Fair Weather Activist

This morning I discovered I am a fair-weather activist. Last night a peace vigil against the hate being spewed by some Murfreesboro Christians against all Murfreesboro Muslims was held at the town square. I planned to attend. I really did. There is little that is more important that standing up for religious freedom. I mean as a professor of Comparative Religion my entire life is devoted to educating young people in the intricacies of religious systems in hopes of making them knowledgeable and respectful citizens of a religious diverse country dedicated to freedom of assembly, speech, and religion. Then it started to rain.

I thought, “Geez, do I want to get wet for the cause of religious freedom? Nah.” In my defense, it was a big storm. Thunder and lightening and everything. This was the kind of storm that Doc Emmet Brown could have used to power his time traveling DeLorean in “Back to the Future.” This was the kind of storm you could use to tap electricity if Ben Franklin hadn’t already done that. So not wanting to get wet was a serious matter.

It never occurred to me that the vigil would be moved indoors.

The group gathered in the courthouse and sang, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.” My own version is “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with them.” So sad.

All the more sad as the voices of fear become ever more powerful in my neighborhood. Republican Congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik says the Islamic Center planned for Murfreesboro is “designed to fracture the moral and political foundation of Middle Tennessee. “ If by moral and political foundation she means the hate filled rhetoric that passes for political discourse at the Republican sponsored Tea Party rallies I have attended, then I hope she is right.

Lori Roberts, a local citizen, said she is against the Islamic Center because she “heard these comments they are looking at making this a national Muslim center. It would make Muslims from all over the world and country come into Murfreesboro to go to meetings at the center.” This center, she said, will be a “threat to this country.”

She’s right. There is nothing more threatening to America than people having meetings. That is why the Constitution condemns the right of free assembly. Doesn’t it?

The scary thing is that Ms. Roberts doesn’t know this is true. She simply heard comments. Comments from people who hate Muslims and fear Islam. Ignorance is rampant in this town, and with it fear, and from that hate.

Tomorrow night our local mosque is holding an open house in an attempt to answer people’s questions and quell their fears. I doubt it will help, though I do plan to attend. Even if it rains.

Perspicuity

I learned a new word today: perspicuity. It means clarity. Ah, the irony. Anyway, I learned the word in the context of a Protestant idea called “Perspicuity of Scripture.” This means that the meaning of the Bible is clear to the ordinary person and does not require any interpretive intermediary. The intermediary the Protestants have in mind is, of course, the Catholic Church, which argues that you cannot understand the Bible unless you read it through the filter of the Church.

While Catholics and Protestants will argue this as an “either/or” (either the Bible is perspicuous or inperspicuous), Jews will take it as “both/and,” the Bible is clear and in need of interpretation.

The Jewish view is simple: The Bible is the Word of God. God writes perspicuously, but what is perspicuous to God may be inperspicuous to humans. Hence the need to read and reread and interpret and reinterpret the perspicuous Word of God.

Now if I were God I’d make my Word truly perspicuous: See Eve. See Eve eat the fruit. Eat, Eve, eat. See Adam eat. Sin, Adam, sin. But even this clearly perspicuous text may be inperspicuous to some. After all, what does “sin” mean? And did it mean the same thing when I wrote it as it does when you read it? So even my perspicuous text may need interpretation.

The fact is you can’t escape interpretation. If the Word of God were really as perspicuous as Protestants claim, we wouldn’t have over 33,000 denominations of Protestant Christianity. The Catholic Church doesn’t have all these divisions because they admit the Bible is inperspicuous and given to many interpretations, which is why they invented the Inquisition to keep the number of interpretations down to one—their’s.

For my money, I prefer inperspicuousness to perspicuousness. The Bible is a nasty book in many ways, and if we can’t interpret it in ways that allow it to say what it perspicuously does not say we might find ourselves killing one another in the Name of God, and who would want to do that?

Melting Jesus

Can we make anything of an act of God that melts a statue of Jesus? Damn right we can!

Solid Rock Church in Monroe, OH, is famous for its 62’ statue of Jesus with his face and arms raised heavenward. Erected by the church’s founders, Lawrence and Darlene Bishop, at a cost of $250,000, the King of Kings statue (called by locals, “Touchdown Jesus”) was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame. Lightening struck the statue last week, and when the flames subsided nothing was left but the frame.

Lightening strikes are of course an act of God, and have been since the time of Zeus. So we can’t help but ask ourselves why God would do such a thing? Wasn’t there a synagogue or mosque or Catholic Church He could have hit? Did He have to blast an evangelical church? And worse, did He have to melt a statue of His Son? What will the unbelievers think?

I can only speak for this unbeliever, and I think God has a wicked sense of humor. And yet is this destruction of the statue of Jesus all that new? I mean didn’t God permit the death of His actual Son in the flesh some 2000 years ago? He did. But then he resurrected Him three days later, so what’s the harm?

As Darlene Bishop said of the statue, “It will be back.” Was she expecting God to resurrect the statue after three days? I don’t know, but if so she was sorely disappointed. If the statue is coming back it will only do so if she and her husband raise another quarter of million dollars to rebuild it. But should they?

I think they should. They should rebuild the statue and then some. The old King of Kings only depicted Jesus from the sternum up. Why not a full body this time? Sixty-two feet? Hell, lets make it 186 feet! And while I think Lady Bishop is wise to say they will make it flame resistant this time, I think a lighting rod on top of Jesus’ head couldn’t hurt.

Why am I so in favor of this? Because I love religious kitsch. Really. The only problem I have with Islam, for example, is that you can’t make statues of Muhammad (PBUH). I want a Muhammad bobble-head doll to stand next to my Jesus bobble-head and my Moses with the Ten Commandments action figure. So, come on, Solid Rock Church, let’s get to rebuilding Touchdown Jesus. And maybe this time make Him out of solid rock.

Hate-Preach

What can we do about religious violence and hatred? What can we do about clergy and laity who insist on spreading lies, hatred, and fear? These are not academic questions. Especially in my town. Especially this week.

There has been an Islamic Center in Murfreesboro, TN for years. It was small, and stayed pretty much under the radar. Now things are different. The Center wants to build a 52,000 square foot community center and mosque. The county commission said yes, the people say no. Not all the people, of course. May be not even most of the people. But enough to make me fear not only for the welfare of my Muslim neighbors, and for any who support them and their right to freedom of religion.

The position of my Christian neighbors is simple: Muslims support Sharia (Islamic law), Sharia is globalist, Muslims want to rule the world, and the center in Murfreesboro will be a training camp for terrorists bent on turning Middle Tennessee into a Taliban stronghold like Afghanistan without the trillion dollars worth of minerals.

Let’s not be naïve. There are Muslims who wish to spread Islam around the world just as there are Christians who wish to spread Christianity around the world. Christianity and Islam are the only religions bent on global domination, and both have a long history of using warfare to do so. It isn’t surprising that these two faiths have been and continue to be at odds, and often at war. It may not be politically correct to say so, but without Christianity and Islam we wouldn’t be fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and (coming soon to a theater of war near you) Iran. You can argue that these wars are not religious, but remove religion from the equation and the wars cease to be fought at all.

So I understand why so many of my neighbors believe we are at war with Islam and that all Muslims are suspect. But what shall we do about it?

There are the obvious suggestions: The mosque could open its doors for “Learn About Islam” evenings. They did that. I could teach a multi-week class on Islam. I did that. Christian churches could invite Muslims to speak to their members about Islam. Some have done that. Education is necessary but clearly not sufficient.

So, when asked by the local newspaper for a suggestion I offered this: We should all begin attending each other’s worship services. Just go and sit and listen to what is being preached. And if and when they hear hate-preach, fear mongering, and calls for action that violate the Constitution or suggest violence, they should loudly stand up, denounce it in the Name of Whatever God they are praying to, and walk out. I urged the newspaper reporter to go to religious services throughout the city and report on what is being preached. Expose hate-preach if there is any. And if there isn’t any, tell us that as well.

The reporter declined. So that leaves matters in your hands. Visit churches, synagogues, and mosques regularly and listen carefully to what is being read, taught, and preached. Take a stand against evil when you find it, and let people know if you don’t. It is the least we can do.

Pound of Flesh

“Pound of flesh.” It is an ugly phrase originating with Shakespeare in his 1596 play, Merchant of Venice. Shylock, the Jewish money lender, has made a deal with Antonio that allows Shylock to cut off a pound of Antonio's flesh if Antonio defaults on a loan he took from Shylock. Jews have been linked to Shylock every since.

Given the popularity of liposuction today, extracting a pound of flesh (or, if I could afford the procedure, 50 pounds) may not be such a big deal, but the phrase isn’t meant to be anything but ugly. And, whether intended or not, it carries with it more than a patina of anti-Semitism. So it shocked and bothered me this morning when I heard Savannah Guthrie, co-host of MSNBC’s morning news show “The Daily Rundown,” use the phrase in regard to the Congressional hearings features BP CEO Tony Hayward.

I am NOT implying that Ms. Guthrie is by any stretch of the imagination an anti-Semite. This may have been a Freudian slip based on the fact that Tony and Antonio are the same name, albeit in different languages. I am simply wondering what it means that this wicked phrase is so deeply ingrained in our language. Does it still conjure up pictures of Jews as Shylock?

I know this was NOT on Ms. Guthrie’s mind. In fact, I wonder if she even thought about the meaning or implication of the phrase. Did she really mean to cast Congress as Shylock? Is BP really Antonio who is being asked to do more than is just when President Obama demands BP pay for the disaster in the Gulf? Is BP the victim of this drama, as many see Antonio as the victim of Shylock in Shakespeare’s play?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, and would love to hear from you regarding them. Do you use the phrase? What do you understand it to mean?

Bupkis mit Kuduchas

There are approximately 22,700 references to me on Google. That is 66 pages of links. Of course simply by googling one’s name one cannot be certain that all these references are to you. There could be other Rabbi Rami Shapiros on the Internet. So I checked, page after page. And it turns out that there are in fact 22,700 references to me on the Internet. Is that cool or what?

Answering that question will determine my worth as a human being. And answering requires an objective standard against with to measure my numbers. So I chose to measure myself against my father. I googled his name and came up with…wait for it…948,000 references. My dad has 41.76211453 more references than me on Google. Damn!

But wait a second, maybe all those references aren’t to my dad, but are just triggered by his name, Archie. As it turns out as long as my dad Archie isn’t a bigamist married to my mom, Sally and some broad named Veronica, then the actual number of Internet references to my father is…NONE! Ha! None, nada, zip, zero, notaonedo!

That means a lot to a Jewish boy in never ending competition with his dad. And I won. At least I think I won. There seems to be something called Archie’s Law that deals with the scale dependency of the effective matrix diffusion coefficient. I don’t know what this law is, but the words “scale” and “dependency” say it all: Yes, Dad, I got on the scale this morning and I am still fat. And, no, Dad, I still haven’t overcome my dependency on your approval.

So with 22,700 Google references to my dad’s zero Google references, why do I still feel inadequate? Maybe I should compare myself to someone else? How about Wayne Dyer? How many Google references does he have? One million, six hundred and sixty thousand! That is more than all the Archies combined!

I don’t get it. I’ve written at least as many books as Wayne. We are both members of National Public Television. We both do lots of public speaking. What has he got that I don’t, besides 1,637,300 more Google references?

Now I’m not saying 22,700 Google references is bupkis. I am grateful that I have made some mark on the digital world, but in a world where even “dog turd” has 135,000 references on Google, you have to wonder. Does my life matter even less than bupkis mit Kuduchas? (Google it!)

Does Obama Hate Jews?

Barack Hussein Obama hates Jews, and is more than willing to sacrifice us and Israel on the altar of improved relations with Muslim countries around the world. At least that is the impression I got after reading the June 2010 issue of Commentary Magazine.

The magazine features 31 responses to the notion that “American Jews are facing an unprecedented political challenge, and at a crucial moment, with the need to address the existential threat to Israel—and by extension to the future of the Jewish people as a whole—from a potentially nuclear Iran. How will American Jews handle this challenge?”

Not so well, as it turns out. Most of the essays in Commentary exhibit a clear distain for the majority of American Jews, most of whom the writers claim are liberal, secular, Democratic fools who have no real love of Judaism or Israel and who (therefore?) voted for Obama in 2008.

No point in arguing with this assessment. Besides, it might even be true. My question is this: what would be different if George W. Bush were suddenly back in control?

Would W reverse Obama’s ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza? Would he put a stop to Obama’s forced moratorium on expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank or building apartments for Jews in Arab East Jerusalem? Would he undo Obama’s peace plan, and dismantle the Palestinian State Obama helped establish? But wait a minute: Obama didn’t do any of these things. In fact, he hasn’t done anything at all. So what is the challenge here?

It seems to me that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu does just what he wants to do, regardless of what President Obama might want him to do. The only thing Obama has done is show the world just how powerless the US is when it comes to imposing its will on Israel (or Korea, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Mexico, BP, etc). President Obama’s only “sin” is airing his disagreements with Israel in public. His actual policies seem to be an extension of the previous administration’s policies.

But what I really don’t understand after reading the June issue of Commentary is just what the Unites States should be doing. Should we go to war with Iran? Should we use Israel as a surrogate military and have her go to war with Iran? Do we have the military capacity for a third front in the forever war against political Islam (the new catch-phrase of the day)? Just what would the commentators in Commentary have us do that we are not doing?

I don’t see any real difference in the actual policies of Presidents Bush and Obama. The United States is still addicted to oil and debt, still run by the rich for the rich, and still caught up in the madness of empire building.

Can somebody help me out here?

Buddha's Bones

Lots of people think I am a Buddhist. No Buddhist would make that mistake, however. I used to consider myself a part of the Zen world, and I keep up my reading in Zen (which proves I am no longer part of the Zen world and never really was), and I admit that every few days, usually after reading some article about the inane behavior of my coreligionists, I think about becoming a Buddhist. I admire the religion’s rationality, its clarity, and its lack of superstition. And then I read today’s China.org.cn. D’oh! (T’ao!)

It seems that when the Buddha was cremated some 2500 years ago he left behind “one skull bone, two scapulas, four teeth and 84,000 pearl–like sariras,” one of which is being unveiled for the first time in a thousand years in Qixia Temple in Jiangsu province’s capital Nanjing.

I know what you’re thinking: “Can I use Qixia as a word in Scrabble?” The answer is ‘no.’ That was what you were thinking. I was thinking, “what’s a sarira?” It turns out that a sarira is a crystalline structure formed when bone is cremated. According to some Buddhist traditions seeing a relic of the Buddha is like seeing the Buddha himself, and automatically creates happiness and virtue. If venerated, sariras can grow and multiply over time, so there is no need to worry about them being scarce.

This particular sarira at the Qixia (21 points) Temple will be unveiled tomorrow, which is why the Chinese government is talking about it today. This leaves me no time to fly to Nanjing to see it and become happy. That, I suspect, is what the ChiComs (Rush Limbaugh speak for Chinese Communists) want after all: to dangle happiness in front of my nose (7452 miles in front of my nose, to be exact) and then to deny me access to it. This just sounds like Mao, doesn’t it? Remember Mao? The guy who said, “Happiness comes from the barrel of a gun.” Or was that Snoopy? Anyway, I can’t get to Qixia Temple to see this bone ball of the Buddha and that just isn’t fair.

On the other hand it just doesn’t seem all that Buddhist to me,either. At least not the Buddhism I know; the Buddhism with all the Jewish psychologists in it.

On the other hand (I’m also into Hinduism, and we have gods with lots of hands), as an avid reader of all things Zen, I am fond of the Zen saying, “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” Seeing a sarira is like meeting the Buddha, so if I did get to the Qixia Temple and I did see the sarira I’d have to kill it. But it is already dead, and has been for 2500 years. So how do I kill what is already dead?

Whoa! Wait a minute. This isn’t a ChiCom plot to rob me of happiness, this is a Zen koan to bring me to enlightenment. I love Buddhism after all!

Bottom line: if Buddhism is about enlightenment, cool. If it is about relics, and the power of bone to make me happy, then I guess I’ll just stick with Judaism and be miserable. Judaism has its own relics, anyway. Take my parents, for example. You know they never owned a stereo? Hell, they never owned a record player at all! Talk about growing up deprived! (Go head, talk about growing up deprived, I’ll wait. OK? Done? Great, now back to me.)

So I guess Buddhism is just a religion like all the rest. It got its good points, its bad points and it’s burnt up balls of Buddha bone. I think I’ll call my parents and wish them a good Shabbos.

What Does It Mean to be a Jew Today?

What does it mean to be a Jew today? What do Jews bring to the world? These are the questions asked of rabbis in the May/June issue of Moment Magazine. As I read the responses I found myself getting more and more frustrated. Something was bothering me about what the Independent, Humanist, Renewal, Reconstructionist and Reform rabbis had to say. Even the Conservative Rabbi, my parents’ rabbi, Amy Katz, whose essay spoke to me powerfully, left me wanting something. But what?

I realized what was missing when I read the comments of the Modern Orthodox, Sephardi, and Chabad rabbis—God. None of the other rabbis even mentioned God. Or, as in the case of the Reconstructionist rabbi who spoke of Jews as Yisrael, God-Wrestlers, God was reduced to nothing more than “today’s weightiest issues.” That’s what we Jews are about: wrestling with today’s weightiest issues. Its also what the Daily Show is about, and the Daily Show is more fun.

The problem with the liberals is that they offered us no mission, no meaning. The Humanist rabbi said that “being Jewish was about choice and personal discovery.” So is psychotherapy. The Renewal rabbi said, “being Jewish means being ourselves.” That is simply a nonsequitor. The Reform rabbi said, “to be Jewish is about understanding one’s place in the world.” Not even “the Jew’s place,” but simply “one’s place,” my place. Do I need religion for that? The Reconstructionist rabbi said, “we Jews, collectively, share a few things,” but so what? The guys at my gym share a few things too. At least Rabbi Amy wrote about our unique pedagogy rooted in argument and doubt, and embracing inconsistancy and paradox. But this is a means. What is the end? What is the point of being Jewish?

There was nothing in the remarks of the liberal rabbis that would make me want to be a Jew or even remain a Jew. Whereas the Sephardi rabbi spoke compellingly of “proclaiming a message of monotheism, rationality, justice and compassion to the entire world," or, as the Chabad rabbi put it, “A Jew is here for one reason alone: To change the world.”

Talk about tag lines! “Be a Jew. Change the world.” You want to get young Jews engaged in Judaism? You want to attract new people to the tribe? Let that be the mission of American Judaism!

Of course when I think of changing the world I think in terms of liberal democratic changes rooted in universalism, humanism, iconoclasm, feminism, global literacy, and social and ecological justice. But these values are not antithetical to Judaism. Indeed, it would be easy to articulate a Judaism and a body of Jewish practices rooted in these values that would indeed change the world.

Tag lines aside, however, I am too liberal to return to Orthodoxy. But if anyone wants to know why liberal Judaism is fading while Orthodoxy is thriving, just read this month’s Moment.

Thank You, Helen Thomas

Thank you, Helen Thomas. Your hate filled anti-Semitism was refreshingly candid, and allows those of us who support Israel (if not Israeli policy) an opportunity to be equally candid in return. Not only did Ms Thomas call for the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, something lots of Jews and Israelis support, but she demanded that all Jews living in Israel go back to wherever they came from.

Where might that be? Helen’s history extends only back to the mid-twentieth century and is decided Eurocentric. She wants Israeli Jews to go back to Germany and Poland. She wants them to go back to the death camps. But what about the hundreds of thousands who came from Arab lands? And why stop with the 20th century? Go back far enough and the Jews came from the very land that Helen wants them to leave. They can’t go home, Helen, they are home.

Enter former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. In his attack on Helen Thomas’ remarks he linked Jews in Israel to African Americans in America. Should they go home too?

Bad analogy. African Americans came here as slaves not colonizers. It isn’t African Americans who should go home, but European Americans. And I imagine there are many Native Americans (though not necessarily those in the casino business) who would be happy to see them do just that.

Ari Fleischer didn’t link Jews settling in Palestine with Europeans settling the Americas because that analogy reveals an ugly truth: rights are only rights when you can defend them. If Palestinians have a right to all of Palestine (including the State of Israel), then Native Americans have the right to all of America. Did Native Americans have a right to live unmolested in the Americas? Yes they did, but only until the Europeans could massacre them at will. Did the Palestinians living in Palestine have a right to live there unmolested? Yes they did, but only as long as they and their allies could defend that right successfully.

Native Americans killed as many Europeans as they could. It just wasn’t enough to stop them from taking their land. Arabs killed as many Jews as they could, but it just wasn’t enough to stop them from establishing their state. Welcome to the real world. Just as it is foolish to demand that European Americans return to Europe, so it is foolish to demand that Israeli Jews return to the countries from which they came. But it is only foolish because the people making the demands lack the military might to enforce their demands. Chances are Native Americans will never have the power to through out the Europeans. The word is still out on the Palestinians.

The treatment of Native Americans and African Americans is the shadow side of American exceptionalism; the treatment of Palestinians is the shadow side of Zionism. How these peoples deal with their respective shadows will determine the moral quality of their respective civilizations. So far neither is doing very well.

As for Helen Thomas? She should go home to Lebanon and give her house to the Native Americans who lived their first.

Burger King Spirituality

CNN posted an essay by John Blake called, “Are there dangers in being ‘spiritual but not religious’? Mr. Blake seems to think so, and relies on Jesuit priest James Martin for support. Being SBNR, Fr. Martin says leads to complacency and self-centeredness. “If it’s just you and God in your room,” Father Martin says, “and a religious community makes no demands on you, why help the poor?” An odd thing for a Catholic priest to say, perhaps, given the Church’s rich tradition of monks and nuns in monastic cells, but a good question nonetheless. Here’s the answer:

The deeper your connection with God becomes, the greater your concern for the welfare of others. The closer you are to the Source of Life, the more compassion and concern you have for all that lives. Besides, if organized religion really wanted to end poverty it would have done so long ago. It seems to me that organized religion is more about pushing camels through needle eyes and getting rich men into heaven (Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25), then about selling what we have and giving to the poor (Luke 12:33; 18:22; Acts 2:45). Jesus, anyone?

I’m not suggesting SBNR folks are saints, but neither are they any more selfish then their church going neighbors.

Borrowing from Huffington Post blogger BJ Gallagher, Mr. Blocks calls SBNR “Burger King Spirituality;” you know: have it your way. Fair enough, but is this any different than Jews choosing among the various brands of Judaism, or Protestants moving from church to church until they find one where the pastor says what they want to hear? Even Catholics have it their way by ignoring those teachings of the Church they find inconvenient or just plain wrong.

Gallagher goes on to praise Twelve-Step followers as the epitome of SBNR. I agree. As my book Recovery, the sacred art points out, the 12-Steps are a powerful spiritual practice free from religious politics and prejudice. And 12-Step meetings are wonderful examples of healing communities.

Mr. Block’s major complaint, again borrowing from Father Martin, is that SBNR people are lazy. We would rather sample many religions than devote ourselves to digging deeply into just one. Amen! Religions are like the proverbial blind men and the elephant. Each has a piece of the whole, but none has a true sense of the elephant itself. So, yes, if you want to climb deep up the elephant’s ass by all means do so, but just don’t imagine that you know what an elephant is just because you are an expert in its intestines.

The truth is that the truth is greater than anything any religion can imagine. Serious SBNR people explore the entirety of human religiosity, and even then we know that we cannot know. That is why we devote ourselves to spiritual practice rather than organizational conformity. Through meditation, prayer, chanting, etc. we seek to move beyond the ego to realize the One manifest as the many. The greater our experience of the One, the greater our love of the other. This is why Jesus urged us to follow two commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. That’s the difference between religion and SBNR. The spiritual teacher tells us to love God, while organized religion tells us to love religion.

[To read Mr. Block’s posting, go to http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/personal/06/03/spiritual.but.not.religious/index.html]

Tefillin and Teheran

Tefillin ("phylacteries") are two small black leather boxes housing four biblical passages that observant Jews wear during the weekday morning prayers. The commandment to wear tefillin is found in four places in the Torah: Ex. 13:1-10, 11-16; Deut. 6:4-9; 13-21. While there is no prohibition against women wearing tefillin, custom has long limited the practice to men. Today, however, more and more women choose to pray with tefillin as well. And with this shift in practice comes the predictable resistance to it.

Case in point: Noa Raz, a Conservative Jew living in Israel. Ms. Raz was attacked and beaten by a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish man at a bus stop in Beersheva. The man noticed the strap marks tefillin often leave in one’s arm. Outraged, the man grabbed Ms. Raz and beat her, all the while screaming, “Woman, abomination, desecration.”

Ms. Raz got away, filed a complaint with the police, and wrote about her ordeal: “We live in a country where the strong dominate and where women are humiliated. As our society becomes more ultra-Orthodox, more extreme, these boundaries become clearer and more frightening. We can protest against the Haredim every day, but they are not the only guilty ones. They are Haredi; this is how they believe and they have the right to believe this way. It is the State that is also guilty of violence, for authorizing their every rampage; and we just carry on and keep quiet. If we don’t wake up to what is happening around us, we will very soon find ourselves living on the corner of Meah Shearim [an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem] and Tehran.”

She is right. And the problem isn’t restricted to Israel. While we focus our attention on global civilizational clashes, there are intra-civilizational clashes that are no less important. This clash is between religious extremists and religious moderates. True, you may find both to be steeped in ignorance and wish to see today’s gods go the way of Zeus and Thor, but that isn’t going to happen. If religion is to further rather than hinder human progress the ultra-Orthodox of every religion must be dethroned. There is still a sense among too many (even too many liberals) that being fanatical for your god is a good thing; that liberal religionists are weak willed and inauthentic; and that only the extremists are true to their faith. Liberals need to speak up more loudly; they need to affirm the legitimacy of their faith more powerfully; and challenge the haredi of every religion whenever their faith spills over into abuse. The alternative is to surrender faith to the fanatics and allow whatever good religion can do to get lost in the fog of fear that is the haredi mindset.

Mavi Marmara: A Turkish Love Boat?

The recent class between Israeli commandos and Muslim and other activists aboard the Turkish flagged ship the Mavi Marmara seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza and bring humanitarian aid to the over one million Gazans trapped in the madness of Hamas hatred and Israeli fear is yet another example of how painful and confusing the situation in the Middle East is.

Let me very clear: First, Israel has every right to exist, and any organization that seeks to undermine that right is an enemy not only of Israel and the Jewish people, but of all people devoted to justice anywhere.

Second, to be pro-Israel doesn’t require you to be anti-Palestinian, and to be pro-Palestinian doesn’t require you to be anti-Israel. Support of the two-state solution requires you to be in favor of the liberation and self-determination of both Israelis and Palestinians. Only when both sides win, can either side win.

Third, while I understand the reason for the three-year-old Israeli blockade, I do not think it is effective. And allowing herself to be the face of oppression in the eyes of millions of Muslims in Gaza, Palestine, and around the Islamic world is just stupid. And while it is true that Israel does allow some aid to enter Gaza, it is also true that Israel is following a policy based on the erroneous idea that crushing the Gazan people economically will somehow cause them to rise up and crush Hamas politically. This will not work. It only hardens the loyalty of the people to their oppressors by allowing the oppressor to shift the blame for oppression to others. Gazans will only overturn Hamas when they see Hamas rather than Israel as their true oppressor. And neither Hamas nor the current Israeli government seems eager to let this happen.

Fourth, the purpose of the flotilla was to provoke confrontation. Israel told the flotilla leaders that it would allow the humanitarian aid to enter Gaza if the ships would come to an Israeli port for inspection. Israel wanted to be certain that the cargo going into Gaza was indeed humanitarian and not military. The flotilla leaders refused. Further, film from Al Jazeera provided by Act! for America shows pockets of activists chanting anti-Jewish rhetoric from the Koran, and the fact that the activists attacked Israelis with metal pipes, knives, and clubs, and tossed one soldier off the deck suggests that some were itching for a fight. There is no Gandhi on either side of the Muslim/Jewish divide, and no one should imagine that either side has a monopoly on hatred or violence or sainthood. The Israelis want heroes, the Muslims want martyrs. Nobody honors saints.

Fifth, Israel made a mistake in sending this particular commando unit to do this particular task. The unit had no experience with civilians, with riot control, or with diplomacy.

In short, the flotilla leaders got just what they wanted: worldwide anti-Israel propaganda. And they couldn’t have done it without the help of the Israelis themselves.

I have no hope for peace in the Middle East. I do not think we will see an end to war in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel/Palestine. I expect the conflict to expand. It is already in Pakistan and will soon be in Iran.

It is said that there can be no peace because there is no one with whom to make peace, but I do not believe that. There are people of good will on every side of this conflict who would rather send their children to college than to war, but their numbers are dwindling, and they have no political power in their respective countries. What is missing are politicians who can make peace.

My fear at the moment is that Israel will once again be demonized. It is just too easy to picture these “loving, good-hearted humanitarians” being brutalized by “violent, heartless Israeli soldiers.” That will be the story: demon Israel against the love boat of Islam.

There are some who will rush to defend Israel, but in so doing they will demonize the Muslims, adding to the heat even as they pretend to shed light.

The end game? War. War with Hamas, then war with Hezbollah, then war with Iran. The question people have to ask themselves is this: how many of our children are we willing to the feed to the god of war? The answer I suspect is “all of them.”

Is Islam a Religion?

One rabbi friend of mine in Nashville is under attack for supporting the building of a mosque in a Nashville neighborhood. Among her critics are those who argue that Islam is a threat to America, that mosques are fronts for terrorist agitation and activities, and that Islam isn’t really a religion but a way of life seeking to impose its values on every aspect of human life.

While I support my friend, I am intrigued by her critics, and not unsympathetic to their fears.

Are there dangerous clerics in Islam? Of course. And there are dangerous clergy in Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism as well. Do some mosques foment hate and terror? Of course. And there are churches, synagogues, and temples in the US, Israel, India, Africa, and elsewhere that do so as well. The challenge is to root out these clerics and the institutions that support them, not to condemn all churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples.

I would urge critics of religious radicalism in all its forms to attend local religious institutions and report on what is being taught by actual clergy in actual religious centers. If there is a mosque, church, synagogue, or temple plotting, preaching or excusing hatred, injustice, and oppression let’s expose them.

Is Islam a religion or a code of life? The two are not mutually exclusive. Judaism also speaks to all aspects of life: social, economic, legal, cultural, political, etc. It tells Jews what foods they can and cannot eat, what kinds of clothing they can and cannot wear, when and how to wage war and when and how to wage peace. There is an important difference, however. While Judaism seeks to impose its strictures on Jews alone, Islam seeks to make the whole world Muslim, just as Christianity used to and in some cases continues to seek to make the whole world Christian.

I too fear totalitarianism, religious and otherwise. I no more want to live under Sharia law than I do under Jewish law, Catholic law, or any system which holds that civil law should be derived from and shaped in accordance with the laws of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or any other scripture. When Muslims start imposing Islamic values on secular America I will fear them. At the moment, however, I am more fearful of conservative Christians imposing their biblical values on America weakening our study of science and medicine, restricting women’s reproductive rights, stepping on the civil rights of homosexuals, holding “national” prayer breakfasts that exclude any god but their own, etc.

Yes, Islam is a complete code of life. So is Judaism. So is Christianity. The only difference is that most American Jews and Christians ignore their respective faiths when those faiths interfere with their personal desires. Muslims just haven’t reached the point where the majority or even a sizable minority give lip service to Islam while living secular lives no longer controlled by it. For better or worse, the mall will trump the mosque just as it has the church and the synagogue.

Let White Men Be White Men

I’m listening to Savage Nation on the radio when it hit me: I exude white male privilege. My kind runs this country even though we are a minority. Lots of people, make that lots of nonwhite people or nonmale people, hate this, and blame my kind as if we have a choice in the matter, but the truth is we don’t. We don’t choose to be white, we don’t choose to be male; we were born this way; and to blame us for our condition is immoral and just plain wrong.

Look at it this way: You may not like homosexuals, and you may despise their agenda, but gay people are gay because they are born that way. You can resist the gay agenda if you wish, but you can’t blame gay people for having one any more than you can blame black people for being black, or, dare I say it, white males for being white males.

White men run Wall Street, dominate Main Street, and control the banks, the government, and the news and entertainment media. Sure there are people of color in these fields, but the control is overwhelmingly white. But this is no more a matter of choice than is the fact that gay people dominate the fashion and design industries. It is simply a law of nature.
So please show some compassion, people!

On the radio they were talking about getting rid of illegal aliens. I am all for that, though I would start with the Borg rather than Mexicans. One fellow called in worrying about who will do all the yard-work if illegal workers from Mexico are kept out of the country? Dr. Savage says there are plenty of legal Americans who can do those jobs. I guess he’s right, but does that get to the heart of the matter? I mean, push comes to shove, Americans can make running shoes, but wouldn’t you rather have Indonesian children do that? After all they seem to have born to the task.

The real question isn’t who will do the yard-work, but why are there so many gardeners in Mexico in the first place? It can’t be supply and demand. There just aren’t that many gardens in Mexico. If there were Mexican gardeners wouldn’t be sneaking into the United States looking for work. It must be genetic. Nature prefers Mexican gardeners, chicken processors, and hotel maids and one cannot blame these people for following the call of nature and seeking out gardens, poultry factories, and hotels no matter where they are.

The same is true of white men like me. We are born to dominate in politics, finance, and media. Blaming us for this is blaming us for being who God made us to be. Blaming us is blaming God, and we all know that’s a bad idea.

And now I’m hearing that Obama wants to profile white males. First he wants to take away our guns, then our god, then our salt, and now he is going to pass a law that requires all white males to prove we are American citizens. And all because of the lack of color of our skin! No wonder we are angry.

So when you see white men marching in the streets defending our right to rule; or when you see white men in banking using money given them by white men in government to further our agenda, relax. This is who we are; this is what we are born to do.

Let white men be white men. Stop the hate.

Thoughts on John 14: 8–12, 26–27

[I was invited to preach on the following passages from the Gospel According to John yesterday morning. I thought I would share my message with you as well.]

Philip said to him [Jesus], “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. (Gospel According to John 14:8-12)…

The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (Gospel According to John 14:26-27)

• • •

Philip said to him, Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” (John 14:8)

Are you kidding me, Phil? You aren’t satisfied yet? Jesus has been walking with you, talking with you, working miracles among you, and you still don’t trust him. You gotta see his boss? What is wrong with you?

Actually nothing. Philip, like Jesus and the other apostles are Jews. Jews are all from Missouri. You gotta show us, and even then we may doubt you. This is the very DNA of the Jewish mind: we are not all that impressed by gods.

Remember Abraham destroying the gods of his father? Remember him challenging God over the true nature of justice? Remember Rachel sitting and pretending to menstruate on the gods of her father? How about the Exodus from Egypt? Ten plagues, splitting the Red Sea? Pretty impressive stuff, and yet the Jews opted to worship a giant piece of bling instead! We Jews aren’t perfect iconoclasts, but we lean in that direction.

Around the same time as John is writing his gospel, telling us how Philip asked to see Jesus’ dad, the rabbinic court had his own run in with God.

In the Talmud (Baba Metzia 59a) we find the rabbis arguing over the status of an oven—is it kosher or not? With the sole exception of Rabbi Eliezer the entire court decides the oven isn’t kosher. Eliezer disagrees and performs several miracles to prove his point. Unimpressed, the rabbis stick with their decision. Then God Himself comes to Eliezer’s defense and urges the rabbis to change their votes. Rabbi Joshua confronts God saying, “It is not in heaven!” (Deut. 30:12), effectively rejecting the testimony of the Almighty! Shaking with laughter God falls back onto his throne, and with tears streaming down His Face says, “At last, My children have defeated Me! At last, my children have defeated Me!”

God wants to be defeated. Jesus needs to be crucified. Only when we are free from external gods are we ready to receive the Spirit of Truth.

When we abide in Truth we are free from conditioning, and when we are free from conditioning we naturally respond to life with love, compassion, and justice. Without labels to define us we discover there is little to divide us.

But most of us are afraid to be free, living without labels troubles our hearts and so we refuse the gift of Truth, and, like Philip, we are never satisfied.

How can we change this? Live Jesus’ teaching backwards. Jesus taught it forward:

The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (Gospel According to John 14:26-27)

Now we must live it backward:

Start by ending the fear that haunts you. When fear is silenced, your hearts are no longer troubled. When your hearts are no longer troubled you have peace. When you have peace the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth dwelling with you will reveal all you need to know. And when you know all you need to know you can do what Jesus did and more. And when you do what Jesus did—when you discover that you and God are one and that your mission on earth is to be a vehicle for unity and love—you will be satisfied. And so will we all.

Fog of Fear

Tefillin ("phylacteries") are two small black leather boxes housing four biblical passages that observant Jews wear during the weekday morning prayers. The commandment to wear tefillin is found in four places in the Torah: Ex. 13:1-10, 11-16; Deut. 6:4-9; 13-21. While there is no prohibition against women wearing tefillin, the custom has long limited the practice to men. Today, however, and more and more women choose to pray with tefillin as well. And with this shift in practice comes the predictable resistance to it.

Case in point: Noa Raz, a Conservative Jew living in Israel. Ms. Raz was attacked and beaten by a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish man at a bus stop in Beersheva. The man noticed the strap marks tefillin often leave in one’s arm. Outraged, the man grabbed and beat her, all the while screaming, “Woman, abomination, desecration.”

Ms. Raz got away, filed a complaint with the police, and wrote about her ordeal. “We live in a country where the strong dominate and where women are humiliated. As our society becomes more ultra-Orthodox, more extreme, these boundaries become clearer and more frightening,” she writes. “We can protest against the Haredim every day, but they are not the only guilty ones. They are Haredi; this is how they believe and they have the right to believe this way. It is the State that is also guilty of violence, for authorizing their every rampage; and we just carry on and keep quiet. If we don’t wake up to what is happening around us, we will very soon find ourselves living on the corner of Meah Shearim [an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem] and Tehran.”

She is right. And the problem isn’t restricted to Israel. While we focus our attention on global civilizational clashes, there are intra-civilizational clashes that are no less important, indeed which may prove even more important. This clash is between religious extremists and religious moderates. True, you may find both to be steeped in ignorance and wish to see today’s gods go the way of Zeus and Thor, but that isn’t going to happen. What must happen, if religion is to further human progress, is that the ultra-Orthodox of every religion must be dethroned. There is still a sense among too many (even too many liberals) that being fanatical for your god is a good thing; that liberal religionists are weak willed and inauthentic; and that only the extremists are true to their faith. Liberals need to speak up more loudly; they need to affirm the legitimacy of their faith more powerfully; and challenge the haredi of every religion whenever the faith spills over into abuse. The alternative is to surrender faith to the fanatics and allow whatever good religion can do to get lost in the fog of fear that is the haredi mindset.

Horror and Humility

[I was invited to speak at a community worship service in Nashville last night. The goal was to bring the community together after the devastating flood that took so many lives and caused over a billion dollars in damages. This is what I said:]

There is only one religious response to the tragedy of the Nashville flood, and that is humility.

Some among us will opt for anger, decrying and even denying the god who assigned shores to the sea (Proverbs 8:29), and yet who seemed indifferent to the banks of the Cumberland.

Some will see in this horror the wrath of a god fashioned in their image that is only too willing to strike down the innocent with the presumed guilty in the name of whatever hatred fuels the heart of these so-called believers.

And some will see in their personal escape from damage and death, the blessing of a god also constructed in their image that blesses them while sweeping away their neighbors’ homes, livelihoods, and even lives.

To the first I offer encouragement: let your anger burn hot, so hot that it sears away your simplistic faith and its denial of the wildness of life, and the impermanence of all who live it. I envy your opportunity to grow.

To the second I offer compassion, for your god and your lives are haunted by fear, and your hearts are stripped of love, and you are forced to live in an arid world defined by condemnation and hate. I pity your inability to love.

To the third I offer contempt, despising your narcissism–drenched god that allows you to imagine you are somehow blessed while your neighbors are cursed. I despise your smugness.

You fools, haters, and drunkards numbed by cheap grace, are like the friends of Job offering dark counsel without knowledge (Job 38:2). And like those ancient friends, your advice is to be ignored.

There is only one religious response to the tragedy of the Nashville flood, and that is humility.

Humility reminds us that we are in the dark as to why things happens—good things and bad things—all things arising from unknowing and dissolving into unknowing, and

Humility is the art of standing naked in the maddening whirlwind that is the Divine. Humility is the truth that arises when we admit we do not know and cannot know what will befall us or why. Humility leaves us, like our brother Job, surrendered to the dust of our own existence and yet in dialogue with God, the true God, the wild God of the wild universe who cannot be reduced to our image, who cannot be restricted to our likes and dislikes, whose mouth cannot be stuffed with our own prejudice, who offers us no surety, safety, or security, but only the capacity to live and love in their absence.

And when we dare to be humbled, when we dare to be broken as individuals, families, and as a community, then and only then can we find that love.

The flooding of the Cumberland isn’t a gift, but we may choose to be gifted by it. The terrible loss of life and property is not a blessing, but we may choose to make it an opportunity for grace and goodness by allowing our brokenness and grief to lead us from passion to compassion.

If we allow ourselves to feel the pain of loss; if we allow ourselves to share the pain of our neighbors; if we do not rush to excuse or condemn or praise; if, like Job, we have the courage to sit in the ruin of our lives and open our hearts so wide as to be capable of accepting—without blessing or cursing—the good and the bad; if we can do this we can love, and through love we can heal, and through healing we can build a community made stronger by tragedy, and washed clean of fear, prejudice, and hate.

Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol haolam, v’imru amen: Blessed is source of peace who offers us a path to peace, and blessed are we made poor by suffering who may yet be made rich through love. We call upon the One manifest as each and all, that we may find the courage to make peace in our selves, in our families, in our community, and in all the world. And let us say amen.

Free Markets, Closed Minds

The Christian Legal Society (CLS), a college club for law students, discriminates against homosexuals. OK, that’s their right. But when they want other students to financially support them through student fees, they cross a line that should not be crossed.

The first amendment allows for all kinds of bias and discrimination, but it doesn’t obligate others to pay for it. Yet that is what the CLS is arguing before the Supreme Court in its case against University of California’s Hastings College of Law. Hastings refused to fund CLS because it violated the college’s policy that student groups funded by student fees levied on all students must be open to all students. Since CLS isn’t open to homosexuals, student fees cannot fund it.

Supporters of CLS argue that this would force the group to let homosexuals join, and, if they have the numbers, take over. This is nonsense. The college didn’t say the group has to admit homosexuals, it just said it won’t use student funds to support student groups that discriminate against some students. Do what you want, just don’t expect the rest of us to pay for it.

Most likely the Supremes will complicate the issue so as to either avoid ruling meaningfully, or to force Hastings to use student monies to fund CLS, hence forcing gay students to pay for their own discrimination. But the issue is really quite simple: you can form whatever clubs you want; just don’t make everyone pay for it. Student fees should go to support only those student clubs open to all students.

For example, Jewish clubs that restrict membership or leadership to Jews are fine; just don’t make nonJews pay for them. Anti-Semitic groups that refuse to accept Jewish members are kosher; just don’t make Jews pay for them. If students in restricted clubs can’t raise the funds to support their clubs, then those clubs will fail. It is called the free market.

Why is it that conservatives like the Christian Legal Society only like capitalism when it favors them?

Thank God for Franklin Graham

Thank God for Rev. Franklin Graham. In an interview with USA TODAY (May 5, 2010), Rev. Graham reminded us that “Muslims do not worship the same ‘God the Father’ I worship,” and he poked fun at Hinduism saying, “No elephant with a hundred arms can do anything for me. None of their 9,000 gods is going to lead me to salvation.”

Brother Graham is right. Allah doesn’t have kids. Neither does YHVH. And Ganesha, the elephant headed God of Hinduism, has nothing to do with Original Sin, a sin original to Christians alone. Different gods for different bods, so to speak.

“We are fooling ourselves, “ Rev. Graham said, “if we think we can have some big kumbaya service and all hold hands and its all going to get better in this world. It’s not going to get better.”

I like this guy. He tells it like it is. Peoples of different faiths can come together and build houses with Habitat for Humanity, but when push comes to shove, shove comes to genocide, jihad, and crusade.

Religions get along as long as they never come into contact with one another. When they do things always go badly. Those of us who imagine a kumbaya moment don’t know much history, and don’t take competing religious claims all that seriously. I understand why Southern Baptist ministers were told by their leadership not to participate in interfaith services after 9/11—it seems to lend credibility to the false gods of the other religions. God forbid.

The Rev. Graham is in the news, however, not because of his soothsaying, but because the Pentagon invited and then disinvited him to lead a prayer service there. It seems that the Kumbaya League complained because he called Islam an “evil religion.”

I agree with both Pentagon decisions. Given our addiction to oil, and love of empire, the Pentagon was probably right to disinvite Rev. Graham and thereby avoid upsetting our Muslim citizens and allies. But this is a tactical move, not a strategic one. As war becomes perpetual, war profiteering becomes a greater and greater driver of our economy, and building larger armies the only way to employ growing legions of unemployed young men and women, it may be necessary for the Pentagon to turn its soldiers into Christian Crusaders, and a new invitation to Rev. Graham will be warranted.

Think about it: a war fought for profit is difficult to staff. But a war fought for God can go on forever. And a forever war is where we seem to be headed. Its good for business, both God’s and banker’s.

Piety, Politics, and the Penis: a Deadly Combination

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Hazing Arizona

A lot of people should have been asking me about my opinion of the anti-illegal immigration law passed recently in Arizona. Just in case you were one of them, I thought I would share my thoughts with you. If you aren’t one of them, skip this paragraph and start with the next one.

Here are my thoughts on the Arizona anti-illegals law. I am a patriotic and loyal American born 298 days after the Fourth of July. As a good American I tend to agree with other good Americans about things. In this case 39% of Americans support the law and 30% oppose it. So I support it. Another 31% say they never heard of it, and if that number grows I may never have heard of it either, but right now I have heard of it and it seems that I support it.

Why do I support it? Because it doesn’t do anything to stop illegals from illegally crossing the Mexican—US border, and because it gives police officers more to do, and because it allows them to say, “May I see your papers please,” which is a line from Firesign Theater that I always wanted to say but had no real occasion to say it and now I can think about becoming a police offer in Arizona so I can say it.

I also like the idea because my grandparents were illegal aliens. At least that is what the Nazis said. So when they came to Ellis Island my maternal grandfather changed his name from something no one remembers to Cohen which sounded much more American to him. He also claimed to be born on December 25 so that people could buy him stuff on sale. My grandfather was very thoughtful that way.

I also like the idea because it will create lots more jobs. To avoid being stopped by the police Hispanics (legal and otherwise) will lighten their skin color, get fitted with blue contacts, and learn to speak English without an accent like they do here in Middle Tennessee. All of this will raise the demand for skin lightening technicians, eye doctors and optometrists, and ESL teachers from Middle Tennessee. So it is good for the economy.

If it works as planned I can see laws singling out other racial and ethnic groups. Africans ought to carry papers proving they are freed-blacks, and I think Jewish men should be stopped by the police and asked, “Can I see your penis, please?” Who knows what kind of new jobs this will bring?

Anyway, just in case the majority of American’s change their minds and oppose this bill, let me suggest one way to get around racial profiling. They can’t profile you if you don’t walk sideways. Every time you see a police office walk straight toward them. This way they can’t see your profile. This works especially well with Jews since it is harder to measure the nose when not in profile. True the Nazis didn’t care, but we aren’t there. Yet.

You Heard It Here First

I want you to hear this from me before you hear it from anyone else. As soon as we formally grieve the tragic loss of life at the British Petroleum drilling platform—and it is a tragedy, make no mistake—we will learn that the BP oil spill sending 21,000 gallons of crude daily into the Gulp of Mexico and heading for New Orleans is no accident.

To get a jump on the theories I called a few people I know who may or may not know anything about this oil spill. I spoke first with Ol’ Dan Tucker, an aide to someone who lives in Washington D.C. and who agreed to talk with me only on condition of anonymity, whatever that means. Anyway Dan told me that the elderly woman for whom he is an aide told him that she thought the timing of the spill was suspicious:

“You know, Obama decided he’s for off-shore drilling in order to get Republican backing for his energy plan, but he is really against it, and then this spill happens which will set off-shoring drilling so far off into the future that it may never happen, so could it be that Obama didn’t really want to see off-shore drilling happen at all so he got some of his Chicago buddies at the CIA to blow the rig? That way he can be for drilling politically and against drilling practically. Pretty convenient, don’t you think?”

I usually try not to think, so I thanked Dan for speaking with me and made another call. I expected to reach his secretary but Pastor Hal Aluya answered his own phone. “Is your secretary in, Pastor? I wanted to ask her about the BP oil spill.”

“Sorry,” Pastor Hal said. “She’s preparing our Holy Oil Duck Scrubbing Mission. But I’d be happy to answer your question.”

“OK. Any thoughts on why this spill in this place at this time?”

“God’s will, of course. The Lord tried to drown New Orleans and its homosexuals with Hurricane Katrina but failed. So now He's sending oil, and if we set it ablaze, fire. Just like the Good Book says. Its Sodom and Gomorrah, Part Two.”

Not wanting to appear biased, I next called a rabbi friend to get his take. I told him what Rev. Aluya said.

“He’s half right,” Rabbi Dove Bear Schmearsonsonson told me. “It is God’s will, but it has nothing to do with the gays. Sure homosexuals are an abomination, but they’re not the only abomination. This spill is about kosher; it will destroy the shellfish industry, and the livelihoods of those who promote it and eat the abominable bottom feeders. God may hate gay people, but no more than He hates shrimp and crabs.”

Sensing I was on a roll, I called a guy I know who claims to have been an imam in the court of Ethiopian Emperor Highli Unlikli.

“We both know who is behind this,” he said. “The Jews; Mossad. I heard that not a single Jew died in that explosion.”

“Were there any Jews on the rig at all?” I asked.

“No. My point exactly. They were planning this explosion for years and so made sure they had no Jews working on it ever.”

I thanked Imam Unlikli for his insights and made one last call.

“Professor Moriarty, please” I said as the fresh voiced woman receptionist finished saying, “Brown, Driver, Briggs, and Moriarty.”

“Yes?” the Professor said.

“I’m calling to get your reaction to the BP oil spill, Professor. Any thoughts as to who's behind this?”

“The British, of course. The company is called British Petroleum, after all. It's revenge for the Battle of New Orleans.”

“The what?” I said.

“The Battle of New Orleans. In 1814 we took a little trip, along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip. We took a little bacon and we took a little beans, and we fought the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.”

“Houd that turn out?” I asked.

“We fired our guns and the British kept a comin, there wasn’t ‘bout as many as there was a while ago. We fired once more they began to runnin’ on down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The War of 1812 was over before the Battle of New Orleans was fought. It was a waste of lives. The British never forgave us, and now they will have their revenge.”

OK, there you have it. What “it” is I’m not sure, but there it is nonetheless. I guarantee you one or more of these ideas or something like them will make it onto Fox & Friends by Monday of next week and onto the other networks a day or two later, and then on the Daily Show by Thursday night. And when they do just remember: you heard it here first.

Q & A at 59

I turned 59 this past Monday. By coincidence (if you believe in coincidence) I received an email from a student who needed to interview a clergy person for a final class paper. He had come across me somewhere and thought I might fit the bill. I thought you might like to read our brief exchange.

What has been your primary goal since becoming a rabbi?

I entered seminary to find God and change religion. I believed and still believe that God is the source and substance of all reality. God is not a being or supreme being, but be-ing itself. To realize God is to realize our connection with and responsibility toward all life. The more you know God the more you become a vehicle for compassion and justice. I wanted to know this God and to make Judaism a means for knowing this and becoming this vehicle.

Did you do it?

I continue to know God, but to change Judaism—no. At this I have failed, and my rabbinate is a failure.

Does it bother you to have wasted your life in this way?

I said I was a failure not that I have wasted my life. To fail means that I first had to try. To waste a life is never to bother living it in the first place. I lived. I continue to live, and I continue to do the only thing I know how to do: I write, and I talk. I write and talk to change minds and hearts and institutions. Perhaps I have changed some minds and heats, but the institution is the same. Failure, yes. Life waster, no.

If you had succeeded in changing the institution what would it look like?

There is no one way to be Jewish even as I envision Judaism. But I would say we would root Judaism in two principles: teshuvah and tikkun: returning to our true nature as God (teshuvah) and repairing the world with godliness (tikkun). This places compassion and justice at the heart of Judaism. Jews would choose which traditions to follow or amend or invent based on a single question: will this make me more just and compassionate? If the answer is yes, then the tradition demands your loyalty. If the answer is no, then it makes no demands on you at all. Every Jew and every synagogue would be unique, but all would be responding to this question. What would unite us would not be shared answers, but a shared question.

If you have failed, what will you do now?

The only thing I know how to do: write and talk.

And if you continue to fail?

I fully expect to fail. But better to fail than not to act.

Doesn’t it ever occur to you to quit?

Of course. Everyday I sit and read newspapers and websites, and watch the news on television, and I think for a moment about abandoning the madness that is religion. Then my anger and frustration translate into yet another book or talk and I go on. I have no idea why this happens, but I cannot ignore it when it does.

You do a lot with interfaith work. Is this more promising that working within one religion?

No. My work in interfaith is to suggest that religions are like the blind men and the elephant: each has a piece of the puzzle but none knows it as a whole. While I admire those who work toward interreligious understanding and peace, I am not among them. I study and teach religion to reveal the existential heart of religion: the realization that we are mortal. Then I focus on those teachers and teachings that help us live with dying, rather than those who promise us some way to escape from dying: Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, Buddha before he was made into a god, Ramana Maharshi, Hillel, Rumi, Ramakrishna, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Toni Packer, to name a few off the top of my head.

Do you write and talk differently now than, say, 25 years ago?

Yes, I write and talk more fiercely. I have less patience for niceties and political correctness. I used to care about what other’s thought of what I wrote and said. And while I still notice this, it no longer shapes my writing or my speaking.

I read once that you say rabbis have a choice between being prophets or clerks, and that most are clerks. Which are you?

I didn’t say that, I was quoting someone else. But I do believe it. Which am I? Only others can say; and only after I’m dead. Hopefully you will be around to ask those who survive me.

God is not One

Stephen Prothero’s new book, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter, is a refreshing antidote to the too easy notion that all religions say the same thing. They don’t. Indeed, they are often mutually exclusive.

While Dr. Prothero suggests that all religions begin with the notion that “something has gone awry.” After that, however, they differ as to what is wrong and what to do about it. Fair enough. This is what is sometimes called the medical model of comparative religion: each religion has its own diagnosis of the human condition, prognosis of the disease, prescription for its cure, and medicine to cure it. Using this model is both easy and informative, and I employ it each time I teach Comparative Religion.

My own sense is that there is a disease underlying all diseases: the realization that we are going to die. Since mortality offends the ego’s sense of being entitled to immortality we invent a variety of ways to make mortality go away: heavens, hells, rebirth, reincarnation, becoming gods ourselves, and moving from plane to plane in search of more knowledge are all ways of defeating death, if only in our own minds. Perhaps the reason why so many religious people are willing to kill and be killed for their religion is that dying is really what religion is all about.

I think the point of Dr. Prothero’s book is to challenge the cheap unity that passes for serious discussion of religion in the popular media. Anyone who thinks Buddhism and Catholicism are the same thing, for example, has never compared an image of the meditating Buddha with the Crucified Christ. This isn’t a matter of apples and oranges, but of apples and road kill.

Does honoring differences preclude real dialogue and interspirituality? Not at all. If religious differences are simply a matter of tomato/tomahto then dialogue is unnecessary, and if religions are each unique and complete unto themselves then dialogue is impossible.

Dialogue is the willingness to step out of what we know to meet one another in the space between, the space of not-knowing. This happens only when you are willing to be addressed by another, to be transformed by the other. If I leave a dialogue unchanged I never really entered into dialogue in the first place. If my encounter with other religions leaves my Judaism untouched, I never really encountered them.

Dialogue rarely happens. Most people are too afraid of meet an other. Most of us are too busy running from mortality to stand still and “die before you die.”

In my own experiences with the faculty of the Spiritual Paths Institute true dialogue is known to happen. But only when we push one another. When my love for my friend leads to a love for what my friend loves then dialogue can happen, and then we can move beyond what we love to love itself.

Dr. Prothero doesn’t preclude this kind of transformative dialogue, he just insists that we don’t cheapen it.

Are Religions Violent?

Phillip Jenkins in Monday’s USA TODAY argues that “any faith can become violent.” True enough. But why?

Religions, professor Jenkins suggests, aren’t intrinsically violent, but “can be used to justify savagery and extremism.” No doubt, but I suggest that the reason religions can be used to justify savagery and extremism is because there is something intrinsically savage and extreme about them.

If I want to convince people to murder other people I will have more success if I focus on religious distinctions than soft drink preferences. There is nothing intrinsic to Coke and Pepsi that leads me, a Coke drinker, to seek to exterminate the Pepsi drinkers of the world. Indeed, when Coke isn’t available, I have been known to sip a Pepsi now and again.

Religion is used to justify violence because religion is inherently violent. Religion by and large is a zero-sum game: for some to win, others must lose. Zero-sum gaming is behind all notions of saved and damned, true believer and infidel, chosen and not chosen. As a zero-sum game religion pits one group against another, which I admit Coke and Pepsi do as well, and then raises that distinction to cosmic proportions, something no other zero-sum game can do.

You may believe Democrats are evil, and do your utmost to see that only Republicans are elected to office, but you can’t claim they are in league with the Devil unless you are willing to leave the confines of politics and take refuge in the cosmic drama of religion. Religion is the ultimate zero-sum game because it is the only cosmic version of the game, and because it is the cosmic version religion foments, not only justifies, savagery and extremism not only in this life but in the next life as well. Even Tea-party loyalists don’t imagine their liberal opponents burning in Hell for all eternity, but many religionists do.

What can we do about this? Not much. Religions are human inventions, so the problem isn’t with this or that religion but with us. All of us. We all fall prey to zero-sum thinking. Religion is the way we elevate our insanity to cosmic proportions. So there is no point in reforming religions until we have reformed ourselves. And since it is we who have to do the reforming, expecting any real reform is wishful thinking.

The solution isn’t more religion or less religion, but a radical investigation into the madness of the human being. Each of us must look at, take responsibility for, and seek to limit the amount of violence we do. Each of us must look at, take responsibility for, and seek to minimize the frequency of our zero-sum gaming— political, economic, religious, etc. If we refuse to participate in zero-sum games, the games will fade away. Religion won’t stop being violent until we do.

Good luck with that.

Iranian Women Rock the Planet

Weather is fascinating, isn’t it? Don’t you ever wonder why tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes happen? I mean really know, not the groundless speculation that comes from meteorologists and other pseudo-scientific types. When I want to know the truth about the weather I go to the source—God. And if I want to know what God has to say about the weather I go to God’s spokesmen—the clergy.

That’s how I learned, for example, that Hurricane Karina was caused by homosexuals planning to hold a Gay Pride Parade in New Orleans. And that’s how I discovered that the hurricane that devastated Haiti was caused by an 1804 pact with the Devil made by the enslaved Haitians in exchange for the power to throw off their French slave masters. And that how I found out that the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Indonesia was caused by the laxity of the victims’ adherence to Islam.

OK. But what about all the earthquakes shaking up the planet lately? What causes them—and don’t tell me anything about plate tectonics, Genesis says nothing about them so I don’t want to know about them.

Thank God I don’t have to rely on scientists for the truth. When it comes to earthquakes I can turn to my favorite meteorocleric the Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi. Mr. Sedighi has revealed the fact that earthquakes are caused by women wearing immodest clothing and behaving promiscuously: “Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.”

Iranian Muslim woman are required by law to cover themselves from head to foot, but some manage to show off their curves anyway, and in doing so endanger us all. Listen to this meteorological prediction by earthquake expert Carole King, “I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky tumbling down.” If burkas can’t save us, we are doomed.

So homosexuals and rebellious slaves cause hurricanes, woman cause earthquakes, and lax believers cause tsunamis, but what causes volcanoes? I’m sure some scientist somewhere has a theory about this, but I’m not going to fall for that. My guess? Lesbians, especially lesbians from Iceland. If every you want to have a tube of hot lava to explode just show pictures of even hotter lesbians. Works every time.

Beware the "O"

I attended the Murfreesboro Tea Party this past Friday. The banner spanning the speakers’ stage said this was a festival of FREEDOM, with the O replaced by a red five-pointed star. When I asked about the star I was told it was to remove the letter “O” which many attendees consider the new sign of the Beast. I get this. I felt the same way about the letter “W” during the Bush years.

What heartened me most about the event was the small turn out. A few hundred white people, most of whom were clearly socialists sucking at the teat of Social Security and Medicare. These people weren’t angry; they were tired, exhausted, beat, humorless, and mostly overweight. I thought I saw a placard that read, "Give me Liberty or Give me Breadth," but I think I may have misread it. “Sad” not “mad” best describes them.

The main speaker, a man we were told who speaks at Tea Parties across this great and God blessed nation of ours, filled our ears with so many platitudes I worried there wouldn’t be any left over for the other speakers. Who’s against freedom, individual responsibility, excessive taxation, and uncritical thought? OK, I admit to having some problem with the latter, but I clapped anyway. Clapping, like yawning, is contagious.

The most interesting speaker was a fellow from Act! for America, an anti-Muslim group, who warned us that America was being taken over by Islamofascists, and the only people who were aware of this were the disempowered ignorant masses. Did he mean us? The more education you had, the more political power you had, the more in the pocket of Islamofascists you were. Thank God the Tennessee educational system is so poor! We will save America yet.

I spoke with the people at the Act! booth, and learned that all Muslims are Islamofascists because Islam promotes Sharia law, and Sharia law is incompatible with American democratic values.

They have a point. If American democratic values are all about the freedom of the individual to be and do whatever s/he wants within the limits set by Ayn Rand, then Sharia law is a problem. But then so is Jewish law (Halacha), Catholic law, and the rules that Southern Baptists, Church of Christ and other Protestant denominations place on people. Freedom is freedom, and most religions are agin’ it. So, I suggested the problem wasn’t just Islam, but all religion. We ought to act to end religion now. No one agreed with me so I moved on to the next table.

This one promoted the John Birch Society. Until I moved to Murfreesboro and saw the John Birch Society’s float in the town’s Christmas parade I had thought the Birchers were out of business. Turns out I was wrong.

According to their brochure, the Birchers are against democracy because it inevitably leads to “overbearing government, crushing debt, and erosion of individual and minority rights.” Why minorities have rights different from those of individuals, I don’t know, and didn’t think to ask. The goal of the Birchers is to return to America to it was in its infancy where citizens enjoyed “limited government, kept the fruits of their labor and were responsible, moral people” who, I mentioned to the person at the JBS table, owned other human beings, committed genocide against native populations, and discriminated against women and people of different religious persuasions. They took back the copy of their magazine I was holding and suggested I move on.

There were lots of other tables to visit, and what they all had in common was a fear of all things left, liberal, nonwhite, and “O”.

All in all the Boro Tea Party was pretty dull. We applauded mom and apple pie, booed Pelosi and Obama, and swatted the pollen swirling around our heads. Should we worry about these people? Sure, if we are even more listless than they are, they will rule the nation within an election or two, but does it matter?

I doubt it. You can change the faces in Washington all you want, the real power lays elsewhere. Whoever is in office, the corporate powers that be continue to exploit the people, melt the planet, and send us off to fight the never-ending war designed to keep us afraid and keep themselves in power. The more things change the more they stay the same.

My Prayers Have Been Answered!

For years I have doubted the efficacy of prayer. I have read the studies and despite misinterpretations to the contrary there is no evidence that prayer works. Until now, that is. Because today my prayer has been answered.

Yes, I see the inconsistency here. I don’t believe in prayer and yet I pray. So sue me. And what do I pray for? The end of National Prayer Day. And that day has come. Well, almost, sort of.

United States District Court Judge Barbara Crabb of the Western District of Wisconsin has ruled National Prayer Day to be in violation of the Constitution of the United States of America. Halleluiah! This doesn’t mean we can’t have a National Prayer Day only that the national government can’t endorse it. It is the same thing with National Car Rental. You can have it but the government can’t endorse it over Hertz or Avis or some other company.

Anyway, here’s a bit of insider information on Judge Crabb on why she may hate God if she does. I have no idea if this is true, but if Crabb is her maiden name and if she went through grade school with the name Crabb she must have had a miserable time: “Hey, Babs, why so crabb-y?” “Watch out guys, you don’t want to date Barbara. You’ll get crabs for sure, heh, heh, heh.” No wonder she hates God, look at the name he stuck her with. She probably prayed and prayed for a different name and nothing happened, so she went to college and law school and got appointed a judge so she could at long last have her revenge. If you think that is far fetched, remember that B.H. Obama spent decades pretending to be American born so he could become president and destroy this country.

Anyway Justice Crabb-y ruled that a national day of prayer is unconstitutional because the government can’t endorse prayer. Man, what is this country coming to? You can force a person to buy health insurance but you can’t urge them to pray? Does that make sense?

Yes it does. Why? Because it is part of Obama’s plan to insure we all get insurance. Everyone but scientists (except Christian Scientists) knows that prayer is the best insurance. If God wants you to be sick and broke that is God’s business, and insuring yourself against this is the devil’s work. But praying for God not to do this to you is good work and a hell of a lot cheaper than buying health insurance from some corporation. But Obama wants you to buy that insurance because he needs big corporations to fund his other efforts to socialize America so he is working to outlaw prayer, which is the better insurance. If you can’t pray, then you had better buy insurance. So you can see how this works.

I know that Her Honor Babs the Crabby Crabb God-hater didn’t outlaw prayer, but that is where things are going. Soon even impromptu prayers like “God Damn It!” will be against the law.

Why does this upset me? I am, after all, skeptical about prayer. True, but I was looking forward to the food at our local National Prayer Day breakfast. Now I heard that instead of eggs they are serving Crabb cakes. Not kosher. Nothing for me to eat. God damn it!

Dr. Ellis Rivkin, z"l

While I believe that the guru system is largely broken, and the clergy often ineffective and sometimes evil, I do believe travelers on the spiritual path need companions and teachers. Dr. Ellis Rivkin was one of mine. He died a few days ago.

I met Dr. Rivkin in Jerusalem. My wife and I were living in the city fantasizing about starting an English language magazine. I attended a series of lectures on Judaism given by Dr. Rivkin, and by the conclusion of the series I was set on following him to Cincinnati and pursuing rabbinic ordination at Hebrew Union College. Shortly after I arrived Dr. Rivkin hired me (and my friend Robert Barr) as his research assistant, a position I held for four years.

Rivkin was a brilliant and iconoclastic scholar. Raised as an Orthodox Jew he carved his own way in Judaism, promoting his theory of the Unity Principle. In a nutshell, he taught that the Jewish people is shaped by an insight into the radical unity of all things. It was this that lead them to the idea of monotheism and shaped the insights of Marx, Freud, and Einstein. Religion was secondary to the Principle itself. Everything the Jewish mind did it did in service to this archetype, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Dr. Rivkin was more than a scholar. He experienced this Unity all the time, and spoke and demonstrated its practical and mystical implications to me during the many private walks he would invite to take with him. If there is a single professor at HUC to whom I owe my understanding of Judaism it is Dr. Rivkin.

States' Rights and Wrongs

I got an email regarding my last post. Rather than add his comments to the blog, this fellow chose to write me directly. I don't mind, but it more interesting for all of us if people post their opinions for everyone to read. So, in the interest of doing just that, let me post what was sent to me:

Dear Rabbi,

As a Jew I don't expect you to understand what happened during the War of Northern Aggression. [I think his grammar is off; he means that since I am a Jew I don't understand, not that he is a Jew]. I am not an antisemite (sic) and know that the Confederacy was bankrolled by Jews, but you probably came over much later. Anyway, the war was not fought over slavery, but over states' rights. It was a defense of the Southern way of life against Northern imperialism. We are still fighting that war today, though now states northern and southern are battling the encroachment of the Federal Government. Please get your facts straight. Sincerely...

I sent the following email back and have heard nothing in reply:

Dear XXX,

Thank you for reading my blog and sharing your thoughts. I urge you to do so in the comments section so others can benefit from them, but I will respond briefly to you in any case.

While I agree with you that the South was defending states' rights, but the only right they were defending was the right to own slaves. The North wasn't going to war over cotton prices, musical styles, fashion, religion, food, or land. If the Southern States hadn't endorsed slavery there would have been no war. I don't think any state has a right to buy and sell human beings.

Sincerely,
Rami

Don't Mean Diddly

I would like to commend Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour for having the guts to say that the complaints against Virginia’s Confederate History Month being insensitive to African Americans because it fails to mention slavery “doesn’t amount to diddly.” He’s right! Slavery was a minor part of the southern life, and most slaves were happy to get free passage to America, and free room and board when they got here. Nobody in their right mind thinks that the American Civil War was fought over slavery. The real issue was economic: the South built its economy on the enslavement of black human beings, and the North opposed that. See, isn't that simple?

I hope Virginia’s Confederate History Month celebrates life in the Confederacy in all its glory, and I hope they create reenactments of Southern life in cities across the state. I myself have never seen a slave auction, and might benefit from watching a reenactment.

While we're at it, I suggest we have a Catholic History Month and ignore the Inquisition, Crusades, witch trials, anti-Semitism, and Priestly Pedophilia; and a US History Month that ignores treatment of Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, etc; and a Nazi History Month that celebrates the creation of the Volkswagen rather than getting bogged down in the murder of six million Jews; and a Jewish History month that ignores the genocide of the Hittites, Jebusites, and all other biblical ites, as well as the plight of the Palestinian people.

Why blemish our histories with piddling things such as slavery, racism, xenophobia, genocide, anti-Semitism, and the like? Why not paint everything nice and rosy? Maybe if we didn't remind ourselves what a f#cked up species we are, we wouldn't be so f#cked up. You think?

Backpedaling on Pedophilia

This from the Associated Press: "Pope Benedict XVI's personal preacher is likening accusations against the pope and the church in the sex abuse scandal to 'collective violence' suffered by the Jews. The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa said in a Good Friday sermon, with the pope listening to him in St. Peter's Basilica, that a Jewish friend has said the accusations remind him of the 'more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.'"

I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry, though the fact that Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa has a Jewish friend is nice. For the Vatican See that preferred to see little and say nothing while millions of Jews were being slaughtered by good Christians and Catholics throughout Europe, to now hide behind anti-Semitism to avoid having to face the fact of church cover-ups of pedophilia among priests is outrageous.

Obviously the Church can’t tell the difference between sticks and stones (not to mention guns and Zyklon B gas) and words. When priests are being indiscriminately rounded up and murdered because they are Catholics, then maybe we can talk. But when pedophile priests are not even rounded up, but in fact recycled into new parishes where they can troll for fresh victims, I think the analogy falls a bit flat.

But wait! Perhaps I am being too partisan. Maybe what Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa is saying is this: Just as newspaper accounts revealing the evil of pedophilia corrupting the Catholic Church are true, so Nazi revelations of Jewish evil corrupting Europe were true. Now it makes sense. He isn’t saying the charges against the Church are false, only that the charges against the Jews were true. Bravissimo!

Here is the problem with the Church and the Pope: they care more about the church and the pope than the people the church and the pope are supposed to serve. The Pope is protecting the brand at the expense of those it has harmed. Not surprising, of course. This is how most corporations react when faced with the evil they do.

Compare the Vatican’s statement that it doesn’t directly hire bishops and priests and is therefore not responsible for anything they may do with Union Carbide Corporation’s response to the disaster in Bhopal, India where 35 tons of toxic gas was leaked from a pesticide plant killing more than 7000 people:

Bhopal was a terrible tragedy that none of us will ever forget. However, it is important to note that Dow never owned or operated the plant, which today is under the control of the Madhya Pradesh state government. Dow acquired the shares of Union Carbide Corporation more than 16 years after the tragedy, and 10 years after the $470 million settlement agreement – paid by Union Carbide Corporation and Union Carbide India, Limited – was approved by the Indian Supreme Court. [For Union Carbide Corporation's perspective on the gas tragedy, visit its web site at www.unioncarbide.com/bhopal]

Isn’t this the same argument?

Happy Easter

I am preaching this morning, my second Easter sermon in so many years. I don't understand why a rabbi would be asked to address a church community on Easter, unless the hope is that s/he would at long last realize that the empty tomb means Jesus is Lord.

A couple of days ago during one of my university classes a guest speaker suggested that the simplest explanation as to why the tomb in which Jesus was buried on Good Friday was empty on Easter Sunday is that God had raised him from the dead. This struck me as odd. Wouldn't a simpler answer be that Jesus' body was removed by his friends, or by his enemies, or that he had faked his death on the cross and, once alone in the tomb raced out, married Mary Magdalene, moved to France, and started a family line that culminates in Dan Brown? Why make supernatural intervention your default position? And what is it like to live in a world where supernatural intervention is considered the simplest explanation of life’s mysteries?

To find out I decided to spend the next day with this hypothesis in mind.

As usual I could not find my car keys that morning, and, rather than blame my wife, my dog, or myself I assumed demons snatched them. When I did find the keys hidden beneath a magazine, I assumed that demons put the magazine on the keys and that God directed me to the move the magazine and discover the keys. I also assumed that demons made me subscribe to the magazine so they could use it to torture me at some future date. God, I assumed, preferred that I save trees and subscribe to the e-version of the magazine which is why He inspired Steve Jobs to invent the iPad, which the Lord wants me to buy despite the demons conspiring to keep me from affording one.

By the end of the day I was totally paranoid. Everything that happened to me was a conspiracy of God and demons. Chance and coincidence were banished, and everything was the result of a cosmic battle. This was not comforting, but I did get a sense that such thinking was a lot simpler than having to deal with the possibility of serendipity and randomness.

Will I share this insight with my listeners this morning as we proclaim the miracle of the empty tomb? It wouldn’t be polite or politic to do so, so perhaps I won’t. But who am I kidding? Of course I’m going to share it! That’s what they get inviting a rabbi to speak on Easter Sunday.

New Direction?

I am tiring of commenting on religion. It is getting too depressing. Just thinking about the new round of abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, the failure of a dad to sue the wicked Phelps "church," the rise of Christian militias, the madness of Israel politics and the Jewish taliban, etc. is just wrecking my spirit.

So I am thinking about dropping the essay format on this blog, and switching to Q & A. These would be shorter posts generated by you. Your questions and versions of my answers might then end up in print as part of my column for Spirituality & Health magazine.At last this way I would offer some positive help to people who might benefit from it.

Please let me know what you think about this idea.

Thanks,
Rami