Open and Closed Religious Borders

These days, people feel free to leave their birth religions to investigate, explore or join another religion.  Some have left religion all together and decided to be agnostic or atheist. Some have grown up without any religion.  Some people mix one religion with another.  There are “dones and “nones”, people who are done with the Church, synagogue or mosque and others who claim to have no religion at all.  Intermarriage between religious believers is rampant.  This wild west religious migration is happening right in front of our eyes.  The world is getting smaller.  We are learning what other people believe.  Religious borders and boundaries are open!

In my own life, I left my religion and community, explored and joined Lutheran Christianity for many years, and finally returned to the Jewish community and tradition.  This has been my religious journey.

I felt free to run away.  And by the way, running away is not always bad.  For some it is the only way to remain sane. There are so many different stories.   Sometimes, like me,  you just need to leave your religious tradition, come to feel completely empty and lost and even join another religion before you wake up. I ran away from the craziness of my family.  I ran and ran as far as I could get. I returned to Judaism when I could no longer run away from my own soul. 

We need to think about how we look at the world’s religions.  We need to avoid two extremes, religious absolutism and religious relativism. No religion has the absolute truth. Religions contain a glimpse of certain truths.  At the same time, it’s wrong to say that every religion is as good as another. Some religious interpretations endorse hatred and violence. Some religions should be avoided.  We need to listen to what others believe with wisdom and discernment. 

Members of each religion should be loyal to and defend their own tradition. That’s fine.  But, at the same time, believers need to be honest about the strengths and weaknesses of their own religious tradition. Religions are, after all, tentative, diverse, and disputatious.  Religions have much to learn from each other. And, remember, God is not a member of any religion.  God is God!

So, I am not upset by all the religious exploration and migration going on.  In its disruptive and sometimes ignorant manner, it demonstrates the importance and vitality of religious questions.  Neither science or secularity will do away with these questions.  Mistakes will be made, there will be regrets, and forgiveness necessary for doing the best you could with what you knew.  People will leave and sometimes return to their traditions.  Such is our life together.  Such is my life. 

Three Buddhist Insights

When I took students to India a few years ago, we listened to a Buddhist monk tell us what he thought were three basic insights from Buddhism:  You cannot change the past, you cannot control the future, you are alive this day.  He concluded, “Do what you can do to change the world this day.”

Sometimes, the smallest thing you do or say today can change the world.  A Lutheran pastor told me a startling story about what happened one Sunday morning.  He was walking around between services as he usually does, unconsciously shaking hands with people, greeting them, saying “good morning” or “how are you?”  He did this week in and week out with thinking too much about it.  It was his calling, routine and his job. This Sunday morning seemed no different that it had been every week. 

A few days later he received an unsigned note in the mail.  It read, “Pastor, a few days ago I decided that life was not worth living.  No one seemed to care whether I was alive or not.  I thought, I will go to Church one more time and then kill myself.  But that morning you stopped and talked to me.  You asked how I was and wished me a good day and fine week.  Thank you.  You saved my life.  You showed me that someone cared about me.   I will be going to see a therapist this week and hope to feel better.  But, you changed my world and I am grateful."

Such is life.  The smallest unconscious things you do and say this very day can change the world.  The past is the past.  The future will be the future.  Be alive today and do what you can do. If you want to know who or what God is about, God resides precisely in the doing.

Living in the Real World

Every day we face the collision between the way things work and the way they ought to work.  Drivers who don’t know how to drive, health insurance with terrible customer service, airlines whose only concern is making more money, politicians acting irrationally, doctors and nurses who don’t have time to call you back, professional baseball players making millions of dollars and hitting 229., and you have your own list.  Whether it’s driving, serving food, being a politician, a doctor, a professor, a farmer, a police officer, a spouse and even God.  Is anything working the way it should?  The culture and the world seem to be declining, becoming more and more rude, crude and lewd.

Are our expectations too idealistic?  Are they unrealistic?  Are they completely unreal?  What gives?

I suppose we could say we are expecting too much of people.  It’s true human beings can be ambiguous, inconsistent, unreliable and unpredictable.  And they are subject to stress, lack of sleep, over multitasking, illness, marital and familial problems, and all sorts of distractions.  Such is the nature of human nature and American contemporary culture.  Our expectations and standards may indeed be too high and entitled.

But where is the line?  Where is the line between making excuses for people and expecting excellence?  When are we asking too much and when are we not asking enough?

To be sure, excellence is the goal.  It is unreal to expect excellence all the time.  But it is possible some of the time.  Every day I experience some people driving very well, some students working hard and caring about learning, some politicians speaking and doing the truth, some administrators sensitively doing right by their employees, some people acting with integrity and character.   As human beings, we do have the capacity to act in an excellent way.  We also have the capacity to act less than excellent.  We have different abilities, moral dispositions and moods which come into play in a variety of ways every day, affected by a myriad of controllable and uncontrollable factors.    But we can do what we can do.

Each day we run after the ideal, appreciate the real, and try to avoid the unreal.  These three are usually mixed together in complicated measure.  It can be exasperating.  Such is life.  But, don’t be pessimistic or optimistic about everything.  Face the realness of life with your refusal to give up or give in

Finally, despite the craziness of life, see the world for the mysterious inconsistent chaotic mixture it is and be grateful that you are here one more day to experience its crazy colorful collage.  Be thankful.  Be as excellent as you can be.  And that is what’s real!

Harold Kushner and God???

Talking about God is difficult because our language is insufficient and our senses too limited.  Traditional ways of talking about God can be helpful but are too limited. I have been open to listening to all sorts of reimagining and redefining what we mean by the word "God."  But non-traditional approaches need to be scrutinized. In that vein, I pay attention to Harold Kushner.

Rabbi Kushner asserts, “when bad things happen to good people” we should not ask why it is happening but when it happens, we should figure out how to survive it.  Rabbi Kushner believes God is not all powerful; God is kind and caring.  For Kushner, God comes to us in the guise of caring people who help us make it through the terrible things that can happen to us in this world. 

Kushner also says that God has created laws of nature, given humans free will and cannot interfere in these processes.  Kushner uses and revises the book of Job to make his points.  Some of my students find Kushner’s views appealing.  I do not and I wonder why.

The Biblical God makes covenants with the Jewish people.  Through these covenants, God promises certain things. These promises are tied to the notion that God works in human history.  How God does this is considered a puzzling mystery but God is assumed to have the power to act wherever God chooses to act, whether that be in the midst of natural or moral evil.  When God does not act commensurate with God’s promises, Biblical folk believe it is just and fair to call God into account. I am proud to be part of that long Jewish tradition that sees questioning God as a statement of faith.

Rabbi Kushner knows all of this but given the suffering and death of his son from the aging disease, Progeria, not to mention the Holocaust and all the other absurd suffering and evil that occurs in the world, he thinks we should stop asking “why” and realize “why” is the wrong question.

Rabbi Kushner’s views are appealing because he seems to get rid of the unanswerable ‘why’ question that haunts us all too often. He does this by limiting and redefining God’s power. He thinks God is at work influencing but not coercing the world.

My problem with Kushner’s God is precisely this:  If God has been influencing the world for thousands and thousands of years and this is the best that God has been able to accomplish, what does it say about God and about us?  Why would we worship such an ineffectual and apparently incompetent deity? Our question to Kushner’s God: “Is this the best you can do?”  Rabbi Kushner’s limited God may be easier and more appealing to swallow, but is that God worthy of worship? Is that God able to engage the power of evil?  And if not, why call that powerless power God?

A God who created the vast, complicated, mysterious cosmos we live in does not appear to be very limited. Think of the sheer power needed to create this universe and all the other universes. This God is responsible for what he has created. And God is either powerful enough to stop suffering and evil or he is not God. 

So, if God does exist, let’s at least be honest: let God be a God of mysterious purpose, of problematic methodology, of strange movements.  Let the “why” questions never cease to barrage this morally questionable deity. Let the mystery remain mystery.  For it is in the aggravating tenaciousness of our questions, that we express our deep trust, our hope against hope, our confusion and puzzlement.  Pray to God, not for faith or reassurance, but for the right questions. Do not flinch to pursue the truth.  Meanwhile, do what you can do each day to stop the craziness.  All the rest is commentary.