Personal Manifesto

I've posted this before, but a couple of people requested I repost it so they can find it. I urge you all to write your own personal manifesto, and to update it as needed. Don't be afraid to change.

Rabbi Rami's Manifesto

* Everything is a manifestation of the one thing I call God. 

* God is not good; good and bad are human categories about which God cares not one bit. 

* Life is not controllable, but you can learn to navigate it, and do some good in the process. 

* Thoughts and feelings are not controllable directly by the will, but you can do what’s right regardless.

* Religion is a human invention designed to give us the illusion of control from which we can then create a sense of meaning and purpose without admitting we are creating it. In truth, we have no control, we invent what meaning there is, and purpose is only a story we tell to hide from the specter of randomness that haunts us. 

* Life has no purpose; life is purpose. 

* Sacred texts always reflect the bias of their authors and intended audience. Don’t be surprised that the Torah’s Jews are God’s Chosen; that the Gospels make Jesus the Christ; that the Bhagavad Gita sees Krishna as God; that the Qur’an holds Mohammad as the final Prophet; or that Harry Potter makes Harry rather than Hermione the hero.  

* Priests, rabbis, pastors, imams, swamis, lamas, and gurus sometimes have your best interest in mind, and always have their best interests at heart. Learn from them, but never turn your life over to them.

* At its best religion is about personal freedom, social justice, and compassion for all living things. At its worst it is about power and control. Religion is rarely at its best. 

* Human beings can be taught to see through propaganda—religious, political, commercial, etc.—overcome its divisiveness, create loving communities, and glimpse the truth through science, art, music, literature, and spiritual practice. What we lack are the teachers to do this.

* Spiritual practice cuts through self and selfishness, reduces conflict, and increases compassion. And that is the best we can do. 

Down with Downward Dog?

Even though many of us associate California with yoga, it turns out that the teaching of yoga to California elementary school kids as a way of calming their minds and improving their bodies may be in trouble. According to opponents of the program, yoga has broader spiritual aims, and therefore yoga classes in public schools violate the First Amendment. I hope they’re right. *

Yoga means “to link or to yoke.” In the context of Hinduism, and yoga makes no sense outside that context, the link is between Atman and Brahman, the soul and God, which, in Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, are in fact one. There are four yogas or four ways of realizing this unity. Hatha yoga isn’t one of them, though it can be used to enhance any of them. The four yogas are Karma Yoga (union with the divine through service), Bhakti Yoga (union with the divine through devotion), Raja Yoga (union with the divine through meditation), and Jnana Yoga (union with the divine through knowledge and study).

So the opponents of public school yoga programs have a point. Done well, yoga awakens us to our union with God. While opponents of yoga in public schools seem to know this, too many practitioners of yoga don’t, and have stripped yoga of its deepest spiritual roots and promise in the name of physical fitness. If this is what it takes to get yoga into public schools, it may be a cost too great to pay. Yoga is more than exercise, it is spiritual practice. So while I wish every elementary school student could begin a life-long yoga practice that would lead to Self-realization and divine union, I’m afraid that the elementary school itself may not be the place for it. Sad but Constitutionally true nonetheless.

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* Full disclosure: There was a time in the early eighties when I practiced hatha yoga daily for 90 minutes as part of my work as a Jnana yogi devoted to study (in my case primarily Torah study). I followed the Iyengar method, and got good enough to be able to kiss my own ass, a nice compliment to the other kind of ass kissing congregational rabbis are often called upon to perform. I haven’t done this in a long time (yoga, I mean, ass kissing is eternal), but I continue to practice Jnana yoga (studying the Torah/teachings of all wisdom traditions), and to a lesser extent Bhakti yoga through my daily chanting practice. And, as promised, these yogas do awaken you to God.

What Difference Do You Make?

I’m writing this on Christmas morning, shortly after sunrise. I’m on my way to Nassau and then on to Paradise Island and the Sivananda Ashram where I will be teaching for the week. As always I pick up a copy of USA Today.

The best article in the paper is about David Menasche, a forty-year old high school English teacher dying of brain cancer. David is travelling around the US visiting past students and asking them if he, David, made a difference in their lives. Wow.

My mind immediately ticked off a list of teachers, now deceased, who have made a difference in my life: Peter Santos and Michael Gelinas, the two high school social studies teachers who introduced me to Hinduism and Buddhism. Miss Marshal, my junior high school history teacher with whom I stayed friends until the end of her very long life. Dr. Terri Havens, my first guru, who introduced me the Mother and Her many guises. Dr. Taitetsu Unno, my Buddhist Studies professor at Smith College who taught me too sit “like a mountain.” Sasaki Roshi who challenged me to be a “Zen Rabbi.” And Dr. Ellis Rivkin and Bonia Shur, two professors at Hebrew Union College, who taught me how to read Judaism for its archetypal wisdom, and how make it come alive by letting that wisdom speak through me, respectively. Reb Zalman Schachter–Shalomi who showed me that as wide my thoughts roamed, Judaism could always accommodate me, and he would always love me.

Not a long list, granted. And there may be others whose names I have forgotten at the moment. But without these people I wouldn’t be who I am.

I have reached thousands of people both in person and through my books, and while I am not aware of any terminal illness, Mr. Menasche’s question remains: did I make a difference?

As we enter the new year, I find this a question worth asking. May you live the new year so that when you die you know you have made a difference. For the better, of course. 

Show Us the Way

I received many thoughtful emails regarding my post on speaking Christianity. One asked what a Jewish response to Newtown might be. There was, of course, one Jewish boy, six-year-old Noah Panzer (alav hashalom) murdered in that slaughter, and I don’t know what his rabbi said to his parents or to the community. I don’t plan to address that. Instead I want to respond from a broader base, one that might highlight a difference between Judaism and Christianity.

Christianity and Judaism share a common theme.

Centuries before King Herod’s efforts to find and murder the newborn King of the Jews, Pharaoh sought to do the same to Moses. Jewish tradition tells us that, like Herod, Pharaoh too was warned that a liberator was about to be born among the Hebrews, and his mass slaughter of all newborn Hebrew boys was an effort to kill this would-be savior.

Both Moses and Jesus survive to confront their respective versions of the domination system: the ruling plutocrats who control others through violence and intimidation, strip people of life, liberty, dignity, and property, and mask their evil in the name of good, claiming that God wills it, and worshipping Pharaohs and Caesars as divine.

But here our stories diverge: Jesus dies at the hands of evil. Moses does not. The victory of Jesus is his resurrection, not the overthrow of Rome. The resurrected Jesus leaves Rome intact. Jesus’ kingdom is no longer of this world, and Christianity turns toward the afterlife for justice and vindication. Any hope that the followers of Jesus would overthrow the domination system ends when they become the Holy Roman Empire, and find themselves perpetuating domination in the name of the very one who died opposing it.

Moses, on the other hand, led his people (Hebrews and the Gentile mixed multitude) out of the domination system into the wilderness and ultimately into Canaan where his God had commanded him to establish a new world order based on distributive justice and compassion for the poor and powerless. Of course as any ancient Canaanite or contemporary Palestinian will tell you, Moses’ people have yet to achieve God’s ideal, but at least they are called to try.

Where Christians are called to find hope in the midst of horror, Jews are called upon to be that hope. Where faith in the Christ Child is faith in a new world sometime in the future; trust in Moses is trust in our capacity to create that new world today.

So what is a Jewish message to the people of Newtown? First, grieve. In Judaism we have a powerful system of grieving. We begin with a week of intense mourning, followed by a month of testing our capacity to return to life even as the tug of the dead pulls at us. Then we have eleven months of slowly making peace with our new reality, never forgetting the dead but turning our attention back to the living, and life itself. And then, on the anniversary of the death, we memorialize our dead, and remember them for a blessing.

So I would say to the people of Newtown to first grieve without restraint. Shut the town down (figuratively if not literally) for a “week” (however they define this time). Then take the next eleven months to rethink what it is to be a town, to look at the evil embodied in our civic, corporate, media, and even religious lives. Look to where we are caught up in a domination system that demonizes the other and oppresses the powerless. Not statewide, not nationally, but locally. And work together to reinvent Newtown as a new town. To leave the world of Pharaohs and Herods, and the organizations that support them, and create something new: a new way to be a community based on distributive justice, compassion, and the dignity of every being.

And then to begin implement this dream as best they can, and in this way be a light unto the peoples of America.

The emails I am receiving urge me to trust God, and to have faith that God has a plan for Newtown. I don’t doubt this. I only suggest that the people of Newtown are the vehicle for God’s plan.

So I would say this: Don’t look to God to make this right. God is looking to you to make things right. Don’t wait for the NRA or Congress or the Connecticut state legislature to change, make the change yourselves. Take up your cross—the death of your children and their teachers—and leave the insanity of Herod and Pharaoh and the leaders of the domination system who masquerade as protectors of liberty, and transformation in your own town. Show us the way, because if you wait for us, you will wait forever.

A Good Time to Speak Christian

Religions are like languages: ways of speaking of and to the world. Just as no language is true or false, so no religion is true or false. And just as some languages are better at some things than others, so some religions are better at some things than others.

English, for example, is better at science than is Persian, while Persian is better at mystical poetry than is English. And Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism are better at exploring the many layers of consciousness than is Judaism, which is better at speaking to issues of justice. In the wake of the recent mass murders in Connecticut, the language we need is Christianity.

Christianity is best at dealing with heartbreak. True, some Christian dialects (denominations) do this better than others, but on the whole Christianity is the language for horrors such as this. This shouldn’t be surprising.

What religion is better equipped to speak to parents of a murdered child then Christianity whose Father suffers the same agony? What religion is better suited to speak to the profound brokenness of the world than one whose God is broken on the Cross? What religion is better prepared to deal with terrible heartbreak than one that makes of heartbreak the key to love?

Sitting on my desk at the moment is a stain glass rendition of Jesus, his chest cut, his heart exposed, and the light of divine love streaming out into the world. And off to my right is a Pieta with Mother Mary cradling her dead son. These two images speak to the totality of this tragedy: the death of a child and the weeping of a mother, and the healing power that comes when we cultivate true compassion—sharing (com) the suffering (passion) of all living things.

Speaking the language of Christianity no more makes me a Christian than speaking Cantonese makes me Chinese. But it does give me a way of navigating the horror of this world in a way that calls me to use my brokenness for the good. So as we all prepare for Christmas—as either participants or observers—I invite you to open yourself to the language of Christianity and see if you can find some healing wisdom in the birth of this baby—holy as all babies are holy—whose adult devotion to justice and compassion destines him to die on the cross of arrogance, cruelty, and evil.

To all of you who read this blog—Christian and otherwise—I wish you a blessed Christmas, and hope that the shallow merriment of the mall doesn’t rob you of the deeper meaning of this man and his message.

No Britches for Bitches

Today is “Wear Pants to Church Day” among Mormons. No, this isn’t a traditional holy day, it’s a new protest day invented by Latter Day Feminists among the Latter Day Saints. These radical Latter Day Saintanistas put up a Facebook page to get some traction for their protest, but the page was taken down after they received death threats. The LA Times quoted one of these: “every single person who is a minority activist should be shot… in the face… point blank… GET OVER YOURSELVES….”

Does this mean an activist who is from a minority group, or does this mean someone who is an activist for a minority group? Clearly some Mormons need more grammar. 

Anyway, I’m not surprised that Mormons can be this violent. Remember the Mountain Meadows massacre? That's when Mormon militias murdered everyone on a wagon train passing through Utah Territory on its way to California. It happened on September 11, 1857. Yes, September 11: a day fanatics seem to love when it comes to mass murder. Mormons can be murderous just like the rest of us, so, like the fellow said on Facebook, GET OVER YOURSELVES.

No, what surprised me was that Mormon women can’t where slacks to church. I had no idea. And there is a good reason why I had no idea that Mormon woman can’t wear pants to church, and that’s because there’s no law against Mormon woman wearing pants to church. They just don’t, but its not because they can’t.

So the feminist protest isn’t even breaking a law, just tweaking a habit. And yet even that was enough to set Mormon against Mormon.

This is what I love about religion: there is nothing too trivial to kill over.