A Jewish Thanksgiving

My favorite Jewish holiday is Passover.  Passover celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  This yearly event is centered on the Passover seder or meal.  It involves eating a variety of symbolic foods which reminds us of the exodus from Egypt.  This is a time when Jews remember.  We say, “In memory lies redemption.”  Remembering the Passover is not merely believing that something happened long ago.  We relive and reexperience what happened.  We assert that we ourselves have been slaves to Pharoah.  And we say, had God not acted we, all of us, would still, to this very day, be slaves. It is a corporate experience of thanksgiving.

As a boy, I remember the excitement in our small apartment in the Bronx when it came time to put away the regular dishes and take out the special Passover china from the front closet.  For a moment, our little place became a holy place where memory was celebrated.  The apartment was scoured and cleansed.  All bread and anything associated with leaven was removed.  And then came the day when the big boxes of Matzoh arrived.  We would eat unleavened bread for 10 days to remember what had happened to us when we had to run away with haste.  

We held two seders on successive nights. There were just four of us, my parents, my brother and me.  In our family my parents were the only ones to survive the Nazi madness.  There were no visitors, no grandparents, no cousins, no uncles or aunts, no one else around the table.  My father in Hebrew, Yiddish and English recited from a book called the Haggadah (the telling).  I can still hear his voice and the distinctive melodies he brought with him from Europe.  

Here is something strange though.  In all those Passover seders, the word Nazi was never mentioned. Despite what had happened to my parents, despite most of their relatives having been murdered in the camps, they continued to remember and give thanks for the exodus from slavery.  They refused to grant Hitler and his killers a posthumous victory. 

My parents were not very sophisticated when it came to religion.  But they were determined to remain Jewish despite what had happened to them, despite what had happened to the Jews and despite the silence of God. 

In so many ways, I am a Jew today because of their despite.  Bernard and Pola Haar, thank you.

Reading the Bible Without Driving Ourselves Crazy

Some of us have turned the Bible into an idol.  We think every word in the Bible was dictated by God into the ears of the writers.  But that is not true!  Jewish and Christian scripture was written by human beings inspired by God. The Bible is not inerrant or infallible. 

There is no such thing as, “The Bible says.” The Bible on its own cannot speak.  It is only when a human being picks it up and begins to interpret what it says that the scripture can begin to speak.  Even then, it is not saying anything on its own.  The words of the Bible are always being interpreted.  And when they are being interpreted they are being interpreted from a specific perspective through someone’s eyes.  The person interpreting may be an atheist, an agnostic, a member of another religion, a conservative, moderate or liberal, a Christian, A Jew or a Muslim.  We all wear glasses.  And the glasses we wear affect the way we read and interpret.  Everybody says they’re open and but everybody, at some point, is closed.  We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear.  Our glasses enable and disable us at the same time.  As soon as you have a written text, you have the virtue and problem of interpretation.

Isn’t this all terribly confusing?  Yes.  So, what we are forced to do is argue out our interpretations in community.  We each know our interpretations are limited and could be wrong.  We ought to be eager to hear where we may have gone astray.  We need to listen to interpretations inside and outside our community.  Which parts of scripture and tradition are descriptive and which parts are prescriptive?  This is an ongoing debate. By the way, the debate is part of faith. And it is ok to disagree.

Let’s stop driving ourselves crazy with our Bible reading.   Jews, Christians, Muslims and all the rest of us are not saved or related to God because of our interpretations.  We live and breathe by the kindness or grace of God, the universe, the force or whatever you call that power at the heart of the universe, for us and not against us. All the rest is interpretation and commentary. Stay sane out there.

A Jewish View of the Reformation

The Reformation is an important event in the life of the Christian Church.  Martin Luther, the prophet of grace, altered the life of the Christian community whether he intended to or not. It was the creation of a movement in the Church Catholic to emphasize the grace of God as explicated by the apostle Paul, Augustine, and restated by Luther. Luther believed the Church had lost sight of what ought to be central to Christians:  justification by faith. 

As revolutionary as Luther was, he could not disengage himself from 16th century antisemitism.  This is well known by now and the Lutheran Church has disowned any of Luther’s statements on the Jews. All to the good.

What is not so well known is that Justification by grace through faith is a Jewish notion.  Jews have always held to the understanding that God has a special relationship with the Jewish people.  And Jews through the centuries have trusted in God despite God’s rather odd methodology. While most Jews did not adopt the Christian belief in original sin, they knew that they were not perfect and could depend on the gracious forgiveness of their God.

Think about it.  When the apostle Paul writes his letter to the Romans he asserts that Abraham himself was justified by faith.  His example is telling.  Paul says when Abraham and Sarah were unable to get pregnant, Abraham believed in the promise and kept on having sex with Sarah no matter how long it took. Abraham had faith despite what was happening.  Abraham was justified by faith.  And Paul advises the Roman gentiles to emulate Abraham’s faith.

A thousand years before the Reformation, the Jewish tradition was aware of the kindness or chesed of God. The Torah given to the Jewish people was a gift from God.  Jews knew God before Jesus, before Paul, before Augustine and before Luther. The grace of God which Luther asserted had been part of Jewish tradition for centuries.

Maybe what Jesus and Paul were up to was to make gentiles or non-Jews as Jewish as possible?!

Why We Killed the Prophets

Why do people kill the prophets?  After all, we admire prophets; prophets are fascinating people. They are usually esteemed in retrospect.  They are spoken of as being courageous truthtellers.  Books are written, monuments erected to remember their words.  Yet, most prophets were persecuted and killed.

In the scriptures, Prophets were threatening figures who did what they could to change people at the root.  Prophets were called by God to speak words they themselves found dangerous. And, prophets were not part of the religious establishment.  In fact, they were usually quite critical of religious leadership and the way people disconnected religion from justice.  Maybe, the only real prophets are the biblical prophets.

Prophets were not pastors or rabbis hired by religious institutions to transmit the tradition.  A prophet was someone who spoke the truth.  Usually, a prophet gave his or her message in the most shocking language available because the goal was not to constantly comfort pew sitters with more and more forgiveness and “cheap grace.”  Prophets were out to wake people up from their stupor. The goal was to change people, to cause them to turn around, to live their lives another way.  The religious word is repentance.

But we have romanticized and domesticated prophets after their death. We made their disturbing radical words part of our bibles and thereby defanged them.  Look what’s happened to Jesus.  Whatever else he was about, he was a prophet.  In every gospel he gets in people’s faces, gets angry and argues with religious people, calls on folks to repent of their hypocrisy and false religion.  He cares about the poor, orphans and widows and uses shocking language to wake people up.  But if you go to most Christian Churches this Sunday, you will find a kind, loving, gracious, friendly Jesus palatable to the masses.  We take out all the juice from the message of the prophets and then wonder how worship services became boring.

And why were prophets killed?

Because they know who we were behind our disguises and masks.  They forcefully ask the terrible questions that silence us.  They get close and personal in our faces.  They won’t shut up.  They don’t care for tact. They are not religious diplomats, politicians or functionaries. They are out to change us, at the root. We honor them in retrospect but we would not have listened to them.  That’s why we kill the prophets.

Religion and Thinking

Some people have an incorrect view of religion.  They assume that religious people do not think or if they think, they do not think well.  Behind this assumption is the belief that religion has primarily to do with emotion and fear.  The argument goes like this:  People are frightened of death, sickness, accidents, tornadoes, failure, being out of control, you name it. . . Since they feel frightened they invented religion so they could jettison their fears onto an imaginary being called, God.  Variations of this argument come from Spinoza, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Kafka, Sartre, Dostoevsky and more recently the less sophisticated modern atheists.

This assumption and its supporting arguments are wrong.  Think about it:  For all the faith people have put in God and religion, the world remains a dangerous and volatile place and many religious people know it.  God and religion do not come with any guarantees or cures for undeserved suffering and evil. Praying to God in Synagogue, Church or Mosque will not keep craziness away from your door.  Suffering and evil are part of life and prayer does not stop it. 

People are religious because they care about truth.  If I trust at the heart of the universe there’s a force that is for us and not against us, it’s because I weigh the evidence and conclude, given the amount of order amidst the chaos within our world, given the laws of nature, given all that is here, given our scriptural glimpses, trusting in God is not foolish.  Faith may be risky but such is life. And when faith is mature it knows about the precariousness of life.

Granted, there are some religious people who use their religion as a balm to avoid looking at the craziness of life.  These people have faith but not a very mature faith.  And when religion is perverted it creates atheists and agnostics.  When I read about the god in which Atheists do not believe , I say, I don’t believe in that God either. 

I am a religious person because I care about truth.  Yes, I have emotions, fears and superstitions that can cloud my better thinking.  But when it comes to faith and faithfulness, I am determined to look life in the eye and not be afraid of any question from any person, field, or source.  As a person of faith, I try to think and think well.  I know that I could be wrong.  That's why, I am always asking questions.  But, Religion and thinking are not opposites; they are inextricably linked.

The Honesty of the Book of Job

The Book of Job is arguably the most mysterious, confusing, controversial, and puzzling book in the Bible.  Over the last two thousand years, learned commentators upon commentators from a variety of religious perspectives have wrestled with this book.  There are all sorts of theories as to what is going on in these strange chapters.  Here are a few of my thoughts:

Whatever else you can say about the Book of Job, it's a story that lets us know the Biblical writers were aware of the problem of underserved suffering and evil, even if they could not resolve it. 

Job is a good man.  He is not a sinless man but he is a person of character, a religious man.  He fears God and turns away from evil.  Near as we know he is not Jewish.  He is relatively successful.  As Job is going about living his life, God is pictured having a conversation with Satan.  Remember, this is not the New Testament devil.  This Satan is a reporter.  He reports to God on how well religious people are being religious.  He raises questions with God about Job’s sincerity and God agrees some tests would be appropriate.

Suddenly, a messenger arrives: The Sabeans came and stole all your oxen and donkeys killing your servants.  I alone escaped to tell the tale.  No sooner does that occur, another messenger appears:  A fire from heaven burned up the sheep and the servants.  I alone escaped to tell the tale. No sooner does this happen then another servant appears:  The Chaldeans came and killed the servants and stole all your camels.  And I alone escaped to tell the tale. There is a crescendo of terrible news.  Messenger after messenger comes and goes until, the last messenger tells Job: Your sons and daughters were partying and while they were partying a horrific wind came, blew down the house and killed them.  I alone escaped to tell the tale.   Then, the final test:  Job himself is struck with sores all over his body. 

At first, he grieves, accepts his fate as we all must.  God gives, God takes, God be blessed.  Such is life.

Then, his friends show up, grieve with him, after which they try to convince Job he deserved what happened to him.  Job is not pleased. Enough is enough!  And so, begins a theological argument which goes on for over forty chapters. Eventually God shows up, does not explain to Job about the tests, but commends Job and not his friends.  God gives him twice as much as he had before. 

Nothing resolved here.  That’s clear.  In fact, the book does not end with God being depicted as moral or immoral or even wise.  God is amoral.  God is God and does not need to play fair.  God can do whatever God wants with no need to explain.

The Book of Job, written as a response to the Babylonian exile and the breaking of the covenants with Israel, allows the problem of innocent suffering to remain a problem.  It has no satisfactory resolution because there is no satisfying resolution.  Jews, Christians and Muslims are left to defend an unfair God who is indefensible. 

One of the odd things about the Book of Job is its impressive refusal to pull any punches.  Undeserved suffering is a problem and it remains a problem to this very day. 

Job and his wife Mrs. Job are metaphors for all human beings.   They are everyone who has ever lived.  They have no choice but to go on living, have more children, more belongings, more of everything, knowing it can all be gone in the blink of an eye.

This is our world and the Biblical text is honest about it, aware of the craziness of life.  Yet, Job remains our teacher.  The Book of Job would have us look God straight in the eye, hurl our protests and questions in his face, and refuse to accept the injustice of life.  Such is the character of our faith.  There may be no more honest piece of scripture in the Bible than the Book of Job.

Religion and Retirement

 I love teaching and it appears I am doing it well.  So, why am I wrestling with retirement and what does retirement have to do with teaching religion? 

I grew up in the 1960’s.  We knew anyone who was over thirty had sold out to “the system” and was morally corrupt.  Simon and Garfunkel sang “How terribly strange to be seventy.”  Bob Dylan told us, “The times they are a changin.” We were young then and knew we would always be young.  But, we were wrong.  We all got old and here we are looking at each other and wondering what happened?  

I have colleagues and friends who have retired.  Some tell me they are enjoying not going to work.  Retirement for them means withdrawing from their occupation for the sake of privacy, rest and recreation. 

Retirement is a state of mind. It’s only been around for a little over a hundred years.   If you think you’re getting old and if you’re tired of what you’re doing and if you have enough money, I suppose you can withdraw and do something else.  I get it.  I respect it.

But I don’t understand retirement.

My teaching isn’t a job.  It’s a vocation, a calling, a passion if not from God then from my own soul.  There are questions which haunt me, which I am compelled to pursue.  And teaching students to think well, letting them know “attention must be paid” to such questions, is vital. And the pursuit of these questions keeps me alive!

I know, retirement is a very individual matter.  It seems people know when they know, it’s time.  And I know a time will come when I will no longer be able to teach.  Some disease will come along and take my energy and desire. I hope that is some time away.  At that time, I will be able to say to myself about my teaching:  I love what I did and I did what I could do. 

In the meantime, I have tests to grade and classes to get ready for the week.