Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 18, 2018 17:49:35 GMT
What if it is the connection to the future that makes Judaism authentic, and not to the past?
When I was a child, the biggest issues facing the Jewish community were anti-semitism and assimilation, focusing particularly on whether or not our grandchildren would be Jewish. The tone of the mainstream Jewish conversation was about survival. Members of the community who married non-Jews were shunned to a greater or lesser degree. As I developed into my teenage years, I realized how nonsensical that was. The Reform Movement was designed specifically to celebrate the best of secular life and to use it to enhance our Judaism. How, then, could we possibly praise someone for being attracted to non-Jewish ways of thinking but scorn them for being attracted to non-Jewish people? That made no sense to me. As I grew older and moved into the Rabbinate, I came to realize that the entire focus of Jewish life in the twenty-first century was pointing in the wrong direction. We were talking about the future, but really we were still looking at the past.
A hundred years ago, Ahad Ha’am wrote that “a “people of the book”, unlike a normal people, is a slave to the book.” He said that “It has surrendered its whole soul to the written word. The book ceases to be what it should be, a source of ever-new inspiration and moral strength; on the contrary, its function in life is to weaken and finally crush all spontaneity of action and emotion, till men become wholly dependent on the written word and incapable of responding to any stimulus in nature or in human life without its permission and approval. Nor, even when that sanction is found, is the response simple and natural: it has to follow a pre-arranged and artificial plan. Consequently both the people and its book stand still from age to age; little or nothing changes, because the vital impulse to change is lacking on both sides. The people stagnates because heart and mind do not react directly and immediately to external events; the book stagnates because, as a result of this absence of direct reaction, heart and mind do not rise in revolt against the written word where it has ceased to be in harmony with current needs.” When I read these words for the first time, they resonated so thoroughly through me that I didn’t know what to do with myself. It openly challenged the Rabbinic tradition I protected, a tradition that looks back to Revelation and the over two-millennia-long process of interpretation for authenticity. The system itself, to use Rachel Adler’s phrase, had become “methodolatrous.” The spontaneity of the Prophets, the relevance of the Prophets, was replaced with the rigid system of the Rabbis. Judaism became defined by a rigid acceptance of the received tradition, and interpretation only within certain pre-established rules. The message of Judaism, either consciously or subconsciously, was that authenticity was defined in the past, and could only be established following the rules of yesteryear. All this, then, leads to my next “What If…?” question of my High Holy Day sermons, one that questions not all of Judaism but at least the last two thousand years of Rabbinic Judaism. That question is, “What if it is the connection to the future that makes Judaism authentic, and not to the past?”
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was critical of the attitude of grounding ourselves totally in the past. He says that “Wise, important, essential and pedagogically useful as the principle “respect for tradition” is, it is grotesque and self-defeating to make of it the supreme article of faith. Religious behaviorism is a doctrine that dominates many minds, and is to a large measure responsible for the crisis in prayer.” In other words, tradition is important, but when tradition overtakes spontaneity, Judaism dies. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplin famously said that “the past has a vote not a veto.” So, we do not ignore the past, but we are not beholden to it.
Author Douglas Rushkoff is quite blunt in his approach to the way Judaism relates to the past, present and future. He says that “endlessly repeating the Judaism of the past turns it into a bedtime tale. It was intended and must serve, instead, as a wake-up call.” He looks at the present and future of Judaism and states boldly that “our civilization is facing the tremendous spiritual, economic, and cultural challenges posed by globalization, the triumph of science over nature, and the incalculable potential of new technologies. Judaism, instead of riding to meet these challenges, is obsessing with self-preservation.” What we now know, though, is that Jewish survival isn’t guaranteed by guilting Jews into marriage with someone else Jewish but is guaranteed by relevance in daily life. The world has changed at a terrifying pace. Like it or not, we are now members of a global society. Information rushes at us constantly from all over. We have become aware of the enormity of global human suffering like never before. We have even come to ask whether the underlying theology of our entire society (a theology in which our community had a very strong influence) may have brought about and subsequently reinforced a separation from the Earth that inevitably led to its despoliation. We have learned that the dichotomous gender division championed by our tradition is archaic at best, damaging at worst. We have seen that our tradition’s almost-total disdain for non-Jews was a social projection and a generalization no less deplorable than the stereotypes thrown at us throughout the years. We have realized that the Rabbinic disgust of homosexuality is profoundly out of step with our modern desire to celebrate all healthy, loving relationships, regardless of who is in them. And, as we saw on Rosh Hashanah, we have come to the painful realization that our tradition has been so gendered as to separate half the Jewish community from authentic modes of Jewish expression. To love Judaism, then, is not to love its roots but to love its future. To love Judaism is not to ask where it has been, but where it is going. To love Judaism is not to obsess about Revelation, but to work towards Redemption. To love Judaism, as Rushkoff astutely observes, is to be able to authentically answer “Hineini – Here I am” to the Divine call.
Can we authentically be Jewish while acknowledging a break with the past? I would say that we can, with a creative reading of a text from Talmud. In Tractate Bava Batra Rabbi Joseph comments on Deuteronomy 10:2, which talks of the tablets that Moses smashed and deposited in the ark, by saying that “this teaches us that both the tablets and the fragments of the tablets were deposited in the ark.” The shattered past was held along with the law that would guide the community into the future. It’s a metaphor that serves us very well today. Our connection with the Jewish past is tenuous at best… to use a Talmudic phrase, it’s like a mountain hanging by a hair. We carry it with us, but acknowledge that it is essentially broken. So, we look forward instead.
In order to look to the future, we need to start being real about where we are today, not where we have been in the past. That’s not to say that we should abandon any connection with the past… of course not. But for the Jewish community to continue into the future, we have to ground ourselves in the present, not in the past. We have to be real with this unique society, a society never before seen in the history of humanity, and we have to start with that reality for Jewish thought and praxis. Clifford Geertz said that “a religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” The chaos that threatened the Jewish community in the past is not in any way the same as the chaos that threatens the Jewish community today. As a result, today’s society is ordered totally differently to that of yesteryear, which means that the religion itself must necessarily be different today, and looking into the future.
We return, then, to the question of the day – “What if it is the connection to the future that makes Judaism authentic, and not to the past?” That means establishing the Jewish religious symbols of the future on those that would be most meaningful to us today, not on symbols and narratives that were most meaningful in the past. Connecting to the future also means moving beyond intellectual ancestor worship, by which I mean looking in the texts of the past for the supposed only authentic answer. It means, instead, preparing a table where our children will want to partake of delicacies old and new. Connecting to the future to make Judaism authentic means recognizing that while our tradition contains much wisdom, today’s questions are profoundly different from those of the past, so the past responses can only give a taste of an authentic answer today. Connecting to the future means actually listening to the guidance of our children, instead of patronizing them. After all, in Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan says that since the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from prophets and given to fools and children. Fools and children – the only two groups of people whose opinions were traditionally ignored as much as those of women! Since as we have seen it is now clearly time to give voice within our tradition to the needs of women, maybe it’s also time to give voice to the needs and concerns of children, and in so doing create the strongest possible connection to the future… their future and our community’s future.
Phyllis Trible once wrote that “the Bible is a pilgrim wandering through history to merge past and present.” I respectfully disagree. I think that way of thinking has to end in order that the Jewish community may thrive long into the future. We can no longer merge past and present because the present is so profoundly different to the past. That way too strongly ties the present to the past, makes us beholden to it, and frightens us out of truly developing ourselves and our community. I believe instead that the Bible is a pilgrim wandering through all times to reflect the past, to challenge the present, and to inspire the future.
If we totally lose our connection to the past, then we become ungrounded and wild. So, it is important for our High Holy Day services to remind us of the past to try to bring it into the present. But it is also not enough. We are the ones who need to consider how these services will lay the foundations for a meaningful Jewish future. I hope that this year, then, we not look to the past but to the future, that our Judaism truly moves from preserving Revelation to preparing Redemption. May the strength of our past and the opportunities of the present give us courage for the future, and let us say, Amen.
When I was a child, the biggest issues facing the Jewish community were anti-semitism and assimilation, focusing particularly on whether or not our grandchildren would be Jewish. The tone of the mainstream Jewish conversation was about survival. Members of the community who married non-Jews were shunned to a greater or lesser degree. As I developed into my teenage years, I realized how nonsensical that was. The Reform Movement was designed specifically to celebrate the best of secular life and to use it to enhance our Judaism. How, then, could we possibly praise someone for being attracted to non-Jewish ways of thinking but scorn them for being attracted to non-Jewish people? That made no sense to me. As I grew older and moved into the Rabbinate, I came to realize that the entire focus of Jewish life in the twenty-first century was pointing in the wrong direction. We were talking about the future, but really we were still looking at the past.
A hundred years ago, Ahad Ha’am wrote that “a “people of the book”, unlike a normal people, is a slave to the book.” He said that “It has surrendered its whole soul to the written word. The book ceases to be what it should be, a source of ever-new inspiration and moral strength; on the contrary, its function in life is to weaken and finally crush all spontaneity of action and emotion, till men become wholly dependent on the written word and incapable of responding to any stimulus in nature or in human life without its permission and approval. Nor, even when that sanction is found, is the response simple and natural: it has to follow a pre-arranged and artificial plan. Consequently both the people and its book stand still from age to age; little or nothing changes, because the vital impulse to change is lacking on both sides. The people stagnates because heart and mind do not react directly and immediately to external events; the book stagnates because, as a result of this absence of direct reaction, heart and mind do not rise in revolt against the written word where it has ceased to be in harmony with current needs.” When I read these words for the first time, they resonated so thoroughly through me that I didn’t know what to do with myself. It openly challenged the Rabbinic tradition I protected, a tradition that looks back to Revelation and the over two-millennia-long process of interpretation for authenticity. The system itself, to use Rachel Adler’s phrase, had become “methodolatrous.” The spontaneity of the Prophets, the relevance of the Prophets, was replaced with the rigid system of the Rabbis. Judaism became defined by a rigid acceptance of the received tradition, and interpretation only within certain pre-established rules. The message of Judaism, either consciously or subconsciously, was that authenticity was defined in the past, and could only be established following the rules of yesteryear. All this, then, leads to my next “What If…?” question of my High Holy Day sermons, one that questions not all of Judaism but at least the last two thousand years of Rabbinic Judaism. That question is, “What if it is the connection to the future that makes Judaism authentic, and not to the past?”
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was critical of the attitude of grounding ourselves totally in the past. He says that “Wise, important, essential and pedagogically useful as the principle “respect for tradition” is, it is grotesque and self-defeating to make of it the supreme article of faith. Religious behaviorism is a doctrine that dominates many minds, and is to a large measure responsible for the crisis in prayer.” In other words, tradition is important, but when tradition overtakes spontaneity, Judaism dies. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplin famously said that “the past has a vote not a veto.” So, we do not ignore the past, but we are not beholden to it.
Author Douglas Rushkoff is quite blunt in his approach to the way Judaism relates to the past, present and future. He says that “endlessly repeating the Judaism of the past turns it into a bedtime tale. It was intended and must serve, instead, as a wake-up call.” He looks at the present and future of Judaism and states boldly that “our civilization is facing the tremendous spiritual, economic, and cultural challenges posed by globalization, the triumph of science over nature, and the incalculable potential of new technologies. Judaism, instead of riding to meet these challenges, is obsessing with self-preservation.” What we now know, though, is that Jewish survival isn’t guaranteed by guilting Jews into marriage with someone else Jewish but is guaranteed by relevance in daily life. The world has changed at a terrifying pace. Like it or not, we are now members of a global society. Information rushes at us constantly from all over. We have become aware of the enormity of global human suffering like never before. We have even come to ask whether the underlying theology of our entire society (a theology in which our community had a very strong influence) may have brought about and subsequently reinforced a separation from the Earth that inevitably led to its despoliation. We have learned that the dichotomous gender division championed by our tradition is archaic at best, damaging at worst. We have seen that our tradition’s almost-total disdain for non-Jews was a social projection and a generalization no less deplorable than the stereotypes thrown at us throughout the years. We have realized that the Rabbinic disgust of homosexuality is profoundly out of step with our modern desire to celebrate all healthy, loving relationships, regardless of who is in them. And, as we saw on Rosh Hashanah, we have come to the painful realization that our tradition has been so gendered as to separate half the Jewish community from authentic modes of Jewish expression. To love Judaism, then, is not to love its roots but to love its future. To love Judaism is not to ask where it has been, but where it is going. To love Judaism is not to obsess about Revelation, but to work towards Redemption. To love Judaism, as Rushkoff astutely observes, is to be able to authentically answer “Hineini – Here I am” to the Divine call.
Can we authentically be Jewish while acknowledging a break with the past? I would say that we can, with a creative reading of a text from Talmud. In Tractate Bava Batra Rabbi Joseph comments on Deuteronomy 10:2, which talks of the tablets that Moses smashed and deposited in the ark, by saying that “this teaches us that both the tablets and the fragments of the tablets were deposited in the ark.” The shattered past was held along with the law that would guide the community into the future. It’s a metaphor that serves us very well today. Our connection with the Jewish past is tenuous at best… to use a Talmudic phrase, it’s like a mountain hanging by a hair. We carry it with us, but acknowledge that it is essentially broken. So, we look forward instead.
In order to look to the future, we need to start being real about where we are today, not where we have been in the past. That’s not to say that we should abandon any connection with the past… of course not. But for the Jewish community to continue into the future, we have to ground ourselves in the present, not in the past. We have to be real with this unique society, a society never before seen in the history of humanity, and we have to start with that reality for Jewish thought and praxis. Clifford Geertz said that “a religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” The chaos that threatened the Jewish community in the past is not in any way the same as the chaos that threatens the Jewish community today. As a result, today’s society is ordered totally differently to that of yesteryear, which means that the religion itself must necessarily be different today, and looking into the future.
We return, then, to the question of the day – “What if it is the connection to the future that makes Judaism authentic, and not to the past?” That means establishing the Jewish religious symbols of the future on those that would be most meaningful to us today, not on symbols and narratives that were most meaningful in the past. Connecting to the future also means moving beyond intellectual ancestor worship, by which I mean looking in the texts of the past for the supposed only authentic answer. It means, instead, preparing a table where our children will want to partake of delicacies old and new. Connecting to the future to make Judaism authentic means recognizing that while our tradition contains much wisdom, today’s questions are profoundly different from those of the past, so the past responses can only give a taste of an authentic answer today. Connecting to the future means actually listening to the guidance of our children, instead of patronizing them. After all, in Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan says that since the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from prophets and given to fools and children. Fools and children – the only two groups of people whose opinions were traditionally ignored as much as those of women! Since as we have seen it is now clearly time to give voice within our tradition to the needs of women, maybe it’s also time to give voice to the needs and concerns of children, and in so doing create the strongest possible connection to the future… their future and our community’s future.
Phyllis Trible once wrote that “the Bible is a pilgrim wandering through history to merge past and present.” I respectfully disagree. I think that way of thinking has to end in order that the Jewish community may thrive long into the future. We can no longer merge past and present because the present is so profoundly different to the past. That way too strongly ties the present to the past, makes us beholden to it, and frightens us out of truly developing ourselves and our community. I believe instead that the Bible is a pilgrim wandering through all times to reflect the past, to challenge the present, and to inspire the future.
If we totally lose our connection to the past, then we become ungrounded and wild. So, it is important for our High Holy Day services to remind us of the past to try to bring it into the present. But it is also not enough. We are the ones who need to consider how these services will lay the foundations for a meaningful Jewish future. I hope that this year, then, we not look to the past but to the future, that our Judaism truly moves from preserving Revelation to preparing Redemption. May the strength of our past and the opportunities of the present give us courage for the future, and let us say, Amen.