revelation

My teacher and my rabbi, Neil Gillman, preferred to start any God-talk with the question of revelation - how did we get our Scriptures? To his thinking, all other pieces of theology flowed out of each person's understanding of Divine revelation. This is where I disagree with him. Although I agree that most parts of theology can be unraveled from your beliefs about revelation, I think that there is something else to consider first: theodicy. The problem of God and evil is too thorny not to make a stab at solving it ("Theodicy", July 13, '08, and "Evil", January 18, '08). I admit, no system of theodicy works completely; still, I think that it is important enough to begin there.

That said, I don't want a world that God is actively changing. Miracles and other interruptions of physics create more problems than they solve. If God can intervene in human life to reveal the Qur’an, to bear a son, and to cause hemorrhoids, then why doesn't God interfere in Darfur, childhood Leukemia or the global financial crisis? I'd rather have a God who doesn't act in our lives than One who does so without a moral yard-stick, randomly, or even cruelly.

When I think about a higher purpose, I can only say that it is subtle. When asked for miracles, Muhammad pointed to the sunset and listened to the birds’ song. I do not imagine a presence that moves mountains, sets the course of rivers, and orders human fate. I prefer a presence that began the comings and goings of the universe, but doesn't micromanage daily life. The divine presence does not mold or shape us like clay, but is always there to share our joy and pain.

In that case, my view of Scripture is not of revelation, but aspiration. Human beings, throughout generations and ages, felt the small still touch of God in their lives, in the same way that we still do in some rare, humbling moments. They tried to describe the experience of God first in oral forms, which were later organized and written. Through law, saga, poetry, story cycles, debates, aphorisms, and precedents, Jews (until recently, almost all men) try to put words to the unnameable.

Sometimes, their words became accepted as community standards and the core of religious identity. At other times, earlier community rituals were written down, edited and made into a system. Whether it started in writing or in action, the result was a sacred tradition of Scripture, the living and growing testimony of a community’s striving toward and with the Divine.

So, it is completely human and totally holy at the same time. Because it is the product of men in their historical setting, the tradition can be judged - even changed occasionally. Because the men hopefully aspired to something much more important than stroking their own egos, it deserves our reverence. Jewish tradition is the legacy of Jews striving beyond themselves, aspiring to know God, and Jews should pledge allegiance to that legacy. Otherwise, we spurn our own birthright.

ritual

Where do rituals come from? What's odd is that nothing exactly happens during most rituals - nothing observable, that is. In many ways, my wife and I were no different on the morning before our wedding than in the evening afterward. And in another very real way, everything had changed. That's the effect of ritual. By going through a religious event, we announce the sacredness and the continuity of tradition in public. At the same time, we take the ordinary and imbue it with holiness.

Take the Bar Mitzvah: this Jewish coming of age ceremony probably once served as a tribal initiation rite, like those still seen in some pre-industrial societies. Now, it's marked by an adolescent Jew's coming up to read from the Torah (Pentateuch). Maybe one family in ancient Judea wanted to mark their son's puberty in a public Israelite way. They approached their local religious leader and asked how they could celebrate the day in a special way. The sage made a few suggestions, and later, other families and communities adopted the idea. With time, it became the local practice, and eventually a religious standard.

Gradually, these rituals can fill up our lives. The sages and rabbis of the Jewish tradition understood this principle well. God cannot be contained or explained, and in order to appreciate the divine in daily life, we need actions and symbols. That's how ritual serves. Early ritual innovators created these "metaphors for the sacred," as Rabbi Cheryl Peretz calls them.

These metaphors bring blessing into our lives and draw us closer to God. For me, being Jewish and doing Jewish rituals add warmth to my life. Judaism gives me a comparison against which to consider the value (or faddishness) of the modern, liberal, Western experience. I can renew my focus through regular prayer, among other rituals.

Because rituals fit within a coherent system, a traditional person can accept the less than ideal aspects of the system as much as possible, so as best to gain the blessing. Also, he or she respects the historic practice, and avoids radical change so as not to do excessive violence to the system. Some harmful practices or trivial aspects do get left behind. Personally, I am conservative in this – I think it is necessarily to be humble and also smart to give the tradition the benefit of the doubt.

redemption

I visited a seventy-two year old diabetic preparing for surgery to remove his toe with gangrene. We talked about his life, and he declared again and again, "It's no good. It's no good." It seemed to him that his life didn't amount to much. The happiest moment he could remember was winning a $20 bet during the Ford administration.

He told me that God had never found him a girlfriend or wife, and he would die lonely. When I pushed to find out what he had done to improve his life, he couldn't think of anything. I wondered afterward if he was paralyzed by his age, and felt that it was too late to make things better.

Was it like the junkie who stole his brother's silver, cleans up, but still feels too ashamed to come back 'round while he's in recovery? For all of them, I say we can always make amends, and improve ourselves.That's the moral of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son: it's never too late. Even at seventy-two, we can't let shame paralyze us. Our lives can still be redeemed.

The Talmud (Avodah Zara 17a) tells about the last days of Elazar ben Durdaya, “a man who had sought out every whore in the world.” He searched the earth to beg mercy for himself and no one would; in the end “He placed his head between his knees and cried bitterly until he expired. At that moment a voice from heaven declared ‘Rabbi Elazar ben Durdaya has been received in the world to come.’" Sometimes, it seems that we can never repent for our misdeeds. The simple truth is that we can.

And when we finally make the effort, God is ready for our repentance. We should not be ashamed, for God calls us to be redeemed: “Go as far as you are able, and I will come the rest of the way to you.” God meets us half-way in the act of redemption, and our lives can have fresh value.

Then, if we're truly blessed, we can bring redemption forward, through good deeds, teaching and advocacy. The shape of our lives becomes new meaning we add to the world. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “It is by lives that the world will be redeemed.” If we each choose value and testify to it with every last muscle, bone, and blood vessel, that will be our redemption.