I Have Failed, Part Three

This rant was to have only two parts, but private emails I received in response to them necessitated a Part Three.

I received very polite and thoughtful email from several people who described themselves as Interfaith Ministers. They wrote to tell me that I didn’t understand what was happening in the Interfaith world, and that if I did, I would be hopeful.

So I asked what was happening, and learned that some people are taking the best of the world’s religions and using these pieces in new ways to create meaningful ceremonies for people who can no longer fit into any one faith. As one email had it, “I take the best teachings of the Torah, the Gospels, and the Koran and offer a beautiful vision of God, humanity, and the world, one that transcends Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and has no need to label people as Jews, Christians, Muslims, or anything else. We are just human.”

Amen to that. But why is that Interfaith? That is a new faith; there is nothing “inter” about it.

Inter-faith implies that each established religion comes to table as it is—shadow and all. There is no need for any religion to disclaim its theology, or to pretend that other religions are as valid as itself. There is no need to create a new worship format, only a need to provide space for all worship formats. You can’t even say that each faith adds its piece to the puzzle, because each faith imagines that its piece is the whole puzzle. The point is, I guess, that there is no judging among or between religions in an authentic Inter-faith gathering.

If we reduce the great religions of the world to warehouses from which we can extract the teachings, texts, and techniques we like, and leave the rest, are we disrespecting these religions? And if we are, let’s be honest about it, and bold about it, and loud about it. Let’s say the old ways are dead, or worse—deadly. Is it time to harvest the wisdom they contain and leave the rest behind? And when we do will we find a universal faith rooted in compassion, justice, and the Golden Rule?

And even if we do, this isn’t Inter-faith but new faith. And if it is the latter how does it deal with the shadow side of humanity? If we only take the light from religion, the dark within ourselves will swallow us just as it did them.

I don’t have any clear answers here. I suspect, and it is only a suspicion, that the future of human religiosity and spiritual maturation does not lie with the established religions we have inherited from the Iron Age.

Where, then, does it lie? Where all religion lies: in us and our quest for meaning, purpose, and transformative love of and for all life.

What we need are practices that open body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit to the reality within and around us in a way that allows us to work with our shadow side and cultivate love; practices that allow us to realize the singular reality of which we are apart; practices that awaken our love for self and other in a way that allows us to harness our shadow side in service to justice and compassion for all beings. These we can extrapolate from the world’s religions.

What we need are revolutions of understanding that revision the teachings of the world’s religions for a post-tribal globalist civilization in such a way as to use the ancient icons to open us to levels of compassion and justice unimagined in the Iron Age.

What we need is a revival of mythic consciousness, poetic consciousness, and mystical consciousness that allows us to read the old in light of the new rather than darken the new with the shadow of the old.

What we need are new ways to gather that doesn’t brand us, or pit one brand against the others. What we need are ways of celebrating life and love in all its forms without artificially limiting that love according to tribal fears and xenophobia.

What we need are prophets: people like Bede Griffiths, Martin Buber, Sri Aurobindo, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, and Ramakrishna (help me identify the great women!).

What we need is a rediscovery of the Divine Feminine, the Divine Mother as the source from which we come and the field in which we grow and play and have our being (to paraphrase St. Paul).

What we need is a revival of pilgrimage, of seekers walking the globe and visiting holy centers of love and learning regardless of the label foisted upon them.

What we need is an explosion of holy rascals like Thomas Jefferson who dare to separate the “diamonds” of wisdom from the “dunghill” of ignorance, arrogance, violence, greed, hatred, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, racism, Anti-Semitism, etc. that surrounds and obscures the truths found in all sacred scriptures.

What we need is rebellion against insanity and absurdity, and a revolution for justice and compassion.

What we need are havens for rebels and revolutionaries; places where they can go to set out of rhetoric into silence, out of doing into being, out of visioning into dreaming, and in this way to make sure their passion is fuelled by compassion, and their daring is given over to dance, and their pleading to play so that the fires that burn within them don’t consume them or the world they hope to love.

If all this is happening in the Interfaith community—more power to you! 

I Have Failed, Part Two

I split this blog post into two sections so as to not lose the import of the second part. In “I Have Failed, Part One” I bemoaned the fact that try as I did to get my students to think critically about the Bible and the God it offers, they still held to their belief that God can do no evil, and all apparent evil done by God and in God’s name is just that, apparent evil, and in fact, when we learn the truth, isn’t evil at all.

I ended that essay with my fear that the world my students will create will be no different than the one they inherit: a world filled with competing gods, each outdoing the other in promoting ignorance, greed, violence, and xenophobia. If this is true, and I clearly think it is, I have to suggest another failure: the failure of my efforts to change any of this.

I have been doing so-called Interfaith work for decades, but to what end?

The Interfaith movement seems to do nothing to challenge the beliefs of people. Its leaders, usually the most liberal members of any given faith, seem content to run panels where clergy of different faiths can expound their truths and sit politely and silently while their competition does the same. There is rarely any attempt to get beyond this PC pabulum. All we ask of one another is that we each do our best to tone down the evil in our respective scriptures, or, failing that, do what we can to minimize the faithful acting it out, or, failing that, attend an Interfaith service to mourn the dead who have died because our gods demanded their deaths.

What I want is something very different. I want us to realize that religions are human constructs, acts of the imagination tapping archetypal forms that speak to the human condition in ways that, when approached wisely, allow us to work with our shadow, to harness that dark energy in service to goodness, justice, and compassion. I want us to see religion as mytho-poetic fingers pointing to something we cannot fully grasp, let alone own.

I don’t want us to deny God, only to free ourselves from idols.

I don’t want to put an end to religion or religious diversity, but I do want to put an end to the arrogance, ignorance, and fear that so many religious institutions and leaders perpetuate in order to rouse the faithful to demonize “the other.”

I don’t want to dismantle efforts to find common ground among religions in the pursuit of compassion and justice, I want to raise compassion and justice up as the universal standard toward which all religions must strive, and by which each religion is measured.

I don’t want to dismiss the truth claims of this or that faith, but I do wish to define truth as that which liberates us to be ever more compassionate and just, and to dismiss as damnable lies anything that doesn’t.

But I don’t see this happening. If anything, Interfaith efforts turn a blind eye to religious evil and the dark gods who condone and command it by insisting that this god isn’t real. But he is real, and far more real than the liberal gods of most Interfaith institutions. A god is a real as his or her capacity to motivate the actions of her or his followers. A god that can blow up a bus is far more real than a god who can only weep over the dead. The god that demands the oppression of women, homosexuals, and myriads of other people labeled as “other” is alive and well and powerful enough to turn the hearts of otherwise decent people to stone.

Honestly, I have no idea where I belong anymore. Perhaps I should identify with the NONES. Or perhaps my real camp is the camp of the DONES. 

I Have Failed, Part One

I’m grading papers this week. One assignment in my Bible class was to rewrite the end of the Book of Job beginning with the premise that God actually tells Job the truth about Job’s suffering: that it was the result of a wager God made with the Devil to see how much punishment and horror Job could endure before losing faith in God.  In the Bible, God never fesses up to Job about this bet.

Some students were wary of rewriting the Bible, but I was pleased that everyone gave it a shot. What troubles me is this: even after admitting the truth that God is responsible for the murder of Job’s children and servants, the theft of his livestock, and the torture of Job himself just to see what would happen (even though an all-knowing God would presumably know in advance what would happen), most of my students refused to blame God at all.

Some did allow Job to get angry with God, but very few allowed Job’s anger to take hold of them personally. Almost to a person, they found a way of excusing God’s behavior, and making it morally sound, ethically right, and even instructional for Job and those of us who read his story.

It seems that there is no horror God can command or commit that will shake the faith of true believers. This may not be shocking, but it should be sobering: as long as we excuse and commend God’s evil we will most likely collude in the commission of that evil.

What I wanted was for some, at least a few, to say this, “If this is God, then I will rebel against him.” I don’t want to deny this God, I want to rebel against Him. While there is much one can say about Job that is positive, he isn’t a rebel. But the reason he isn’t a rebel is that he is never told the truth. I wanted my students to tell Job the truth and make him a rebel and perhaps to rebel themselves. But this didn’t happen.

After months of analyzing the Bible, placing it in its historical context, and wrestling with its often-contradictory teachings, to have the vast majority of students blithely excuse the shadow side of God and defend the evil that comes from it, I cannot escape the notion that I have failed my students, and failed them miserably. And I despair of the world they will create, a world filled with evil done in the name of the God they call Love.

Free Library

I spent the last three days with my friend and teacher, Andrew Harvey, at Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville. He was our guest speaker for Wisdom House's annual Mystic Heart Retreat. (Next April we are hosting Matthew Fox).

One of the things Andrew asked us to do is discover what we were most passionate about and then engage with that passion for the good of the planet. I have two passions: books and dogs. I chose to begin with books.

Tomorrow morning I will be opening a free library on my front lawn. This is a small book house where neighbors can share with one another books they love. When I was a congregational rabbi my community created People of the Books, an organization that worked with kindergarten and first grade teachers in some of Miami's poorer schools to buy new books for their students to own and read. For some kids these were the first books they ever owned. Eventually People of the Books expanded in a larger literacy program, but I always loved the idea of placing books in the hands of little kids. So now I am doing it again, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The "library" will hold a dozen books or so, and I hope little kids and their parents will drop by and take the books and add books of their own. If you would like to learn more about this project check out the website: www.littlefreelibrary.org/.

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan's 13 Wants

I found this on-line and wanted to share it with you. I wrote my MA thesis on the work of Rabbi Kaplan, and learned from him privately in Jerusalem in 1976. I had not seen this text before. It only enhances my appreciation of this great sage.

THE THIRTEEN WANTS

A prayer composed by Mordecai Kaplan in 1926 for the dedication of the new headquarters of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ).

1. We want Judaism to help us overcome temptation, doubt and discouragement.

2. We want Judaism to imbue us with a sense of responsibility for the righteous use of the blessings wherewith God endows us.

3. We want the Jew so to be trusted that his yea will be taken as yea, and his nay as nay.

4. We want to learn how to utilize our leisure to best advantage, physically, intellectually, and spiritually.

5. We want the Jewish home to live up to its traditional standards of virtue and piety.

6. We want the Jewish upbringing of our children to further their moral and spiritual growth, and to enable them to accept with joy their heritage as Jews.

7. We want the synagogue to enable us to worship God in sincerity and in truth.

8. We want our religious traditions to be interpreted in terms of understandable experience and to be made relevant to our present-day needs.

9. We want to participate in the upbuilding of Eretz Yisrael as a means to the renaissance of the Jewish spirit.

10.           We want Judaism to find rich, manifold and ever new expression in philosophy, letters and the arts.

11.           We want all forms of Jewish organization to make for spiritual purpose and ethical endeavor.

12.           We want the unity of Israel throughout the world to be fostered through mutual help in time of need, and through cooperation in the furtherance of Judaism at all time.

13.           We want Judaism to function as a potent influence for justice, freedom and peace in the life of men and nations.

Tablet Wars

Posting the Ten Commandments in government buildings may soon become legal in Tennessee, and I for one am all for it. After all this is a central Jewish document, and if Tennessee wants to honor my people and our faith, well bless their little hearts.

What I don’t understand is why Christians would want the Ten Commandments posted. The text never mentions Christ and actually commands things that Christians have long since abandoned.

The Commandments open with a verse that makes it clear God is speaking to Jews, since we are the ones God brought out of Egypt.  The commandment against making and bowing down before graven images makes the image of Jesus problematic. Proclaiming the seventh day (Saturday) as the Sabbath makes Sunday sabbath worship inappropriate, and if we really banned all work in the Sabbath what would people do after church: restaurants would be closed, shopping would be impossible, and sporting events would be banned. We’d actually have to sit around and talk to one another! God forbid. And even honoring one’s parents is tough when so many of us are convinced that Medicare and Social Security are satanic. Of course there are the commandments against murder, adultery, theft, bearing false witness, and coveting, but I doubt anyone is in favor of only posting the last five Commandments.

I’m not saying that Christians didn’t and don’t have a right to ignore or change the Ten Commandments and worship as they choose—they do. I’m only asking why they would want to have such a clearly Jewish document posted on government buildings?

If I were a Christian and I believed that the United States was a Christian Nation, I would want to post the Beatitudes rather than the Ten Commandments on our government buildings. You know: blessed are the poor, the grieving, the powerless, the hungry, the kind, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the unjustly persecuted. In fact even as a Jew who doesn’t believe the United States is a Christian Nation I would rather see the Beatitudes than the Ten Commandments on our government buildings. Talk about an agenda for national policy! Jesus rocks. And the fact that he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey rather than an elephant only makes me feel closer to him.

But maybe that’s the problem: Jesus is too liberal. It’s one thing to be commanded not to swear falsely in court, it’s another to imagine that we are to care for “the least of these” as Jesus called the 99 percent of his day. I wonder if passion for the Commandments isn’t a way of avoiding Jesus’ compassion for the poor?

Just asking. Please weigh in.