Grosse Pointe Jewish Council High Holidays, 2023/5784
Erev Rosh Hashanah – “Are You Saved?”
You answer the front door to a pair of nicely dressed middle-aged women who ask, “Are you saved?” And with a smile you answer, “Thank you for asking, but I’m Jewish, so I really don’t need what you’re selling.”
Jews don’t use that expression. We don’t ask if one’s soul is saved. But just because we don’t talk about “personal salvation”, it doesn’t mean that it’s not something that we ought to address. But first we should ask: How does Judaism define “salvation”? And then: Does in fact our history and heritage promise some kind of “personal salvation”? And if it does, what is it and what do we have to do to get it?
Judaism, early on, recognized and struggled with the notion that we live between the infinite above and the finite below. Hebrew Scripture clearly distinguishes between the realms of the heavens and the earth. The heavens are the domain of God: infinite, of unlimited perfection. The earth is the world of limitation and imperfection, chaotic and finite. We see this especially in the poetry of Psalm 115 The heavens are God’s heavens, but the earth God has given to בני אדם the children of humanity [v.16]. And it’s from that earth, the humus, that we humans were quite literally formed! In the second Creation story in Genesis chapter 2 we’re told: then YHVH God formed the man out of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. [2:7]
We are a unique union of upper and lower opposites: from the “dust of the earth”, our physical, finite existence is filled with God’s “breath of life”. Frail and finite yet life-breathed with the “in-dwelling presence” of God, a presence that the rabbis called Shechinah. We are animated with an awareness that prompts us to transcend the boundaries of finite, existing reality. Accepting “what is”, we nevertheless yearn for “what could be, might be, should be.” It is that awareness that distinguishes us from every other living thing.
This awareness, God’s gift to humanity, is however also the source of our persistent anxiety: we are limited beings with unlimited horizons. Every other creature instinctively and existentially shrinks its world down to a manageable, controllable size and does not wonder or think about what’s beyond it. Only we are pressed to see beyond the immediacy of our senses. Aware of what could be, we desire what might be, even what should be. And there’s the rub, we almost always fall short! We reach for what’s beyond our grasp. And unless we can give real and substantive meaning to our finite reality with its infinite desires, we become frustrated, less than fully satisfied with life. And because this is a natural, universal human condition, religions develop their own responses to this dilemma, each its own solution that escapes the circumstance of our finite condition—thus its own promise of “salvation”!
Though each faith-system defines its own response, all affirm some kind of “salvation”, namely an ultimate satisfying and successful completion of a purposeful life. And so, behind that knock-on-your-door pointed question “Are you saved?”, is their proposition that correct faith, with proper prayer, of the right religion-- rescues one from this finite life being “all there is”.
For those women, standing at your door, the One-True-God is the active agent sanctioning your salvation, and you need to “open yourself” to the One-True-God who is anxiously waiting to transform your life. Who, in abundant and unconditional grace, is looking for the opportunity to rescue you from the limitations of your fallible life and ultimate death. This One-True-God promises that on the other side of finite reality, exists an infinite salvation. God will “save you” with eternal life in Heaven from what is otherwise a deadly earthly end. That understanding of “salvation” may define some religious systems, but not Judaism!
Salvation for us (though we don’t use that term) is not a rescue from the finite, rather it is a transformation of the finite into a meaningful existence that transcends our mortality. You will not hear rabbis (at least not progressive rabbis) speak of salvation as God’s graciously promised rescue of your person or soul. What “salvation” does mean for us is properly described in the Exodus narrative of the splitting of the sea: “Fear not! Stand still! And see the salvation of YHVH” [Exodus14:13]. In our Passover Seder we read, “With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm God saved us from bondage in Egypt.” “Salvation”, at least biblically, is the rescue of our people, first from Egypt, and later from the Assyrians and the Babylonians. If for other communities, Salvation is directed to one’s personal soul, Jewish, Biblical ‘salvation’ describes national deliverance from an immediate threat.
I said before that every faith-system struggles with, and then promises, a salvific success in spite of one’s finite life As Jews, what then do we call that aspiration? If the word “salvation” doesn’t work for us because of its particular parochial religious coloring, there should be a different word, a more appropriate word—and for me there is. My choice is the Greek word soterios though it is often translated as “one’s personal state of salvation”. But more generically it merely means “one’s sense of ultimate personal wellbeing”.
If religion’s primary goal is to help its members achieve a state of “ultimate personal well-being”, what is it that impedes that achievement? Clearly it is the conflict of my mortal frailty and finity, with my innate desire to be infinite. Each of us, though bounded and limited, yearn to be unbounded and unlimited. Rationally I know that I have finite qualities and abilities: I will never be as athletic, smart, good-looking or good-hearted as I would like to be. And I will never again run or be as energetic as I was in my youth. I will never read every book I’d like to, travel everywhere I’m drawn to, or know everything I need to! Rationally I know all this. I learned all that as I’ve matured. But still, knowing this truth, I’m still left wanting.
Simply acknowledging my finitude does not remove my subconscious and emotional needs, nor does it make my finite existence any easier to accept. Indeed, the reality of our finitude is painful. It forces us to deal with the fact that what I really want in this world I may never get-- and then I die! And the way in which we deal with the reality of human finitude becomes the basis of one’s chosen religion.
Traditional Judaism, Post-Biblical Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, affirms that eventually, some day, in the Messianic “World to Come”, our resurrected bodies will enjoy endless serenity—the infinite reward for observing the mitzvote. But if that’s not your personal expectation (and it’s not mine), then what can I hope for? Soterios, “ultimate personal wellbeing” without the hope of bodily resurrection in the next world, must mean that we focus on our life in this world, hoping to achieve soterios in the here and now.
Look, we handle relatively well the incidental limitations of our finite nature, the aging of our bodies and minds, becoming slower in step, having lapses of memory. But when it comes to the crushing limitations of failed dreams, serious illness, and of course death, we are existentially challenged. How does Progressive Judaism then promise soterios, a state of ultimate personal well-being without the expectation of a messianic resurrection?! I begin by coming to grips with the fact that my body, my life is finite, subject to accident, pain and suffering. It means that we must sincerely realize and fully accept the ultimate reality that health and living may only be ours for a moment.
It means we must reconcile the possibility that even though ‘Life is not fair’, we may still live satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding lives. That sincere intellectual and emotional realization becomes one’s ultimately satisfying soterios. It’s being able to say “I’m OK”, and truly, sincerely, genuinely mean it! And that is our Jewish “salvation”. Our tradition reminds us that it is what we do in this life, day by day, that is its own reward. If we have grasped each moment, making the most of it despite the frailty of my finitude; if we can honestly proclaim that Life does not have to be infinite in order to be worthwhile-- then we have begun to achieve something of a salvific soterios, ultimate personal well-being.
And this understanding, my this-world understanding of soterios as ‘ultimate well-being’, is different from the door-knockers’ ‘Salvation’ in another way. In ours, we are fully and completely our own active agents! It is my responsibility to find in life a satisfying and fulfilling sense of ultimate, personal wellbeing. Of course we are aware that the reality of living means that there will be death. I am aware that in the end— it will be the end.
Most of us, I believe, accept our finitude, most of us reluctantly admit that there are absolute, finite limits to personhood—we just have to become really, fully, intellectually and emotionally OK with that. And as a Jew, I affirm that beyond my limited life, I am already connected to the past and the future, connected in an unbroken chain of tradition that ties us together. My actions, if I make them clear and strong, do echo beyond the limits of my life, do touch other lives that touch more lives. I am connected in a matrix that reaches worldwide and through time, a matrix that stretches from what was, into what will be, connecting my finite, limited being with the infinite existence of my history and my people.
In confronting and ultimately accepting my finite nature there is neither paradox nor tension, there is only an awareness that I’m connected to a transcendent reality that is as much a part of me as I am of it. Soterios, ultimate existential well-being, is knowing that despite my finitude, I have already touched the infinite.
Rosh Hashanah – “Are You Blessed?”
Last April Rabbi Harold Kushner died, 88 years old. He was a Conservative rabbi, serving a Massachusetts congregation, but is best known for his 1981 internationally best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He wrote it after their first child, Aaron, died from progeria, a premature aging disease. He was 14 years old when he died of old age. His book, which ought to be in every home, and re-read every couple of years, deals with the question of human suffering and God’s omnipotence.
Rabbi Kushner grew up, as did you and I, hearing that because God is good, God will bless the lives of good people. We read just that in this morning’s Torah portion when God promised Abraham: “By myself have I sworn that because you have done this thing. . . that in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven”. (Genesis 22:16)
And then on Yom Kippur morning we will read in Torah: For I command you this day to love God, to keep the commandments, laws and teachings of your God that . . . your God may bless you. (Deuteronomy 30: 15-18)
With their son Aaron’s illness and death, Harold Kushner and his wife did not feel blessed. His struggle to believe in a good God, an all-powerful God who blesses the righteous, became the impetus for his remarkable little book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. My message this morning, honoring his memory, recalls not only that first book, but also his last-- The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person.
This morning our Torah reading began “And God tested Abraham . . .” God also tested Job in a book at the other end of our Bible. Both tests threatened the lives of their children, though here in Genesis Abraham’s will live. Kushner begins his treatise on Job by saying that we are by nature “meaning-makers”, that is, we are constantly trying to understand our world in terms of cause and effect. We “desperately want to believe that the world makes sense, that it is a place where things don’t just happen— that they happen for a reason, for a purpose.” But if the world is unpredictable, if this is really a “world of randomness then” he wrote, “we become uncomfortable.” [p. 4]
And so, when bad things do happen to Job, his visitors, his friends, question his goodness, because after all, our world is orderly and predictable and fair, and people get what they deserve. Job’s friends, and in fact so many of us, want desperately to find meaning in suffering. Because if bad things happen to good people just because they do, what does that then say about an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God?
The Biblical Book of Job is a treatise on whether the misfortunes that fall on ostensibly good people, come to them from the hand of God. After all, if we believe that ours is a moral world of justice and fairness, God-directed and God-controlled, then suffering must serve a moral purpose. So Job’s visitors ask him, again and again, ‘we thought you were blessed, so how have you sinned’?
Kushner’s book, his commentary on Job is less than 200 pages, but it’s long on detailing the structure, contents and context of the book. He says that the story was originally a very old, and very short Fable, to which was later added a much longer Poem. The Fable is found in chapters 1, 2 and the last chapter 42. The Fable is a simple tale of faith rewarded. God’s accuser challenges God saying ‘You know that it’s only because people are blessed that they worship and revere You’. So Job, the test case, is stripped of everything he has and loves, but is in the end rewarded because he remains faithful to God. The added, much longer Poem of 39 chapters, inserted between the bookends of the original Fable, is the story of Job’s visitors. His friends challenge Job that surely, somehow his fate is the effect of some cause.
Job’s first visitor affirms that punishment is a message from the Righteous God, a lesson to be learned. Job concedes the point, and asks that God, or anyone, make some sense of his punishment, just tell him what he’s done wrong to deserve this misery. Because if he is sinless and is suffering for no reason—that would shake his faith in God’s moral rule over the world.
Visitors two and three rehash much the same argument. They invoke the traditional belief that God knows us better than we know ourselves, that God punishes us only when there is a reason to punish. They tell Job that if he would stop insisting on his innocence and throw himself on the mercy of God, then God would likely forgive him and all will be well. Job at first argues with his visitors, but then stops and turns his attention and anger to God:
Withdraw Your hand from me, that Your terror not frighten me. Then summon me, and I will answer. Or let me speak, and You reply to me. How many are my iniquities and my sins? Advise me of my transgressions and my sins. Why do you hide Your face, and treat me like your enemy? [Job 13: 21-26]
But Job’s anger is shouting into the wind. He gets no response from God, and falls into depression, wishing for his life as it was.
Job again took up his discourse and said: “If only I could return to the days when God was my guardian; when His lamp shone over my head, and by His light I walked through darkness—to the days when I was in my prime, when God protected me, when God hadn’t yet deserted me . . . When I went out to the gate of the city, and took my seat in the square, when young men held their breath, and the aged rose up and stood. [Job 29: 1-5,7-8]
From despair and depression, and drained of any hope, alone in his misery, all Job has is his integrity and innocence which he continues to declare though no one seems to hear.
“If I have walked with falsehood, and my foot has hurried to deceit—let me be weighed in a just balance, and God will know my integrity! If my step has turned aside from the way, and my heart has followed my eyes, and if any spot has clung to my hands; then let me sow and let what grows for me be rooted out. If I have withheld anything that the poor desired, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail, or have eaten my morsel alone, though the orphan has not eaten; if I have seen anyone perish for lack of clothing, or a poor person without covering; if I have raised my hand against the orphan because I saw I had supporters at the gate, then let my shoulder blade fall from my shoulder, and let my arm be broken from its socket. If I have rejoiced because my wealth was great, or because my hand had gotten much; if I have rejoiced at the ruin of those who hated me, or exulted when evil overtook them; if I have concealed my transgressions as others do, by hiding my iniquity in my bosom; if my land has cried out against me, if I have eaten its yield without payment, and caused the death of its owners, then let thorns grow instead of wheat, and foul weeds instead of barley.” And chapter 31 then concludes: Thus ended the words of Job. [edited from Job 31]
Job is done. He is exhausted, spent and alone, when then, and only then, from out of the whirlwind God finally speaks to Job.
Who is this that darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge? Gird your loins like a man, I will question you, and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Do you know who fixed its dimensions? Who shut in the sea with doors and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’? Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know any of this. [edited Job 38]
Job then quietly replies to God: I know that You can do anything, that nothing You propose is impossible for You. . . Indeed, I spoke without understanding of things beyond me, which I did not know. Hear now, let me speak; I will ask and You will inform me.
עַל־כֵּ֭ן אֶמְאַ֣ס וְנִחַ֑מְתִּי “Therefore I recant and relent” (which is the traditional translation) עַל־עָפָ֥ר וָאֵֽפֶר “being but dust and ashes” [Job 42: 1-6]
This is a surprise! After 41 chapters, after all that he’s been through, his consistent insistence on his integrity and innocence-- this is his declaration? Has he given up? Is it a confession and concession? Is Job throwing up his hands saying “Ok God, do whatever You’re going to do! I give up, I’m nothing and you are everything!” And then, just then when Job seems to give up and concede defeat, what happens?! God delivers a swift and unexpected happily-ever-after ending, restoring all of Job’s property, fortune and family.
But wait, Rabbi Kushner writes. Remember that it’s the Fable of the Accuser challenging God in chapters 1 and 2 that concludes here in chapter 42 with God suddenly restoring everything to Job. But a later has hand added 39 chapters, which must have been meant to become the focus of the book. Kushner thinks that Job’s final declaration should be read as the conclusion to the Poem and, Kushner suggests, it has been traditionally mistranslated. He writes that understanding the word nachamti as “I relent” is wrong. The text says emas v’nachamti, but it’s not “I recant and relent”, but rather “I recant and am comforted being only dust and ashes.” Kushner reads Job as saying “Now I understand. I recant my accusations against the unfairness of your actions because now I understand and I am comforted in knowing that being only “dust and ashes” I did not, could not, have not brought these afflictions on myself. And a good God would not have done it to me.
Kushner writes that Job in effect said: “It was not my cause that brought your effect. I wanted to believe that the world makes sense, that it is a place where things just don’t happen— but that they happen for a reason. I had previously found comfort in believing that goodness is blessed and evil is cursed. I did not want to believe that what happens to us is unpredictable, that we live in a world of randomness. But now I understand, and so I find a new kind of comfort, knowing that it is not my fault. Now I understand that it is not my questioning ‘Why?’ that’s important, but rather the ‘When’ that requires a response. How do I respond ‘when’ bad things happen?”
Kushner writes that way back in Genesis, at the other end of our Bible, there’s the story of the Garden of Eden where God in effect, and in Kushner’s word, said:
I chose to make this a world of challenge and response, a world in which humans would eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and have to make a hundred decisions every day as to what was the right thing to do, learning from their mistakes when they got something wrong. It would be a world with no shortage of problems, but a world blessed with great minds and great souls to solve those problems, to invent things, to discover cures. [And I will be there] comforting, inspiring, strengthening. [p.199]
And so Rabbi Harold Kushner (of blessed memory) concludes his treatise on Job with this:
I find God in the miracle of human resilience in the face of the world’s imperfections, even the world’s cruelty. . . Having heard God say to Job, it will not be a perfect world, but it will be a world marked with great natural beauty, inspiring human creativity, and astonishing human resilience. And I will be with you in all of these times, and I [Kushner] like Job respond אֶמְאַ֣ס וְנִחַ֑מְתִּי עַל־עָפָ֥ר וָאֵֽפֶר, I repudiate my past accusations, my doubt, even my anger. . . Vulnerable and mortal, but dust and ashes[in a chaotic world beyond my control], I am comforted because I know I am not alone.
Erev Yom Kippur -- "Who Are You Here?"
There has always been a certain mystique about this evening. In former days, Jews came to Yom Kippur fearful and uncertain of their future. There was a foreboding trepidation that began just after sunset with the singing of Kol Nidre, believing that for the next twenty-four hours they’d be standing before God, waiting for their fate to be indelibly inscribed in God’s Book of Life.
That Kol Nidre moment before the open ark, with Torah scrolls lined up like so many silent witnesses to one’s personal failings and frailty, has been for many a reminder of the painful past of the Spanish Inquisition. For them, the dark and heavy melody of Kol Nidre is associated with the story of the Spanish Marranos, a connection so obviously referred to in what we have just read:
Kol Nidre is the prayer of people not free to make their own decisions, people forced to say what they do not mean. In repeating this prayer, we identify with the agony of our forebears who had to say ‘yes’ when they meant ‘no.’
We are supposed to know that these “forebears” are the Jews of the Spanish Inquisition who, in 1492 were forced by the Catholic Church to convert, and thus practiced their Judaism in secret. These were the “hidden” Jews of 15th and 16th C. Spain and Portugal. To see their memorial honored here in the Machzor, our holiday prayerbook, one would think that these Marranos were heroes. Indeed, were we not taught that the words of Kol Nidre, declaring our vows “null and void” was written specifically to absolve the brave Marrano community from their vows of Catholic confession?
My teachers, and I assume yours, described secret Marrano gatherings, hidden in caves, by the light of candles, singing quietly Kol Nidre, asking for atonement from the forced and false vows demanded of them. That legend has been so embedded in our Yom Kippur experience that even its melody has taken on the pathos of the story.
The truth of the Marranos, however, is something else again. We know that prior to the implementation of the Spanish Inquisition, a great number of Jews were indeed anxious to shed their Jewish stigma. 60 years ago the scholar Cecil Roth wrote: “in some places, Jews did not wait for the application of [compulsive conversion], but came forward spontaneously, clamoring for admission into the Church.” [A History of the Marranos, 1959]
Roth reflects that perhaps the reason so many were anxious to convert, to become more socially acceptable, was that “It was not very difficult for insincere, temporizing Jews to become insincere, temporizing Christians.” The history is that during the Inquisition there were about 250,000 unconverted identified Jews, and an equal number of newly converted ones. Those Jews who proudly and resolutely maintained their Jewish identities called their brothers and sisters who had quickly converted in the Church-- “Marranos”, from the Spanish slang for “swine.” Those Jews who refused to convert were forced to leave Spain and later Portugal.
Cecil Roth wrote that the Inquisition was initiated, not against the forthright identified Jews, but to expose the insincere Marranos who affirmed their new faith in order to ‘get ahead’ in Spanish society. Those who remained Jews were excluded from the torture of the Inquisition, though they were forced to leave their homeland. It was those insincere, newly and socially converted, seen as trying to infiltrate the national culture and ruling society, who became the targets of the Inquisition. The desired assimilation of many of the Marranos proved to be their own undoing.
And an interesting and strikingly similar phenomenon has been happening in both the American and Israeli Jewish communities for over 50 years. We and they have ceased to purposefully and conscientiously incorporate “Judaism” into our identities as Jews. The modern Jewish experience, both here in the Diaspora and within the Land of Israel, has been that Jews are abandoning their specific Jewish character in order to become fully “emancipated.”
Emancipation becoming acculturation began in the last years of the 18th C with the Enlightenment, and by the 19th and certainly the 20th C in Western Europe and in America, much of the Jewish community began to or had already emerged into “modernity.” The secular Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah opened for Jews both political opportunity and social integration, promising the Jewish community that they could indeed become just like everyone else. Now, in the 21st C, having fully emerged into this brave, new, and enlightened world, the two primary centers of world Jewry are becoming profoundly less Jewish! We are becoming less conspicuous as Jews.
I don’t think that we are consciously trying to be “less Jewish”, but in finding new ways to celebrate our social acceptability, we have become, in effect, “less existentially Jewish”, less observationally Jewish in how we live our lives. And because we live in a culture where religious differences, for the most part, no longer make a difference to them or to us-- it doesn’t. Knowingly or not, purposefully or not, our cultural liberalism and social acceptance necessarily has an anti-religious, or maybe better “non-religious” character.
This should not be surprising. The general American Jewish community has long been accused by the more traditional and observant Jewish community of losing its singular Jewish character. But you may be surprised that it has also happened in Israel. Among Israeli chilonim, the so-called secular majority, there is an alarming lack of knowledge and practice of, and interest in, our historical Jewish Heritage. Partly, this is a negative response to the heavy-handed religious authority of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox charedi community, who will only accept their kind of Judaism as legitimate Judaism. Non-Orthodox Israeli Jews, have to a large extent, developed a “so who cares” attitude. And though the Reform and Conservative Movements have found a place in Israel, it has not significantly impacted the non-Orthodox majority. The nominally secular Israelis are less interested in “things Jewish” than they are in “things Western”. From Home Depot to Office Depot, from Burger King to Subway, from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to “Star Wars”--Western American culture has become the defining and identifying element of Israeli modernity.
And here in America, our pursuit to be fully integrated into American society seems to mean that we ought to be less conspicuous as Jews. The reduction in ritual and experiential Jewish life, the isolation of our Jewish identities into compartmentalized and segregated calendar-defined “Jewish times”, separate and apart from our day-to-day, week-to-week regular lives, has become normalized.
What is remarkable about much of the American Jewish community is that we are much more secular than our Christian and Muslim neighbors. We have lost that survival instinct that sustained us for generations, that expressed and experiential religious identity that served as the protective shield that kept us safely together. As a result, on certain “Jewish” days, in “Jewish” places, we take on, wrap around us, a visibly Jewish identity, only to disrobe when returning to regular life. If that’s true, what does it say about us? Does that make us something like the Marranos, who clothed themselves as Christians?
We know that there have been times when it was “inconvenient” to be an identified Jew, and when it is far easier to compete in business and succeed socially without showing that star around one’s neck. It became not only easy, but at times fashionable to hide one’s Jewishness. Today, it’s not that our brothers and sisters are consciously avoiding a Jewish label, it’s that many have faded away, moved to the periphery of the Jewish community. And the irony is that for those of our folks out there on the outer edges, they still want the Jewish community to be there for them, with a rabbi who will marry them (if needed) and bury them (when necessary!). Are these the new Marranos, today’s hidden Jews?
I often hear the mantra of those folks that it really doesn’t matter if one “does” Jewish as long as one is a good person. Because, if Judaism is all about living a moral, ethical life, then it really isn’t all that important to participate in “Jewish” life. It may sound reasonable to those folks, but it doesn’t do the Jewish community, present or future, any good.
It may make them feel better to say that in following Jewish values there’s no need to “be Jewish”, and that as proponents of Biblical, Jewish ethics we are doing our part to make this a better society, which is what Judaism is all about anyway. But I just don’t see a future in shunning particularism in favor of promoting the universal, in pursuing the greater value of harmony and universality at the expense of a distinctly Jewish life and a viable Jewish community.
Understand, I am not chastising those who have faded away from an expressed and experiential Jewish identity, who have decided that it doesn’t “work” for them. Each of us must define our own identities, values and principles, and behave in accordance with them. But don’t think that you’re doing the rest of us Jews any good, or securing a Jewish future for your community by proclaiming the secular nobility of transcendent ethics! Be “Jewish”... or don’t be!
There was nothing righteous about the Marranos hiding their less-than-earnest Jewish identities by becoming insincere Christians . What confronts this and future Jewish generations is not a religious inquisition, but rather that we have finally succeeded in becoming fully integrated into American society and culture, with the result that the American Jewish community is rapidly becoming more American than it is Jewish! We are no longer sure what “religious” means, or what religion is worth. We’re more comfortable identifying as “spiritual but not religious”. And in fact SBNR (spiritual but not religious) is increasingly becoming the norm in the Christian community as well. But it has different consequences for us, already less than 3% of the population if some of us fade away into American culture.
For us, it’s very different than 15th C Spain. We are not faced with an either/or decision of give it up or leave. We need actively identified Jews if we want American Judaism to not just survive but succeed. We cannot wait for those who have faded and fallen away to catch up to us and declare “here we are!”. The sad truth is that eventually, the hidden Jew in America will be fully absorbed by America and will quietly disappear.
On this Kol Nidre eve and again tomorrow, we ask forgiveness for those sins we committed inadvertently and unintentionally.
May we be forgiven for hiding from responsibility.
May we find the strength and the courage to come out of the shadows and into the struggle of defining what American Judaism is to become.
May we be among those who will make a difference in what happens in this new year.
Yom Kippur -- "Why Are You Here?"
I teach Introduction to Judaism courses at both Oakland and Rochester Universities. Since virtually all of my students are not Jewish, either Christian or Muslim or Nothing, I try to explain our Jewish Heritage within the rubric of how faith-communities in-general, and Judaism in particular, respond to the great issues of the human condition. Early on in my course I explain that religions, systems-of-faith, are alone able to address three very human questions: Why am I here? What comes after “here”? and Why do bad things happen to good people? To a large extent, our choice of a faith-community depends on how personally satisfactorily it responds to these ultimately unanswerable questions.
On Rosh Hashana morning I used Rabbi Harold Kushner’s commentary on the Biblical Book of Job as my attempt to answer that last question. This morning I’m asking “Why am I here?” (Here that is, not for Yom Kippur, but here at all!) And then “What happens to me after this ‘here’”?
Last night I addressed the question ‘Who are you here?’ This morning I ask ‘Why are we here?’. And the Jewish response is very simple: we are God’s partners in the ongoing work of Creation. When we ask: ‘What is it that God wants from us?’, we recall the Prophet Micah’s response: “Do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with God” [6:8]. Jewish tradition has always affirmed that what God wants from us is proper behavior, doing the right thing. We fulfill our part of the covenant when we work to repair what’s wrong in our world, when at the end of each day we can look in the mirror and knowingly nod to ourselves thinking ‘the world is a little better today because I was here.’
I’ve said to you often enough that Judaism has never affirmed a correct, proper belief, but always avowed proper behavior. For us it’s not “true belief” that brings divine approval, that merits divine reward, but right action. The Jewish imperative is to make the most of your life by living it well, by righting wrongs and helping those in need. That, Jewish tradition has always affirmed, is why I am and you are here in this world. And to clarify for each of us what that must mean, is why on the High Holidays I am, and you are, here in this place, on these days. If then, it is Jewishly plainly apparent what God wants from us, why we’re here (physically and existentially), it’s still not at all clear what happens to us after this existential ‘here’.
The great 20th C Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, began his monumental explanation of Judaism, The Star of Redemption with these words: “All knowledge of the Whole has its source in death, in the fear of death.
‘From dust you are, and to dust you shall return,’ is no empty biblical verse” he wrote, “it is the context within which we fashion our lives and attempt to establish some record of enduring worth.” It is perhaps the first issue that any and every religion must grapple with: ‘what happens when we die?’
The Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes asserts that universal death reduces all human life to an absurdity. If we all must die, the author writes, then it doesn’t much matter how we live because in the end it’s all vanity, futility, a fruitless endeavor, a “chasing after wind.” Whether one is wise or foolish, righteous or selfish, rich or poor, death ultimately claims all.
Ecclesiastes’ startling declaration is an astounding, even staggering message within the Biblical text. It seems to say that our fleeting lives only appear to have relevance and purpose—that all we really can do is pointlessly pass time, awaiting the inevitable.
Some folks seek solace and religious comfort in the hope that death isn't really the end at all. There is life after life they say. We go to “a better place”. What appears to be injustice in this life, or what might seem to be frustration and failure, will all be made right in the heavenly world after death. Though bad things might happen to good people here, all is turned around in the righteousness of God’s judgement later on. I addressed the prospect of a salvific heavenly reward after the toil and trials of our frail and finite mortality on the evening of Rosh Hashana.
Though traditional Judaism promises personal resurrection with the messianic arrival, and eternal life after life in the transformative perfection of the Olam Haba, the “World to Come”-- I’m not a believer. For me, what is manifestly true is that all of us, from the greatest to the least, will die. But is Ecclesiastes right? Are our lives ultimately irrelevant? Surely there must be more to life than Ecclesiastes’ vanity of emptiness. Surely there is something of worth, of value to be gained by living properly.
The answer from Jewish tradition is that we must live our lives as though the journey itself has intrinsic, inherent, essential and purposeful value. Because we cannot know what lies beyond the shadow of death, we must live rightly today because righteousness can be, and should be, its own reward. We read in the Torah this morning Moses’ final message to the nation of Israel. And then, just a few verses later, God says to him:
Go up to … Mount Nebo, in the land of Moab, opposite Jericho; and behold the land of Canaan which I give to the people of Israel for a possession. You will die on that mountain, you will ascend and be gathered to your people… Though you shall see the land before you; you shall not go there, I give it to the people of Israel.” [Deuteronomy 32: 50–52]
Last night we read in our prayerbooks “Birth is a beginning and death a destination, and life is a journey.” Was the journey of Moses’ life empty, futile and fruitless because in the end he is unable to finish the journey, to cross into the Promised Land? Was his leadership and vision, his devotion to his people, his dedication to the journey, merely a vanity of emptiness, a “chasing after wind”? Franz Kafka, a contemporary of Rosenzweig writes, “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.” Moses' humanity, and ours, is a measure of our finite nature. Though our limits are real and unavoidable, our essence, our presence in this world, does remain despite the absence of our bodies. Who and what we were do, affect the world we leave behind.
Our traditional Midrash says that what we do during our lives has meaning because we are weaving the fabric we will wear in the world to come. How we conduct ourselves today will determine the effect of our lives in the world and on the people around us. Our journey, however limited, will surely touch and change the future one way or another. And though in the end, my and your journeys end, always short of that Promised Land, our lives live on in those who have journeyed with us and who will journey on without us.
Michigan’s own folksinger Matt Watroba wrote:
How will I leave? How will I leave this earth?
When it comes my time to go how will they measure my worth?
I will live on in those that I touched while I lived.
In this journey of life from my death to my birth, that's how I'll leave this earth.
Most of us will not leave behind material testaments of worldly success: buildings or foundations or institutions in our memory. Most of us will not be remembered by those who never met us. And those we have touched with our lives, our family and friends, will most likely not remember everything we said, and not every thing we did—but they will remember how we made them feel. And however they remember us, however we live on in their memories, we do in fact live on.
Erev Rosh Hashanah – “Are You Saved?”
You answer the front door to a pair of nicely dressed middle-aged women who ask, “Are you saved?” And with a smile you answer, “Thank you for asking, but I’m Jewish, so I really don’t need what you’re selling.”
Jews don’t use that expression. We don’t ask if one’s soul is saved. But just because we don’t talk about “personal salvation”, it doesn’t mean that it’s not something that we ought to address. But first we should ask: How does Judaism define “salvation”? And then: Does in fact our history and heritage promise some kind of “personal salvation”? And if it does, what is it and what do we have to do to get it?
Judaism, early on, recognized and struggled with the notion that we live between the infinite above and the finite below. Hebrew Scripture clearly distinguishes between the realms of the heavens and the earth. The heavens are the domain of God: infinite, of unlimited perfection. The earth is the world of limitation and imperfection, chaotic and finite. We see this especially in the poetry of Psalm 115 The heavens are God’s heavens, but the earth God has given to בני אדם the children of humanity [v.16]. And it’s from that earth, the humus, that we humans were quite literally formed! In the second Creation story in Genesis chapter 2 we’re told: then YHVH God formed the man out of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. [2:7]
We are a unique union of upper and lower opposites: from the “dust of the earth”, our physical, finite existence is filled with God’s “breath of life”. Frail and finite yet life-breathed with the “in-dwelling presence” of God, a presence that the rabbis called Shechinah. We are animated with an awareness that prompts us to transcend the boundaries of finite, existing reality. Accepting “what is”, we nevertheless yearn for “what could be, might be, should be.” It is that awareness that distinguishes us from every other living thing.
This awareness, God’s gift to humanity, is however also the source of our persistent anxiety: we are limited beings with unlimited horizons. Every other creature instinctively and existentially shrinks its world down to a manageable, controllable size and does not wonder or think about what’s beyond it. Only we are pressed to see beyond the immediacy of our senses. Aware of what could be, we desire what might be, even what should be. And there’s the rub, we almost always fall short! We reach for what’s beyond our grasp. And unless we can give real and substantive meaning to our finite reality with its infinite desires, we become frustrated, less than fully satisfied with life. And because this is a natural, universal human condition, religions develop their own responses to this dilemma, each its own solution that escapes the circumstance of our finite condition—thus its own promise of “salvation”!
Though each faith-system defines its own response, all affirm some kind of “salvation”, namely an ultimate satisfying and successful completion of a purposeful life. And so, behind that knock-on-your-door pointed question “Are you saved?”, is their proposition that correct faith, with proper prayer, of the right religion-- rescues one from this finite life being “all there is”.
For those women, standing at your door, the One-True-God is the active agent sanctioning your salvation, and you need to “open yourself” to the One-True-God who is anxiously waiting to transform your life. Who, in abundant and unconditional grace, is looking for the opportunity to rescue you from the limitations of your fallible life and ultimate death. This One-True-God promises that on the other side of finite reality, exists an infinite salvation. God will “save you” with eternal life in Heaven from what is otherwise a deadly earthly end. That understanding of “salvation” may define some religious systems, but not Judaism!
Salvation for us (though we don’t use that term) is not a rescue from the finite, rather it is a transformation of the finite into a meaningful existence that transcends our mortality. You will not hear rabbis (at least not progressive rabbis) speak of salvation as God’s graciously promised rescue of your person or soul. What “salvation” does mean for us is properly described in the Exodus narrative of the splitting of the sea: “Fear not! Stand still! And see the salvation of YHVH” [Exodus14:13]. In our Passover Seder we read, “With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm God saved us from bondage in Egypt.” “Salvation”, at least biblically, is the rescue of our people, first from Egypt, and later from the Assyrians and the Babylonians. If for other communities, Salvation is directed to one’s personal soul, Jewish, Biblical ‘salvation’ describes national deliverance from an immediate threat.
I said before that every faith-system struggles with, and then promises, a salvific success in spite of one’s finite life As Jews, what then do we call that aspiration? If the word “salvation” doesn’t work for us because of its particular parochial religious coloring, there should be a different word, a more appropriate word—and for me there is. My choice is the Greek word soterios though it is often translated as “one’s personal state of salvation”. But more generically it merely means “one’s sense of ultimate personal wellbeing”.
If religion’s primary goal is to help its members achieve a state of “ultimate personal well-being”, what is it that impedes that achievement? Clearly it is the conflict of my mortal frailty and finity, with my innate desire to be infinite. Each of us, though bounded and limited, yearn to be unbounded and unlimited. Rationally I know that I have finite qualities and abilities: I will never be as athletic, smart, good-looking or good-hearted as I would like to be. And I will never again run or be as energetic as I was in my youth. I will never read every book I’d like to, travel everywhere I’m drawn to, or know everything I need to! Rationally I know all this. I learned all that as I’ve matured. But still, knowing this truth, I’m still left wanting.
Simply acknowledging my finitude does not remove my subconscious and emotional needs, nor does it make my finite existence any easier to accept. Indeed, the reality of our finitude is painful. It forces us to deal with the fact that what I really want in this world I may never get-- and then I die! And the way in which we deal with the reality of human finitude becomes the basis of one’s chosen religion.
Traditional Judaism, Post-Biblical Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, affirms that eventually, some day, in the Messianic “World to Come”, our resurrected bodies will enjoy endless serenity—the infinite reward for observing the mitzvote. But if that’s not your personal expectation (and it’s not mine), then what can I hope for? Soterios, “ultimate personal wellbeing” without the hope of bodily resurrection in the next world, must mean that we focus on our life in this world, hoping to achieve soterios in the here and now.
Look, we handle relatively well the incidental limitations of our finite nature, the aging of our bodies and minds, becoming slower in step, having lapses of memory. But when it comes to the crushing limitations of failed dreams, serious illness, and of course death, we are existentially challenged. How does Progressive Judaism then promise soterios, a state of ultimate personal well-being without the expectation of a messianic resurrection?! I begin by coming to grips with the fact that my body, my life is finite, subject to accident, pain and suffering. It means that we must sincerely realize and fully accept the ultimate reality that health and living may only be ours for a moment.
It means we must reconcile the possibility that even though ‘Life is not fair’, we may still live satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding lives. That sincere intellectual and emotional realization becomes one’s ultimately satisfying soterios. It’s being able to say “I’m OK”, and truly, sincerely, genuinely mean it! And that is our Jewish “salvation”. Our tradition reminds us that it is what we do in this life, day by day, that is its own reward. If we have grasped each moment, making the most of it despite the frailty of my finitude; if we can honestly proclaim that Life does not have to be infinite in order to be worthwhile-- then we have begun to achieve something of a salvific soterios, ultimate personal well-being.
And this understanding, my this-world understanding of soterios as ‘ultimate well-being’, is different from the door-knockers’ ‘Salvation’ in another way. In ours, we are fully and completely our own active agents! It is my responsibility to find in life a satisfying and fulfilling sense of ultimate, personal wellbeing. Of course we are aware that the reality of living means that there will be death. I am aware that in the end— it will be the end.
Most of us, I believe, accept our finitude, most of us reluctantly admit that there are absolute, finite limits to personhood—we just have to become really, fully, intellectually and emotionally OK with that. And as a Jew, I affirm that beyond my limited life, I am already connected to the past and the future, connected in an unbroken chain of tradition that ties us together. My actions, if I make them clear and strong, do echo beyond the limits of my life, do touch other lives that touch more lives. I am connected in a matrix that reaches worldwide and through time, a matrix that stretches from what was, into what will be, connecting my finite, limited being with the infinite existence of my history and my people.
In confronting and ultimately accepting my finite nature there is neither paradox nor tension, there is only an awareness that I’m connected to a transcendent reality that is as much a part of me as I am of it. Soterios, ultimate existential well-being, is knowing that despite my finitude, I have already touched the infinite.
Rosh Hashanah – “Are You Blessed?”
Last April Rabbi Harold Kushner died, 88 years old. He was a Conservative rabbi, serving a Massachusetts congregation, but is best known for his 1981 internationally best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He wrote it after their first child, Aaron, died from progeria, a premature aging disease. He was 14 years old when he died of old age. His book, which ought to be in every home, and re-read every couple of years, deals with the question of human suffering and God’s omnipotence.
Rabbi Kushner grew up, as did you and I, hearing that because God is good, God will bless the lives of good people. We read just that in this morning’s Torah portion when God promised Abraham: “By myself have I sworn that because you have done this thing. . . that in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven”. (Genesis 22:16)
And then on Yom Kippur morning we will read in Torah: For I command you this day to love God, to keep the commandments, laws and teachings of your God that . . . your God may bless you. (Deuteronomy 30: 15-18)
With their son Aaron’s illness and death, Harold Kushner and his wife did not feel blessed. His struggle to believe in a good God, an all-powerful God who blesses the righteous, became the impetus for his remarkable little book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. My message this morning, honoring his memory, recalls not only that first book, but also his last-- The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person.
This morning our Torah reading began “And God tested Abraham . . .” God also tested Job in a book at the other end of our Bible. Both tests threatened the lives of their children, though here in Genesis Abraham’s will live. Kushner begins his treatise on Job by saying that we are by nature “meaning-makers”, that is, we are constantly trying to understand our world in terms of cause and effect. We “desperately want to believe that the world makes sense, that it is a place where things don’t just happen— that they happen for a reason, for a purpose.” But if the world is unpredictable, if this is really a “world of randomness then” he wrote, “we become uncomfortable.” [p. 4]
And so, when bad things do happen to Job, his visitors, his friends, question his goodness, because after all, our world is orderly and predictable and fair, and people get what they deserve. Job’s friends, and in fact so many of us, want desperately to find meaning in suffering. Because if bad things happen to good people just because they do, what does that then say about an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God?
The Biblical Book of Job is a treatise on whether the misfortunes that fall on ostensibly good people, come to them from the hand of God. After all, if we believe that ours is a moral world of justice and fairness, God-directed and God-controlled, then suffering must serve a moral purpose. So Job’s visitors ask him, again and again, ‘we thought you were blessed, so how have you sinned’?
Kushner’s book, his commentary on Job is less than 200 pages, but it’s long on detailing the structure, contents and context of the book. He says that the story was originally a very old, and very short Fable, to which was later added a much longer Poem. The Fable is found in chapters 1, 2 and the last chapter 42. The Fable is a simple tale of faith rewarded. God’s accuser challenges God saying ‘You know that it’s only because people are blessed that they worship and revere You’. So Job, the test case, is stripped of everything he has and loves, but is in the end rewarded because he remains faithful to God. The added, much longer Poem of 39 chapters, inserted between the bookends of the original Fable, is the story of Job’s visitors. His friends challenge Job that surely, somehow his fate is the effect of some cause.
Job’s first visitor affirms that punishment is a message from the Righteous God, a lesson to be learned. Job concedes the point, and asks that God, or anyone, make some sense of his punishment, just tell him what he’s done wrong to deserve this misery. Because if he is sinless and is suffering for no reason—that would shake his faith in God’s moral rule over the world.
Visitors two and three rehash much the same argument. They invoke the traditional belief that God knows us better than we know ourselves, that God punishes us only when there is a reason to punish. They tell Job that if he would stop insisting on his innocence and throw himself on the mercy of God, then God would likely forgive him and all will be well. Job at first argues with his visitors, but then stops and turns his attention and anger to God:
Withdraw Your hand from me, that Your terror not frighten me. Then summon me, and I will answer. Or let me speak, and You reply to me. How many are my iniquities and my sins? Advise me of my transgressions and my sins. Why do you hide Your face, and treat me like your enemy? [Job 13: 21-26]
But Job’s anger is shouting into the wind. He gets no response from God, and falls into depression, wishing for his life as it was.
Job again took up his discourse and said: “If only I could return to the days when God was my guardian; when His lamp shone over my head, and by His light I walked through darkness—to the days when I was in my prime, when God protected me, when God hadn’t yet deserted me . . . When I went out to the gate of the city, and took my seat in the square, when young men held their breath, and the aged rose up and stood. [Job 29: 1-5,7-8]
From despair and depression, and drained of any hope, alone in his misery, all Job has is his integrity and innocence which he continues to declare though no one seems to hear.
“If I have walked with falsehood, and my foot has hurried to deceit—let me be weighed in a just balance, and God will know my integrity! If my step has turned aside from the way, and my heart has followed my eyes, and if any spot has clung to my hands; then let me sow and let what grows for me be rooted out. If I have withheld anything that the poor desired, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail, or have eaten my morsel alone, though the orphan has not eaten; if I have seen anyone perish for lack of clothing, or a poor person without covering; if I have raised my hand against the orphan because I saw I had supporters at the gate, then let my shoulder blade fall from my shoulder, and let my arm be broken from its socket. If I have rejoiced because my wealth was great, or because my hand had gotten much; if I have rejoiced at the ruin of those who hated me, or exulted when evil overtook them; if I have concealed my transgressions as others do, by hiding my iniquity in my bosom; if my land has cried out against me, if I have eaten its yield without payment, and caused the death of its owners, then let thorns grow instead of wheat, and foul weeds instead of barley.” And chapter 31 then concludes: Thus ended the words of Job. [edited from Job 31]
Job is done. He is exhausted, spent and alone, when then, and only then, from out of the whirlwind God finally speaks to Job.
Who is this that darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge? Gird your loins like a man, I will question you, and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Do you know who fixed its dimensions? Who shut in the sea with doors and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’? Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know any of this. [edited Job 38]
Job then quietly replies to God: I know that You can do anything, that nothing You propose is impossible for You. . . Indeed, I spoke without understanding of things beyond me, which I did not know. Hear now, let me speak; I will ask and You will inform me.
עַל־כֵּ֭ן אֶמְאַ֣ס וְנִחַ֑מְתִּי “Therefore I recant and relent” (which is the traditional translation) עַל־עָפָ֥ר וָאֵֽפֶר “being but dust and ashes” [Job 42: 1-6]
This is a surprise! After 41 chapters, after all that he’s been through, his consistent insistence on his integrity and innocence-- this is his declaration? Has he given up? Is it a confession and concession? Is Job throwing up his hands saying “Ok God, do whatever You’re going to do! I give up, I’m nothing and you are everything!” And then, just then when Job seems to give up and concede defeat, what happens?! God delivers a swift and unexpected happily-ever-after ending, restoring all of Job’s property, fortune and family.
But wait, Rabbi Kushner writes. Remember that it’s the Fable of the Accuser challenging God in chapters 1 and 2 that concludes here in chapter 42 with God suddenly restoring everything to Job. But a later has hand added 39 chapters, which must have been meant to become the focus of the book. Kushner thinks that Job’s final declaration should be read as the conclusion to the Poem and, Kushner suggests, it has been traditionally mistranslated. He writes that understanding the word nachamti as “I relent” is wrong. The text says emas v’nachamti, but it’s not “I recant and relent”, but rather “I recant and am comforted being only dust and ashes.” Kushner reads Job as saying “Now I understand. I recant my accusations against the unfairness of your actions because now I understand and I am comforted in knowing that being only “dust and ashes” I did not, could not, have not brought these afflictions on myself. And a good God would not have done it to me.
Kushner writes that Job in effect said: “It was not my cause that brought your effect. I wanted to believe that the world makes sense, that it is a place where things just don’t happen— but that they happen for a reason. I had previously found comfort in believing that goodness is blessed and evil is cursed. I did not want to believe that what happens to us is unpredictable, that we live in a world of randomness. But now I understand, and so I find a new kind of comfort, knowing that it is not my fault. Now I understand that it is not my questioning ‘Why?’ that’s important, but rather the ‘When’ that requires a response. How do I respond ‘when’ bad things happen?”
Kushner writes that way back in Genesis, at the other end of our Bible, there’s the story of the Garden of Eden where God in effect, and in Kushner’s word, said:
I chose to make this a world of challenge and response, a world in which humans would eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and have to make a hundred decisions every day as to what was the right thing to do, learning from their mistakes when they got something wrong. It would be a world with no shortage of problems, but a world blessed with great minds and great souls to solve those problems, to invent things, to discover cures. [And I will be there] comforting, inspiring, strengthening. [p.199]
And so Rabbi Harold Kushner (of blessed memory) concludes his treatise on Job with this:
I find God in the miracle of human resilience in the face of the world’s imperfections, even the world’s cruelty. . . Having heard God say to Job, it will not be a perfect world, but it will be a world marked with great natural beauty, inspiring human creativity, and astonishing human resilience. And I will be with you in all of these times, and I [Kushner] like Job respond אֶמְאַ֣ס וְנִחַ֑מְתִּי עַל־עָפָ֥ר וָאֵֽפֶר, I repudiate my past accusations, my doubt, even my anger. . . Vulnerable and mortal, but dust and ashes[in a chaotic world beyond my control], I am comforted because I know I am not alone.
Erev Yom Kippur -- "Who Are You Here?"
There has always been a certain mystique about this evening. In former days, Jews came to Yom Kippur fearful and uncertain of their future. There was a foreboding trepidation that began just after sunset with the singing of Kol Nidre, believing that for the next twenty-four hours they’d be standing before God, waiting for their fate to be indelibly inscribed in God’s Book of Life.
That Kol Nidre moment before the open ark, with Torah scrolls lined up like so many silent witnesses to one’s personal failings and frailty, has been for many a reminder of the painful past of the Spanish Inquisition. For them, the dark and heavy melody of Kol Nidre is associated with the story of the Spanish Marranos, a connection so obviously referred to in what we have just read:
Kol Nidre is the prayer of people not free to make their own decisions, people forced to say what they do not mean. In repeating this prayer, we identify with the agony of our forebears who had to say ‘yes’ when they meant ‘no.’
We are supposed to know that these “forebears” are the Jews of the Spanish Inquisition who, in 1492 were forced by the Catholic Church to convert, and thus practiced their Judaism in secret. These were the “hidden” Jews of 15th and 16th C. Spain and Portugal. To see their memorial honored here in the Machzor, our holiday prayerbook, one would think that these Marranos were heroes. Indeed, were we not taught that the words of Kol Nidre, declaring our vows “null and void” was written specifically to absolve the brave Marrano community from their vows of Catholic confession?
My teachers, and I assume yours, described secret Marrano gatherings, hidden in caves, by the light of candles, singing quietly Kol Nidre, asking for atonement from the forced and false vows demanded of them. That legend has been so embedded in our Yom Kippur experience that even its melody has taken on the pathos of the story.
The truth of the Marranos, however, is something else again. We know that prior to the implementation of the Spanish Inquisition, a great number of Jews were indeed anxious to shed their Jewish stigma. 60 years ago the scholar Cecil Roth wrote: “in some places, Jews did not wait for the application of [compulsive conversion], but came forward spontaneously, clamoring for admission into the Church.” [A History of the Marranos, 1959]
Roth reflects that perhaps the reason so many were anxious to convert, to become more socially acceptable, was that “It was not very difficult for insincere, temporizing Jews to become insincere, temporizing Christians.” The history is that during the Inquisition there were about 250,000 unconverted identified Jews, and an equal number of newly converted ones. Those Jews who proudly and resolutely maintained their Jewish identities called their brothers and sisters who had quickly converted in the Church-- “Marranos”, from the Spanish slang for “swine.” Those Jews who refused to convert were forced to leave Spain and later Portugal.
Cecil Roth wrote that the Inquisition was initiated, not against the forthright identified Jews, but to expose the insincere Marranos who affirmed their new faith in order to ‘get ahead’ in Spanish society. Those who remained Jews were excluded from the torture of the Inquisition, though they were forced to leave their homeland. It was those insincere, newly and socially converted, seen as trying to infiltrate the national culture and ruling society, who became the targets of the Inquisition. The desired assimilation of many of the Marranos proved to be their own undoing.
And an interesting and strikingly similar phenomenon has been happening in both the American and Israeli Jewish communities for over 50 years. We and they have ceased to purposefully and conscientiously incorporate “Judaism” into our identities as Jews. The modern Jewish experience, both here in the Diaspora and within the Land of Israel, has been that Jews are abandoning their specific Jewish character in order to become fully “emancipated.”
Emancipation becoming acculturation began in the last years of the 18th C with the Enlightenment, and by the 19th and certainly the 20th C in Western Europe and in America, much of the Jewish community began to or had already emerged into “modernity.” The secular Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah opened for Jews both political opportunity and social integration, promising the Jewish community that they could indeed become just like everyone else. Now, in the 21st C, having fully emerged into this brave, new, and enlightened world, the two primary centers of world Jewry are becoming profoundly less Jewish! We are becoming less conspicuous as Jews.
I don’t think that we are consciously trying to be “less Jewish”, but in finding new ways to celebrate our social acceptability, we have become, in effect, “less existentially Jewish”, less observationally Jewish in how we live our lives. And because we live in a culture where religious differences, for the most part, no longer make a difference to them or to us-- it doesn’t. Knowingly or not, purposefully or not, our cultural liberalism and social acceptance necessarily has an anti-religious, or maybe better “non-religious” character.
This should not be surprising. The general American Jewish community has long been accused by the more traditional and observant Jewish community of losing its singular Jewish character. But you may be surprised that it has also happened in Israel. Among Israeli chilonim, the so-called secular majority, there is an alarming lack of knowledge and practice of, and interest in, our historical Jewish Heritage. Partly, this is a negative response to the heavy-handed religious authority of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox charedi community, who will only accept their kind of Judaism as legitimate Judaism. Non-Orthodox Israeli Jews, have to a large extent, developed a “so who cares” attitude. And though the Reform and Conservative Movements have found a place in Israel, it has not significantly impacted the non-Orthodox majority. The nominally secular Israelis are less interested in “things Jewish” than they are in “things Western”. From Home Depot to Office Depot, from Burger King to Subway, from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to “Star Wars”--Western American culture has become the defining and identifying element of Israeli modernity.
And here in America, our pursuit to be fully integrated into American society seems to mean that we ought to be less conspicuous as Jews. The reduction in ritual and experiential Jewish life, the isolation of our Jewish identities into compartmentalized and segregated calendar-defined “Jewish times”, separate and apart from our day-to-day, week-to-week regular lives, has become normalized.
What is remarkable about much of the American Jewish community is that we are much more secular than our Christian and Muslim neighbors. We have lost that survival instinct that sustained us for generations, that expressed and experiential religious identity that served as the protective shield that kept us safely together. As a result, on certain “Jewish” days, in “Jewish” places, we take on, wrap around us, a visibly Jewish identity, only to disrobe when returning to regular life. If that’s true, what does it say about us? Does that make us something like the Marranos, who clothed themselves as Christians?
We know that there have been times when it was “inconvenient” to be an identified Jew, and when it is far easier to compete in business and succeed socially without showing that star around one’s neck. It became not only easy, but at times fashionable to hide one’s Jewishness. Today, it’s not that our brothers and sisters are consciously avoiding a Jewish label, it’s that many have faded away, moved to the periphery of the Jewish community. And the irony is that for those of our folks out there on the outer edges, they still want the Jewish community to be there for them, with a rabbi who will marry them (if needed) and bury them (when necessary!). Are these the new Marranos, today’s hidden Jews?
I often hear the mantra of those folks that it really doesn’t matter if one “does” Jewish as long as one is a good person. Because, if Judaism is all about living a moral, ethical life, then it really isn’t all that important to participate in “Jewish” life. It may sound reasonable to those folks, but it doesn’t do the Jewish community, present or future, any good.
It may make them feel better to say that in following Jewish values there’s no need to “be Jewish”, and that as proponents of Biblical, Jewish ethics we are doing our part to make this a better society, which is what Judaism is all about anyway. But I just don’t see a future in shunning particularism in favor of promoting the universal, in pursuing the greater value of harmony and universality at the expense of a distinctly Jewish life and a viable Jewish community.
Understand, I am not chastising those who have faded away from an expressed and experiential Jewish identity, who have decided that it doesn’t “work” for them. Each of us must define our own identities, values and principles, and behave in accordance with them. But don’t think that you’re doing the rest of us Jews any good, or securing a Jewish future for your community by proclaiming the secular nobility of transcendent ethics! Be “Jewish”... or don’t be!
There was nothing righteous about the Marranos hiding their less-than-earnest Jewish identities by becoming insincere Christians . What confronts this and future Jewish generations is not a religious inquisition, but rather that we have finally succeeded in becoming fully integrated into American society and culture, with the result that the American Jewish community is rapidly becoming more American than it is Jewish! We are no longer sure what “religious” means, or what religion is worth. We’re more comfortable identifying as “spiritual but not religious”. And in fact SBNR (spiritual but not religious) is increasingly becoming the norm in the Christian community as well. But it has different consequences for us, already less than 3% of the population if some of us fade away into American culture.
For us, it’s very different than 15th C Spain. We are not faced with an either/or decision of give it up or leave. We need actively identified Jews if we want American Judaism to not just survive but succeed. We cannot wait for those who have faded and fallen away to catch up to us and declare “here we are!”. The sad truth is that eventually, the hidden Jew in America will be fully absorbed by America and will quietly disappear.
On this Kol Nidre eve and again tomorrow, we ask forgiveness for those sins we committed inadvertently and unintentionally.
May we be forgiven for hiding from responsibility.
May we find the strength and the courage to come out of the shadows and into the struggle of defining what American Judaism is to become.
May we be among those who will make a difference in what happens in this new year.
Yom Kippur -- "Why Are You Here?"
I teach Introduction to Judaism courses at both Oakland and Rochester Universities. Since virtually all of my students are not Jewish, either Christian or Muslim or Nothing, I try to explain our Jewish Heritage within the rubric of how faith-communities in-general, and Judaism in particular, respond to the great issues of the human condition. Early on in my course I explain that religions, systems-of-faith, are alone able to address three very human questions: Why am I here? What comes after “here”? and Why do bad things happen to good people? To a large extent, our choice of a faith-community depends on how personally satisfactorily it responds to these ultimately unanswerable questions.
On Rosh Hashana morning I used Rabbi Harold Kushner’s commentary on the Biblical Book of Job as my attempt to answer that last question. This morning I’m asking “Why am I here?” (Here that is, not for Yom Kippur, but here at all!) And then “What happens to me after this ‘here’”?
Last night I addressed the question ‘Who are you here?’ This morning I ask ‘Why are we here?’. And the Jewish response is very simple: we are God’s partners in the ongoing work of Creation. When we ask: ‘What is it that God wants from us?’, we recall the Prophet Micah’s response: “Do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with God” [6:8]. Jewish tradition has always affirmed that what God wants from us is proper behavior, doing the right thing. We fulfill our part of the covenant when we work to repair what’s wrong in our world, when at the end of each day we can look in the mirror and knowingly nod to ourselves thinking ‘the world is a little better today because I was here.’
I’ve said to you often enough that Judaism has never affirmed a correct, proper belief, but always avowed proper behavior. For us it’s not “true belief” that brings divine approval, that merits divine reward, but right action. The Jewish imperative is to make the most of your life by living it well, by righting wrongs and helping those in need. That, Jewish tradition has always affirmed, is why I am and you are here in this world. And to clarify for each of us what that must mean, is why on the High Holidays I am, and you are, here in this place, on these days. If then, it is Jewishly plainly apparent what God wants from us, why we’re here (physically and existentially), it’s still not at all clear what happens to us after this existential ‘here’.
The great 20th C Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, began his monumental explanation of Judaism, The Star of Redemption with these words: “All knowledge of the Whole has its source in death, in the fear of death.
‘From dust you are, and to dust you shall return,’ is no empty biblical verse” he wrote, “it is the context within which we fashion our lives and attempt to establish some record of enduring worth.” It is perhaps the first issue that any and every religion must grapple with: ‘what happens when we die?’
The Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes asserts that universal death reduces all human life to an absurdity. If we all must die, the author writes, then it doesn’t much matter how we live because in the end it’s all vanity, futility, a fruitless endeavor, a “chasing after wind.” Whether one is wise or foolish, righteous or selfish, rich or poor, death ultimately claims all.
Ecclesiastes’ startling declaration is an astounding, even staggering message within the Biblical text. It seems to say that our fleeting lives only appear to have relevance and purpose—that all we really can do is pointlessly pass time, awaiting the inevitable.
Some folks seek solace and religious comfort in the hope that death isn't really the end at all. There is life after life they say. We go to “a better place”. What appears to be injustice in this life, or what might seem to be frustration and failure, will all be made right in the heavenly world after death. Though bad things might happen to good people here, all is turned around in the righteousness of God’s judgement later on. I addressed the prospect of a salvific heavenly reward after the toil and trials of our frail and finite mortality on the evening of Rosh Hashana.
Though traditional Judaism promises personal resurrection with the messianic arrival, and eternal life after life in the transformative perfection of the Olam Haba, the “World to Come”-- I’m not a believer. For me, what is manifestly true is that all of us, from the greatest to the least, will die. But is Ecclesiastes right? Are our lives ultimately irrelevant? Surely there must be more to life than Ecclesiastes’ vanity of emptiness. Surely there is something of worth, of value to be gained by living properly.
The answer from Jewish tradition is that we must live our lives as though the journey itself has intrinsic, inherent, essential and purposeful value. Because we cannot know what lies beyond the shadow of death, we must live rightly today because righteousness can be, and should be, its own reward. We read in the Torah this morning Moses’ final message to the nation of Israel. And then, just a few verses later, God says to him:
Go up to … Mount Nebo, in the land of Moab, opposite Jericho; and behold the land of Canaan which I give to the people of Israel for a possession. You will die on that mountain, you will ascend and be gathered to your people… Though you shall see the land before you; you shall not go there, I give it to the people of Israel.” [Deuteronomy 32: 50–52]
Last night we read in our prayerbooks “Birth is a beginning and death a destination, and life is a journey.” Was the journey of Moses’ life empty, futile and fruitless because in the end he is unable to finish the journey, to cross into the Promised Land? Was his leadership and vision, his devotion to his people, his dedication to the journey, merely a vanity of emptiness, a “chasing after wind”? Franz Kafka, a contemporary of Rosenzweig writes, “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.” Moses' humanity, and ours, is a measure of our finite nature. Though our limits are real and unavoidable, our essence, our presence in this world, does remain despite the absence of our bodies. Who and what we were do, affect the world we leave behind.
Our traditional Midrash says that what we do during our lives has meaning because we are weaving the fabric we will wear in the world to come. How we conduct ourselves today will determine the effect of our lives in the world and on the people around us. Our journey, however limited, will surely touch and change the future one way or another. And though in the end, my and your journeys end, always short of that Promised Land, our lives live on in those who have journeyed with us and who will journey on without us.
Michigan’s own folksinger Matt Watroba wrote:
How will I leave? How will I leave this earth?
When it comes my time to go how will they measure my worth?
I will live on in those that I touched while I lived.
In this journey of life from my death to my birth, that's how I'll leave this earth.
Most of us will not leave behind material testaments of worldly success: buildings or foundations or institutions in our memory. Most of us will not be remembered by those who never met us. And those we have touched with our lives, our family and friends, will most likely not remember everything we said, and not every thing we did—but they will remember how we made them feel. And however they remember us, however we live on in their memories, we do in fact live on.