lies, it has to be a communal, democratic endeavor, guided by those knowledgeable of Judaism of the past to help ground the narrative, but not dominated by them. Authority figures throughout Jewish past have claimed God told them what to do, usually to their benefit. Now we believe differently – that God, defined as a verb, does not demand obedience, but does nonetheless demand a response of us. And to be clear again, I don’t necessarily mean God as a noun – to believe that would mean to still be held by the narrative of the past. God the verb – “ehyeh asher ehyeh… I am that I am” - is made evident in our doing, our acting, our redeeming, our perfecting. That means that in those actions some Jews will experience God and some will not, and that’s how it’s meant to be. God is not the focus of the new Jewish narrative, God is the result of the formation of that narrative. We are no longer waiting for a bat kol, a heavenly voice, to tell us what to do. We should be too busy bringing God into the world instead.
So, we are going to have to be real with ourselves. It’s time to be totally honest with our response to our Jewish narrative. Instead of squeezing and contorting ourselves to fit into that narrative, we need to first and foremost analyze the human condition and then create the narrative that makes sense today as a result of that enquiry. We need to base our narrative, to quote Arthur Waskow, “on the questions asked in pain and fury, hope and joy, that move our own generation.” We will need to create a narrative that will take the boundaries of the previous narratives and forcefully, albeit lovingly, open them much wider. We will need to create a narrative in which we are no longer beholden to the past but, rather, love the past for bringing us to where we are today, and use it to remind ourselves of the progress we have made. So, if anything in our community seems archaic, it becomes our responsibility to treasure it, learn from it and not be beholden to it. If it is no longer the appropriate answer to the question “Where are you?” then we have not only the permission, but the mandate, to find a more appropriate answer.
If we are to create an authentic world-building narrative that holds together past, present and future, if we are to hold a narrative and hand it down to the next generation and expect them to love it as we do, then instead of interrogating our tradition we are going to have to start letting it interrogate us, demand of us a response. Not a response to a heavenly voice demanding obeisance, but to the Divine voice within us, within our community - a voice that gives us permission to radically evolve our narrative in order to face the immediate needs of the present. The creation of that narrative starts with our response to every page in our machzor today. The creation of that narrative starts now. May our search for our answer bring us fulfillment, joy and a new understand of our place in the journey from our wondrous mythic past to our glorious potential future. And let us say, Amen.
On Shabbat Shuvah, I suggested that while Reform Judaism celebrates individual choices, that embrace of individualism also threatens the communal narrative, and that if we are to create a communal destiny then everyone needs to ask what they as individuals can do to contribute to that communal destiny. Last night, I suggested that while Reform Judaism celebrates the necessary intellectual critiques of the Bible and indeed all aspects of Judaism, it has to particularly foster the emotional connections to Judaism. Instead of Reform Jews focusing on what they no longer feel is relevant to Judaism, we need to be intellectually consistent and at the same time focus on what fosters a strong emotional connection to Judaism. So, how do we create an authentic, world-building narrative that comes from us, that focuses on community and that fosters a lasting emotional connection?
I believe the answer to that can only be given after we address another question - “what does God want of you?” Now, I appreciate that putting God in a question about the Jewish future when so many contemporary Jews don’t believe in God, or at least in an anthropomorphic God, might initially seem problematic. But I believe that if part of the community’s authentic answer includes disbelief in an anthropomorphic God, that is an essential and healthy part of the communal response. For so many years, we have focused on us asking questions of Judaism – is this still relevant? is this offensive? – that we have interrogated Judaism to the point that no answer can satisfy. As Abraham Joshua Heschel said, religion consists of God’s question and our answer. This question is not new. ‘Mah Adonai elohecha sho’el mei’imach? What does the Eternal your God ask of you?’ asks Deuteronomy. ‘Only to fear the Eternal your God, to walk in God’s ways, to love God and to serve the Eternal your God with all your heart and your soul.’ ‘Mah Adonai doreish m’imach? What does the Eternal your God require of you?’ asks the prophet Micah. ‘Only to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ And I want to be absolutely clear that I’m not talking about being asked by a bat kol, a heavenly voice booming from heaven. I think I was fairly clear about that on Rosh Hashanah morning. The focus of the creation of an authentic Jewish narrative cannot be an authoritarian voice from above. Nonetheless, I do believe that if we can stop always asking the questions and instead just be asked, then the answer is already there. Heschel again – “To be implies to stand for, because every being is representative of something that is more than itself.” If that is the case, as I believe it is, then what do we stand for? That’s the question that is asked of us, and that’s the question that helps form a new narrative. Jewish being in and of itself is not sufficient for a narrative. The call that Heschel quite rightly states resonates in every generation, the call of God to the first human beings – “ayeka – where are you?” has to be answered differently by differing generations. Ahad Ha’am said that “every generation has its own needs, its own truths. It was right for the ancients to think and act as they did in their time; it is equally right for us to think and act as we do in the different conditions of our own time.”
So, we need to use new metaphors and new vocabulary to create a new, authentic narrative. For example, the Jewish community has for generations interpreted the word teshuvah as repentance, atonement, or a return, meaning a return to God. But how can we return to a patriarchal, authoritarian, dominating, judgmental, transcendent God? Why on earth would we want to? No, we have to understand that word anew, in its other translation, as an answer, a response. Today must be a day of us answering the question asked of all of us – where are you… an answer that may well include repentance but doesn’t necessarily have to. And if the Jewish community responds to the question “Where are you?” with “Here! We are here, where we’ve always been, the same traditional place we’ve been for generations” then we’re not being authentic to our ever-evolving needs and beliefs. How can we be in the same place as the Rabbis of the Talmud, who believed in a flat Earth at the center of the universe covered by a domed firmament that held back chaotic waters? How can we be in the same place as the Rabbis who had not experienced women working towards egalitarianism in society? How can we be in the same place as the Rabbis who had not witnessed the inhumanity of the Holocaust? How can we be in the same place as the Rabbis who knew nothing of wave-particle duality or of ecology or of the fact that human beings can now permanently alter the planet’s entire weather system?
These changes are so profound, so shocking, and demanding of such a strong shift in language and metaphor that we have to ask ourselves if the creation of a new narrative requires mere evolution from previous narratives, or if it requires a total revolution? There are advantages and disadvantages to each answer. Evolution may be comforting for today’s Jewish community, it might shift the boundaries and metaphors of the past slowly and therefore in a more palatable manner. At the same time, it may not be bold enough to meet the demands of a totally different Jewish community. Revolution, on the other hand, may more honestly address the needs of today’s community but may struggle to form an authentic link to the past. But Judaism has for so long been authoritarian spiritually and practically that we have to wonder, is it possible for a democratic Judaism to arise and still authentically claim a link to the past? Perhaps it is, but only tenuously. But that shouldn’t actually be a problem because tenuous links are not unknown in Judaism – for example, the Rabbis knew that the laws of Shabbat as they interpreted them from Torah were so extraordinarily tenuous that they described them as being “like mountains hanging by a hair.” They knew what they were doing. The Rabbis knew that the transition from Biblical to Rabbinic Judaism was nothing short of a revolution, but that it had to be couched as evolution in order to be palatable to the masses. So, now, we must do the same, based on the same sources that were available to the Rabbis, such as the words of the prophets I mentioned before, or the book of Psalms which adjures us to “seek peace and pursue it,” not because it’s a nice thing to do but because it is the thing to do. That is the foundation of the Jewish narrative. That is the answer to the question “Where are you?” – “We are seeking peace in Your Name.” If that’s the case, why does God seem so distant to us in the current narrative? God tells us clearly through Isaiah – “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the orphan; plead the case of the widow.” This is the only authentic narrative that can today hold together past, present and future, which is revolutionary in its obsession with action but is evolutionary due to its basis in particularly prophetic wisdom.
As it is, open revolution would be too traumatic. As Rabbi Barbara Borts says, “the synagogue should not be a battleground; it is, rather, to be a place of essential existence, of harmony and contentment, a world without boundaries between man and woman, the world and the Jew – humans and God.” There are enough battles to be fought in the world, often as a result of our negligence and self-interest. Our new Jewish narrative needs to challenge us against that self-interest, and it needs to be real with how terrifying humanity has become. It needs to address our simultaneous power for good and power for evil, our capacity to improve society and our capacity to annihilate the entire human race. It needs to balance our ideals of equality and our simultaneous tendency for oppression and domination. It needs to simultaneously hold our mastery over all other species while acknowledging our total dependency on the web of life. It needs to comfort us in the isolating loneliness of modernity while simultaneously rebuking us for our complicity in global oppression and bloodshed. And, to be clear, our Yom Kippur liturgy certainly does that – it certainly holds us to account for our failures, and therefore still remains relevant today, even if the metaphors of God therein speak little to many of us and merely act as our theological grounding in the past.
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the new narrative is that for God to be relevant in the 21st century, God must exist in our narrative as a verb, not as a noun. We need to transform our theology and flood it with new metaphors of God so, to quote Rachel Adler, we can “bridge the gap between the impoverished world of meaning we currently inhabit and the richer and more vital worlds that might be.” We live in a time of impoverished, outdated metaphors littering our narrative which we pass onto the next generation and are then somehow surprised that they form no emotional connection with that narrative even though we have little connection with it ourselves. If we are to live Judaism of today, we have to stop living Judaism of the past. And that means that as a community, we need to create a new narrative. We cannot do that as isolated individuals because that way chaos lies, it has to be a communal, democratic endeavor, guided by those knowledgeable of Judaism of the past to help ground the narrative, but not dominated by them. Authority figures throughout Jewish past have claimed God told them what to do, usually to their benefit. Now we believe differently – that God, defined as a verb, does not demand obedience, but does nonetheless demand a response of us. And to be clear again, I don’t necessarily mean God as a noun – to believe that would mean to still be held by the narrative of the past. God the verb – “ehyeh asher ehyeh… I am that I am” - is made evident in our doing, our acting, our redeeming, our perfecting. That means that in those actions some Jews will experience God and some will not, and that’s how it’s meant to be. God is not the focus of the new Jewish narrative, God is the result of the formation of that narrative. We are no longer waiting for a bat kol, a heavenly voice, to tell us what to do. We should be too busy bringing God into the world instead.
So, we are going to have to be real with ourselves. It’s time to be totally honest with our response to our Jewish narrative. Instead of squeezing and contorting ourselves to fit into that narrative, we need to first and foremost analyze the human condition and then create the narrative that makes sense today as a result of that enquiry. We need to base our narrative, to quote Arthur Waskow, “on the questions asked in pain and fury, hope and joy, that move our own generation.” We will need to create a narrative that will take the boundaries of the previous narratives and forcefully, albeit lovingly, open them much wider. We will need to create a narrative in which we are no longer beholden to the past but, rather, love the past for bringing us to where we are today, and use it to remind ourselves of the progress we have made. So, if anything in our community seems archaic, it becomes our responsibility to treasure it, learn from it and not be beholden to it. If it is no longer the appropriate answer to the question “Where are you?” then we have not only the permission, but the mandate, to find a more appropriate answer.
If we are to create an authentic world-building narrative that holds together past, present and future, if we are to hold a narrative and hand it down to the next generation and expect them to love it as we do, then instead of interrogating our tradition we are going to have to start letting it interrogate us, demand of us a response. Not a response to a heavenly voice demanding obeisance, but to the Divine voice within us, within our community - a voice that gives us permission to radically evolve our narrative in order to face the immediate needs of the present. The creation of that narrative starts with our response to every page in our machzor today. The creation of that narrative starts now. May our search for our answer bring us fulfillment, joy and a new understand of our place in the journey from our wondrous mythic past to our glorious potential future. And let us say, Amen.
