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When I was a little kid, there was
an older boy who lived upstairs. He was originally from Israel, and everyone
called him Gadi. Kids in the neighborhood worshipped him. Gadi was strong –
he’d protect you from neighborhood bullies. He was wise – he taught you all
sorts of things, like how to bunt. And he was kind – when the ice cream truck
came down our street, he’d treat you to a free popsicle.
I was in awe of Gadi. One day, he
said: “Let’s play Hide and Seek. Cover your eyes, count to 50, and then come
and find me.” And off he ran. In my excitement, I lost track of where I was;
not only couldn’t I find Gadi – I couldn’t find my way back home. I called out
his name – but there was no answer. Some tough kids were giving me the eye –
but Gadi wasn’t there to chase them away. I wanted to retrace my steps and
return home – but Gadi wasn’t there to show me the way. My mouth was dry from
the heat, but Gadi wasn’t there to buy me a coke. Alone, and afraid, with
tears in my eyes, I kept calling out Gadi’s name…
The older I get, the more I feel
like that little boy when it comes to God. They tell me He’s strong, and wise,
and kind – but the truth is that He doesn’t seem to answer when I call Him.
Maybe it’s just that I’m lost, and I haven’t been seeking Him in the right
places (though I’ve spent a good part of every single day of the last 35 years
thinking about and searching for Him; Still no answer). Or maybe I’m playing
Hide and Seek by myself, and there’s really nobody out there to be found…
At the heart of Judaism are two
books: The Siddur, or the prayer book, is our guide to calling to God. The
Humash, or the Five Books of the Torah, is according to tradition, God’s
calling to us.
Yet each of these books is
problematic. The Siddur is made up of thousands of prayers, most of which
praise God for His strength, wisdom, and kindness. Typical is this line, from
Ashray:
SHOMER ADOANI ET KOL
OHAVAV
V’ET KOL HA R’SHA-IM
YASHMID
God protects all who
love Him,
But He destroys all
the wicked
Even a child knows this isn’t the
way things work. There is so much suffering and injustice in the world, and
all the prayers in the Siddur can’t assure God’s answer to or even His
acknowledgement of, our despair and desperation.
The Torah is supposed to be the
word of God. But do we truly believe that in Exodus 35:2, God wants all
those who don’t observe Shabbes to be executed? (If it’s so, most of you
people are in big trouble!) Do we believe, with Leviticus 25:44, that God
permits slavery, so long as the slave is not Jewish (Did Abraham Lincoln know
something that God didn’t?) And do we believe in Numbers 31:17, that God
ordered Moses and the Israelites to go out and slaughter Midianite babies?
(War is brutal, and sometimes it’s necessary, but is it possible that the
Geneva Convention could be more ethical than God is?)
There are two traditional ways to
answer these problems. Some Ultra-Orthodox Jews believe: “Ours is not to
reason why, ours is but to do or die!” Science and Western values are meaningless,
compared to the Torah. We do what God said because God said so. Who
are we to understand, or question God? Fact: The world is 5768 years
old. That means dinosaurs lived and died out only five thousand years ago.
And if you find fossils that can be carbon dated 10 million years, it’s only a
trick put there by God to test your faith.
Modern Orthodox Jews accept science
and secular knowledge. They would tell you that there are two Torahs –
the written laws we have in the Humash, and the oral laws we have in the
Talmud. You can only understand the former through the prism of the latter.
Capital punishment for non-capital crimes (like breaking Shabbes) is listed
mainly as a warning, and the circumstances necessary for it to be carried out are
so restrictive, that it virtually never happened. Yes, slavery existed in the
ancient world, but the Torah came along to make the institution more humane
until such time as it could be abolished. And if we knew where Osama ben Ladin
was hiding out today, would we not call in an air strike even though it would
kill his wives and children along with him?
There is, of course, another
approach: There is no justice, because there is no Judge. In other
words: atheism.
In the last couple of years, there
have been a stream of books, some of them Best Sellers, promoting Atheism. I
read two this summer: ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins, and ‘God Is Not
Great’ by Christopher Hitchens. These books are a reaction to 9/11, and the
Islamic fanatics who perpetrated it in the name of Allah. They are also a
response to Christian fundamentalists and their crusade against teaching
evolution in the schools. The books hold that religion is evil, created by
petty people with the purpose of controlling the masses.
My first impression on reading
these books was to think: Everything they say about other religions is
true, but they’re wrong about us. And indeed, there are some gross
errors about Judaism. But some of their criticisms apply to the Jewish
religion as well.
Adopting the atheistic approach
might lead a Jew to say: “There is no God; The Siddur is a bunch of meaningless
poetry, and the Humash is a crock of lies. And if those are the pillars
that Judaism stand on, then the whole religion comes crashing down!” That’s
why socialist Jews at the end of the 19th century organized Yom
Kippur Balls, where they could dance and feast the most sacred night away, and
Israelis on secular Kibbutzim in the first half of the 20th century
would work their fields on the Day of Atonement, and then eat pork – as an act
of defiance.
But there’s another way to deal
with the God problem. We can redefine what we mean by God.
In the 20th century two
rabbis associated with Conservative Judaism offered new understandings of God.
Mordecai Kaplan, in the 1930’s, rejected the idea of a supernatural God up in
Heaven who watches over us. To Kaplan, God was “the Power that makes for
salvation.” God was the force within us that pushes us to make ourselves, and
the world better. In 1981 Harold Kushner wrote ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good
People’. Kushner believes that if God is all-powerful, He cannot be good, and
if He is all good, He cannot be powerful – otherwise He would use
His power to stop evil and help the righteous. Kushner chooses to envision God
as the Creator, who set the world in motion, and then let it run on its own.
God is powerless to stop hurricanes and earthquakes; He cannot prevent drunk
drivers from plowing into a family coming home from a wedding; He does not halt
the growth of cancer cells in the human body. What He does do is offer
us love, and strength, so that we may better cope with the terrible things that
befall us.
I have been profoundly influenced
by the theology of Kaplan and Kushner. But for each problem they solve, they
leave another one in its wake, most notably, what do we do with the traditional
text of the Siddur? And if God didn’t write the Torah, why should we bother
obeying it?
In traditional Judaism, God is
involved in three realms: Creation, Revelation, and Redemption.
It is mainly in the creation of the
world that I find evidence for the existence of God. The universe seems too
ingenious to me to be the result of some cosmic accident. The more I learn
about biology, and astronomy, the more convinced I am that the atheists are
wrong. The microscope and the telescope reveal the hand of God. Science
brings us not farther from God, but closer. When we consider the
vastness of the universe, the complexity of the human body, and the infinite
variety of living things on earth, we can’t help but be in awe. And awe leads
us to a power we call God.
Yet at the same time, we struggle
to understand what the Divine Plan could possibly be. God gave us no Owner’s
Manual, and science is still a long time away from creating a complete one. We
may be in awe at the miracle of life, but we are horrified at the violence
within nature. Wind and Rain and Fire insure life, but when out of control
they destroy it. And most living things seem to serve simply as a source of
food for stronger species. We wonder if human beings were formed as the
pinnacle of creation, as Genesis would have us believe, or if we are merely
some intermediate stage in the long process of evolution, to be one day extinct
and forgotten.
So I believe in a Creator, whom I
call God, but I am unclear as to what plans He had in mind for us.
The second aspect of God, according
to traditional Judaism is Revelation. God, we are told revealed His will to
the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai. You want an Owner’s Manual? Open up the
Torah! You want to know what God had in mind? It’s right there in the Humash!
But literary and historical
scholarship lead many of us to the conclusion that the Torah is not the word of
God, but the product of men – and women. Biblical criticism points out that
the Torah is filled with repetitions, contradictions and borrowings, not to
mention different writing styles and grammatical mistakes. The
conclusion drawn is that the Torah is a pastiche of at least four different
documents, written by different people, in different times and places, and
later edited into what we call the Torah.
Some of what is found there is
indeed ingenious and sublime: The institution of the Sabbath; Social Welfare
laws protecting the widow, the orphan, the stranger and the poor; Concerns for
the ecology of the land and for the pain of animals. But some of the Torah’s
laws seem cruel and inhuman: That a Jewish child born of an adulterous union
can never marry another Jew; or that a single woman who was raped is to be
married off to the rapist; or that a rebellious child is to be taken out to the
town square to be stoned to death. It is asking too much to accept that a Just
and Kind God could have ordained such laws.
Finally, we come to God’s role as
Redeemer – the One who intervenes to save the individual who is in dire
straits, and the One who will ultimately deliver the Jewish people from
persecution.
I very much want to believe that
there is a God who is watching over me. But frankly, I don’t see any evidence
for it. And yes, it is quite miraculous that the Jewish people are still
around after all that we’ve been through. But I’m inclined to believe it has
more to do with our tenacity, with our value system, and with pure luck than it
does with God watching out for us. Some people see a bald six year old
suffering from cancer, doomed to live a short and painful life, and say: “that
child was sent to earth to perform some important mission, and now she’s being
called back to God”; or “that disease was sent to teach the parents some
crucial lesson about love, devotion, and humility.” I, on the other hand, can
only see further proof that the force that created the universe is not a
personal being who cares for the innocent or the righteous. Some people see in
the slaughter of the six million during the Shoah evidence that God cared
enough for the Jews to save 12 million of us from a monster who planned our total
extermination, and He used our losses as a way of providing us with a homeland
we could only dream about for 2,000 years. I, on the other hand, can only
think that if God truly was the “Shomer Yisrael”, the Guardian of Israel, Hitler
would have been the one afflicted with cancer long before Kristalnacht.
So now we have to ask: If God is
the force responsible for Creation, but played no role in the Revelation of the
Torah, or in the Redemption of humankind, why bother to pray? Why observe the
Mitzvot? Why spend so much time worrying about what God is or isn’t writing in
the book of Life on the Day of Atonement.
Let me share my answer. I
don’t pretend it is the answer – only that, today - it’s what
works for me.
We tend to think of God as a noun: He
is a divine being. Like Michelangelo, we imagine an old man with a white beard
up in the sky.
But we humans can never truly get
to know God, the being, God the noun. What we need to do, instead, is
understand God as an adverb.
Instead of speaking about God,
or talking to God, or searching for God, we need to think about the
Godly. We need to focus on the attributes our tradition
associated with God and to strive to incorporate those characteristics into our
lives. We need to strive for Godliness. In the absence of a noun, use an
adverb; Until I find God, I will try to act Godly.
The Rabbis in the Midrash hint at
this. The Torah (Deuteronomy 11:22) commands us “to walk in all His ways.”
What are the ways of God?
“God is gracious, compassionate,
patient, kind, truthful, assuring love forever, forgiving iniquity, transgression,
and sin, and granting pardon.”
And so we are taught:
As the Holy One is righteous, you
too must be righteous. As the Holy One is kind, you too must be kind.
The Rabbis teach: “We must follow
the attributes of the Holy One, praised be He. As He clothes the naked
(providing cover for Adam and Eve) you should clothe the naked. As He visited
the sick (checking on Abraham after his circumcision at age 90) – you should
visit the sick. The Holy One comforted those who mourned (blessing Isaac after
the death of his father); you should comfort those who mourn. The Holy One
buried the dead (as He did for Moses on Mt. Nebo); you should bury the dead.”
All we can know about God is what
the Torah tells us He does. What He does is Tzedek – Justice, and
Hesed – Kindness. Those who are seeking God will behave in a godly
way. We will act in accordance with the ways of justice: We will conduct
ourselves honestly in business. We will return lost items to their proper
owners. We will not steal. We will not lie. We will not commit acts of
violence. We will not accept bribes. We will not encroach on the borders of
others.
And being Godly means we
will act in accordance with the ways of Kindness: We will give Tzedakah to the
poor. We will look out for the Widow, the orphan, and the stranger. We will
care for the sick. We will comfort the bereaved. We will show respect and
deference to the elderly. We will be concerned about the pain and suffering of
animals.
What, then is the Torah? It is a
holy book, not because God wrote it, but because it is the Jewish people’s
record of our search for Godliness. It’s stories are our people’s story, our
attempt to figure out who we are and what is expected of us. It is sacred in
the same way that the cardboard box we all have in a drawer is sacred: The one
that contains legal documents, and family photos, and keepsakes and letters
from people we loved and are no longer with us. A few of the things in the
shoebox are trivial, and no longer meaningful. But most of what’s in there are
priceless treasures that we wouldn’t for a minute think of throwing away.
What about the Mitzvot? A mitzvah
to me is not a command issued by God. Rather, it is a demand that godliness
has imposed on us. For more than 3,000 years, the Jewish people have struggled
to define what constitutes “Justice,” and what makes up “Kindness”. The
earliest answers made it into the Books known as the Bible. Later generations
of Jews continued to struggle with definitions of godliness, and they became
the Apocrypha, the Mishnah, the Midrash, the Gemara, the Codes of Jewish Law,
the Responsa Literature, the Kabbalah, and works of Jewish philosophy. These
mitzvoth were codified into Halakhah, or Jewish law. Halakhah comes to decide
which of many possibilities should be followed. It also serves to unify us as
a people, so that we Jews are doing the same thing. But because we have no one
central religious authority, and because Halakhah is created by different
people in different times and places – it also will divide us.
Change in Halakhah and Jewish
tradition is possible, is even mandated, because our understanding of what it
is to be Just, or Kind, changes over time. But change should be undertaken
with great caution, because it can also split us apart, and because sometimes
what seems “Just and Kind” today may turn out to be merely the latest,
passing fad. Conservative Judaism struggled with the issue of egalitarianism
for over half a century – What role should women play in Jewish life. We’ve
been wrestling with the question of homosexuality for only a decade and a half
– time will show us what is “just” and what is “Kind”, when it comes to gays
and lesbians, and every other issue, as well.
Rabbis play an important role in
this dynamic. A rabbi is a teacher, one who shows us what’s in the book. A
rabbi is also the one who mediates between the demands of the tradition, on the
one hand, and the needs of the people, on the other. He serves the Jewish
religion - but also the Jewish people. When the two are in conflict, it is the
Rabbi who is charged with making peace.
What are we to do with the other
book, the Siddur? Let me tell you what prayer is not: It is not
“begging”, which is what the English words means. Jewish Prayer is not
approaching God with a “wish-list”, as if He were Santa Claus before
Christmas. I personally don’t believe that asking God to forgive us, or
heal us, or enrich us gets us those things – though it might make us feel
better when we do. What Tefilah – the Hebrew word – is, is “Serious
Thinking”. It is stopping what we are doing several times a day and meditating
on the question: Am I doing the godly thing? What does Godliness demand of me
now? How can I be Just and Kind?
Yet the prayers in the Siddur were
composed by and for people who thought of God in the traditional sense – as a
noun, and not as an adverb. I could abandon the Siddur, decide to write my own
prayers. But much of the power of Jewish prayer comes from knowing that these
are the same prayers our people have been saying for 2,000 years, and from the
realization that I could walk into any synagogue in the world tomorrow, open up
the Siddur, and immediately feel that I’m at home.
But how do I get past the words:
“BARUKH ATA ADONAI”. How can I say “Praised are You” when I don’t know if
there’s really a “You” out there listening to me?
Prayer functions one of three ways:
First, as a Mantra. Most of the
time we’re not paying attention to the words – even if we know what they mean.
The chanting, the singing, the dovvining are background music, as we seriously
think about any number of things in our life and what we should do about them.
Being together with other Jews in a synagogue on a Shabbes or Yontif may be
more powerful than any words we happen to be saying. The experience of prayer
can be meaningful even if we don’t believe all things we’re saying.
Second, Prayers are poems. As I
read them, I see the world not through my eyes, but through the poet’s. I am
moved by his insights and I am challenged by his relationship to
God. And by paying careful attention to the themes he wrote about, I am
reminded of the values Judaism considers important.
Third, Sometimes in Prayer, I focus
on words, not sentences. Each word can be mined for new meanings, or can serve
as a spring board that leads me to serious contemplation. Here’s an example:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with
all your might.” I might skip over the part about God and instead zero in on
the word “Love”. I think about the people I love. And how I express my love.
And I wonder if I do it “with all my heart, and soul, and might” at all times.
Or do I show love only when I’m in the proper mood. And is that right? What
about the people who need my love even when I’m not in a loving mood? (Now,
while I’m thinking about this, the Cantor is already three prayers ahead of me
– but that’s alright. That’s what happens when we pray…)
Judaism, I believe, comes not from
God at Mt. Sinai – it is a way of life developed by the Jewish people, going
all the way back to Abraham, evolving to this day. It comes as an answer to
the question: If there is a God, what would He want us to do? “Judaism”
is what we came up with. Sometimes we get it right; those things we
hold on to. Sometimes we get it wrong – those things, over time, we work out
and change. Judaism is ultimately about bringing Godliness into the cycle of
human life, into the seasons of the year, and into activities of each and every
day.
Jews wanted to know how we should
bring children into the world, and what message to convey to their parents – so
we created Bris and Baby Naming. We wanted to know how to tell adolescents
they’re no longer children, and now have responsibilities; we created Bar and
Bat Mitzvah. We wanted to teach young people about the joys and obligations of
love and sex, so we created Huppah and the ideals of Jewish marriage. And we
wanted to care for the sick and elderly, and the dead and the bereaved – so our
people created the mitzvot of honoring the old, visiting the ill, burying the
dead and comforting the mourner. But it’s all really about “How do you live a
godly life?”
Originally, we were a tribe
connected to the land, and in April we celebrated the Barley crop, in June the
First Fruits, and in October, the final harvest. Over time, those festivals
took on historical meanings: Passover was about the Exodus, Shavuot, the giving
of the Torah, and Sukkot about the search for a home. In the winter, with
Hanukah and Purim, we celebrated our survival first over darkness and the cold,
and later over our enemies. And every Fall, we come together as a people, to
ask ourselves if we have lived up to our ideals of Godliness.
Each and every day, keeping Kosher
is the way we developed to help us relate to the food we eat; Jewish ethics
guide us in how to run our businesses and how to relate to family, friends, and
strangers; and prayer – morning, noon and night challenges us to ask ourselves:
Are we living a Godly life?
The essence of being a Jew is
searching for Godliness, and striving to act Godly. Two things are
required of us: First, to figure out what Godliness is; that means engaging
with our tradition, reading our sacred texts, studying our ancient and holy
teachings. We are “the People of the Book.” You can’t be authentically Jewish
if Jewish Books – the Torah, the Bible, the Talmud, the Zohar, the Codes,
Philosophy – are not on your shelves, open at your desk, sitting by your bed
The second thing we must do is
practice Godliness in our daily lives. It’s not what we think or feel that
matters, it’s what we do.
To me, the most important teaching
in all of our tradition comes from the prophet MICAH. He said: “You have been
taught what “Good” is, and what “Godliness” demands of you: Doing Justice.
Loving Kindness. And Humbly following whatever you believe about God.” That’s
what it means to be a Jew.
After calling out for Gadi for
quite some time, in vain, the little lost boy came to the realization that his
idol wasn’t going to answer him. He was on his own.
At that moment, he came to a
critical juncture in his life:
He could have cursed Gadi, and
blamed him for the whole debacle. He didn’t.
He could have sat down there on the
sidewalk and collapsed into tears. He didn’t
Instead, he asked himself: What
would Gadi do in this situation.
He “opened his book” on Gadi, and
he recalled all those stories about his hero, and the words his friend had told
him over the years. He remembered at that moment that Gadi was strong, and
wise, and kind.
And then, instead of uttering some
plea into the air, the boy did some serious thinking: How can I use what I know
about Gadi to help myself right now?
Instead of waiting for Gadi to come
and save him, the boy tried to act as Gadi would have under the same
circumstances.
And it worked. The boy drew on
wisdom and courage he never knew he had.
And it helped him find his way
home.
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