D'var Torah
by Rabbi Tirzah Firestone: Kol Nidre 2007
For a faith to last it has to work. If a religion is not effective in the world,
if it does not speak to the issues and crises of the day, it will simply fall
into disuse and ultimately, fade away.
To survive centuries and millennia, a faith must evolve. It must be able to
translate itself again and again into the clothes, the language, the Weltanschauung,
the worldview, of a new generation.
And, in turn, each generation must decide: Do the God language and the sacred
practices that have been handed down to me speak to me? Do these rituals and
prayers have any meaning for me? Do they point to that which I know, from my
own experience, to be transcendent?
If not, they will dissolve. As theologian Karen Armstrong says: Each generation
has to create the image of God that works for it, because the idea of God formed
in one generation, by one set of human beings is often meaningless in another.
And if we do not do this work of discernment, we find ourselves trudging around
our lives with the empty baggage of our parents, beliefs that were once living
symbols, now idols of somebody else’s worship.
We know this is true because we are living through this process ourselves. Here
we are on Yom Kippur eve. But why are we here? Why indeed come to this ancient
rite? We who no longer practice Torah precisely, or accept the unque
stioned weight
of rabbinic authority? If we are here merely to fill our bellies with warm,
nostalgic feelings, we could just as easily go to the Jewish deli on 28th street.
But no, we are here in this place together to fill a different kind of hunger,
and because we have faith in our faith. Faith that there is something that is
still powerful, still alive and transformative at the core of this ancient legacy
called Judaism. We are here because we hope we will find something tonight that
vibrates with meaning, that can nourish us, that can show us the way to cleanse,
and heal and redeem our lives.
This generational process is called bu the Hassidic masters, birur,
discerning that which is spiritually alive from that which is just a relic.
Birur takes guts. And it takes a razor sharp awareness to say: this
part of our religion no longer sings to us; this part holds the truth.
But here things get tricky and we have to be careful. Because it is so easy
to re-make our faith, and for that matter, to remake God, in our own image.
Then we are into another kind of idolatry: one that is all too common. It is
the kind of faith that is always comfortable. It conforms to our own pictures
of the world, and endorses our own preferences and politics, rather than compelling
us to transcend them.
Then we have constructed a faith, and often a God, that encourages our complacency
instead of drawing us beyond our personal limitations. And then, instead of
stretching us and inspiring our compassion for all creation, our small God endorses
our choices as we see fit…Then God has become a riff in a Jackie Mason
skit, “He’s on our side not their side, your side and not his side,
…he created you but doesn’t really like you, he created us and he
loves us, in fact, he owes us big time for making him famous…”
The absurdity of these unconscious idolatries and projections struck me sharply
years ago when David and I were in Indonesia on our honeymoon. There I caught
myself in the act. Staring at millions of foreign looking people and wondering:
who are all these foreign people? And how do they fit into the world? It took
me a day or two to realize that I was the foreigner. That they fit just fine.
Still, I had a hard time when I realized that none of them had ever heard of
Judaism (much less Adonai.) They didn’t know that it existed, or even
cared. Hmmmm. Nevertheless, God had created them, I reminded myself. Each one
of these millions and millions of people with their own ways of worshipping
and thinking. That couldn’t be accidental. God must have known about that,
even if it wasn’t Jewish. I had to remind myself that Judaism after all,
is a very minor religion in the world, and shockingly, Jews are less than .22%
of the human population. Busted. …I had caught myself in a kind of internalized
racial superiority. And worse, I had tried to drag God into it with me.
I don’t need to underscore how dangerous this kind of thinking is, yet
I think it is more common than we would like to admit. When we feel deep down
that our blood is more precious because we are white or we are American or because
we are Jews, then we are verging into perilous territory, and our shadow figures,
skinheads or the KKK are not far behind.
As Judaism evolves, and it is, we must be scrupulous in this discernment process,
forcing it to shed that which is no longer useful to the grander scheme of creation.
(Because if creation does not survive, then none of its parts will either!)
The Judaism that worked for my Bubbe and Zeide in Germany before the war, but
which I unconsciously drag around with me, is no longer big enough to encompass
this global world in which I live. For example, their Yiddishkeit couldn’t
speak to the ecological crisis that renders our endangered planet borderless.
The faith of my grandparents and their image of God, was based on a highly partitioned
map and an insular worldview; they certainly couldn’t have foreseen global
migrations and mixings of populations that is part and parcel of our world.
How would my grandparents begin to understand that two of my children were born
in Guatemala? that one of my children has a Christian father? that two others
are Jewish-identified but keep Christmas? That 15% of my congregation is not
Jewish. That I even have a congregation! Just look at the evolution of our world,
and of Yiddishkeit! Do my grandparents’ Judaism and mine even know one
another? Do my grandparents’God and my God even speak the same language?
But what language IS god speaking today? Our work is to learn that language.
And to follow that which is within Judaism that can help us do that.
By the way, just to clarify a point, Judaism and God are not the same thing.
Some people get them confused. Judaism is a set of conventions that help us
put order and meaning to our lives. It has a force field that is magnetic and
powerful—so powerful that we sometimes mistake it for God. But God is
the core of the universe. Judaism is not the core of the universe. Judaism simply
attempts to point the way to that core, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not.
And so we begin again: For a faith to last it has to work. To last, Judaism,
like every faith, must point us to that which is alive and life giving. And
we must be willing and use discernment to shed the conventions of our faith
and the images of God that are dead.
I would like to close with a powerful story about discernment and the evolution
of the god-image. One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. Imagine
that. In the midst of this waking nightmare in which their families and their
entire society was being incinerated , they had the guts and the stamina to
rouse themselves to set up a beit-din, a Jewish court of law, and they
proceeded to try God, charging God with cruelty and betrayal in the highest
degree. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problem
of evil and suffering, in the midst of the obscenity of their situation. They
could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found God
guilty, and presumably, worthy of death. The head Rabbi pronounced the verdict.
Then he looked up and said: Friends, the trial is over. It is time now for the
evening prayers.
Although it sounds nonsensical at first—after all, why bother praying
if God has been dismissed from his role?—these men understood that even
while their image of God had disintegrated, even though the ground of their
being had fallen out from under them, their way of life was still right and
good and they had simply to get on with it. No matter what was done to them,
no matter how low the world went, their faith in order and menschlichkeit,
decency, could not be taken from them. That would endure.
Like our forebears in the camps, my friends, we too, must wrestle with and abandon
our old conceptions of God. We too, must put behind us our failed images of
God, the partial parent, the rescuer, the One who will come to save us and our
people exclusively, or the God who will reach out from heaven and put things
right in a crazy world. That God is gone; and a faith that furthers these ideas
is no longer useful.
On this Yom Kippur night, let us employ our ancient faith, not to reaffirm old
worldviews, but to get on with the holy work of ordering our lives, furthering
sanity and goodness in this world. Let us align ourselves with the living core
at the center of our being, and at the center of life itself, so that we might
bring about a viable future for ourselves, and our world, for our people, and
for all people.
And now my friends, it is time for the evening prayers.
Rabbi Tirzah Firestone
www.tirzahfirestone.com
Please reprint with permission of the author.