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.

Hybrid Religion

As a young boy, my parents instructed me “do not forget that you are a Jew” and be a good American.  They did not tell me how to do that.  They brought me up to accommodate the Jewish and the American parts of my identity, to negotiate, every day in all sorts of ways, between these two aspects of my life. Without saying so, my parents were bringing me up to engage in “hybrid religion.”

Hybrid religion is figuring out how to be religious when you are surrounded by a different religious culture. If you are religious in America, you do so under the umbrella of American culture.

Some of us are not happy about this so we ty to isolate ourselves and avoid the culture as much as we can; others love American culture and have made their peace with it, but most of us are in the middle constructing our own hybrid religion.  Many of us, including me, are committed to building a bridge between our religious tradition and American culture. We are not sure how to do that.  We struggle between accommodating the parts we like and resisting the parts we find offensive.

Here is the secret:  This is what religious people have always had to do.

Each day we balance our religious commitments against the overbearing culture in which we live.  What do I accept, what do I embrace, what do I resist?  This is what we do each day. Of course, there will always be somebody to your right who will complain that you are not merely accommodating; you have capitulated to the culture.

The key is to be wise enough to know what is required for our hybrid religion to have integrity. Here is where the true argument is and has always been.  Religious people have had to figure out how to have integrity “while still participating in the culture that surrounded them.”

As a Jew, I decide what parts of my tradition to embrace and what parts to let go. Christians and Muslims face the same situation.   God’s expectations are, in all of this, at best arguable.  Such is the dilemma of hybrid religion.

Live Despite the Fear

My mother was a worrier.  Having escaped the Nazi madness, she was determined to be in control of her life.  No longer would she be surprised by sudden evil.  When someone knocked on our apartment door, she worried about who was there and interrogated the identity of the person, even when that person was her own son.  When the phone would ring, she panicked about who was calling with terrible news.  Worry, anxiety, and fear were her way of controlling the uncontrollable. I remember one day telling her she should leave our one bedroom apartment, go outside and enjoy the beautiful sunshine.  She refused saying, “It’s sunny now but it will soon be raining.”  My mother had seen craziness up close and she had learned to be afraid of life.

More than any other command in our scriptures and traditions is the exhortation, “do not fear for I am with you”, “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not fear”, “Fear not, I am the Lord your God”, and on and on it goes.  We are told that we are accompanied by God; we are encouraged and excoriated to not be afraid.  In fact, in the Bible, when someone tells you not to fear, that is precisely the time to begin to worry, you know craziness is on its way.

Here is the problem.  Telling us to not be afraid does not stop us from being afraid.  Fear is a deeply felt unconscious emotion.  And, by the way, there are people, events and things we ought to fear.  My mother was not completely wrong.  Walking in heavy traffic ought to scare you.  The thought of nuclear war is frightening.  Tornadoes and hurricanes cause us to run for cover.  Cancers, heart attacks, ALS, Alzheimer’s and all sorts of other diseases scare us and they ought to.  

We fear what we cannot control.  We are frightened of violent people, unpredictable diseases, and natural calamities that suddenly come out of nowhere and attack us without reason.  But that is life.  Right? What can we do about it?  What can I do about fear, with or without faith, since it seems to be such an intricate part of our being human? 

After my father died, my mother who rarely left her safe apartment, went outside, and got a job working at a bakery.  She had to get up every morning at 5 a.m., catch a bus that took an hour to get to the store and then take the same bus an hour back to get home at 7 p.m.  She fretted, was worried and scared but she acted anyway.   Fear is real, and while some people will say, “Just have faith and everything will work out”, the rest of us know better.  We get up and face the day.  And the day is not always easy.

Over the years, I have come to respect and admire the courage and tenacity of my mother. Despite her worrying, panicking and fear, she survived the Nazis, got married, emigrated to a strange land, raised two boys, cleaned the apartment within an inch of itself, and worked in a bakery. She left that legacy to me and my brother. She showed us, courage is the ability to act despite fear.  Hats off to Pola Haar!

And if you think about it, you and I do this all the time.  In this part of the world we periodically have tornadoes.  They can be terrible and damaging.  Yet, we keep living here.  We overrule the fear and say. “Yes, I am scared.  I feel the fear at the core of my being.  Yet, I will not let it overtake my ability to make decisions.”  “I will not let the fear stop me from living my life.”  Many of us get in our cars every day and join the rest of the drivers knowing that accidents can happen.  Despite the fear, we keep on keeping on.

It takes courage to get out of bed in the morning and go outside.  So, it’s ok and normal to worry, feel anxious, be afraid.  Feel the fear but do not let the fear run your life.  Yes, craziness may attack you but resist its power.   Live your life despite the fear.  If my mother did it, so can you, and so can I.  By the way, living as a “mensch” “despite the fear”, is the heart and soul of all religion!

A Jewish Reflection on Good Friday

Today is Good Friday.  It is a day when Christians remember the killing of Jesus as a day of salvation.  The murder of Jesus is paradoxically understood to be both a tragedy and the gracious act of a merciful God.  In so many Churches across the world the event will be theatrically reenacted, preached about, hymned, and hailed as a day of sadness and salvation.  In and through Jesus death, Christians proclaim, the world is saved from the power of sin, death and evil.

As a Jew, I think of this day differently.  In so many ways and on so many days Good Friday was a dreaded day in the Jewish community.  It was a day when Christians would relive the death of their Lord and once again blame the Jews for having murdered their God. The cross came to be a symbol of pogroms, abuse, vandalism, and much worse. 

Things have indeed changed.  Seventy years after the Holocaust many have recognized the terrible things that were done in the name of Jesus and the cross.  We have come to know each other better.  We have become friends.  We work together.  We marry each other.  We are reconciled.  All is good!

What has not changed is the story.  It is Good Friday and once again the story is told, is read out loud, about the Jews conspiring with the Romans to kill Jesus.  The Gospel stories many not have been originally intended as an indictment against all Jews for all time.  But they have functioned that way for two millennia. 

On this Good Friday, both Jews and Christians need to remember and be aware that the Gospel stories can function in a toxic manner.  On this Good Friday, let us remember what happened.  Let us refuse to forget.  And let us all say, “never again.”