P’kudei: Anoint & Hallow (Exodus 38:21-40:38)

At the end of exile comes the cloud, the in-dwelling presence of YHWH, the Shekhinah. It seems a common (if not perhaps universal) human desire for what William James called the MORE, that experience of oneness, of awe, of in-breathing, of breaking down the barriers between self and cosmos. P’kudei continues the long, repetitive description of offerings, processes, plans, and building of the Mishkan/Ohel but the patterns that emerge in the text possibly point to a metaphor for the struggle to draw forth, hamshakhah, the MORE into the everyday world of work and life.

With each passing passage of the accounting of the building materials and of the avodah of construction comes the phrase “as YHWH commanded.” A description of the dedication (chanukah?) of the mishkan through anointing and hallowing the structure, the clothing, and the priests follows the accounting. And the whole sidrah is capped off with the descent of the presence of YHWH to dwell with Israel in “all their journeys.” Here human labor becomes the dwelling place of the divine; work becomes a means to experience the holy; by extension, could this be a way to think of daily labor, daily banal deeds? Or is it limited to the creation of structures and ritual objects? Limited to the priests?

The students of the Maggid took this one step further by seeing the whole thing as a physical manifestation of a spiritual process. While maintaining the historical importance of Israel’s history, the early hasidic rabbis saw in the construction of the Mishkan in the wilderness to end the exile as an allegory for the inner wilderness where the soul wanders, and to the ability of the soul to build its inner mishkan, to labor to create within oneself a space for the divine by constructing a mishkan of mitzvot and the whole Torah, both written and oral. The Orah le-Hayyim taught that the intention of the builders of the Mishkan was so strong that it evoked desire within the Shekhinah to dwell among them; the individual’s intention in doing mitzvot and in studying torah can cause the Shekhinah to dwell within her or him, making the individual a Tabernacle of Testimony.

Rabbi Or Rose teaches that in these passages there is a tension between the Hasidic teaching that the entire earth, all of creation, is filled with the presence of YHWH, but that we must build the mishkan within in order to feel, experience, see that presence. The tension is resolved because the immanence makes the experience possible. But it is only available to us through our own effort to build the mishkan.

Vayak’heil: Tzedakah, Uplift, and Work (Exodus 35:1-38:20)

I’ve been rereading and studying Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism over the past week for a course I’m teaching on cultural theory. I’m not sure if this is why I focused on the labor themes of the text or not, but I could not help but wonder at the relationship between skill, work, and calling as they are described in the text. Many online commentaries of this parasha zero in on the Shabbat injunctions at the beginning and riff on that, but for me, that’s the least interesting part of the parasha.

In Fox’s translation, a few words and phrases get repeated and associated repeatedly throughout the passage in reference both to the offerings of materials to build the Mishkan and in regards to the workers actually creating it:

• to raise
• to lift up
• to make-willing, to be willing
• wise mind, wisdom
• spirit and mind

There is a feeling in the text, in the way that these concepts get repeated over and over in Fox’s translation, that one is impelled to offer (donate) as the words are repeated both for the mind being lifted up to offer and then the individual Hebrew lifting up that offering. There’s a sense of being impelled or called to offer and then that offering is lifted up for the building of the Tabernacle. The same language is then used for the workers who actually build the Mishkan, that their minds are infused with wisdom and have been raised up with wisdom from YHWH to do the work.

The URJ commentary points to the historical existence of Hebrew arts—sculpture, architecture, mosaic, painting, etc.—and explains the historical distancing of the Jews from representational art. But I wondered as I read about the Torah itself which seems to “lift up” artisanship and art and skill in labor and creation as wisdom and as a calling from YHWH, as part of the creative work that humankind must do in relationship with the Divine.

It wasn’t until I looked at the Speaking Torah portion for Vayak’heil that it all came together. The Maggid’s students took these passages and, in a mode of רמז and סוד interpretation give us a mystical, Jewish understanding of labor. Because I’ve been reading about Calvinist readings of labor this week, I feel pushed to distinguish the two, but there is some significant overlap here as well.

In two separate places, the rebbes teach that when we are working in mindfulness of what it means to work as a creation of YHWH, it hallows all work and is a manifestation of humans participating in the ongoing process of creation. The Me’or Eynayim calls this Torah within us, that what impels, motivates, or pushes us to act for good in the world is actually Torah itself, and we are vessels. In the passage describing the work of women on the Mishkan, the T’semah ha-Shem li-Tsevi interprets קל אשה to mean not just merely all the Hebrew women, but rather, all womanhood itself, which would then be the Sh’khinah; here, it is the Sh’kninah that impels or motivates work, and we are the vessels of that cosmic impetus, again participating in ongoing creation.

There is a meditative mindfulness about work here that distinguishes it from the Calvinist concept of “vocation.” Rather than fulfilling one’s earthly role for the sole purpose of the glorification of god, the Rebbes taught that we are co-creators with the divine, that the divine works through us, and that through mindfulness of this dynamic we participate in creation itself. (This dovetails with the chasidic teaching that Betzalel, the chief architect of the Mishkan, was a master of the Hebrew letters who knew how they were used to create the world, and deployed them to create the Mishkan in reflection of the original creation.)

The editors of Speaking Torah contradict the current, extreme versions of chasidism that insist that these passages actually refer to study, so the eschew work and deny the dignity and holiness of the workaday world (a dynamic that has caused significant problems within the state of Israel). They argue that the teachings are clear that the labors of daily life are themselves a sacred activity with the possibility of sacrilizing daily life; in the editors reading, the Me’or Eynayim actually says that mindful work the rest of the week is what actually makes the Shabbat holy.

Whereas Calvinism’s vocation is about holding one’s nose to work in the social structure for the sole purpose of glorifying god, the Maggid’s teachings about work combined with my reading of the parasha see the spirit or mind being implanted with knowledge or skill necessary to participate with Torah/Sh’khinah/YHWH in creation itself. Work, in this way, is an end or process toward unification with Keter, toward the negation of the self in the recognition of the self as vessel for the divine. In the Hayyim v’Hesed, a comparison of Jacob and Moses leads to a teaching that as Moses turned away from the body in his recognition of his own nothingness compared to God, so did Jacob turn toward his body and make it whole and perfect by using it. Because the world is fallen and utterly depraved, this kind of sanctification is not possible in the Calvinist view, and indeed would be blasphemous.

There is a kind of mystical experience, then, associated with everyday work, but it is unclear in the Hayyim v’Hesed (at least in the passage quoted by the editors) whether or not this is an ideal (Moses as exemplar) or a command. But reading deeper, it seems to be rejected by the Rebbes as it is in the banal, every-day world of the body and work that the divine is made present in the world.

That leaves me with several questions at the level of practice. How can mindfulness of the Torah/Sh’khinah working through a human vessel be incorporated into an experience of daily work? And does the nature of the work matter at all? Is all work (all deed?) holy by definition, or can that mindfulness lead you to the realization that your work is not holy or hallowing? If Ya’akov hallowed himself through his embodied working, but if Moshe’s sanctification came from self-negation, then what is the relationship between embodiedness, work, and sanctification of the world (tikkun olam)?

T’tzaveh—Holiness through Light & Blood (Exodus 27:20-30:10)

Without You, we are nothing at all. So whatever holiness we call forth, it is really as though You were calling and doing it all. Our mind and strength are entirely Your own. … All our deeds are nothing more than a response to your call. When we turn ourselves toward the good, fulfilling Your pure will, it is just like [You] responding [to Yourself.] — ‘Avodat Yisrael

The confession of undiminished astonishment is rare in a literature that is so used to providing answers and explanations. In the end, we are being told here, they are all worth nothing. All we can do is stand before the mystery—and go on living and following God’s word in this strange world. —Editors, Speaking Torah, Vol. 1 

T’tzaveh continues the instructions regarding the mishkan, but moves to ritual practices and purgations and hallowings (kadesh-ings) of the priests. In several places I read this week the reminder that mishkan and shekhinah share the same Hebrew root (but nowhere did anyone actually give the root). But with a little sleuthing, I found the root שכן, to dwell. It is to the relationship between holiness and in-dwelling, the relationship between the physical (the mishkan) and that which dwells in it (the shekhinah) that I found myself returning to through the week.

The text of the parashat moves quickly and frankly from the ‘eternal light’ of the menorah through the bloody rituals of sacrifice. But nearly all the commentary I found on the text focused almost exclusively either on the imagery of the light of the menorah from the first few verses of the parashat, or an anthropological explanation of the rituals of animal sacrifices and the significance of blood to the ancient Hebrews. On the second count, I found myself wanting more depth and complexity. Clearly, the ancient Hebrews saw blood as something essential, a substance of deep significance in the structure of life and the world as they saw it. And just as clearly, the post-Temple rabbinic tradition has replaced blood and ritual sacrifice with notions of transcendence and in-dwelling. But I want to know more about the ways that such rituals function culturally and the way they are experienced. I suspect there are some good anthropological texts out there that treat such things; I will need to look for them, however.

When I was preparing for the hatafat dam brit, I read several commentaries on the ritual of shedding of blood of convert men, including a book about circumcision called Covenant of Blood by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman. Hoffman’s views are pretty critical of the ways that blood rituals developed from their ancient roots through Rabbinic judaism; and he begins with a willingness for the ancients to be seen as responding to their lived experiences rather than what we moderns might judge as bloodthirstiness or simple wrongheadedness. Yet it was hard for me not to read the passaged about spreading blood around the altar, smearing blood on the priests, and purifying the ground with the blood of animals in terms of its primitiveness, superstition, and violence. One of my teachers, Rabbi Wolf-Prusan taught me that much of what motivated the ancient Hebrews was about the mystery, frustration, and precariousness of embodied living, trying to make sense of life and death, the combination of living consciousness and a mortal body. In that framework, I can read the passage in its context and I can appreciate the significance of ritual as an effort to hallow the ground, the place, and the people.

One pattern stood out to me in the descriptions of the high priest’s vestments, a pattern of remembering, which seems to be a central theme in Judaism, not to forget what has happened before, and to bear the burden of memory as a sacred burden. The Torah describes the priest’s clothing in terms that made me think of them as mnemonic, not in a literal memorization sense, but in the sense that remembering is itself a kind of sacred act. Here is the pattern that gets repeated several times throughout the parashat (with a couple different variations)

to bear
the names (of Israel)
over your (the priest’s) heart (or on his shoulders (the ephod))
in the mishkan
to remember
in YHWH‘s presence
regularly (marking the time)

This ritualized, almost poetic, repetitive of the act of remembering becomes a practice of awareness of identity and relationship, and marks a kind of liminal enactment of the relationship between the physical and the kodesh.

Perhaps this is why I’m particularly drawn to the brief passage in Speaking Torah that I began with above. I still find myself struggling to define or understand or grasp in some meaningful way, other than experientially, the Holy. And maybe at the end, really all we can do is stand before that mystery and wonder.

T’rumah (Exodus 25:1-27:19)

We Children of Israel are forever building up our entire selves to become dwelling places for divinity. … We Israelites are called upon to build up the full form of shekhinah (= mishkan) by using our entire selves. … The verse [Exodus 25:8] does not say ‘within it’ but ‘whihin them’! … This is what we have taught: that each of us must build up our entire self to be a fit dwelling of divinity. Then God indeed dwells within us. This is what the holy Zohar meant when it taught that the form in which the world was created, the form of the mishkan, and the human form, are all the same.

— Malbim, Or ha-Me’ir quoted in Speaking Torah, Vol. 1

A common idea among modern liberal Jews is that Torah is an emergent phenomenon arising from the ongoing, centuries-long dialogue, debate, and struggle of Jews with the text and with each other about what this founding document might mean. Torah is both communal and accretive, in this view. But some parts of the text are easier than others to have this kind of dialogue, and this middle section of Sh’mot baffles me, not at the p’shat level—it’s anthropological origins in ancient middle eastern cultic practice are clear, fascinating, and interesting—but at the deeper levels.

As I wrap up the week of study, I keep coming back to the idea that the משכן (mishkan) stands for the immanence of the Divine, of holiness, both in that it is human constructed—that is, we create the holy space—and that it is “in our midst.”

The Text (Monday)

I seem to have picked an inauspicious (or perhaps immanently auspicious) parsha to start my Torah blogging with. Reading it on the morning train on my way to work, it was hard to keep my eyes from glazing over. The seemingly endless descriptions of curtains, poles, and slaughter-sites feels really disconnected from life of a modern Jew. I understand the symbolic and anthropological import to the mishkan, but knowing such doesn’t change the construction instructions into scintillating reading.

Fox’s commentary with his translation offered some interesting ways to frame the building instructions from the anthropological point of view, that the dwelling place of the divine is the earthly locus of the divine presence, the axis mundi, to borrow Eliade’s phrase. Fox argues that the litany of materials and measurements are the message of the mishkan passage, culminating in the injunctions about Shabbat (next week’s parsha). I like this idea of the measurements and materials being a human expression of perfect proportions and perfect matter, but it is difficult for me to make something meaningful out of that. [But i love the imagery of the winged-sphinxes (usually “cherubim”) protecting the holy witness of divine will.]

Commentaries (Thursday)

Reading the commentaries this week, I find myself thinking mostly about the relationship between human action and holiness, about how we are partners in the acts of creation and in the making of holiness in the world. I’m sure I’ve been quite influenced by the contemporary Judaism of which I’m a part, which takes the Lorianic Kabbalah and makes the key ideas of tikkun olam as central to Jewish worldview and life.

After Sinai, the moment of complete immersion in the presence of the Eternal, the people must wander away from the axis mundi, the center of the universe in Sinai [thinking Eliade here], but the mishkan allows them to take the presence with them. That they must construct it themselves emphasizes the humanness of making holiness and the human responsibility in kadeshing (if you’ll pardon a coinage) the world we live in. To extrapolate from Rosenzweig’s argument that these chapters of Exodus are actually the pinnacle of the Torah, this is the moment when a formerly enslaved people were able to turn their work, the labor of their bodies, to something higher, and to do so of their own free will. Questions about what we are working for and why come to the fore—am I building a mishkan, as it were, or a pyramid?

I also like the centrality of wandering to this line of thinking about the mishkan. This is a story of people in exile, used to living apart from the holy place, and it creates a bridge between the physical, historical land of revelation and the wandering people. The divine goes with you, if you build it. [I first encountered the idea that one of the Hebrews great innovations was that you could take your god with you, and did not become subject to new gods when you moved (or were forced) from one land to another in Karen Armstrong’s work when I was in college.]

Sod (Shabbat)

The early hasidic masters seem focus on the spiritual meaning of the mishkan and the meaning of making an offering, a t’murah (literally an ‘uplifting’). Reading the redactors’ commentary, it is no wonder that I found earlier this week the fact that this is a portable, moveable dwelling place so appealing, as it is both the divine presence for the diaspora and the interior experience of holiness from practice, which is what drew me to Judaism in the first place. In the No’am Elimelekh, we learn that the mitzvot can, depending on your intention, serve to open the heart to experience the divine in this world, again emphasizing the immanence of the divine and the connection of holiness to human acts.

Thinking about the Malbim’s command to build a dwelling place for the divine in your own heart, and Rabbi Green’s response to the idea, I keep thinking about the ineffability of Sinai, the overwhelming experience of oneness with YHWH and the experience of covenant, and the desire, maybe the drive, to put it into words or to somehow make it real, thingly, but the impossibility of doing so. It strikes me that the mishkan was empty; it was a physical shell, but there was no god within it. You cannot make an image of g-d because the physical cannot contain the expanse of olamim, the eternal Being itself; and what you can make, a dwelling, leaves us with awesome emptiness and silence.

Torah Study

Much has happened since I stopped posting on this blog, including my official conversion to Judaism following all the halachic steps (hatafat dam brit, beit din, and mikvah). After yamim nora’im, I decided I was going to do a more focused torah study this year, following the weekly parashot. I wanted to dig into the text a bit deeper than I have in the past, so I’m doing a three-part study following the tradition of Torah reading on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbat.

On Mondays, I read the parasha itself, using the Everett Fox translation.

Thursdays is modern/scholarly commentary day, usually using the URJ’s Torah; as I get the money, I’d like to use the URJ’s women’s torah commentary, the Conservative movement’s Eitz Chayim, and the queer Torah commentary. But for the moment, money restricts me to the standard. I also have the Oxford Jewish Study Bible which has lots of great notes on the Hebrew.

And on Shabbat morning, I read Speaking Torah, the hasidic commentary as collected by some of the best neo-Hasidic rabbis in the United States, Arthur Green, Ebn Leader, Ariel Evan Mayse, and Or N. Rose. Speaking Torah has kinda broken my mind open as it more or less refuses that p’shat reading altogether and goes straight to sod.

Since the Jewish tradition is to study Torah in pairs or groups, but I’m a single guy living alone, I thought I might see if I can use the internet to get some dialogue. Paraphrasing the old Talmudic tradition, when Rabbi A speaks, the voice of heaven says he is correct; and when Rabbi B speaks in direct opposition, the voice of heaven says he is correct; and when Rabbi C says “But they contradict each other!” the voice of heaven says he is correct, too.  So my assumption is that all voices are important and welcome even where they directly contradict.

Practice & Holiness

Why practice a religion? Why keep commandments? Why observe the ritual practices of any tradition, let alone Judaism? I imagine that for some people who no longer believe in a personal god, or who have a historical or anthropological view of religion, practice and ritual are the contextual, human-made acts of superstition or cultural identity. And they are correct. But that is only the beginning of the story. To understand that humans evolved brains that can perceive their own insignificance in the face of the universe, that is, who can feel awe; to know that our brains evolved in a way that we perceive things that aren’t there; or to know that culture, including religion, emerges out of social interaction in specific times and places and is modified to meet human needs; etc.; is merely to know where religion comes from.  But knowing all of that does not erase the real effects of religious practice on individuals and communities, nor does it negate the powerful meanings it generates for adherents.

So clearly, for a rationalist who believes in evolution and in the historical, human production of the Bible, the meaning of ritual, practice, and observance cannot rest upon the ancient convictions that they were given or commanded by a supernatural God. Nor can they end with a mere sociological or functionalist explanation. Can religious practice be meaningful for a rationalist, beyond being an expression of ethnic identity or group fealty?

My own reasons for practice are largely personal, experiential, and ethical, and even aesthetic. I find meaning in the ritual that marks the passage of time and marks time as sacred, both in shabbat and in the holidays; it gives structure and flow to the cycles of my life. I find davening to be a kind of meditative focusing of attention in the sacred, to what is important to me, both in my personal shacharit and at shul. I find the reading of Torah on Saturday mornings to connect the communal to the historical through language and ritual, as it takes multiple people to read correctly. In short, I like practicing Judaism.

Recently I have been reading books about the spiritual aspects of Jewish practice, and one notion has really caught my attention: that Jewish attention to ritual detail and to arguing about how to observe is itself the sacred practice that grounds us in the importance of what we are doing here and now. In a Mormon context—with mandatory belief and constant surveillance—arguments about practice were always expressions of power and domination. They can be so in Judaism as well; but because Judaism’s whole worldview sees sin and salvation and time differently, it feels different somehow. This Rabbi argued that the argument itself is a practice that constantly reminds us of our earthy, embodiedness and our embeddedness in a community. Jewish practice is about being present and paying attention to what we are doing right now. The rules of Judaism and the joy in small things like challah or a shabbat double mitzvot (wink) emphasize its nowness, the holiness of the life we live, rather than a life deferred or to come.

The holiness code in Leviticus, which Christians read as antithetical to salvation, turns out to be the core of not just the rules, but the meaning of Jewish practice itself: To be holy, because God is holy. In his book Sinai & Zion, Dr. Jon D. Levenson, a professor of Hebrew Bible at University of Chicago, has tried to show the Jewishness of the Tanakh, and to reclaim Torah from Christian misreadings. His approach is to explain Jewish theology as expressed in the Torah by seeing it historically and anthropologically, and to carefully peel back the Christian prejudices that often fail to see what is actually in the Torah.  Levenson argues that the mitzvot are terms of the covenant, demonstrations of commitment to the suzerain יהוה.

Levenson’s history of Hebrew monotheism, while threatening to some traditional believers, to me humanizes the ancient Hebrews and shows how one group of people, over thousands of years, created its own unique relationship to the universe and to the sacred. Levenson argues that the Hebrews created, through their conception of a covenant with יהוה, a three level theology, which I then borrowed into my own vision of the panentheistic divine as described by Rabbi Green in Radical Judaism.

The Hebrews focused their belief in one god (historically, by ignoring or discrediting other gods). In modern radical Judaism, I would say that Judaism sees the unity and holiness of all Being, of existence itself, of the universe as a whole, in terms of our relationship to it and our consciousness of it. I also think of the mystical explanations of the breath of ה–שם that connects us all, in each breath, to the ongoing creative unfolding of the universe.

The Hebrews central religious tenet was to love god wholly. I feel this love as a deep sense of connection to all of “creation,” to the earth and all living things, and to the universe as a whole. Many eco-Jews today anchor their environmental ethics in this relationship to creation. But it is the fact of existence and knowledge that I exist within and as a part of all existence that a kind of openness breaks open in a love of the divine.

Levenson explains that in Torah, history led up to the covenant at Sinai, and after Sinai are the mitzvot, the ongoing, day-to-day actions that link the people to יהוה. Levenson’s reading of Torah suggests strongly (although he doesn’t say it) that observance of the mitzvot is the means of constantly enacting the relationship to the divine.

In a literal sense, historical, anthropological, the mitzvot are a cultural creation.

But in choosing Judaism, I think what I’m doing is throwing in my lot with the Jews, saying that I choose to take upon myself that relationship to the divine that they have created over the past couple millennia, to commit myself to a Jewish practice as the way my life will be an expression of the sacredness of existence.

Confronting Torah—Some Preliminary Steps with Heschel

The Bible is not an intellectual sinecure, and its acceptance should not be like setting up a talismanic lock that seals both the mind and the conscience against the intrusion of new thoughts. Revelation [the Bible] is not vicarious thinking. Its purpose is not to substitute for but to extend our understanding. (273)

Since I began this journey 18 months ago, I have been avoiding really grappling with what I think of The Torah(a) (i.e., the Pentateuch) and the Tanakh (the Bible). Having spent a good deal of my life studying critically the production and reception of texts, and having studied in my early 20s biblical high criticism, and having studied  the history and sociology of Christian fundamentalism (which is a particular, uh, problematic relationship to the Bible text) in graduate school, I just didn’t see a place for the Bible in my spiritual life. Indeed, until recently I hadn’t picked up a bible, except out of curiosity or to look up an allusion in nearly 15 years. In February and March, I briefly tried to study the weekly parashat, before giving that up in frustration with the arcanely offensive ancient text.

I have recently returned to reading Heschel’s God in Search of Man—which I had laid aside last fall after becoming frustrated with Heschel’s theism—having realized that I have much to learn from Heschel even if I don’t share his belief about god or his conception of faith. This was partly precipitated by a Shavu’ot study group that focused on the meaning of Torah for liberal Jews, where we discussed Heschel’s belief that The Torah requires interpretation to be meaningful and complete. After reading more of Heschel’s writings on Torah this morning, I still find myself struggling with his theism; Heschel is far too concerned with the “divine inspiration” of the prophets for my comfort. But I also find myself excited by his understanding of The Torah as a text and his notion of how to approach the text as a Jew.

In Ch. 27 “The Principle of Revelation,” Heschel lays out some key principles that I find important for my humanist approach to Judaism and for a meaningful approach to the Bible and to all of Torah. Here are my interpretations of Heschel’s principles of approaching Torah through text.

1. Text vs. Meaning: Heschel distinguishes between, on one hand, the text—including its literary and historical production in a specific context—and on the other hand, the meaning of the text. For Heschel, the true content of the Torah is not the same thing as its literary “frame”, which is human. This distinction helps me settle into reading the Bible, because it allows me to maintainthe space for textual and historical criticism and, although I probably have a slightly different idea of this than Heschel, it maintains the possibility of meaning and interpretation.

2. Text as Dialogic, Holy with Human: For Heschel, the Bible is a record not of God’s revealed Word as such, but rather, of the prophets’ interaction and response to that revelation. I would go a step further toward a humanist reading, where the Bible represents historical and local records of a people’s (or individual’s) efforts to understand their experience of the Holy, in particular political, cultural, historical moments. For Heschel, the Bible is necessarily dialogic, the “word of God and man; a record of both revelation and response” (260). As a non-theist/humanist, the importance here is in the dialogism, the relationship of humans to experience; that it is always interpretive and responsive.

3. Text as Incomplete and as Hidden: In Mormon mythology, there is a story in the origins of the Book of Mormon, that Joseph Smith only translated 1/3 of the book; the other 2/3 of the book were sealed. Harold Bloom, in his interpretation of Mormonism as “the American religion”, compares this piece of the Mormon origin mythology to parts of Kabbalah, where the emphasis is placed on hidden and future knowledge. Heschel reads parts of the Tanakh to say that much of torah remains hidden or unrevealed; knowledge as yet unknown. For Heschel, a large part of reading The Torah and the Bible is in the yearning for that hidden, as yet unknown knowledge. There is something profound in both the Mormon and the Jewish notions of hidden knowledge, of mysteries unrevealed—human life is characterized by having a brain that yearns to know its environment, and which evolved to do so through conscious problem solving. But that very capacity, our evolved consciousness, also makes us aware of the fact that we don’t know. In fact, we know very little. This sacrilization of the unknown and of the desire to know are indeed, for me, a driving force in my life at large. Heschel argues that the Messianic age will be characterized by a revelation of what is hidden. In a humanist judaism, the messianic age is not a literal time, but rather a state of the world that we strive to bring about through, for example, tikkun olam. The hidden knowledge can become, in a humanist reading, the knowledge one gains by leading a dedicated, ethical, engaged, curious life.

4. Text as Common, Mundane, Human, and Ugly: Heschel argues that the divine truth of Torah is hidden in the robes of the every-day human experience of the people who wrote the Bible, and that, indeed, the holiness can be hidden within the most mundane or even offensively human of concerns. I cannot help but see The Torah and the Tanakh as the production of a people in a time and place, albeit for me the record of one people’s (the Hebrews’) struggle to understand and make sense of their experience of the ineffable, the holy. Heschel’s teaching leaves that human layer in place; but he believes that underneath that outer human layer lies the divine truths.

5. Text as a Container of Meaning: This leads Heschel to an interpretive move that resonates with my education in literary criticism: The text is only the vehicle for our understanding, for our meaning-building from the text. Heschel offers a metaphor of a clothed human: The obvious, historical, human layer of the Bible is the clothing; the general principles and ideas of the text are the human body underneath the clothing; but the real meaning of the Holy, the soul of the human, the actual Torah, requires insight, work, and struggle. Heschel goes so far as to say that only those who were at Sinai can pierce through the text to the Soul. Again, the theistic framing doesn’t work for me; but what does work for me is the centrality and location of meaning as being in the engagement with the text. For Heschel, Torah isn’t the text itself, but is within the text, like wine is in a jar (268). The text of the Bible is mere container or surface. This resonates with some post-structural textual criticism that I still find useful in dealing with cultural texts and objects.

6. Text Requires Engagement: Through several different points, I think Heschel is arguing that texts are not inert, stand-alone objects; they are rather living, breathing, human entities that exist only in our interaction with them. I gather this from Heschel’s insistence that the prophets of the Bible by definition challenged god/the divine and argued with god/the divine; that biblical passages change meaning over time as context and history and experience change human perspective; and that truth comes only through the courage to look beyond the surface level to how something actually is or actually works.

7.  Text Requires Philosophy of Religion: Heschel argues against two approaches to text. First, the fundamentalist approach to the Bible falsely assumes the Bible is self-contained and self-sufficient, and ignores its history and production. Second, the rationalist approach which may in its overconfidence eliminate the possibility of meaningful interpretation. His critique of rationalism earlier in the book bothered me as incomplete and as apologia; but here it resonated with me, as I have read scientists railing against human culture generally, as if the kind of empirical truth scientific method can produce is actually the source of all knowledge (e.g., Sam Harris’s recent work on morality) and as if scientific method weren’t itself structured within value systems and historical moments. So I’m fine with being cautious about a rationalist approach to textual interpretation. Heschel proposes the philosophy of religion approach to the text as the antidote for both, as its purpose is to lead us to “higher knowledge and understanding.” Here he loses me, as I’m not sure what “higher knowledge or understanding” would even mean. Rather, I would argue that the antidote for both fundamentalism and problematic rationalism would be a humanist-rationalism, one that takes science and history and sociology seriously, but one which understands the human need for and process of meaning making and which also takes the human experience of holiness (not its empirical existence or non-existence) seriously. This will be a place that I will need to work out in detail in the future.

8. Text as Interactive and Ongoing: Finally, and for me, most importantly, Heschel explains the Jewish/rabbinic approach to the Bible, one which I experienced first hand at this week’s Traveling Shavuot study groups. Torah is, essentially, not the text; rather Torah is the interaction of Israel with the text. The call to study The Torah is in fact a call to continue this interaction, this struggle with text, in order to produce Torah. If The Torah (or the Bible) is seen as complete and self-contained, it becomes a stumbling block to true understanding and to truth. Heschel goes so far as to argue that those who claim a fundamentalist relationship to the Bible can never have Torah at all, because they have foreclosed the possibility of struggle and interpretation (274). “Judaism is based on a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation,” he says. Torah is both written (the text) and oral (interpretation and communal dialogue). Jews speak often of Israel as “struggle with god”; but here, Israel becomes “struggle with text”. He then flips the claims of authority that mark Christianity’s approach to truth (as well as Islam’s): “The source of authority is not the word as given in the text, but Israel’s understanding of the text.” Torah is in the life of Israel (struggle with god), not in a literal book. Without a continual, ongoing, never-ending effort to understand, the text is just paper (275).

What I loved about Heschel, in the end, was his approach to the Bible as text, rather than as the word. It can be boiled down to a couple key points that are compatible with my humanist values: the text is human and historical; and the text’s meaning and holiness comes from our dialogic interaction with it. I’m sure Heschel would be uncomfortable with my leaving out revelation; but as always, for me, holiness is in the human experience, the encounter with Existence, the Universe, and with our own dyingness.

teku

Note:

(a) In Hebrew and the Jewish tradition, the word תורה can mean several different things: the particular five books of Moses; or more generally law or teachings; and in the rabbinical tradition, torah can be oral or written, the entire body of knowledge of judaism and jewishness. For my purposes here, when I type The Torah (with caps) it refers to the Pentateuch; when I type it without the definite article, it will be in reference to the broader idea of teachings or laws.

Toward a Meaningful Daily שחרית (for Humanists)

This past spring, I took a course with a Reconstructionist rabbi (with Renewal leanings) who is part of our synagogue community. The course covered the Shacharit and Shabbat Torah service, and it had the unintended side-effect of convincing me that I needed to look more carefully and seriously at the notion of prayer and its role in my life as a Jew.

My childhood and young adulthood associations with prayer are thoroughly theist, patriarchal, and heterosexist. But I also cannot deny some powerful experiences I had praying in the Mormon mode, especially the day when I was 22 years old that I had decided to kill myself because I was gay, and telling God—whom I believed was a real, anthropomorphic being at the time—what I had planned while sitting at the bottom of Bryce Canyon in southern Utah. I no longer believe that my experience came from an outside divine force, but I definitely believe that having been reduced to nothingness, I was totally open emotionally and spiritually to see clearly (and being in the red rock desert always clarifies life for me). What I felt, like a light going off in my head, was that if I died then at age 22, I would miss a lifetime of love. I think I sat there for about an hour with my mouth hanging open. Then I got up, walked back to my car, and went back to my studies.

Between leaving Mormonism and choosing Judaism, my most serious and regular practice had been basic vipassana meditation in the (lesser wheel) buddhist tradition. I had been a casual buddhist for about 15 years, and meditation had been my practice of choice on many levels.  I discovered buddhism when I was still at BYU during my senior year, through Thich Nhat Hanh, but didn’t start seriously meditating until I read a book by Jack Kornfield around my 28th birthday. My experience with meditation and reading buddhist psychology and philosophy opened me up in a completely different way. The constant practice of accepting what is and of being open to the here and now transformed in ways that I still cannot articulate (and to be clear, I still need this daily practice; I’m a bit of a cling-er, grasper, holder-on; I’m also an idealist who rages against the imperfection and injustice of the world).  Buddhism also showed me a path to ethical living that I had been unable to find in Mormonism, because buddhism insists that you see the world as it is and other people as they are. So I have had important and powerful experiences of holiness before and outside of Judaism (and frankly I don’t see that changing).

As I posted about a couple months ago, I have been working through the rabbinic teaching that prayer has three phases, Praise, Thanks, and Asking, and thinking about what that could mean in a more meditative vein, and especially what it means for someone who isn’t sure he believes in a g-d at all.  So I finally decided about three weeks ago to take a leap of faith, and begin doing a small modified  שחרת  before breakfast in the morning. I’m using a combination of the Siddur Sha’ar Zahav (from my somewhat frum Reform shul) and the Koren Siddur (British Orthodox). By modified, I mean that from the Orthodox siddur, I cut out a lot of text and I cut out all the clothing bits (tsitsit, tallit, and teffilin). Here’s the order of my Shacharit:

• Modeh ani
• Asher yatzar et ha-adam (I call this the “orifices” prayer…teehee)
• Elohai n’shamah (my fav)
• Morning brachot [I use the SZ siddur here for feminist, disabled-friendly, non-ethnocentric language:
  נברך את עין החיים יוצרת השולם, etc.]
• Ha-Gomeil chasadim tovim [I am currently really taken by this line:
  ותננו היום ובכל יום לחן ולחסד ולרחמים בעיניך]
•  Sh’ma

I have some struggles with these prayers, mainly because the traditional language makes a couple of assumptions that I don’t believe, e.g., that god is a conscious, agentive being; and that god is a ruler or sovereign of some kind. So why pray this stuff? Why pray at all?

I’m not sure I know yet. But one of the things that drew me to modern, liberal Judaism is its willingness to look at tradition, ask hard questions, and rethink our relationship to tradition and most importantly development meanings for it that make sense in our context today. SZ’s siddur has some beautiful readings especially associated with the Orifices Prayer and the Daily Blessings. But also, being who I am and where I am in life, I also can just sit there and think about what something means. Then there’s the simple experiential aspect where the hebrew functions as a kind of mantra, a sonorous and embodied swaying practice of focus and attention. I’ve been trying to find traditional melodies to sing the prayers, but am not having a lot of luck; I have found a Yemini melody for the Modeh Ani and Elohai N’Shamah, and another for the Sh’ma that I love, but which are difficult to sing early in the morning. In any case, beginning the day with what amounts to a 15 minute long remembrance of the miracle of being alive and gratitude for your body is, for me personally, a very good thing.

Still, I wonder why I’m doing this. As I’ve said many times on this blog, I came to Judaism for the practice, because I know that I need in my life regular focus and attention and structure to keep my mind contained, at least minimally, and to remind myself of my actual core values. What has shocked me in this process is a couple of things that I’ve learned by accident, just by doing the practice.

First, on a personal level (if you’ll permit), I have spent a long time, a very very long time, ignoring and hating my body; I didn’t quite understand the depth of that hatred until the past few weeks. 41 years at war with my own body. The daily ritual of confronting myself with gratitude for that body has been jarring and awakening. Where that will lead, I don’t yet know.

Second, there is an interesting layer of meanings with the “melech” language of traditional prayer. On one hand, it really goes back to pre-Babylonian captivity semitic Battle of the Gods (i.e., where various peoples and tribes were vying for control of the pantheon). This is the Hebrews claiming that their god is King of them all! Then there’s the later monotheistic layer, where the Jewish diaspora, along with Christians and Muslims, conceived of the One God as ruler of the universe, as supreme sovereign; and where theology developed around submission and helplessness. I think I’ve been inspired somewhat by Rabbi Green’s insistence that, despite some of our modern democratic discomfort with the Melech language, we need to keep it. Rabbi Green argues (if you’ll excuse an oversimplification) that it keeps the balance of Justice and Mercy in the works if we maintain and embrace the Melech language.

But I have come to think of the King/Ruler image as something a bit more important, in a buddhist sense. There is in the Orthodox siddur a long prayer leading up to the Sh’ma wherein the davenner works through the power and limitlessness and ultimateness of god in a way that, I have come to realize, works to eliminate or break open the Ego. That has resonated with my buddhist studies and practice, where one of the goals is disidentification, not so that you disappear, but so that you can see. The practice of recognizing our own human powerlessness can force important breaks in the Ego, to see one’s self and one’s place in society, the world, the universe with stark clarity. Of course, I am thinking here of Melech language as practice and meaning rather than as literal representation of an actual being. It’s the effect of the practice that matters. [There is much then to be said about the conncetion of this ego-break that I find to be vital here (and in Buddhism) and the notion of tikkun olam, but I haven’t thought about that much yet.]

Which leads me to third: I hadn’t ever realized it, but all those years I’ve been meditating, there was something missing for me. In vipassana (and much more so in Zen technique), the egolessness and openness saved my life at a crucial juncture in my development, and it has sustained me for over a decade. But there’s a way in which it leaves me feeling empty (which some would say is the point), or more importantly, disconnected. I’ve been reading a book called Making Prayer Real: Leading Jewish Voices on Why Prayer Is Difficult and What to Do about It, by Rabbi Mike Comins. Rabbi Comins interviewed 50 different rabbis and organized his book around their observations about what prayer means and how to do it. The book has been very comforting to me on one level, in that many of the rabbis interviewed are humanists in the same way that I am.

But more importantly, what I have realized from these rabbis teachings is that whereas viapassana is completely monistic in its form and goal, that I still need some dualism. For anyone who has known me at all over the past 20 years, that will be an astounding revelation. But there is something about the act of “calling out” that creates a connection that is, for me, missing in Buddhist practice. I will probably continue vipassana meditation for the rest of my life; so what I’m saying here isn’t a condemnation. Rather, it’s that I had always wondered why I didn’t just dive in and become a full-fledged buddhist; something was always holding me back.

What I am starting to see is that I need both monism, and the practice of dualism for a fully formed spiritual life. “Calling out” in prayer—to praise, thank, and ask—is not about the reality, the thingliness of god; it’s about acknowledge the human need for relationship and connection. The day-to-day, real-life experience of being human is that the Ego is simply not the Other, and can never be. The desire to merge and blend with the Other that often drives sexual intercourse and that brief twinge of disappointment after you orgasm comes from the realization that I am not nor can I ever be the other. I am fundamentally separate, which drives the pleasure and the necessity of connection. For me personally, my buddhist experience was that the practice broke down my ego and helped me to see and accept, thereby freeing me to have compassion. But what it didn’t give me was a meaningful experience of connection to myself, to others, and to the world and cosmos. I think that, for me, prayer has the potential to provide that connection.

Pesach and Practice: Some Reflections from My First Passover as a Jew

A few months ago, a teacher at shul told me that I would probably find that the rhythm of my year would soon shift to revolve around Passover and the High Holy Days. I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but this spring I have felt a kind of inner tectonic shift, reorienting myself to spring and fall. I didn’t expect Pesach to be as meaningful as it was and have enjoyed 8 days of opening and awareness.

Spring

And underneath it all, just a good old fashioned, pre-monotheistic (i.e., pagan) ritual celebration of springtime. Sacrifice of the firstborn lamb (totally pagan) and ritual meal of the first fruits of the field (totally pagan). The histories I have read basically all said the same thing: Pesach is a syncretic practice of probably two different pagan traditions, one pastoral and one agricultural, with a gradually emerging, nationalistic monotheism that was ultimately congealed during Babylonian captivity.

Although I’m slightly mortified by the thought of animal sacrifice, I find a depth of meaning in the grounded, in-your-face recognition of the fragility and utter dependence on other living things that the blood sacrifices of many older cultures contained within them.

In many ways, I’m probably a pagan at heart. I feel strongly the movement of the seasons, the changing in the length of days, the passage of time and change of the earth as it moves in its orbit. Like any good American raised west of the Rockies, I feel my most powerful connections when I’m out in wilderness (a fraught term, I realize).

This year, my practice included a long and, for me, glorious walk through Golden Gate Park and along Ocean Beach, watching birds, smelling the (invasive) trees, and talking with a good friend. Next year I want to find a way to bring those older, deeper roots of passover even more to the surface.

Bodies and Awareness through Eating Practice

The former Mormon in me rebels against minutiae of rules and strictures and the pressures of a community monitoring my practice. I am deeply lucky to have good Jewish friends who are either patient with my choices (and mistakes) or fully supportive, even when their choices are different. As a practice for the festival, I had decided to keep fully kosher and kosher for Pesach. Of course, I made a hilarious gaff on Erev Pesach by serving creamed asparagus with beef. And I decided to go the Sephardi route and rejected the kitnyot laws as arcane and ultimately too ascetic for my personal spiritual life.

Pesach Table 5771

What emerged for me was a hyper-awareness of my body, of eating, and of hunger and satedness. I thought about everything that I put into my mouth for 8 days. I thought about whether or not I really wanted it in my mouth, whether or not i was really hungry, whether or not I needed the nutrients and calories, and whether or not it would support my practice to eat it. This had a dual impact. First, as a person who is more or less a mindless eater (reflected in my voluminous girth) it gave me an experience of conscious eating that I’d never had. It was eye opening in a way that diet never could have been. I’m still, er, digesting what it means. Second, it set aside the eight days of Pesach as a time apart, a time unto itself. Judaism loves the notion of separation—which is frankly one of the things that I struggle with in Judaism, as I tend to be a lumper rather than a splitter—and for the purposes of practice I found the separation through an embodied practice so basic as eating to be just enough to push my awareness into a different space.

Moses, Mitzrayim, and (Re)Birth

Rabbi Waskow’s recent book on the passover story, an extended book-long midrash on the maggid, opens up the possibilities for understanding the exodus in a new way, one that resonated with me much more deeply than the national story so often retold. The traditional, ethnocentric, nation-building story only works for me on a metaphorical level, where I can think of the Hebrew people as they are described in the text, as being a hodgepodge, multi-ethnic, mongrel group of escaping slaves, so that rather than an ethos, Israel becomes a collection of the oppressed that can stand in metaphorically for the whole lot of the human family struggling for freedom.

Further, I’m surely not the first Jew to struggle with the idea of a god who would harden Pharaoh’s heart, magically force him to abuse, crush, and subjugate the Hebrews, in order to prove his power through the plagues. As the Hebrew god spends a lot of time in the Torah waving his divine phallus about to demonstrate his masculine superiority over all other forms of holiness, I find myself cranky with the ancient tribalism of it all and the immanent violence of the story. I cannot abide a god who would murder one nation’s first born in order to make a motley crew of escaping slaves into his own Firstborn.

Waskow’s midrash steps back from the surface-level, direct details of the story to see an intense story of birth, a feminization of divine power, a massive metaphor for the emergence of a new Being, a new kind of Holiness. Waskow teaches that, when read openly and with attention, the white fire reveals something quite different from the black fire in the Book of Exodus. Whereas for Waskow the new lesson is one of the centrality of the feminine, what resonated for me in his teaching (which builds on the last few decades of feminist Torah reading) was specifically the imagery of birth.

The midwives who resist Pharoh’s order are the beginning of the new story, with their resistance and their observation of the strength and power of the Hebrew women. In the white fire, all the blood of the escape—the entire Nile turning to blood, the blood of the firstborn Egyptians, the blood on the lintel (a not-so-subtle metaphor of a cervix), combined with the water of the (Red) Sea of Reeds—comes to stand for the blood of childbirth. Mitzrayim, the narrow place, the birth canal. Waskow writes,

They could feel their lives, pregnant with possibility, begin to point toward a destination. A birth. … These doorways echo the bloody doorway of the womb through which all human being must pass to being independent beings. … It reminds us that history, biology, human earthlings, and the earth, are intertwined.

Perhaps it’s my interminable midlife crisis, perhaps it’s my longing to be a father, perhaps it’s Just a resonant Jungian archetype, but i can’t stop thinking about birth, becoming a new being, starting anew looking forward to the other shore.

Holiness

Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (quoted in Waskow)

As I’ve discussed at length in previous posts, I seek the human experience of holiness, and I want a framework within which to share it in community. Pesach this year has been a brief eight-day encounter with the Burning Bush, a glimpse into that state of awareness that brings me a sense of belonging, purpose, and connectedness.

Rabbi Waskow continues his midrash with the spiral of god’s name, ehyeh asher ehyeh asher ehyeh asher ehyeh…

Here he continues his feminist reading of the white fire, where the deeper, older name of god, Shaddai, insists on a feminine god who gives birth. The transformation of the name of god from Breasts to an unpronounceable name that only exists in breath, yyyyyyyhhhhhhhwwwwwwhhhhh, connects us to the breath of life.

God was seen as infinite mother, pouring forth blessings from breasts above and womb below, from heavens that pour forth nourishing rain from the ocean deeps that birth new life. … [And the new name is] just yyyhhhwwwhhh, a Breathing. ‘I am the breath of life and the breath of life is what will set you free. Teach them that if they learn My Name is just Breathing, they will be able to reach across all tongues and boundaries, to pass over them all for birth, and life, and freedom.’

Pesach became for me this year a reminder to Breathe. Life is breath; holiness is life. L’Chaim.

teku

Resonance & Alone-ness in Choosing Judaism

In a fascinating interpretation of Moby Dick in the book All Things Shining (1), Ahab is seen as a representation of a kind of Christianity that seeks closed-ness through completion, a view of the world where Truth is already known, so all other possibilities are cut off and where seeking other or more truth is foreclosed. In the story, Ahab can only see the white whale as the object of desire and of aversion, the singular truth of his universe is to avenge himself upon the whale’s body. But Ishmael represents a different orientation to the whale, upon whose head he sees a blankness, an emptiness devoid of any meaning at all, which then opens Ishmael up to a different kind of truth, joy, and meaning. Further, Dreyfus and Kelly, the two philosophers who wrote the book, read Ishmael’s relationship with the pagan Queequeg as an implicit critique of Christianity, where “Christianity goes astray not in its basic religious impulse, but rather in its totalizing turn,” where Christianity becomes all that exists, Truth itself. Ishmael represents a new kind of truth, a new orientation to being, that finds joy and beauty in an embodied, social openness to finding relationship, ritual, truth, beauty, joy in the every-day, in the mundane, in the foreign and exotic as well as the familiar. Ishmael moves easily from his Protestant worship to joining Queequeg in his pagan ritual. Ahab, on the other hand, single-mindedly and blindly pursues the whale as the only truth of his life and is destroyed by it. “Ishmael’s polytheistic view finds in the communal rituals of daily life, contradictory and polysemic and plural as they are, the meanings that can drive away the drizzly November of the soul.”

The book provoked me to seek and to name what I have found most valuable in my own spiritual path, and where I have found meaning over the past 16 years since leaving Mormonism. I found myself reflected in much of the book’s conclusions, in the way I came to redefine the sacred as immanent and joy as embodied and present rather than deferred and transcendent. I had through life’s experiences come to the same conclusions as Ishamael had, at least in Dreyfus’s and Kelly’s reading of Moby Dick. And I found that I loved that about my spiritual life and that I feel like those lessons learned have been useful and meaningful to me over the past decade. [Caveat emptor: The book is receiving some pretty scathing critiques from philosophers (2).]

I read this book at about the same time that I hit a wall in my exploration of Judaism. I find myself asking often, “Why?” Why am I doing this? Why am I exploring a spiritual community that would add yet another outsider status to my already sufficient outsiderness? Why do I need a community at all, especially a deeply traditional one? Why can’t I continue on my individual spiritual path that I’ve been walking since I left Mormonism 16 years ago? What is in Judaism that would make me want to commit to it in a way that I had given up on years ago? Is choosing Judaism a step backwards into Ahab, or can it be a further step into Ishmael?

Whereas everyone in my Choosing Judaism group is exploring conversion because they have married a JBB and are looking for spiritual harmonization and/or exploring the religion of a spouse, I come to Judaism on a rather individual path. As a single gay guy, I have come up hard against the social and communal and familial aspects of Judaism generally (not to mention the somewhat closed relationships at the shul I’ve been attending). There’s a contradiction between my search for spiritual community and the increasingly isolating experience I’ve been having on this path.

The past few days, I have (serendipitously?) stumbled upon expressions by other people of a few of the things that resonate so powerfully for me in Judaism, one in an article about Tuny Kushner and the other in a Conservative rabbi’s articulation of Jewish pluralism.

Last fall, I’d been asked by a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal to write a brief review of a book about representations of Mormons in popular culture (3); and this week, I began reading the book for that purpose. The very first essay in the collection was an engagement with Tony Kushner’s two-play cycle Angels in America, where in the conclusion of the essay, the author lists off a set of congruences between Mormon belief and practice and Jewish belief and practice that account for Kushner’s public statements of sympathy with Mormon belief (despite writing a play wherein the gay Mormon character is the only one in the play who is not redeemed in the play). The writer states:

Elsewhere, Kushner has spoken positively of certain aspects of Mormon theology, particularly those that he thinks reflect Judaism: the emphasis of practice over belief and the de-emphasis on damnation, the centrality of a text, the importance of diasporic experience in forming identity, and the positive theology of the body. (4)

Is my attraction to Judaism that simple and obvious? Of course, Mormonism is far more complex than those issues cited above (for example, the emphasis on practice over belief is far from clear, in my opinion), yet there is a kernel of truth there. And these are most of the values that I take from Mormonism that still inform my personal ethics and spirituality, so many years after leaving Mormonism behind. I do not think that I am merely seeking a surrogate or replacement for Mormonism. I’ve been through too much over the past 16 years for that. But as a sociologist who researches the social construction of perception, values, and cognition (i.e., culture), I have to stop and recognize the possible influences that Mormonism may be having on my exploration of Judaism.

Because I do not come to Judaism from a place of belief (I’ve spoken at length about my agnosticism in this blog), but rather in search of spiritual practice, I’m definitely drawn to some key practices in judaism, especially the yearly ritual calendar and the weekly shabbat. I’ve been exploring the possibilities of daily practice through what I think of as humanist prayer; but my buddhist background leads me to continued meditation practice. So far, my daily practice has remained pretty firmly buddhist. Since my favorite Conservative rabbis were also buddhist (even though I’m converting at a reform shul), and since my own teacher also relies heavily on contemporary american buddhism for her teachings, I feel pretty comfortable with that practice for the moment. That said, I find that although Mormonism is an intensely legalistic and socially surveilled system, it still emphasizes belief extensively in a way that I do not find in Judaism. In fact, my current research project at work shows that Mormonism’s efforts to control the beliefs of its adherents is very often what pushes people out, particularly questioning and seeking personalities. The lack of this kind of orthodoxy in Judaism is, for me, is a very good thing.

But the other pieces outlined in the essay about Kushner I hadn’t really connected to my Mormon past before: a positive theology of the body, de-emphasis on damnation, etc. My main concern at this point is that I’m moving through my Jewish experience on its own terms, and not out of habit from my Mormon upbringing. But I’m not sure how to do that.

The second piece that articulated a deep resonance for me was in a book about Jewish social ethics by Conservative Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff (5). In a chapter examining the multiple views and movements and ideas and contradictions within Judaism, R. Dorff explains the Jewish approach to Torah as a system of arguments that are “not only rationally but theologically necessary, for all sides bespeak “the words of the living God.'” In my early 20s, I had developed an idea that “truth” was something that emerged out of the spaces between contradictions, that paradoxes where two logically opposed ideas were both true revealed a truer kind of truth, almost like a Zen koan. In graduate school, I encountered William James’ notion of truth as a process, or an emergence out of social, human interaction. James had been studying cultural religious diversity and had come to the almost postmodern conclusion that truth was a culturally conditioned value judgment rather than an essential quality of a pre- or extra-human object. James spoke of truth as a verb, something that we do rather than the quality of something that exists. [Note: In this view, the scientific method produces truth, but it is a socially produced human truth, not an existential or ontological truth; James does not mean to devalue scientific truth, but rather to frame and account for its origins.]

Since the ages of the Pharisees, according to R. Dorff, Jews have turned away from prophecy and toward dialectical scholarly discourse for truth. This brings with it a system of ethics in the discourse, wherein those who disagree with you are accorded dignity and a respectful hearing, and wherein participants are (or should be) always willing to change their positions upon hearing a good argument. Dorff also discusses the notion of learning to read the “white fire”, the empty spaces between the words of Torah as an expansiveness and openness to creativity and novelty in interpretation and exegesis. This Jewish view of Talmudic, midrashic truth seems to be a continuation of my personal efforts to redefine and understand truth that began in my early 20s in college, and the possibilities of finding that intellectual base within a spiritual tradition is more than a little exciting for me.

And so this week, I have re-connected with the why of my Jewish path. But at the same time, those whys have reinforced the alone-ness of my particular journey. Jews and jewish communities seem to function generally more on an ethnic model, which I’ve discussed before. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it means that the highly intellectualized version of Judaism that I’m getting from my reading is not exactly the judaism that I’m encountering in face-to-face interaction with the Jews around me. Just as my academic career can be socially isolating generally, so my path to judaism feels to me like it’s going down a road that puts me yet again on the outside of an already outside group.

I cannot apologize for who I am or what makes me tick. Nor do I regret these things that are so resonant and important to me within Judaism. But it does leave me with the problem I stated up above: that for me, in distinction with everything that Judaism is socially, my Jewishness is for the moment a piece of my alone-ness.

teku

Notes:

(1) Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011).

(2) Gary Wills. “Superficial and Sublime?” in New York Review of Books. Vol. 58 No. 6 (April 7, 2011).

(3) Mark T. Decker and Michael Austin, eds. Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on Page, Stage, and Screen (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2010).

(4) Christine Hutchinson-Jones. “Center and Periphery: Mormons and American Culture in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America” in Decker and Austin, eds. Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on Page, Stage, and Screen (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2010): 26.

(5) Elliot N. Dorff. To Do the Right and the Good: A Jewish Approach to Modern Social Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002).