Why I'm Obsessed with Religious Questions

I came to study Religion after completing my University studies; I decided to attend a Lutheran Seminary where, among other things, I became aware of the questions faced by all religious people including me.

Certain other events also contributed to my pursuit of questions.

When I was boy, my parents sent me to a Jewish parochial school, a Yeshiva, which I attended for six years.  This was where I was taught, in Jewish tradition, the question is more important than the answer to the question.  The Rabbis at Yeshiva Zichron Moshe, Steinberg, Frost, Lipshitz, amd Eisenblaat taught me to wrestle with the text and to love the questions. For half the day (8-12) we studied Hebrew subjects and for the other half (1-5) English subjects.   I was a much better Hebrew than English student.

Years later, when I was in the Air Force, on leave and trying to catch a flight from Germany to the U.S., I was put on an air transport which had only one seat left.  The rest of the plane contained coffins on their way from Vietnam, piled high, towering over me, almost right up to my seat.  We flew back together for seven hours.  I grew up on that flight and came to realize the terrible questions associated with war.

Most important was the Holocaust.  My parents rarely said much about those days.  Our apartment in the Bronx was a crazy place.  But as I grew up I realized I was the child of survivors.  And as I came to read the words of Elie Wiesel, imploring people to pray to God for the right questions, I was compelled to pursue questions about the character and nature of God, of human beings, of good and evil, of the Bible, of Judaism and Christianity, and the various religious traditions. 

The questions raised by Religion are vital:  What are we doing here on this planet?  How did we get here?  Is there any meaning to our existence?  From where did the material that came to be part of the Big Bang come from?  Is there a God and is that God involved in our world, which is to say, how does God work in human history?  What does God have to do with absurd suffering and evil, especially the Holocaust?  Is there an afterlife and if so what is it all about?  Why all this secrecy from God?  Why all the different world’s religions?  Why do some people hate and fear each other, while others do not? For good or for bad, Religion asks the big, mysterious, truthful, hard to get at, questions. And let’s be honest, the responses are usually tentative, limited and possibly wrong.

I have been lucky to have found a place that allows me to teach the questions which have haunted me all these years.  And I have been lucky to have found students willing to wrestle and slog through the difficult twists and turns encased within these questions. 

Btw, besides being haunted by the questions, I have come to love and be obsessed by them.

Jeremiah's Underwear

There is a funny and not so funny story about underwear in the 13^th chapter of Book of Jeremiah.  After the Babylonian exile, God tells Jeremiah to go and buy some underwear, go down to the local river, and bury the underwear under some mud.  Now, if God tells you to go and bury your underwear, what do you do?  You go and bury your underwear!  The Biblical prophets used odd, vivid and concrete illustrations to get their points across.

After some time went by, God tells Jeremiah to go back to the river, retrieve your underwear, which he does, and behold, it was dirty.  God explains to Jeremiah, when Israel was young she was as close to God as a person is to his or her underwear. In those days she was faithful and clean.  But since then, Israel has been disobedient, she has become like this dirty underwear, gross and nothing to which you want to get close.

I love this story because it talks about how intimate God is with Israel.  In our time we are puzzled as to the whereabouts of God.  I get it.  I understand.  But in this story, God is closer to Israel than underwear.  Think of how close you are to your underwear right now.

God lives among the clean and dirty, the light and the darkness of our existences, in what is apparent and what is hidden, God is intimate with us, as close to us as our underwear.

But here is the surprising thing:  In this story, though distressed by Israel’s behavior, disappointed in their forgetfulness, God does not forsake them.  God accompanies Israel into exile.  God is pictured as being married to Israel and Israel is married to God. Their fates are inextricably woven together.  And God is present and intimate with them regardless of what they do.  Jews call this “hesed” or kindness.  Christians call it “grace” or unmerited love.  Either way this story of Jeremiah’s underwear tells us something about the character of God.  God is intimate with us regardless of the way we act. And, by the way, we are intimate with God despite the way God acts.   Exactly what this means and how it plays its way out in our history is, I grant, mysterious and puzzling, to say the least.

Jeremiah’s point in telling the story about underwear was to get Israel to repent, to change, to come back to her husband, who loves her unconditionally.   The word repent means to turn around and live your life differently.  Jeremiah and all the prophets, including Jesus, call on people to change at the root, to repent.

This weekend is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot or Weeks or Pentecost, that day when Jews remember and relive standing again at Sinai to receive God’s teaching on how to live life, the Torah.  The poetic instructions of Torah create a wedded intimacy between God and the Jewish people that can never be divided, not even by dirty underwear.

So, when and if you wonder about the whereabouts of God, remember Jeremiah’s underwear! God may be closer to you than you think.

Why Do Some People Keep Hating Jews?

It’s been over seventy years since the Holocaust, the awful attempt by the Nazis to kill every living Jew.  Most people know something about the horrors of that time.  The event has been taught, studied, debated, analyzed and examined.  Most people know that hatred of Jews is irrational and dangerous.

Yet, today, in the year 2018, antisemitism and hatred of Jews has not disappeared.  It may not be something you personally experience from day to day, but it is real, and it is not going away. 

And I ask myself, why?  Some will say the problem is the State of Israel.  The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may be the reason.  But, think about this: if tomorrow morning Israel were to disappear, would that stop some people from hating Jews?  Others say the problem is the long history of anti-Judaism inside Christianity and Christian scripture. But, If, tomorrow we could excise all the anti-Jewish texts in the Christian scriptures would that stop the hating?  Some say there is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world by controlling the world economy, the banks and the media.  If, I could show you how untrue and ridiculous this conspiracy theory is, would that stop the hating?

I remember hearing Elie Wiesel speaking at Augustana, saying how in the 1950’s, just ten years after Auschwitz, he was convinced the Holocaust would be the end of people hating Jews.  A few years later he said, “Can you imagine how naïve we were to think such things?”

So, why does it go on from generation to generation to generation?   I suspect the answer is fear and ignorance.  Some people are frightened and come to believe there are unseen forces controlling what happens in the world.  And “the Jews” are the traditional group waiting to be accused.  Though the fear of Jews is rooted in ignorance, it is fueled by an irrational anxiety satisfied with conspiratorial theories.  It’s a matter of faith.  Some people believe what they want to believe.

What can we do?  We must keep on and keep on educating and hoping we can get through the perceptual screen which does not allow facts to enter.  There is no easy remedy.  People remain people and on and on it goes.

As for me, I am sad and astounded at the persistence and resilience of this hatred. 

American Culture in the Trump Era

I may be turning into an old curmudgeon, but it seems American culture is deteriorating in front of our eyes.

The center will no longer hold.  American culture has always been held together by an idea.  We have not been bound by our various ethnic identities, nor by our religious commitments, nor by our economic status, nor by our political views.  We unite around the idea that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”  Despite our differences we are supposed to respect and tolerate each other.  This idea is at the center. 

But does the center still cohere?  What if we are lost, no longer sure about our democracy, our religious faiths, our President, our government, our fellow citizens, our military strength, our liberties, our right to privacy, our place in the world, and the stunning value of being an American citizen? 

The culture seems bored out of its collective mind.  We are the richest land on the planet, yet many people seem depressed and running to get stoned in whatever way they can find.  When I say “stoned” I mean so many seem desperate to escape by whatever means are available, from TV with its myriad options upon options, Amazon, to HULU to Acorn to the great Netflix.  You could sit in front of the tube all day and still not watch everything “you have to see” to not fall behind.  We run to escape from the emptiness of life through all sorts of drugs legal and illegal, social media with its inexhaustible sites, the newest action video games, anything that will get us away from the next minute of having to face ourselves.

While a part of me thinks what I just wrote above is true, another voice in my head says, you are too close to the culture to really know what is going on.  This voice wants to argue, you are being catastrophic, pessimistic and cynical.  It may not be that bad or any worse than it’s ever been.  

This other voice lectures me.  American culture, our democracy, as always, is wrestling between liberty and order. We are unsure about the limits, and more precisely the moral limits, so we push and pull from either side.  Some are eager for more change.  Others think we have changed too much.  Many in the middle are confused.  The politicians seem lost, corrupt or cowardly.  Such times bring out the buffoons, the haters and extremists.  And the more unsure we get, the harder the struggle and animus between the sides.  This too shall pass.  

I answer, perhaps, but at what cost?

 So, which is correct?  The side that thinks our culture is deteriorating or the side that says this is what we do, and we will be better off for having walked through the mess?  I hope for the latter but fear the former.

A Jewish Look at the Apostle Paul

Paul was not a Christian. Nor was he a convert.  He never converted to Christianity because there was no Christianity to convert to.  In Paul’s time the name Christian had not yet been coined.  He was a Jew first and foremost.  He lived as a Torah observing Jew and died as a Torah observing Jew.  He came to believe Jesus was the Christ.  And he came to believe non-Jews should be grafted into the Jewish covenant relationship with God.  He cautioned non-Jews to not get arrogant or snotty about their new faith.

For Paul, the words grace, faith, justification and Christ were important for non-Jews to trust and understand. He was convinced that Jesus Christ revealed the heart of God toward all human beings.  And that heart was centered in the love of God as he knew it from Jewish tradition.  Paul affirmed his Jewish tradition when he declared, despite all the craziness that happened to people in their lives, nothing would separate them from the love of God.

Most of his beliefs, especially the “despite” talk had always been part of what it meant to be Jewish.  If you read his chapters 9-11 in his letter to the Romans, Paul affirms that even without Jesus, God made promises to the Jewish people, and God has a special relationship with the Jewish people that will never end.  For Paul, Torah was the revelation which helped him define the meaning of Christ.

I agree with Mark Nanos, a Biblical theologian you should Google, if not read (www.marknanos.com).  He posits Paul as a Torah observing Jew who started small sub-groups or associations of non-Jews in the hope to make them as Jewish as possible.  His writing makes a lot more sense of Paul that any other interpretation I have read.

If Nanos is correct, while it still does not diminish the differences between Jews and Christians, it does challenge the way too many Christians have understood Paul, as a Jew who gave up Judaism, Torah and the Jewish community to become Christian.  Nothing, it appears, could be further from the truth. 

Common Words, Uncommon Meanings

There are words we all commonly use and think we know what these words mean.  Words like God, Jesus, Jew, Holocaust, evil, and death.  We commonly use these words as if to say we understand but the fact is we do not.

These words possess weight, heft, timber, threat and mystery.  Smart people, smarter than you or me, have investigated them for millennia and still their meaning eludes us.  But they are important words, vital words, and they will not go away for they touch something deep in our souls and they ought to.

We are creatures that long to understand what we are doing here on this planet that floats and rotates in black space.  And these common words with uncommon meanings pull at us because they are “limit” words.  They take us to those places where, if we’re honest, we know we do not know, but we act and talk like we know.

Look at the word Holocaust.  The word means burnt offering and gives the impression of something done to appease an angry god.  But the common meaning is that of a horrendous disaster and we think we know what that means.   But the word Holocaust points to something much deeper and profound, the ability of human beings to be inhuman and to arbitrarily and systematically murder a million children under the age of ten.  The horror of the event is so horrible we dare not get too close or precise for fear of what we will see and what it will do to us.

Or the word and name, Jesus.  Here is a man, a Jew who lived over two thousand years ago, some call him the Christ without a second thought, Jesus, who remains a mysterious puzzle to many of us wrapped and bound in ambiguous messianic scriptures, sophisticated theological language, awful Hollywood movies where he is always strangely pictured as having a British accent, Jesus, whose followers have loved and cared for the neighbor and who have also murdered the neighbor in Jesus name, Jesus disputed by Jews and Muslims with sound questions, weighted down with creeds, and dogmas and hymns and liturgies, books upon books and yet this poor Jew is still not understood.  For all the religious christological hoopla and faith, we do not know who he was and what he really accomplished.  Yet, the word Jesus, has an ongoing intricate place in our culture’s vocabulary.

There’s a wildness and a secrecy about these words that keeps us from getting too close.  Holocaust, God, Jesus, Jew, evil, and death:  all these common words along with others with uncommon meanings haunt us because they are so much part of our lives and yet we do not know what they mean.  We talk and write, not with these words but, against them.  And whether we are for or against them, they will not let us go. 

Mansplaining and Teaching Religion?

My wife tells me that I have a problem called mansplaining.  She says I explain things to her that do not require explaining and I sometimes do so in a condescending and patronizing manner.   Since she is quite honest and usually right, I am asking myself where I might have acquired this ailment.  Do all men have this problem or only male Religion professors and teachers?

Some have explained mansplaining as a combination of over confidence and misjudgment over what someone else (usually a woman) knows and does not know. 

I was not aware of my mansplaining, and I suppose it means I too easily and arrogantly assume I have knowledge which no one else possesses.  Or, the more likely, as a teacher, I am used to repeating myself since some students tend to forget and the exam is on Monday.

So, I hereby apologize to my wife for mansplaining and promise to be more aware and do better.