Adult Forum class at St. Pat's: A Jewish View of Death and Dying

Birth is a beginning
And death is a destination.
And life is a journey from childhood to maturity.
And youth to age;
From innocence to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion and then, perhaps, to wisdom;
From weakness to strength
Or strength to weakness - and often back again;
From health to sickness and back, we pray, to health again;
From offence to forgiveness,
From loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude,
From pain to compassion,
And grief to understanding -
From fear to faith;
And from defeat to defeat to defeat -
Until, looking backward or ahead,
We see that victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey, stage by stage, a sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning.
And death a destination.
And life is a journey,
A sacred pilgrimage to life everlasting.
 
That poem expresses in about 140 words the Jewish view of life and death. One of the fundamental beliefs of Judaism is that life does not begin with birth nor end with death. (Ecc. 12:7). In fact, Jewish thought anticipated the first law of thermodynamics – that energy is never created or destroyed, but simply assumes different forms – and so death is determined by the soul no longer animating the body, not the body expressing the soul, though this is mitigated by considerations such as whether the individual is suffering pain, and Judaism holds that we have an obligation to alleviate pain, even if it contradicts keeping the person alive as long as possible.

For Jews the soul is immortal and eternal – it exists both before and after death and passes from one phase to another. First there is the wholly spiritual existence of the soul before it enters the body, then physical life, then post-physical life in heaven or paradise, and finally life in the world to come that will follow the resurrection of the dead.
The second phase, the time spent on the earth in a body, is considered crucial, but we have to at least consider the possibility that, since this whole cosmology was made up by people in this phase, they may be giving it undue importance. Nevertheless, the ultimate purpose of the soul is considered to be fulfilled during the time it spends in this phase, presencing God in this world by finding and expressing Godliness in everyday life.

The Rabbis teach that there is a paradox in this in that for our actions in this world to make a difference, they must be the product of our free will. If we were to directly experience the power and beauty of God’s presence as we manifest it in this world, we would always choose what is right and lose our autonomy – so they teach that the soul is fully aware and cognizant up until birth, when it enters a condition of total spiritual blackout. We enter a world where the Divine reality is hidden, in which our purpose in life is not clear, and in which there is the appearance of evil and wickedness. In this condition of spiritual darkness, our positive and Godly actions are truly our own choice and achievement.

What we have to guide us in these choices is that the soul is fully saturated with Divine wisdom, knowledge, and vision – herein lies the paradox – we can’t see the truth, and we can’t know it with any certainty, but at the same time we do know it deep down – deep enough that we can choose to ignore it, but also deep enough that we can always access it – this is the choice; to pursue the Godly knowledge within us or to suppress it.

So the very physicality of our everyday life – its opaqueness, its self-centeredness, obsures all knowledge and memory of our Divine Source. This is what Einstein was referring to when he said:

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living things and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Because of this veil of illusion, we never experience the full satisfaction of our achievements in manifesting the divine will – achievement and satisfaction exist in different realms – achievement in the physical, and satisfaction in the spiritual – so Judaism teaches that the full reward for good works in this life will come in the next.

The third phase is what we call “heaven and hell,” but the Jewish conception of these is very different from the usual conception. After death, the soul returns to the Divine Source, together with all the Godliness it brought to the physical world by its manifestation of God. It also brings all its negative achievements – the result of the times it suppressed the “yetzer tov” – the Godly impulse – and gave in to the “yetzer hara” – the evil impulse. The soul now relives its experiences and experiences the good it accomplished during its incarnation as incredible happiness and pleasure and the negative as incredibly painful.

This is not punishment or reward, but simply what is called a “cheshbon ha-nefesh” – an accounting of the soul. The accounting is done by the heavenly court; the “judgment” comes by the soul itself confronting a reality of its own life from which it was sheltered in this world. The soul’s experience of the Godliness it brought into the world by its positive actions is the pleasure of heaven (Gan Eden), and its experience of the destructiveness it created through its lapses and transgressions is the pain of “Gehenna” or Purgatory.

The truth hurts, and it also cleanses and heals. The spiritual pain cleanses the soul of the blemishes it accumulated on earth and heals it; thus freed from its accumulated negativity, the soul is now able to experience the good it did and to “bask in the Divine Presence” created by the Godliness it brought into the world. Because the soul is, at its core, unadulteratedly good, the good we accomplish is infinite and the evil we do is superficial and shallow. So even the most wicked of souls experiences, at most, 12 months of Gehenna followed by an eternity of heaven. Also, the experience of Gehenna can be mitigated by the actions of those who are still alive – through prayers and good deeds performed in their memory. Similarly the soul of one who has passed remains involved in the lives of those it leaves behind, deriving pain or pride from their deeds and is able to intercede on their behalf before the Heavenly Throne.

The final phase is “the world to come.” Once humanity as a whole has completed its mission of making the physical world “a dwelling place for God,” comes the era of universal reward – the “next world.” Paradise or Gan Eden is a spiritual world inhabited by souls without bodies. The world to come is a physical world, inhabited by souls with (perfected) physical bodies.

But until then, we in this world experience death as loss, and Jewish tradition has combined this cosmology of death with the process of mourning. Studies of how people accept and move on from loss have shown that the first week, the first month, and the first year are critical. Jewish tradition calls for a week of intense mourning – the mourner does not leave their house, mirrors are covered, and the mourner sits on the floor or on a low bench. Others come to visit, entering without knocking, and bring food so that the mourner does not have to cook. Prayers (minyan) are held in the house of mourning. After the first week the mourner re-enters life, attending Synagogue daily to say the Mourner’s prayer in community and does this for a month. After that first month, the mourner is to resume their normal life and activities and prolonged grieving is forbidden. They say the memorial prayer weekly for a year, and after the first year annually and on specific holy days.

Sermon at St. Patrick's Episcopal Church 3 October 2010

The boy was only ten years old – a child of a happy family, living comfortably in the English countryside. Then one day his father was suddenly incapacitated by a stroke. The loving, attentive man the boy had known for all of his life disappeared and what was left was a bed-ridden, paralyzed, unresponsive shell.

Trying to maintain as much normalcy as she could, the boy’s mother insisted that the boy, his older brother and his younger sister go to school the next day, and so they did, but without much hope of having their attention on schoolwork. One of the boy’s teachers, an Anglican Priest took him aside after class and suggested they pray for the boy’s father. “But sir,” the boy said, “I’m afraid my father doesn’t believe in God.” “That’s alright” said the teacher “God believes in him, and that’s all he needs.”

The boy was Tony Blair who went on to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and who, after his political career, founded The Tony Blair Interfaith Foundation with the goal of countering extremism in all six leading religions as well as doing charitable work. He never forgot the lesson in faith he learned on that day at school.

The philosopher Alan Watts drew an interesting distinction between belief and faith. Referring to the root of belief in Middle English (lief = wish), he said that belief is a heartfelt wish that things be or turn out a certain way – in other words, there is a way things should be and a way they shouldn’t be, and belief is a wish that they be the way they “should.” Faith, on the other hand is trust. Specifically, trust in the truth – things are the way they are, and that is what there is to work with. In other words, the only power I have is to play the particular hand that I’m dealt and trust that I can influence how it turns out. In a specifically religious context there is a popular phrase “The will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you.” While of unknown origin, this phrase is consistent with numerous Biblical passages from both the Hebrew and Christian Canons and points to the essence of faith as trust in God and the world God has created.

This week’s readings, particularly the Psalm and the Gospel passage, are among the most famous in the Bible and are all about faith. In the Gospel, Jesus calls the Apostles to account for having insufficient faith – he says “ If you had even as much faith as a tiny seed, you could command a tree to relocate to the sea and it would obey you,” yet, he says, not only do they lack even that much faith, but they seem to think that they should be rewarded of doing the minimum that they should do – following Jesus and asking him to teach them.

All of the readings point to the importance of faith – Paul’s message to Timothy is basically “have faith: Hold fast the words, you’ve heard from me, in faith and love.” And along with the poetry of the psalm, the readings from the Hebrew Canon express the Hebrew people’s steadfast faith in God even in the face of exile and torment.

But, faith in what? In Voltaire’s Candide, Dr. Pangloss blithely asserts, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that this is “the best of all possible worlds” and we could choose to go blithely along trusting that everything is OK no matter how awful it seems – we could be passive and stoical and call it trust, but that seems like a tall order when things are going very wrong. When the Babylonians conquered Judea and the Hebrew people were exiled “to the rivers of Babylon,” they might well have abandoned their faith in God, and their religious practices along with it. They might have felt that the world is a random place and nothing matters, or they might have decided that the way to get along is to go along and adapted their faith to that of their captors, but instead they held fast – “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither” is not so much a statement of allegiance to a city or state as to what Jerusalem represented, even with the Temple in ruins and the people in exile – the Jerusalem they would “set above their chiefest joy” and the city that sits alone and weeps is a metaphor for their faith in God. Martyrs, through the centuries, both Jewish and Christian have held to their faith in God, saying with Job “though He kill me, yet I have faith in Him.”

In today’s world, we might opt for the inflated ego of faith in ourselves as the answer to it all – that this life is all there is, and we can manipulate it for the good of ourselves and our own. Or we might choose blind unquestioning faith in we know not what, like someone I knew who said that faith is “believing what you know cannot possibly be true.”
My personal choice is faith in God – not some anthropomorphic God – the proverbial old man with a long beard - but faith in a supreme power that is at the same time immanent – present and active, interacting in the world through us and our actions - and transcendent – more than the sum of human activity and human experience can comprehend - and that God is the unity of all life expressed in an infinite variety of ways, moving toward its own realization in that unity being re-established. In the words of the old hymn, “We are one in the spirit we are one in the Lord, and we pray that our unity will one day be restored.”

Belief is a one-time event – you decide what you believe, that decision divides the world into two camps – those who believe what you believe, and those who don’t. Call them good and bad, God and Satan, the way it should be and the way it shouldn’t be, it doesn’t matter. Even situational ethics or moral relativism does this – black and white ethics or morals are bad, situational or relativistic ethics or morals are good. In this sense belief is easy – it reduces to a bumper sticker, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

With faith it’s not so easy. First of all, faith has no proof – even if you say you have faith in “the word of God,” the question arises, which word? The Scriptures of every religion, including the Hebrew and Christian Canons, the apocrypha, the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of it, is rife with contradictions. If I have been uprooted from the land that my family has lived on for generations and transplanted to “the Rivers of Babylon,” what evidence do I have that life will return to what it was? The Temple has been destroyed, we have been settled in a strange land where we are expected to live as a subject people – what is the faith so strong that I can say “If I forget thee, o Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill,” when “gone is from the daughter of Zion all her splendor; her princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.” If I am a follower of Paul’s, seventy years after his death, and someone writes to me in his name telling me to “have faith,” what evidence do I have that there is anything real to trust in?

Belief-based religion is notorious for picking and choosing among the “word of God” to support particular views of what is right and wrong. Faith is above all trust – trust that there is a truth that is in Paul’s words, seen “through a glass, darkly;” and that will reveal itself when one is open to its unfolding.

And that trust is not a one-time event, it’s a discipline. By nature and by learning, we are predisposed to the question “is this good for me or bad” about everything in the world, and the “me” in that question quickly becomes “us” – our family, tribe, nation, etc. In other words, we default to belief and a binary world, and it takes work to recover our faith from our immediate reaction and return to a created position of trust and openness to how things will unfold. Also, in my own faith in God, I have to continually remind myself that while God’s will operates immanently – here and now - God’s perspective is transcendent and outside of time, so what appears to be an utter disaster now may in the long view be an important contribution toward the realization of that unity that is God.
So for me the question becomes how quickly can I recover from the latest threat or trauma and resume the discipline of faith, accepting what God/life offers me and discovering its significance (or lack of significance) in the fullness of time, while at the same time trusting that the commitments I have taken on – to my family, to the world – are also worthy of trust and that events that appear to be setbacks to those commitments will, ultimately forward them.

It is that practice of recovery that is the discipline of faith and the speed of recovery that is the metric for how much we are growing in faith. We will suffer setbacks and challenges to our faith on a daily, maybe an hourly basis. We will be tempted by to take the easier path and just believe, falling into the trap of excluding those who don’t believe as we do, and we may even, from time to time, lose faith altogether. Nietzsche said “that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Faith cannot be killed, but every time it takes a blow, the quicker we recover, the stronger we become in faith.

Paul as "The New Abraham" - thoughts on descent

Thanks to my friend Rafael for getting me off my ass to post this.

Paul considered himself the “new Abraham.” Abraham brought God to the pagan world as part of his covenant with God (“if you take me for your God I will make you the father of many nations”). Paul brought God (through Jesus) to the Gentiles, bringing the Gentiles into the Abrahamic covenant. This required a redefinition of descent from Abraham – Jewish tradition held (and holds) that Jews are the blood descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and that somehow this blood descent was transferred when non-Jews joined the faith.

Some thoughts about the whole issue of descent through consanguinity vs. descent through adoption.:

• Unquestionably, Isaac is the fulfillment/manifestation of God’s covenant with Abraham – no Isaac, no “father of many nations.”

• Equally unquestionably, Isaac is Abraham’s son by blood, then Jacob is Isaac’s, etc. However, with each marriage – Isaac to Rebecca, Jacob to Rachel and Leah, new DNA enters the bloodline. By the time you get to Moses, who also marries outside the tribe, there is an enormous admixture of “gentile” blood, and all of those people beginning with Rebecca are considered in the Hebrew bloodline. This goes on throughout the OT and throughout history, including Ruth, who is an ancestor of David, who is supposedly an ancestor of Jesus, presumably on his mother’s side.

• In most early societies, lineage is reckoned patrilinearly. While reflective of male dominance overall, this is problematic since only the mother can be known with absolute certainty, assuming the birth is witnessed. Starting around 1600, Jews began using matrilineal descent for this reason, but by then it didn’t matter. Reform Jews use both patrilineal and matrilineal descent to determine tribe membership.

• My point in all of this is that it’s essentially arbitrary. Judaism, while not a proselytizing religion, has always accepted converts (cf Ruth, again) and, incidentally, the Hebrew names given to converts are either Abraham and Sarah or ***** ben Abraham or ***** bat Sarah, emphasizing that even a “Jew by choice” is now considered to share in the inheritance of Abraham, i.e. the covenant.

So here’s what I’m thinking: The past is essentially an invention anyhow. Quantum physics suggests that past and future are both determined by present actions – see http://tinyurl.com/248xzqc and so we have a situation that is essentially made up from the jump.

Paul’s case that anyone who declares themselves into the covenant is in has a strong foundation – converts had already been doing so for a couple of millennia by his time, and while men had to be circumcised as a sign (and blood sacrifice) when they opted in, women didn’t have to do anything but say so (“whither thou goest,” etc.). What’s required is not a huge leap of logic or faith – God’s covenant with Abraham (individually) required nothing from Abe except to go where God sent him and make God his God. God’s later covenant with the Hebrew people through Moses was the one with 613 stipulations. Paul, whilst I don’t’ think he ever says so explicitly, is implicitly distinguishing between the two covenants – he says that Jesus’ message is that everyone can come to the Abrahamic covenant through recreating his relationship with God the Father, and Paul extends this invitation beyond where Jesus went by bringing it to the Gentiles. He also says that those in the Mosaic covenant can follow Jesus without any need for rejection or violation of the Mosaic covenant.

I think that this message, while controversial to some at the time, was within the ground rules of mainstream Judaism in the First Century – sects were forming all over the place, and since the Babylonian Captivity, all sorts of new stuff was happening – house worship, synagogues, Rabbinical study. Also, while the Torah explicitly states that not one word may be added or subtracted from it, the rise of the Rabbis (Tanaim) opened up interpretation and debate as a legitimate intellectual activity within Judaism, so in that context the Jesus Movement was just one more school of thought, particularly since Jesus never claimed to be the Jewish Messiah – it wasn’t so long after the Prophets that the notion of a new Prophet would have been too extreme or heretical. I think it was Paul who was controversial by extending the Abrahamic Covenant to the Gentiles without any requirement that they (a) take on the outward sign of that covenant, which was a command given to Abraham (Gen 17:10) and (b) take on the Mosaic Covenant as well.

So I think that the evidence for Paul seeing himself as an emissary from Abraham through Jesus is convincing. I think that the problem for Jewish followers of Jesus in his time was that, for them, the Mosaic Covenant was part and parcel of the deal – no Moses, no Abraham. A short time later, after the Romans returned and the Temple was destroyed, this notion became a problem for the Romans as well, first because it departed from the Jewish position of conciliation with whoever was oppressing them at the time. Rome had just gone through a period where that position was briefly and bloodily abandoned, so they weren’t anxious to see it abandoned again and second because of the fiscus Judaicus – if followers of Jesus had to become Jews, that was a whole new and expanding tax base for Rome; if they didn’t, then Paul’s teaching was essentially stealing taxpayers from them. Combine this with John and Luke who were basically distorting Paul’s teaching to create a new religion that, in addition to not paying as much in taxes to Rome was teaching that allegiance to God superseded allegiance to the Emperor and the Emperor was not divine, and you were bound to piss the Romans off as well as the Jews. Poor Paul.

Beware the Secular Taliban

In my last article I posed some questions and shared some thoughts on faith and what I think is the difference between faith and belief. As was the case with two prior articles on the Religion section of HP, this article drew a large number of responses ranging from appreciative to caustic. Since that posting I’ve read a number of articles in the Religion section and am puzzled by a pattern I think I’ve detected.

Not to pull rank, but by way of a relevant context, I consider myself a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in Neuropsychology and have studied biology, pharmacology, and (at an amateur level) quantum physics. Additionally, I’ve made a study late in my life of philosophy and theology. I find no essential contradiction between being a scientist and inquiring into philosophical or theological questions or even having religious faith. In this I find myself in the company of Einstein, Freeman Dyson, Charles Darwin and others as detailed in a recent post by Krista Tippett.

My theological thinking is, without doubt, on the radical end of the spectrum, so I’m used to being attacked from the right – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, even Buddhist from time to time, conservatives are offended by my lack of orthodoxy and my view that all institutional religions are (a) aimed at the same target and (b) fundamentally corrupted to the extent that they hold power over their adherents. What did come as a surprise was the vituperation I drew from those who proclaim themselves to be anti-religion, atheistic, scientific, and intellectual. Somehow the very fact that I consider this to be a legitimate area of inquiry seems deeply offensive to these folks.

So I have to wonder, what is so offensive? If I engage in an exploration of my own faith (and I distinguish faith from religion or belief), how does that harm those who would have you believe that they have settled the question once and for all. There is no God, all religions are false, and all those who profess any level of faith and belief are stupid. So why bother going online to call them names (it’s not just me, it’s anyone who posts from a faith perspective including the aforementioned conservatives who come in for their share of calumny from these supposed superior intellects)? One fellow was honest enough to answer that he just likes to argue, but most don’t.

I’ve come to believe that there is a scientific/intellectual right that is no less fundamentalist and no more tolerant of other views than their religious counterparts. Their belief system is one of the secular churches – science, mathematics, philosophy, etc., and anyone who does not think as they do is ipso facto evil. Oh, they would never use a term like evil – they use their world’s terms for evil – stupid, benighted, brainwashed, you name it.

What I will call Secular Fundamentalism is no more consistent with what it claims as its roots than Religious Fundamentalism is consistent with its own roots. Christian fundamentalism bears very little resemblance to the teachings or life of Jesus Christ, extreme Orthodox Judaism is more concerned with following rules than with the moral teachings on which Judaism stands, and as for Islamic Fundamentalism, the Prophet (PBOH) would barely recognize it.

My studies in science, philosophy, and theology have led me to a conclusion I consider both basic and inescapable. We know nothing for sure, and everything we think we know will someday be shown to be either false or only part of the story. As human beings we are very sure of what we know and equally sure that when we discover something we don’t know, we will figure it out. We are equally sure that there is nothing we don’t know (and don’t know we don’t know) that is worth bothering with. As Schopenhauer said: “every man mistakes the limits of his vision for the limits of the world.”

So to those who take issue with my exploration I say “yes, I may be wrong.” But to those who feel the need to be insulting and condescending about it, I say “what are you afraid of?” The 17th Century mathematician Blaise Pascal is famous for his metaphorical wager: If God does not exist and I act as if he does, I lose nothing. But if God does exist and I act as if he doesn’t, I lose everything.” On the face of it this seems to me to be a pretty cynical basis for belief, but even so it points toward an open mind that the detractors of religion seem to lack. As a psychologist, when I see a reaction that seems (a) intellectually inconsistent and (b) out of proportion to the stimulus it suggests to me that something is being threatened. It is human to resist being dominated by anything, even our own beliefs, and that is one reason I tried to make the case for faith as a more difficult but superior basis for the inquiry than belief – my detractors seem to have missed that point.

Belief is Easy - Faith is a Discipline

Alan Watts drew an interesting distinction between belief and faith. Referring to the root of belief in Middle English (lief = wish), he said that belief is a heartfelt wish that things be or turn out a certain way – in other words, there is a way things should be and a way they shouldn’t be, and belief is a wish that they be the way they “should.” Faith, on the other hand is trust in the truth – things are the way they are, and that is what there is to work with. In other words, the only power I have is to play the particular hand that I’m dealt and trust that it will work out. In a specifically religious context there is a popular phrase “The will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you.” While of unknown origin, this phrase is consistent with numerous Biblical passages from both the Hebrew and Christian Canons and points to the essence of faith as trust.

But even if we accept Watts’ definition of faith, we are left with some questions. First, faith in what? One might opt for a Panglossian faith that this is “the best of all possible worlds” and go blithely along trusting that everything is OK no matter how awful it seems, or one might abandon faith altogether for, on the one hand, belief or on the other hand the view that the universe is random and nothing matters, or one might opt for the inflated ego of faith in oneself as the answer to it all, or blind faith, à la someone I knew who said that faith is “believing what you know cannot possibly be true.”

My personal choice is faith in God – not the anthropomorphic God of Western religion, but a panentheistic faith in a supreme power that is at the same time immanent (present) and transcendent, and that is the unity of all life expressed in an infinite variety of ways, moving toward its own realization in that unity being re-established.

I am including this expression of my own faith not because I think it’s the right one or the best one but because I need an example for purposes of this essay and would not presume to use anyone else’s faith as my example. Which brings me to my point: belief is a one-time event – you decide what you believe, that divides the world into two camps – call them good and bad, God and Satan, the way it should be and the way it shouldn’t be, it doesn’t matter. Even situational ethics or moral relativism does this – black and white ethics or morals are bad, situational or relativistic ethics or morals are good. In this sense belief is easy – in the words of a bumper sticker, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

With faith it’s not so easy. First of all, faith has no proof – if one is to have faith in “the word of God,” the question arises, which word? The Bible, including the Hebrew and Christian Canons, the apocrypha, the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of it, is rife with contradictions. Belief-based religion is notorious for picking and choosing among the “word of God” to support particular views of what is right and wrong. Faith is above all trust – trust that there is a truth that is only dimly reflected in human beings’ attempts to represent it, and that will reveal itself when one is open to its unfolding.

And that trust is not a one-time event, it’s a discipline. By wiring and by learning, we are predisposed to the question “is this good for me or bad” about everything in the world, and the “me” in that question quickly becomes “us” – our family, tribe, nation, etc. In other words, we default to belief, and faith takes work to recover from our immediate reaction and return to the created position of trust and openness to how things will unfold. Also, in my own faith in God, I have to continually remind myself that while God’s will operates immanently, God’s perspective is transcendent and outside of time, so what appears to be an utter disaster now may in the long view be an important contribution toward the realization of that unity that is God.

So for me the question becomes how quickly can I recover from the latest threat or trauma and resume my discipline of faith, accepting what God/life offers me and discovering its significance (or lack thereof) in the fullness of time, while at the same time trusting that the commitments I have taken on – to my family, to the world – are also worthy of trust and that events that appear to be setbacks to those commitments will, ultimately forward them, and it is the practice of that recovery that is the discipline of faith and the speed of recovery that is the metric for how much I am growing in faith.

Talk at Tikkun Leil Shavuot, NTHC, May 18, 2010

After many years of labor an inventor discovered the art of making fire. He took his tools to the snow-clad northern regions and initiated a tribe into the art – and the advantages – of making fire. The people became so absorbed in this novelty that it did not occur to them to thank the inventor, who one day quietly slipped away. Being one of those rare human beings endowed with greatness, he had no desire to be remembered or revered; all he sought was the satisfaction of knowing that someone had benefited from his discovery.
The next tribe he went to was just as eager to learn as the first. But the local priests, jealous of the stranger's hold on the people, had him assassinated. To allay any suspicion of the crime, they had a portrait of the Great Inventor enthroned upon the main altar of the temple, and a liturgy designed so that his name would be revered and his memory kept alive. The greatest care was taken that not a single rubric of the liturgy was altered or omitted. The tools for making fire were enshrined within a casket and were said to bring healing to all who laid their hands on them with faith.
The High Priest himself undertook the task of compiling a Life of the Inventor. This became the Holy Book in which the Inventor's loving-kindness was offered as an example for all to emulate, his glorious deeds were eulogized, his superhuman nature made an article of faith. The priests saw to it that the Book was handed down to future generations, while they authoritatively interpreted the meaning of his words and the significance of his holy life and death. And they ruthlessly punished with death or excommunication anyone who deviated from their doctrine. Caught up as they were in these religious tasks, the people completely forgot the art of making fire.
From Taking Flight by Anthony de Mello -

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק, תִּרְדֹּף--לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה וְיָרַשְׁתָּ אֶת-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ.
Deut 16:20 Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive, and inherit the land which Adonai your God is giving you.

The key to understanding this oft-quoted injunction is to understand what is meant by צֶדֶק.. The word can be translated as justice or righteousness. The latter, in the context of Biblical times did not carry the sense of arrogance or self-righteousness that the word carries today, or in the religious context an overly showy piety or religiosity that may be sincere, but often is not. Instead it meant something more like conforming one’s behavior to God’s expectations – to do what is right is to do what is just, and vice versa. Similarly, “justice” can be understood to have more to do with living in the spirit of God’s expectations than living according to a code or rituals. Throughout the Tanach we find the terms “justice” and “righteousness” used interchangeably, for example in Amos:
וְיִגַּל כַּמַּיִם, מִשְׁפָּט; וּצְדָקָה, כְּנַחַל אֵיתָן. But let justice well up as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
And we find, notably in Deuteronomy and in Jonah the terms חמלה,compassion, רַחוּם, compassionate, and חסד, grace or graciousness closely associated, even equated, with God’s justice or righteousness
But in modern times a number of different forms of justice have been distinguished – three of the main ones are retributive justice, restorative justice, and distributive justice.

Retributive justice is, as is clear from the name, about retribution – justice in the sense of payback or getting even for a wrong that was done. Thus retributive justice always looks to the past to determine what is the “right” payback in the present or for the future. In theology it refers to divine retribution – punishment for failing to live up to God’s standards.

Restorative justice is also concerned with righting a wrong – in this case not by retribution or punishment but by restoring what was lost or taken away or by compensating the person who was wronged for the value lost.
Distributive justice means the just distribution of what is needed for life – food, clothing, shelter, etc. In a religious context we can say that it means just distribution of God’s gifts – divinely mandated economic and social justice, that God is equally available to all, that God’s spirit is distributed freely to each and every person and everyone has the power to transform God’s world into a place of that same justice and equality. In this view, there is no hierarchy – men don’t take precedence over women, Jews over Gentiles (or vice versa), rich over poor, etc.

צֶדֶק, justice or righteousness is also the root of הַצדָקָה, justification – to make just, and in the sense of Distributive Justice, justification must assume a common divine law for all humanity. This in turn requires that we posit one God who is the same for all people, Jewish, Gentile, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and non-believer alike. If we bring together all these terms – צֶדֶק, הַצדָקָה, חמלה ,רַחוּם, חסד – justice or righteousness, justification, compassion, compassionate, grace or graciousness we come to a sense that we are justified, brought right with God as a gift of God – that is, by God’s grace.

One writer draws an analogy to the air we breathe – “it is always and equally available for everyone in any normal place or time. We do nothing to obtain it, nothing to merit it, and it is there unconditionally for good and bad people alike. On the one hand it is absolutely transcendent, since we depend on it totally. On the other, it is absolutely immanent, since it is everywhere inside and outside us, all around us.”
The same author goes on to point out that air is a free offer that only becomes a free gift when we accept it and cooperate with it. Should we abuse the gift – pursue asphyxiation or hyperventilation, that is our choice, not the air acting on us. With God, as with air, it is a matter of collaboration and participation with what is already there, everywhere.
צֶדֶק – God’s righteousness, that is God’s very character as distributive justice, is, like air, a free offer that becomes a free gift through our participation with it, through our collaboration with God in tikkun olam – transforming the world. It is from God’s free offer of God’s own spirit – the primary distributive justice - that the secondary distributive justice that transforms the world will come.

We accept God’s offer by faith. For example, Habakkuk says וְצַדִּיק,בֶּאֱמוּנָתוֹ יִחְיֶה – the righteous shall live by his faith. Faith is to justice as breathing is to air – we accept the offer by participating in it. Don’t hear “faith” here as “belief.” They are vitally different. Alan Watts points out that the root of belief in middle English is lief – to fervently wish for. Faith, on the contrary is commitment to a program. To have faith in צֶדֶק is to commit oneself to being God’s partner in transforming the world into a place of love, joy, and peace through engaging from our heart and spirit. One familiar example of this is צדקה – charity, but not just giving money once a week or even once a day, or giving clothes or food at different times of the year (though both of those are good and worthy forms of charity), but day to day, minute to minute engagement with being charitable – with recognizing that God’s justice includes the even distribution of God’s spirit to all as a free offer, and that whether they accept the offer or not (because unlike air, which we decline at the cost of our life, God’s grace can be accepted or declined), the next person is as worthy of it as I am.

It is only if we remember this last point that we can avoid the trap of righteousness, or what our Christian neighbors call “works without faith.” As Jews we have a great structure of law that can be seen as the external manifestation of our covenantal relationship with God – 613 commandments, of which probably no human alive can keep all of them. As Reform Jews we have chosen to look to the spirit of the Law rather than its letter – with Hillel the tolerant and liberal “loose constructionist” of the Law, “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary — and now go study.” And some of us do go study and others don’t. In either case, when we turn from “faith with works”– living in conformance with the spirit of God’s law however we understand it – to following the letter of the law in the belief that that alone makes us good people – “works without faith” we find instances of Hasidic Rabbis who steal and embezzle, Catholic Priests who molest children, and all the other so-called “abuses of religion” we have seen over the years.
To bring God’s justice to bear in this world is possible only for humans by virtue of our being created in God’s image in that we (and apparently only we among God’s creations) share with God the ability for what has been called time binding. This is a term coined by Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics. Korzybski posited that all living things engage in bindings at progressively more complex levels. Energy binding is what all life forms do in the process of converting ambient energy for use in their life processes. Space binding is performed by animals and to a much lesser degree by some plants in their various activities as they claim territory. Finally, through language and culture, human beings perform time binding by the transmission of knowledge and abstractions through time which become, by accretion, cultures.

Put more simply, animals, which bind energy and space, simply repeat the same instinctive actions over and over again, and each generation must acquire the same learned behaviors for itself. A dog today does not behave very differently from a dog in Biblical times. Human beings, on the other hand, pass on the lessons they have learned from generation to generation, and each generation builds on the learnings of those that have gone before. In the Tanach, particularly in the Torah, God is not static and unchanging. Rather, the God of Noah, who destroys most of life on Earth becomes the God of Abraham, who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and is at least open to possibly sparing the cities, becomes the God of Moses who tries nine non-lethal plagues before destroying the Egyptian first-born, the God of Jonah who spares Nineveh. In Exodus we are introduced to the attributes of God:

1. Adonai — compassion before man sins;
2. Adonai — compassion after man has sinned;
3. El — mighty in compassion to give all creatures according to their need;
4. Rachum — merciful, that mankind may not be distressed;
5. Chanun — gracious if mankind is already in distress;
6. Erech appayim — slow to anger;
7. Rav chesed — plenteous in mercy;
8. Emet — truth;
9. Notzer chesed laalafim — keeping mercy unto thousands;
10. Noseh avon — forgiving iniquity;
11. Noseh peshah — forgiving transgression;
12. Noseh chatah — forgiving sin;
13. Venakeh — and pardoning.

Which Maimonides asserted are the essential ways God operates. As Maimonides interpreted these 13 attributes, they are the essence of God’s justice and therefore of the justice we are to pursue – compassion, mercy, graciousness, truth, forgiveness.

Einstein said “All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they have not behind them a living spirit." Following the rules, whether the 613 mitzvot, the principles of Reform Judaism, or the 13 attributes of God must be an expression of faith, not a substitute for faith. It’s an uneven proposition – works without faith is easy, but if I may borrow from the Christian canon, faith without action is no faith at all. Action is the natural expression of faith – it’s almost an oxymoron to talk about faith without action. The living spirit that Einstein is referring to is God’s own nature, offered to us through God’s distributive justice – it is God making us “just” like God,– this is what is meant, I believe, by human beings being created b’tzelem Elohim in the image of God, and like God we are free by nature – free to accept the offer or to decline the offer. To accept it is what we Habakkuk means by ֶאֱמוּנָ – faith – working toward a reclaiming of the world in partnership with God.

Working for justice, mercy, equality, and the equal value of every human being regardless of race, gender, sexual preference, skin color, economic status, religious belief, or any of the other irrelevant external factors that fool us into forgetting the Shema – that God is Unity.

The Question of Jesus and Christ: Part 2

My posting in this section a couple of weeks ago (I’m Down with Jesus, it’s Christ that Gives Me a Problem) drew immediate responses and a larger number of responses than anything I’ve written on HP to date – like twice as many. The nature of the responses varied greatly, from serious engagement with the questions I raised to doctrinaire chiding that I was attempting, through “over-intellectualizing” to deny the deity of Christ. Some were appreciative of the inquiry, others snarky to downright nasty. A number attempted to deny that Jesus was a “mere Jew,” which is somewhat astonishing to me.

A predominant strain in the critical responses was to quote Scripture to disprove what I was saying, even though I made it clear that my inquiry began with a commitment to distinguishing what we (and scholars and theologians) can reasonably agree are likely to represent Jesus’ actual words (what Jesus said) versus what others such as John, Luke, and the early Church Fathers wrote and attributed to Jesus (what others said Jesus said and what others said about Jesus). I think it is the failure to make this distinction that is at the heart of the difference between those who would describe themselves or be described as “fundamentalists,” those who are more or less in the mainstream of Christianity and those who are making a serious study of Christianity.

Fundamentalism in America is generally considered to have begun with the Niagara Bible Conference (1878–1897) and is based in what are called the "five fundamentals"
• The Inerrancy of Scripture
• The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus
• The doctrine of substitutionary atonement by God's grace and through human faith
• The bodily resurrection of Jesus
• The authenticity of Christ's miracles (or, alternatively, his pre-millennial second coming)

My post addressed the second, third and fourth of these (though not the virgin birth), and by distinguishing what Jesus said from what others said he said or said about him, the first by implication or assumption, and this is what seemed to strike a nerve amongst my critics. Somehow fundamentalists seem to be able to reconcile the “inerrancy” of Scripture with the massive contradictions that there are between different accounts of the supposedly same events.

Also, the notion of inerrant scripture is, to me, untenable based on transcription and translation. In his book Misquoting Jesus Bart Ehrman makes the point that Scripture began as oral transmission that was then written down. In the absence of printing or other means of consistent reproduction, it was copied by hand, with inevitable errors in transcription. Translation of the writing into languages other than those in which it originated also led to errors of translation and differences of interpretation, raising the question of “which scripture?”

Finally, there were clear political agendas in some of the translations – for example, the King James Version translates Matthew 26:28 as “For this is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” Leave aside for the moment that the statement (at the Last Supper), if made by Jesus at all, would have been made in Aramaic but is rendered by Matthew in Greek. The Greek is “Touto gar estin to aima mou tēs diathēkēs to peri pollōn ekchunnomenon eis aphesin amartiōn” (This is my blood of the covenant which is shed on behalf of many for forgiveness of sins). There are two glaring differences here between the KJV “translation” and the Greek “original.” First is the substitution of “testament” for “covenant” διαθήκης (diathēkēs) can mean either and also “will” (in the sense of “last will and testament”) in Greek, but in English the two words have different meanings. A testament is a witnessing (cf “testimony”) or a statement of how one’s possessions are to be distributed after death. A covenant is a binding pact. The terminology “blood of the covenant” echoes Exodus 24:8 "So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people and said 'Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with these words.'”

More troublesome, though is not the questionable translation but the insertion of a word that is not there in the original – “new testament (or covenant)” for “testament.” By adding the word new and obscuring the reference to Exodus, the KJV translators drove a wedge into the already wide gap between Jesus and his Jewish roots.

I will say again that, in the teachings we can reasonably attribute to Jesus himself, there is nothing – not one thing – that contradicts or breaks with the Judaism of what came to be (thanks to the KJV) the “old” testament. In this most moving of statements of his legacy, Jesus tied the events of his life and imminent crucifixion to the seminal event of Judaism, the making of the covenant with God at Mount Sinai.

So as I said in my earlier post, I have no problem with Jesus. I’m just trying to understand the Christ event – the crucifixion and resurrection in the context of Jesus’ life and teachings as a Jew who never claimed to be anything but “the son of man,” a term which is not understandable except in the context of the time when that term (in Aramaic bein enosh) simply meant “a human being,” and was in common usage. It was not unusual for people in those times and that language to refer to themselves in the third person, and “son of man” was a common way to do this. The prophets use that term as did other people, and it manifestly does not mean “son of God.” Jesus may have been using the term to emphasize that, even as a prophet and teacher he was a human being among human beings.

I believe that Jesus’ message was what he said it was – asked what was most essential in God’s teachings, Jesus replied “to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your power,” which is the verse in Deuteronomy at the heart of the Shema(“Listen Israel, the Lord, your God, is unity”) and to love your neighbor as yourself. As to the Christ event, whatever happened there, the message seems clear to me – never lose hope.