A Different View on Gun Control

I flew back to Nashville from Aspen, CO this morning, and fell into a conversation with my seatmate about the current state of the US economy. “I’m the 1%” he told me. I’m not, I replied.

“Where do you stand on gun control?” he asked. I favor it.

“Me too, but you shouldn't be. Anyone among the 1% who isn’t in favor of gun control is a fool. The same with anyone in the 99% who favors it.” And why is that?

“Because this country is on its way to a civil war: the 1% versus the 99%. Right now the 1% runs the country and controls the military. The military is our jobs program for the poor. When the 99% rise up against us, we will use the army against them. What's happening in Syria will happen here. Some among the military will turn against us, but most will see that their future lies with serving us rather than killing us. If we allow the civilian poor to arm themselves it will make it that much harder to defeat them.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what to say. So he just went on.

“Capitalism is a culture of winner take all, and winners rig the system to keep winning. When the losers finally catch on that they can’t win, they'll take to the streets and bring their guns with them. Of course you can’t stop them from owning some guns, the Second Amendment and all that, but I would restrict them to the most primitive hunting weapons, and not let any military grade or military style hardware get into their hands.”

What about a revolution via the ballot box?

“Never gonna to happen. We own the media, the media tells people what to think. Liberal media, conservative media, MSNBC or FOX, it doesn’t matter. I’s just circus, just distraction. Media figures and politicians are all millionaires. The difference between them is an illusion designed to keep the 99% believing there is hope that one day they too can be rich. Never gonna happen.”

Your view sounds very dystopian. “Dystopian for you, utopian for me.”

As I sat thinking about what I had just heard, I couldn’t help noticing that this one percenter was stuck in the same cramped tin can I was. It gave me hope. But probably not enough.

Symbol of Hate?

I passed a pick-up truck on the highway yesterday that was covered in Confederate Battle Flags. A large sticker featuring one of these flags read, "It's not a symbol of hate; it's part of our history."

Does this make sense?

Imagine a German driving a car covered with Nazi swastikas coupled with the saying, "It's not a symbol of hate; it's part of our history." Does this make the symbol any less objectionable?

On the other hand, the Star of David is a symbol of oppression to millions of Palestinians. Can I excuse this with the notion that "It's not a symbol of hate; it's part of our history," or do I have to find another symbol that is somehow neutral? And is there such a symbol?

Please don't jump on the "moral equivalency" soap box.* That isn't my point. I am NOT equating Nazis and Israelis. I am asking the question when, if ever, is a symbol beyond the pale; when, if ever, do I let other peoples' reactions to my beloved symbols influence my use of those symbols?

*I know saying this won't stop some of you from going there anyway, but please try. 

B'nai Mitzvah Redux

According to a new Reform effort the key to stopping parents from quitting the synagogue once their kids become Bar and Bat Mitzvah (“Repositioning Bar Mitzvahs to End Drain.” Wednesday, September 4, 2013) is to get “the children to spend less time learning Hebrew and memorizing prayers, and more time working as a group on sustained ‘social action’ projects.” Seriously? If my goal is feeding people (the example offered in the article), wouldn’t the thousands of dollars I spend on synagogue membership be better spent actually feeding people? I’m sorry, but if you want liberal Jewish kids to stay Jewish you have to focus on the Jewish not the liberal.

Bar and Bat Mitzvah aged children are natural revolutionaries. If you want them to be Jewish you have to show them that Judaism is revolutionary. Teach them about Abraham shattering his father’s idols. Teach them how Abraham’s argument with God over Sodom was a battle of justice against power, and Abraham/justice won! Show them how living Jewishly is an ongoing struggle against idols and for justice.

Show them how keeping kosher—boldly redefined as lifting all their consuming to the highest ethical, moral, and environmental values they can muster, and then striving to go even higher—is a way to battle the consumerist culture and corporate class system that is destroying persons and planet. Show them (ala Levinas) how unplugging from the Internet on Shabbat and joining with family and friends to play and talk face to face is an act of radical resistance against the facelessness that defines American life and blinds us to the exploitation and demonization of the Other. Show them (ala Levi Strauss) how authentic Torah study teaches them how to deconstruct all texts (from newspapers to advertisements) to see what is really being said. Teach them that Jews question, doubt, and argue, and that these are our David–stones used to topple the corporate and statist Goliaths that turn all beings into commodities, and show them how to use Jewish tradition to free themselves and others from the narrows of Pharonic slavery and into the terrible desert of freedom, and toward the messianic redemption of a global promised land.

Giving our children less Judaism isn’t going to help their parents agree to pay for more dues. Parents will pay for those things that add value to their children’s lives and futures. If Judaism can’t do that, not only should parents leave, but all of us should get out as well.

Rosh HaShanah Queries

I received an emailed list of questions regarding the High Holy Days this morning. I share my answers with you here as an invitation to you to offer your own.

Why do so many Jews attend High Holy Day services when so few attend weekly Shabbat services?

Guilt. Most Jews do little that is overtly Jewish (keeping kosher, observing Shabbat, building a sukkah, etc.), and slogging through the High Holy Day services is a way of saying, “I’m still Jewish.”

Why do so many Jews—even those who attend High Holy Day services—find them boring and tedious?

Because they are are boring and tedious.

Would people find the services more compelling if they understood Hebrew?

No. Knowing what we are saying makes it even harder to say it. Most Jews—even many rabbis—don’t believe a word of what they’re saying.

Why are Jewish services so long?

Because we never found a good editor. Not only is our liturgy one prayer heaped upon another, we then repeat so many of them as if no one were paying attention in the first place. This has nothing to do with attention, of course, and everything to do with ancient Temple sacrificial practices, but the result is that confessing the same sins or singing the same praises over and over reduces both confession and praise to mere babble.

Would people find the High Holy Day more interesting if they understood its kabbalistic or mystical meanings?

Kabbalah depends on a mastery of Torah and Talmud that most Jews cannot even imagine. To skip Torah and Talmud and jump to Kabbalistic texts would require a dumbing down of Kabbalah to the point of inanity. Mysticism isn’t an alternative to the liturgy but an experience of the nonduality of God that is supposed to emerge from praying the liturgy. To pretend to the former when we have no facility with the latter is just silly.

What do you think is the real problem behind Jewish lack of interest in services?

Jews. We are among the most educated people on the planet. We helped create modernity—Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Buber, Einstein, Friedan, etc.—and yet when we walk into a synagogue we are asked to pretend that we are living in the 12^th century rather than the 21^st century. The real problem with synagogue services is that they speak to a world we have long since abandoned. As the service drones on we become robots programmed to rise and sit and read responsively and make a fetish out of Torah. We become a community of the living dead shrouded in tallit (prayer shawls), imitating dead ancestors, and wondering why we feel so dead ourselves.

If you could change three things about High Holy Day services what would they be?

1. The theology. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is dead, and adding Sarah, Rivkah, Leah and Rachel to his epitaph does nothing to bring him back to life. We need the God of Spinoza, Einstein, and Kaplan instead: God as reality, God as process, God as source and substance of all being and becoming, God as that power that makes for human happiness, justice, compassion, wisdom, and love, and not the Father King of our medieval ancestors.

2. The liturgy. We have to invent a liturgy that reflects what we do believe, rather than recite a liturgy in which we can’t believe. Someone should go through the High Holy Day liturgy and a) identify the key passages and phrases (Al Cheyt, Unetanah Tokef, Kol Nidrei, Shofarot, etc.) that are unique to Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur, b) recast them in a modern poetic form (both in Hebrew and, in my case, English) that reflects a modern, egalitarian, non­–xenophobic, and scientifically accurate understanding of life, and c) shape a contemplative liturgy around them that relies heavily on silence and great music (not responsive readings and camp songs).

3. The length. Even with a good 45 minutes devoted to Torah discussion (instead of sermonizing), the service shouldn’t last more than two hours.

Any last thoughts?

One: we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of the High Holy Days is, and then determine if that purpose is relevant to us, and, if it is, reinvent a High Holy Day experience that actually matters. Personally, I would offer a ten day Days of Awe intensive rooted in serious self-reflection, meditation, musar, forgiveness work, chanting, etc. that would actually promote teshuvah (returning to God), tikkun (engaging life with godliness), and tzedakah (opening our hearts and hands to the needy). I experimented with this when I was a congregational rabbi and I think it worked fairly well. Today I am retired, but that doesn’t stop me from offering advice to my colleagues: be bold!

Another Science & Religion Piece

In the August 19^th issue of The New Republic Steven Pinker wrote a masterful essay entitled “Science is Not Your Enemy.” The essay is a defense of science that often veers into an attack on religion.

Pinker writes that science is committed to two ideals: The first is that the world is intelligible…In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.” The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. Part of the difficulty is that we humans are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief-faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

Which leads us to religion. To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are mistaken… There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers…

I agree with Dr. Pinker, but is this really what religion is all about? To dismiss religion because of ancient ideas many religious people have long outgrown is like dismissing medicine because doctors once rejected the idea of germs. Why assume that only science grows? The history of religion suggests that it too challenges outmoded thinking and offers new theories in its place.

Religion is one way people make meaning out of reality. While it is true that many religions insist on a worldview that is demonstrably false, this doesn’t mean the meaning making is any less at the heart of what these religions are doing. Good religion, just like good science, works with facts as we know them. Bad religion like bad science ignores the facts when they are inconvenient.

Based on evidence I consider irrefutable, I am a firm believer in evolution. Contemplating the unfolding of species over 13.8 billion years is awe inspiring, but when I ask my science colleagues about the meaning of evolution most of them draw a blank. There is no meaning to evolution. As Steven Weinberg once wrote, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

But when I look at the universe through the lens of science I can’t help but make meaning out of what I see. I see evolution pushing toward minds capable of greater and greater levels of consciousness. Making meaning out of evolution is the work of religion.

Is meaning intrinsic to life? Yes, because we meaning makers are intrinsic to life. Humans are the way nature makes meaning no less than chickens are the way nature makes eggs (or is it the way eggs make chickens?).

Religion, no less than science, is a method. And religion, like science, also rests on two ideals. The first is that the world is meaningful, and we humans (at least on this planet at this time) are the means by which the universe makes meaning. The second ideal is that religion, no less than science, is hard. Religion at its best isn’t a matter of blind faith, but of careful investigation and introspection.

Religion’s method is contemplative inquiry, difficult practices that take years to master, and which allow us to study reality in such a way as to make meaning out of it. Often meaning is best articulated through myth, metaphor, poetry, art, and music. These should not be taken literally, and when they are good religion goes bad, and making meaning devolves into imposing belief.

Steven Pinker is correct: science is not the enemy, but neither is religion. Contra Jay Gould’s “nonoverlapping magesteria,” at their best science and religion are two overlapping human endeavors. Religion needs science to keep it from clinging to old maps that no longer accurately represent the facts on the ground. Science needs religion to avoid falling over the precipice of nihilism. Religion and science are not in opposition. On the contrary, they are partners in the human quest for truth, meaning, and purpose.

How do you understand the relationship between science and religion?

Pointless?

After talking with a rabbi friend of mine earlier today about the relationship between religion and science, I read this quote from Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

Certainly not all scientists are this nihilistic, nor does the fact that science cannot answer questions about morality and meaning (the lack of which is, I assume, why the universe seems pointless) prove there is no morality or meaning. It just “proves” that if you are looking for morality and meaning don’t use the tools of science, at least not the sciences Steven Weinberg uses to comprehend the universe.

My rabbi friend wants to make religion the antidote of pointlessness, but that may not help since religion yields a variety of moral and meaning systems without any way to objectively judge which is actually true.

Maybe the problem lies with Weinberg’s assumption. Let’s assume that life prior to the evolution of humans is intrinsically amoral and meaningless. Let’s further assume that humans are the way nature makes morality and meaning, and that religion and philosophy are the ways we do this. Since humans are part of nature, and since humans produce a variety of moralities and meanings it is wrong to say that nature is amoral or meaningless, and more accurate to say that nature is multi-moral and multi-meaning.

This, of course, leads us to relativism where no morality is better than any other, and no meaning is any more true than any other. And that can lead us back to nihilism. So maybe the only way we can assume a universal morality and meaning is to assume a force outside of nature that imposes such. Which leaves us pretty much were we are today: competing morality/meaning systems each claiming to be the one true standard of the one true God.

Your thoughts?