Rapture Reflux

Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there?

I just came back from a walk and I didn’t see a single soul. We’re you Raptured? Are you in Heaven?

It seems so empty in my neighborhood. So quiet. Even the cicadas seem to have been taken up to heaven.

SHEMA YISRAEL ADONAI…. Anyone? Anyone? There must be some Jews out there. Where are we going to eat? All the Chinese restaurants in my town are run by Chinese Christians and they went to heaven.

ALLAH HU…. Anyone? Anyone? Falafel and humus sound good just about now. There must be some Muslims around. Lucky them: all the people that hated them were raptured to heaven so now they can build their mosque. But they better build fast: in five months—fire! The whole earth burned to ash. Man when God cleans up after Himself He doesn’t fool around.

Well, I have no idea who’s left on the planet. There are lots of dogs barking, so I guess that book about dogs going to heaven was a lie. I bet the author is still around somewhere. He’s going to burn for sure.

Is there something we can do about this? I mean the good are gone and the rest of us are doomed. What if we convert? Jesus save me!...........

Nope. I’m still here. I guess he knows I can’t make myself believe what I was taught was make believe. So it’s my parents fault. HEY! My parents! They weren’t raptured. I think I’ll call them and see what is going on over there. I bet they have restaurants that are open—I mean they live in a Jewish ghetto. I never should have left home. I had no idea that God was going to take all my neighbors. I was certain that Catholics and Episcopalians would be left behind, but I can’t find a Papist or a Tory anywhere.

This is so sad. God, I’m sorry I killed Your Son. And I’m sorry I didn’t believe in Him. And I’m sorry I stayed Jewish when You wanted me to be Baptist. Can’t You forgive me? Hello? God?

WHOA! Outside my window! Cars are driving by. And there’s somebody walking her dog. Thank God, thank God, it wasn’t the Rapture after all. I just woke up early and no one was out and about yet. But now—they’re all here!

I knew it was a lie! Take that Jesus! Take that God of Love! We’re all left behind and maybe we’ll leave you behind too. How would you like that? Huh? Wouldya? Huh? Of course You may have taken a couple of people to heaven and that would count as the Rapture and that would mean that we will all die in five months. So I take all that back, God. We can be cool, right? I mean burning billions of people and animals alive that sounds harsh even for You. Maybe we should talk. You need help.

Rapture Ready? Tomorrow's the Big Day

Well this is it, the end times. Tomorrow is the Rapture when God calls all faithful Christians to heaven leaving the rest of us to await the destruction of the world by fire on October 21st. I knew it was coming, and even blogged about it a few weeks ago, but now it’s here, and, honestly, it has me rattled.

I’ll be teaching a workshop on loving kindness at a church this Saturday, and I expect many of the participants to be taken to heaven sometime during my presentation. Those who are left won’t be in much of a mood to be loving or kind, so we’ll probably end early. I’ll look for an ice cream store run by unsaved folks and hence still open, and order a hot fudge sundae. No point in dieting when there are only five months left.

Anyway, I don’t know if you are on the Rapture Train or not, and if you are I wish you well. But if you’re not, what will you do?

Seriously. What will you do? Is there any reason to go to work? Don’t worry about your rent or mortgage or any other bills. You can stall for five months and then its all over anyway, so why work? If you don’t have to pay your bills, you’ll have plenty of cash to use for food, so you won’t starve before you burn.

OK, so you won’t work. How will you spend your time? What would you do differently if you knew—as you can know if you want to know*—that the world is ending in five months? Would you leave your spouse? Move to another town? Admit that you’re gay or Kenyan or on the No-Fly list? How sad to think that you will just keep doing what your doing until you spontaneously combust on Friday, October 21st.

I know what I would like to do. I won’t tell you because I’m not going to do it on the off chance that the world will still be here on October 22nd Yes my fear of change is that great. But how about you? Are you as cowardly as me?

If you knew you had but five months to live, five healthy and financially sound months by the way, how would you live them?

*For more info on the end of the world, visit http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/outreach/tracts/may21/

Future of Inter-Faith

A very articulate essay* by Rabbi Michael Balinsky, a trustee of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, raises what is for me a troubling issue.

An Orthodox Jew, Rabbi Balinsky isn’t comfortable praying with people of other faiths. He was relieved to discover that the Parliament, out of respect for the different religions of which it is comprised, doesn’t do group prayer. From what I can tell, each religion is encouraged to stay in its own box, collaborating with the others only on those issues of common concern: climate, poverty, etc.

While I respect this, for me it just isn’t enough. When I sit with people of different faiths I don’t want to talk about what we have in common, I want to talk about where we differ. I want to learn another’s way of seeing the world, and learn it so deeply that it may transform the way I see the world as well.

Religions are lens through which their respective followers view reality. Each lens has its distortion that makes its view of reality unique and less than accurate. For me, inter-faith work is about discovering our distortions and seeking to correct them. One way to do this is to share lenses, and in so doing realize that all lenses distort, and that no lens is right, and in this way cultivate a deep humility that allows us to honor differing lenses without the illusion that any one of them reveals the truth.

It is this humility that allows me to pray in any religious tradition. To me the point isn’t the words or the world-view, but the experience of slipping into the greater whole of which I am a part.

I suspect I am leaving religion behind. I cannot stay within my box. I am finding myself less and less comfortable in the Jewish world and the inter-faith world. I love religion the way I love literature and music, but I refuse to be limited to one author, composer or genre. Humans create religion, art, literature, music, science, etc. I am human—it is all my heritage. Why is it so lonely in a place that should be so welcoming?

The first weekend of February 2012 I am hosting SAStalks at Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville. (SAS stands for Spirit, Art, and Science.) We are inviting 18 speakers to speak for 18 minutes each on the topic of “The Future of Inter-faith.” I hope to hear ideas that show me the way, because right now I am despairing there is one.

• http://www.parliamentofreligions.org/news/index.php/2011/05/do-we-have-to-pray-together/?utm_source=Parliament+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f72d956125-Newsletter_15&utm_medium=email

Surrounded by Books

I live surrounded by books. This is true physically and metaphorically. I am what I have read. In fact I have a book addiction: I am convinced that the next book I read will at last answer all my questions, so I buy lots of books. It never works, of course, so I buy lots more. I am forever skimming magazines for ads regarding new books, and then rush to my computer to order just those that will answer all my questions.

I know it doesn’t work, but I do it anyway. It is a compulsion. I am an addict. True, given all the other addictions one might have, an addiction to books is not so bad. It would even be better if I actually read the books I buy. The truth is, however, that after reading just a few pages I realize that I have read this book before—not this actual book by this particular author, but the same ideas. In a sense I keep buying the same books over and over and over again. The joys of addiction.

Everyone once in a while I pretend I’m going to change. I sift through all my books and cull the best, and donate the rest to the library at Middle Tennessee State University. That way I still have access to them if I need them without having to stare at them day in and day out.

It’s getting to be another of these “once in a while” moments.

There are only ten books that I really need: The Book by Alan Watts, The First and Last Freedom by J. Krishnamurti, I & Thou by Martin Buber, Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu, The Inner Chapters by Chuang Tzu, and the biblical books of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and John. Together these form the library from which I invent my philosophy of life.

I am tempted to donate all but these ten to the library, but I doubt I’ll ever do so.

First, because I love other books by these authors, and like having them around. Second, because there are other authors I value highly and prefer to not live without: Spinoza, Kafka, Nachman of Breslov, Edmund Jabes, Hermann Hesse, Rumi, Bankei, Blake, Marshal McLuhan, Erich Fromm, and William James.

No, the first step toward literary sobriety isn’t getting rid of more books, but stop buying new ones. I should just reread the 21 authors listed here, and maybe I will.

It’s just that a bunch of new magazines came in yesterday, and there are so many interesting books being advertised, and I am certain that one of them will answer all my questions. So I will get to the books on my shelves just as soon as I add a few more to them.

Oh to be in America

Last night I participated in a panel discussion on “the religious other.” The panel was held at a Nashville Presbyterian church, so the “other” consisted of three Jews and two Muslims. Chance Dillon, my intern at Wisdom House, moderated. He did (in case he is reading this) a marvelous job.

Two things of interest happened during the event. The first was the realization that the same year one of the Jewish panelist’s sister was making aliyah (moving to Israel) to live freely as a Jew (1958), the father of the Palestinian American panelist was flying to the United States from Palestine (by which she meant Israel) because he could no longer live freely as a Muslim.

This was a moment ripe for deeper discussion, but it passed almost unnoticed. I am working with Chance to bring the two of them together over lunch to explore this further.

The second thing of note was a question a Christian man asked me after the event about the hijab worn by the Muslim woman. He wanted to know why she has to flaunt her Islam, and why she just doesn’t dress American. Her dress makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be American, and maybe wants Americans to be Muslims. The idea of a Muslim American just didn’t make sense.

I suggested he ask her, but he was intimidated. I said that it was an affirmation of her religion, and that to be American is to honor the differences this man wanted to erase. He disagreed. I pointed to my yarmulke and asked why this doesn’t bother him when the hijab does. He said it did bother him, but it was harder to notice. We both made mention of the fact that the Imam was dressed in a blue business suit.

I was wearing all black (as I usually do) either in imitation of my rebbe or in honor of Johnnie Cash. I’m never quite sure which.

What troubled me was my inability to make a convincing case that Americans are not monolithic. We think, eat, speak, act, dress, pray, and play in many different ways. He could see only one: Republican, pork, drawl, haughty, golfer, Protestant, and… well, I couldn’t tell what his game of choice was so perhaps he was a free-thinker after all.

Anyway, just asking the question about the hijab is a huge step in the right direction. For many Americans listening to a Muslim, let alone talking with one, is a novel and potentially life-changing event. I applaud meetings like this and urge all of you to sponsor them in your own houses of worship. And, in case you are wondering, the next one with this group will take place in the Imam’s mosque.

Invisible Women--Modesty at Its Most Divine

Everyone knows that religious men prefer their women modest. For some Muslims this means burying their women beneath burkahs allowing only a slit or mesh veil through which they are allowed to see and be seen. Pretty severe, but we Jews do them one better: we erase them altogether.

At least that is what Der Tzitung and Der Voch, two Orthodox Jewish publications, did when they erased Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and counter terrorism adviser Audrey Tomason from the iconic White House photo showing the nation’s leaders in the Situation Room during the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. According to Der Tzitung, printing photographs of women is contrary to Jewish laws of modesty. While Muslim men prefer not to see real women, Jews worry about seeing virtual women. Which leads to a wonderful business opportunity: Orthodox porn.

If I can get the backing, I plan to publish maideleh (Yiddish for young woman), a glossy magazine featuring naked Jewish women. Not being allowed to publish photos of said women, however, means I wouldn't have to hire either models or photographers. And the more women I featured, the more blank pages I could publish, keeping printing costs to a bare minimum (pun intended). Jewish guys would just have to imagine the naked women I’m not actually photographing or printing. Hey these are God's laws, not mine.

Maideleh will be the perfect porn mag for married Jewish men. When "the wife" sees them looking at it, they can say with confidence, "Don’t worry, I only read it for the articles."

Reading, Writing, and Body Counts: New Rules on Campus

Two Republican state senators are trying to pass a bill making it legal for students, faculty, and staff to carry guns on college campuses in Tennessee. The governor and Senate Speaker, also Republicans, are opposed to it. So too is the president of Middle Tennessee State University where I and my family work.

I for one like the bill. I think everyone on campus should be armed.

As a Jew, I would carry an Israeli made Uzi on campus as a sign of my Jewish affiliation. I would urge others to carry other ethnically associated weapons. Germans should carry Lugers, Brits Walther PPK’s. I would also keep a nine millimeter handgun in a holster on my hip, and another in the waistband of my jeans in the small of back.

I would of course be well trained in the use of these weapons, but I would have no hesitancy regarding their use: anyone who threatened my safety would be fair game. Unfortunately I am easily frightened. Knowing that everyone on campus may be carrying a gun, and knowing that I cannot know in advance who will suddenly snap and start shooting, I would feel justified in drawing and perhaps even firing my weapon whenever anyone abruptly put a hand into pocket or purse. True they might simply be reaching for a pen, but I cannot be sure, and must strike first to protect myself.

There are over 2500 faculty and staff on my campus, and around 27,000 students. As of 2006 1% of Americans were in jail at any given time. I think this means that 300 people on campus are potential criminals. But that doesn’t count all those criminals who avoid capture and plead out. So, without bothering with actual facts, let’s assume that 10% are potential killers. That is 3000 people out to kill me. Would you walk unarmed into a crowd of 3000 people bent on your destruction?

Of course not, but as a professor, I have no choice. Everyday I step onto the campus seething with thousands of would be killers I am risking my life. I have a right to protect myself. And because I can’t be sure which of the people I pass on campus are among the 3000 murderers enrolled or employed by MTSU, I am within my rights to shoot anyone who scares me.

I would, of course, grant the same rights to everyone else, so I expect to hear lots of gunfire during the day once this bill becomes law. I would of course have no choice but to return fire in the general direction of the shoots I hear, and that will make things all the more interesting.

You may or may not agree with me. I don’t care. This law will be passed eventually. And when it is, I for one am going to buy lots of stock in companies that make bullets.

God and Human Bondage

As we gear up to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War the issue of slavery is once again a hot topic in my neighborhood. Was the Confederacy all about slavery or was it all about state’s rights? It was about both: the slave holding states were concerned that they would lose their rights to own slaves.

This is not simply my opinion. As a loyal, albeit transplanted southerner, I take as my touchstone the immortal words of Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, who, in a March 21, 1861 speech in Savanna, GA contrasted North and South and said the following:

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth… [Those who oppose slavery are] attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal. In the conflict thus far, success has been on our side, complete throughout the length and breadth of the Confederate States. It is upon this, as I have stated, our social fabric is firmly planted; and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world.”

Not only was slavery the cornerstone of the Confederacy, the hope was that it would spread throughout the world as a hallmark of civilized and enlightened society. Who are we to disagree with Vice President Stephens? How dare we dismiss or twist his words to suit modern liberal sensibilities? Even pretending that we succeeded from the North for any reason other than slavery is to give to the North the moral high ground. We had to lie to our brave soldiers and tell them they were defending their homeland against Yankee aggression, for if we told them the truth, if we admitted that we were sending them to be slaughtered to protect the rights of the wealthy few to own slaves as a means of maintaining their wealth and power, they would not have gone bravely to their deaths. We had to lie to our soldiers; but let us not lie to ourselves.

As we commemorate, and in some circles celebrate, the formation of the Confederate States of America, let us not whitewash the principle for which so many hundreds of thousands of brave and loyal Southerners died. Let us not take the cowardly route and hide behind the notion that this was a war over states rights, but let us make it clear that the right we demanded was the right to enslave and own Negroes.

You may or may not agree with God’s great truth of white superiority and His great principle of slavery upon which the Confederacy was founded, but do not defame our heritage by pretending that we went to war for anything less than God and human bondage.

The Empty Tomb

Today is Easter Sunday, and I am going to preach at a local church. My plan is to share my new understanding of Good Friday with them (see the previous post, “A New View of Good Friday”) and then reinterpret Easter in light of it.

Good Friday, in my new reading, is the day God dies for His sins—the sin of creating a world filled with unnecessary suffering and where evil is perpetrated in His Name. God dies so that we cannot kill in His Name anymore.

On Easter we find the tomb of God empty. To me the tomb is for Christians what the Holy of Holies is for Jews, and the Ka’aba is for Muslims: an empty space speaking to the ineffability of God. In the Abrahamic religions God cannot be imaged, so of course their sacred space should be empty of images.

If God dies for His sins, the sins He commits by sanctioning evil in His Name, the only way He can express this is to step beyond Names and Naming—to become something that humans cannot use or manipulate to their own ends: the Tao that cannot be named.

The problem with Christianity is that Christians just can’t do away with images. So Jesus appears after the Resurrection. And even when he ascends to Heaven He promises to return—and this time as anything but the Prince of Peace. The Second Coming, the ultimate reinstitution of the Image of God is going to be the ultimate slaughter of those who worship a different Image of God. The Second Coming undoes Good Friday and makes a mockery of Easter Sunday. With the theology of the Second Coming God learns a harsh lesson: people want to slaughter one another, and if God Himself won’t condone it anymore, they will invent a new God who will.

The hate-filled blood spattered Jesus of Revelation is the hope of those who cannot follow God and atone for their sins. The God of Good Friday is sorry. The God of Easter Sunday is free. The God of the Second Coming is psycho.

So, if you buy my new reading of Good Friday and kill the Gods of hate at whose altars we humans have worshipped for millennia, and if you buy my new reading of Easter where the tomb is empty as a sign that we are free of Gods made in our own image and designed to sanction our own madness, what shall you do with this day?

My suggestion is simple: look deeply into your self, your family, your community, your nation, your faith, and free yourself of any image that sanctions evil, even and especially if it does so in the Name of God. If you wish to believe in God, fine, but believe in the God who is empty.

Easter is a holy day of hope, but let our hope not be in some coming horror. If we are to affirm hope, let us affirm hope in freedom, love, justice, and humility. Let us say, “The Lord is Risen and so is our Heart: risen beyond fear and hatred, beyond heaven and hell, beyond vindictive ideologies masquerading as Truth.” Anything less is just more of the same.

A New View of Good Friday

Today is Good Friday, the anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus. For Jews this was a time fraught with danger. As Christians poured into their churches to hear how the Jews murdered their God, they often poured out of their churches to murder Jews. This is less likely to happen today, though I had a fascinating conversation with a Catholic priest the other day who suggested the times they are a changin’.

It seems the Church is changing the phrase “Christ died for all” to “Christ died for many.” In other words He died only for those who believe in Him, everyone else is damned. The Jews being the consummate outsiders are not included in Christ’s salvific act of sacrifice, and this may, my friend said, lead to renewed anti-Semitism.

While I don’t expect my Catholic neighbors to engage in pogroms anytime soon, he does raise an interesting point: for whom did Christ die?

I don’t believe in substitutionary atonement: no one can pay for another’s sin. I believe in the Gospel According to Pottery Barn: you break it; you buy it. So let me suggest a radically new understanding of Good Friday: God didn’t die for our sins, God died for God’s sins.

God finally realized that He was responsible for the sins of the world. It was His rejection of Cain that led to the killing of Abel. It was He who murdered almost all life in the Flood. It was He who sanctioned genocide after genocide, and called for the slaughter of hundreds of millions of animals. After centuries of this madness, He was, as the Hebrew prophets revealed, sick of it. He just wanted people to be good to one another. But what could He do to make amends and get this message across?

God chose to become one of us to teach us the new Way: the way of love. No temples, no priests, no rabbis, just people loving one another. And then, to make amends for all the killing He had caused, He allowed Himself to be killed as well.

God died for His sins, not ours. And having died for His sins, God can no longer be used as an excuse for our sins. God changed when He died at the Cross. Unfortunately we did not. We kept to the old ways, the ways of worshipping gods who commend and command what would otherwise be thought of as evil. We made of God’s atoning cross a sword with which to continue the bloodstained madness of the now dead god.

So Good Friday must be reinterpreted. Good Friday is the day that God died for His sins that you and I might stop killing in His Name. Good Friday should be the day we stop fostering hate and hurt and murderous acts in His Name. It should be, but I doubt it will be.

I am a Kosher Pescatarian

I am a kosher pescatarian: I don’t eat animals and do eat those fish permitted by Jewish law. I say this for three reasons. First: I feel guilty about eating fish, and admitting it makes me feel less so; second, I feel self-righteous about not eating meat, and proclaiming it makes me feel more so; and third, to introduce my response to a newly proposed Dutch law requiring that all animals killed in Dutch slaughterhouses be stunned into unconsciousness before slaughtering. Jewish and Muslim law do not allow stunning, so this law will outlaw kosher and halal slaughtering in the Netherlands.

The bill is supported by right wing anti-immigrant parties who want to make the Netherlands inhospitable to Muslims (Jews are collateral damage) in coalition with animal rights activists who would like to end the slaughter altogether, but are happy for any measure they believe will alleviate animal suffering.

Kosher and halal slaughtering also seeks to minimize animal suffering, so why can’t secular and religious authorities work together to achieve a common goal? If stunning actually alleviates suffering, why not make it part of kosher and halal slaughtering? Why do we Jews expend untold amounts of energy and ingenuity to get around Sabbath laws we find annoying, and none at all when it comes to killing our fellow sentient beings? I suggest we have lost our moral compass, and have made a fetish of Iron Age technology.

This is the danger of all religions that look to the past not only for guidance (which is often helpful) but also for authority (which is often unhelpful and even wicked). When we allow ancient mores and technologies to trump those of our own time (unless it inconveniences us, in which case they are suddenly deemed irrelevant), we have trapped ourselves in a religion that may survive but cannot thrive.

I welcome the challenge to kosher and halal slaughtering. I urge rabbis and imams to find more compassionate ways to kill our fellow creatures, and challenge them to take the next step and proclaim the eating of meat contrary to the wills of Yah and Allah. Just don’t outlaw fish anytime soon; I’m having tuna for dinner.

Tonight is the first night of Pesach, Passover. Jews around the world will gather to retell our founding story: how we were unjustly enslaved in Egypt and how God liberated us after crushing the Egyptians with unbelievable horrors. I just can’t get behind this story.

First of all we Jews were not innocent victims of the Egyptians. Read the closing chapters of Genesis to discover that Joseph and Pharaoh used the seven years of famine to strip the Egyptian people of everything they had: their land, their dignity, their freedoms. Only three groups thrived during this period: Pharaoh, his Priests, and the Hebrew people. I am not proud of this, nor can I herald Joseph as my hero.

So tonight before we get drunk on our innocence, let us atone for our guilt—for our having collaborated with Pharaoh at the expense of the Egyptian people—by seeing where we may be collaborating with evil today, and ending that collaboration during the week of Pesach.

Skip to the plagues. This was a war between YHVH and the Gods of Egypt. Each of the ten plagues is the defeat of an Egyptian God: from Hapi, God of the Nile; to Ra, God of the Sun; to Pharaoh, God on Earth. I love stories of Gods at War, but the collateral damage to the Egyptian people is untenable. The ancient rabbis knew this. That’s why they tell the story of God opposing the Hebrews’ celebration of the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, and why they commanded us to diminish our cups of wine that we not drink to the suffering of others.

Our liberation cost the Egyptian people dearly. Let that sober us up, and more importantly let it shift our attention to others, such as the Palestinians, who continue to pay a heavy price for our freedom.

For me the real heroes of Pesach are the women. Passover is a women’s revolution against the madness of Pharaohs and Gods: the midwives Shifrah and Puah refuse to murder the Hebrew baby boys, Moses’ mother Yocheved saves her son from the soldiers sent to kill him, Pharaoh’s daughter defies her father and raises Moses as her own son in his own house, Moses sister Miriam brings Yocheved to nurse him establishing a silent conspiracy of Moses’ two mommies against the all-powerful Pharaoh, and Moses’ wife Zipporah saves her husband from a God gone mad who seeks to murder her husband even as he makes his way to Egypt to save the Hebrew people. Had any one of these women failed, the story would end in tragedy rather than triumph.

Let tonight be more than a celebration of an ancient liberation from evil. Let it be a time to admit to and liberate ourselves from our own collaboration with evil; a time to admit to and end the suffering we cause others; a time to challenge the power of gods— religious, economic, political— and to celebrate the power of the few to do justly regardless of the odds.

Chag sameach Pesach.

Is God Necessary for Morality?

Is God necessary for morality? The question came up in class the other day. It is a perennial question, though one that is essentially beside the point. Whether you believe God decides what is right and wrong, or you believe that people do so, you still have to choose a moral system. It isn’t as if God or people offer just one.

If you say God decides what is right and wrong you have to decide which god is God before you can follow the moral system of that God. Most people follow the gods of their parents, but is this really a sound enough basis on which to determine one’s morality?

If you take another track and look for the common moral themes among religions you might come up with a generic list of values that all gods seem to support, but no religion agrees as to how to apply these values, so you are again forced to choose. For example all religions support modesty regarding women, yet for some Jews this means married women should wear wigs, while for some Muslims it means women should cover both head and face. Who’s right? And what do we make of women who refuse to do either? Are they immodest?

I think the best we humans can do vis a vis morality is to follow the advice of Rabbi Hillel. Without any reference to God, he simply defined the entirety of Torah as not doing to others what you do not want others to do to you. If you don’t want to be judged, don’t judge. If you don’t want to be killed, don’t kill. If you don’t want others to burn your holy book or outlaw your religion, don’t do the same to others. If you don’t want someone to discriminate against you because of your race, color, creed, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, politics, etc., then don’t engage in discrimination on these grounds yourself.

Honestly, I can’t think of a better moral guide than this.

Judaism's Mission Statement

[I was asked recently to articulate why Judaism matters. Here is my reply:]

Now HaShem said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. [As a consequence of your going] I will make of you a people vital to life, and I will bless you, and spread your reputation [as a people devoted to justice and compassion], so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse [those who follow the way of justice and compassion will be blessed with justice and compassion, those who do not will be cursed with injustice and cruelty]; and through you all the earth’s families [human and otherwise] shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3, my rendering)

This is the mission statement of the Jewish people. The Hebrew translated here as “Go” is lech lecha, and literally means to walk to your self, implying both an external and an internal journey. To take this journey we are challenged to leave behind nationalism, tribalism, and family baggage. Judaism is not about conforming to the past, but about living God's command in the present. It isn't about fitting in, but about moving on.

Where we are to go, the “land” mentioned here, is not revealed. While some insist it is Israel, I suggest it is something more (which is not the same as saying it is something else): a state of mind. In either case, this is a journey based on radical trust. We will be shown our destination only when we arrive at it.

Our importance as a people depends on our taking this journey into the unknown. We are called to be the boundary–crossers (this may be the original meaning of Habiru/Hebrew); we are the ones who "boldly go where no one has gone before." But the purpose of the journey is not to become great, but to become a vehicle through which all of the earth’s families will be blessed. Our goal isn't to conquer or convert, but to bless and bring blessings to the entire world, every family of every species. We do this by embodying compassion: engaging the world justly, lovingly, and humbly (Micah 6:8).

When asked to articulate the entirety of Torah while standing on one foot Rabbi Hillel said, “What is hateful to you do not do to another. This is the whole of the Torah; all the rest is commentary. Now go and study it.” (Tractate Shabbat 32a).

I take Hillel literally. The entire Torah, the entirety of Judaism, is a guide to compassion when we read and live it as such. If your reading of Torah and/or your living of Judaism does not make you more just, loving, and humble then you are misreading Torah and not living Judaism.

This is why I am a Jew: At its best Judaism challenges me to drop the known and step into the unknown; to be a blessing and a vehicle for blessing so that all life benefits from my life; and to embody a specific level of consciousness that embraces the world with justice, love, and humility. True, Judaism is often not at its best, but I can find enough examples past and present to keep me loyal to the mission.

Kahn-ing the System

Safoorah Kahn is suing the Berkeley, Ill school board for religious discrimination. The Obama Justice Department is siding with her. Wrong call.

In August of 2008, after working as a math teacher for only none months, Ms. Kahn requested three weeks leave in December to go on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca each Muslim is to make at least once in her life, health and finances permitting. Ms. Kahn understood her religion to mandate going as soon as one can afford, a position that no religious authority supports. She petitioned for the time off, and the school board said no. Ms. Kahn then quit her job, went on the Hajj, and upon her return sued the school board for religious discrimination.

This is bullshit. I teach, and December is crunch time. Getting a substitute teacher to cover for Ms. Kahn would have been disruptive to the students. It ruins continuity, and if she was building toward some goal at the end of the semester, her leaving would have made achieving it next to impossible.

I can understand that people want to scam the system, and how religion—any religion—can be useful when doing so. What I don’t understand is why the Justice Department is supporting Ms. Kahn against the School Board. This isn’t religious discrimination. Ms. Kahn could have saved her hajj money, and worked out a agreement with her school so that she could go on the hajj in a year or two. This would have been respectful of her religion, her job, and her students.

It is wrong for someone to take a job, and then dodge the requirements of that job and seek to avoid the consequences by hiding behind bogus claims of religious discrimination. If an observant Jew takes a job that requires working on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath), and doesn’t tell her employer before she is hired that she cannot work Saturdays, she has no right to take Saturdays off or to complain about religious discrimination. If your religion makes doing your job impossible, go find a different job.

In Buddhism there is the obligation of Right Livelihood. Buddhists are prohibited from doing jobs that cause suffering. I’m not saying that all Buddhists follow their religion, but those that do shouldn’t take jobs that violate it. We should use this as a principle for all peoples: don’t take a job you can’t or won’t do because of your religious convictions. If pharmacists can’t give birth control pills, or doctors can’t perform abortions to save the life of a mother—go teach math. I hear there is a job opening in Berkeley, Ill.

Who We Are

I watched President Obama commit us to endless war last night, and it made me sick. Speaking of the obligation of America to intervene in Libya Mr. Obama said, “To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and, more profoundly, our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are.”

Is he kidding? A betrayal of who we are? We betray who we are so often that I suspect it isn’t really who we are. We lied our way into the Mexican War, we lied our way into Vietnam, we lied our way into Iraq, we stand idly by while our allies in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain go after their protestors, we turned a blind eye to to Rwanda genocide, we refuse to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, and are turning a blind eye right now to the Ivory Coast.

We are not the knight in shining armor riding to the rescue of oppressed peoples around the globe. We are a military/financial empire that pursues its interests and gets into bed with anyone who will give us what we want, regardless of what they do to their own people.

I’m not saying we are wrong to intervene in Libya. I don’t know. I suspect it will end badly because it almost always ends badly. But let’s not pretend we are doing this as part of some obligation to humanity. The hypocrisy in this speech was so overwhelming that I was shocked the President got through the speech with a straight face.

The Bush Doctrine said that we could attack anyone we decided was threatening us. The Obama Doctrine says we can attack anyone we decide threatening their own people. That just about covers the entire globe. We can now go to war with anyone we want, anywhere we want, anytime we want. We are now on a permanent and global war footing.

This is not what I voted for when I voted for President Obama in 2008. If I wanted permanent war I would have voted for Senator McCain. It seems that it no longer matters which party wins: the wars just go on forever.

God's Plan

“I’m a firm believer in God’s plan.” The woman standing by my booth in City Café is repeating this sentence like a mantra. She is talking to my waitress, and relating a medical condition that is bringing her much pain and suffering. Every two or three sentences she pauses and recites, “I’m a firm believer in God’s plan.”

It is easy to challenge this mantra. It is easy to say that this woman’s obsessive repetition of the phrase suggests a desperate wish to believe. But as my waitress affirms the truth of her belief, she relaxes a bit, and just weeps.

Does God have a plan for her life? This depends on how you define “God.” For this woman God is a being larger and more powerful than humans but not so different from them. God has thoughts and feelings; God has a plan, and it is always for the good. Even when it hurts.

For me, God is reality. Does reality have a plan? Not the way this woman thinks. For me God’s plan is simply to be God: to manifest all possibility, and, I believe, to manifest beings with the capability of knowing reality as God. In other words, God is the process of Self-expression and God-realization.

I am a believer no less than the woman in the restaurant. But my belief would not provide the comfort that this woman seeks. So when my waitress turns to me and asks, “What do you think, Rabbi? Does God have a plan for her life?” I replied, “Of course, and I’m glad you (speaking directly to the woman) are aware of this.”

“But what is His plan,” the waitress asks. “What does God want of her?”

“The same thing God want’s of all of us: to love one another, to come to each other’s aid, to allow our suffering to crack our hearts wide open so that the more we suffer the more we love; the more we hurt the less hurt we cause; the more we trust God the less we judge one another. I can’t tell you why God has taken your life in this direction, but I can assure you that God has only one goal in mind: to make you a greater vehicle for love.”

The women stared at me for a moment, then the suffering woman cried, hugged the waitress, mouthed a silent “thank you” to me, and left the café. Did I believe what I said? Does it matter?

What do you believe? What would you have said?

Jewish Apathy? Who Cares?

Haaretz.com has an interesting article entitled “Why liberal Judaism is in free fall” (www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/jerusalem-babylon-why-liberal-judaism-is-in-free-fall-1.344102)

The gist of the essay is that apathy is killing liberal Judaism. Maybe, but why? Most rabbis I talk with seem to think it is a cosmetic problem: more Hebrew, more hand-clapping and singing, a newer version of the siddur (prayer book), and the next thing you know Liberal Jews are as enthusiastic as the Satmar Hasidim. I doubt it.

Liberal Jews are like voters in an off year election: most of them don’t turn out (and by “them” I mean “us” and by “us” I mean me). The problem is that for liberal Jews it is always an off year election. Give them a reason to show up, however, and they might.

But maybe there is no reason. Maybe there is nothing (short of pogroms in their neighborhoods) that will bring liberal Jews to shul. If, as is true of most liberal Jews, you don’t believe that the Jews are God’s Chosen obligated to the 613 Commandments and central to the salvation of the planet and her peoples, it is hard to drag your butt to shul on Saturday to wade through hundreds of pages of mostly meaningless and often repetitive liturgy.

And yet Judaism and Jewish culture are hardly moribund. I attended a fabulous Havdallah service in St. Louis featuring the Hasidic-jazz fusion of my friend Rabbi James Goodman; the Jewish music scene in New York and LA is thriving; Jewish art, literature, and poetry are alive and well. Maybe it is just corporate religion that is on life-support.

Maybe we need to create events rather than communities. Maybe communities cannot be artificially erected and funded through dues. Maybe the old model of “If you build it (the synagogue) they will come (and pay off the mortgage) no longer works. Maybe Judaism has to happen differently. Maybe. I'm only asking questions here. And I know I'll hear from some shul-lovers who say everything is fine. Maybe it is.

I’d love to hear examples of where Judaism is working for you. Please share them in the comments section.

Happy Purim

There are many intriguing aspects to Purim, the Jewish holy day celebrating the salvation of the Jews of Persia through the daring of Queen Esther. First there is the fact that intermarriage is central to the story: if Jewish Esther had not married the Gentile King the Jews would have died. Second, there is the fact that God plays no role in the story: it is Esther who saves her people, not God. Third, there is the tradition of allowing cross-dressing and the skewing of rabbis as part of the holy day fun. Fourth there is the custom of giving gifts and tzedakah (charity). And fifth there is the tradition of getting so drunk on Purim that you can no longer tell the difference between Mordecai and Haman, i.e. Good and Evil. Couple these with the fact that the entire story is fictional and based on the Babylonian Gods Ishtar (Esther) and Marduk (Mordecai) you have a deeply compelling tale of existential spirituality.

Unfortunately too many Jews think of Purim, which falls on March 19-20 this year, as a kids’ holy day—sans the alcohol. In the interest of full disclosure, I have never gotten drunk. I don’t even like Rum Raisin ice cream, so getting beyond good and evil with the help of alcohol falls outside my experience. And yet…

The relationship of good and evil is central to much of my thinking. I believe in both, and see each as a necessary corollary of the other. Just as you cannot have front without back, so you cannot have good without evil. They go together. Good and evil are part of the binary dynamic of the phenomenal world, the world that you and I experience moment to moment. So what might it mean to go beyond these?

That would be a wonderful discussion for adults to have during Purim. Raising the level of our holy days in this way would capture the imagination and intellect of adult Jews and help bring about a revival of Judaism. Using Purim each year to discuss the state of moral discourse and to explore ever more deeply the nature of good and evil would help return Judaism to relevancy in the lives of many Jews for whom it is largely inconsequential.

So whatever else you do this Purim, make some time to talk with friends about good and evil. And for those Jews seeking to blur the divide between Mordecai and Haman, remember: Jews don’t let Jews drive drunk.

Unchain Their Hearts

Today is the Fast of Esther, commemorating Queen Esther’s call to her fellow Jews to fast on her behalf as she prepares to risk her life to save theirs. It is also International Chained Woman Day referring to those Jewish women (agunot) who are chained to husbands who either refuse to give them a divorce or who are missing (in battle or otherwise) but cannot be proven dead, and who are therefore married to the missing for the rest of their lives. (Women have no right to divorce in Judaism but do have the right to refuse a divorce their husbands may desire, so that men, too, can be chained.)

Many Orthodox rabbis work with women’s groups to find a way out of this nonsense, but estimates put the number of chained of women in the thousands.

Does this sound right to you? Does it make any sense to maintain a Bronze Age marriage bond that enslaves spouses to one another? Isn’t this just the kind of madness with which people who worry about Sharia are concerned?

Here in Tennessee I have spoken with many Jews who are worried about Sharia (Islamic law), and unconcerned about halacha (Jewish law). Why? Either because they believe halacha comes from God, or they have abandoned halachic observance, and choose to live their lives as modern rather than Bronze Age Jews.

Why do modern men and women voluntarily bind themselves to halacha and Sharia? The answer is that they believe this is what God wants of them. But this only begs the question: why believe in a god who demands this of you?

The answer to the craziness of religious laws isn’t legalized oppression of religious expression, but free men and women walking away from such craziness. As long as we in the United States maintain a country that protects both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, we don’t have to worry about either halacha or Sharia forcing us to live in ways most of us find repugnant. But this requires a knowledge of and support for the First Amendment that more and more Americans seem to be abandoning. The danger isn’t Muslim or Jewish orthodoxies, or even Christian fundamentalists who find freedom of religion a stumbling block to their version of a God fearing America. The danger is that we liberals will be out-maneuvered and lose the very rights that make the United States the exceptional experiment it is.