During the past six weeks or so I have learned something new about the meaning of Torah. I have had a revelation, of sorts, about a central teaching of our faith. It’s an idea I have dismissed for a long time, but these last weeks I’ve come to the conclusion that this idea has critical meaning for our era. In just a few minutes I’m going to share this insight with you. But first I want to tell you a brief bit of history.
In March, 1095, Pope Urban II called for a crusade of all Christendom in order to bring Jerusalem back under Christian control. Some scholarly authorities believe the Crusade was motivated by religious piety and theology. Some scholars suggest that the Crusade was a response to Moslem aggression and the growing threat of Moslem dominance in the region. Some argue it was caused by economic instability. Whatever the root cause, four crusader armies left their homes in Western Europe, killing and pillaging wherever they went. Not coincidentally, vast numbers of Jews were killed as the Crusaders marched through Europe, despite the Pope’s plea to leave them in peace. It seems that once the ferociousness of war is unleashed, it cannot distinguish between infidels and innocents.
By December, 1098, the Crusading armies had made their way through much of the Middle East. Just East of Antioch the Crusaders destroyed the town of Ma’arra and shocked the world by eating human flesh from the adults and children who were massacred. On July 7, 1099, the Crusaders began their attack on Jerusalem, first with a procession around the city walls led by priests. As the walls did not fall down as expected, the Crusaders resorted to standard military tactics, and Jerusalem fell eight days later to the Crusaders, who killed almost all its inhabitants, an estimated 70,000-100,00 thousand civilians.
For the next 450 years, Europe and the Middle East were the scene of on again, off again barbaric religious violence, as Muslims and Christians jockeyed for power and position. Fervor for the carnage was fueled by religious leaders on all sides: My religion is true, consequently your’s must be false; and since your’s is false I have a right to kill you. Those who were stronger and had the power did the killing. Those who were weaker lost the wars. Those who were powerless – more often than not Jews – were the victims.
In the year 2006 nothing much has changed. The battlegrounds of the earth are still often religious battlegrounds. People from all corners of the world kill each other in the name of God. Protestants and Catholics murdered each other regularly in Northern Ireland. Sunni And Sh’ia kill each other in Allah’s name. Muslim and Hindu fight each other to the death, chanting prayers as they die. The world at this moment seems inextricably poised on the brink of a clash of religious civilizations, with Islam and the Christian West locked in a struggle of mythological proportions. It was no slip of the speech writer’s pen that our President described the battle with Al Queda as a crusade.
And, once again, in the middle, are we, the Jewish People, and our political sovereignty in the State of Israel is the world’s lightening rod. There is one difference, however. In this era, we have power, huge power, the power to protect ourselves and the power to take out our enemies. We have so much power that the United States thinks nothing of letting Israel be its proxy in fighting the Iranian proxy, Hizbollah, the epitome of what the president likes to call "Islamic fascism."
Perhaps this is the beginning of the prophesied war of Gog and Magog, Armageddon. Perhaps it is chevlei mashiach – the birth pangs of the messiah, the beginning of the end of days, the final war before the rapture. Or maybe this is not the rapture at all but simply the rupture of humanity, humanity brought to the edge of war, once again, as in days of old, by religious fanaticism.
The realm of religion, the life of faith, was gifted to the world to teach us how to create sacred moments and just societies, how to feel with compassion and act with loving kindness, and how to bring comfort and aid to the needy. The essence of Torah is given to Abraham our father, who is singled out "that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of Adonai by doing what is right and just"...(Gen. 18:19)
and reiterated by Isaiah who states "I have called to you in righteousness to be a light of nations, to open the eyes of the blind and to release those imprisoned, sitting in darkness." (Is. 42:6-7)
And it is not just our tradition that teaches these values. The New Testament preaches in the Book of James: "Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in humility born of wisdom... for the wisdom of heaven is first of all pure, then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy..and sincere. You who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness." (James 3:13-18) And the Koran exhorts its faithful: "O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah...(4:135) O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for Allah, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not hatred of others make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice. Be just: that is next to piety, and fear Allah". (5:8)
How is it possible that we have the ability to probe the recesses of the cosmos, to map the human genome, but no apparent ability whatsoever to love our neighbor, or, at the very least, to live and let live? God must weep at our failure.
Sixty years ago, Albert Camus, writing as a war correspondent during World War II and the French/Algerian War, concluded that the human impulse to kill and torture was supported by misguided thinking. He wrote, "We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves, and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology." The root cause, for Camus, is strict ideology, of either the left or the right, which claims to have certainty, all the answers, and for which "fear is a method." This is precisely what the Torah calls idolatry. This is the Torah’s teaching I began to understand which I think is so centrally relevant to the world we live in.
We were taught that the Torah rejected the pagan belief that statues were gods. The truth is, no one in the ancient world really believed that statues were gods. Idolatry was never about praying to statues. Idolatry is about turning the infinite into an object. It is, in essence, being self-contained. Idolatry has all the answers. Idolatry thrives on human vulnerability and fear, on the manipulation of human weakness. It seduces us into thinking that we are in control, that we control the gods. The root of all evil, according to the prophets, teaches Abraham Joshua Heschel, is "humanity’s false sense of sovereignty, and stemming from it, human pride, arrogance and presumption." (The Prophets, p. 165). Such hubris leads inevitably to the desire to kill, because we are right and the other is wrong, dead wrong.
The keystone of this world view is the fantasy that my view of reality is the one true view of reality. It is an idolatrous fantasy to argue that global warming has no basis in science as the polar ice caps shrink before our eyes. It is an idolatrous fantasy to refuse to make antiretrovirul drugs available to an HIV infected population on the belief that herbs work just as well. It is idolatry to believe that only you know God’s truth. It is idolatry to believe that a person who does not share your beliefs is a sinner or a heretic. It is idolatry to kill another human being for their beliefs.
Rosh Hashanah is itself a corrective to this idolatrous world of fantasy. Rosh Hashana is not a distinctively Jewish holiday. It does not commemorate a particularly Jewish moment, as does Pesach or Chanukah. Rosh Hashana is the birthday of the world. It’s most commonly sounded theme, struck again and again is "God is Sovereign." We blow the shofar as part of a coronation ceremony. We prostrate ourselves on the ground, heads touching the floor, to demonstrate our submission. We acknowledge that God, infinite, unfathomable and uncontainable in any single image or ideology, is the ultimate power of life, and we, created in God’s image, are dignified, but finite creatures and simply not in control. Given the gift of life we are invited on a journey to find meaning and to gain understanding, but never to find all the answers. We celebrate this festival of creation as Jews in order to be reminded that God is not Jewish, that we inhabit a magnificent and varied wide world which is not defined by the Jewish story.
The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides sees this message as central to our purpose as Jews. We are the people who point to the clay feel of idolatry. We are the people meant to teach the world that the yearning for power and control and self-actualization must be limited. We must not allow human beings to fall prey to their fears and their longing for cheap solutions. We must come to know the real world, and the people who inhabit it, and to recognize our limits. There is ample room for human dignity and achievement within our human limits.
And still, we can not afford to pat ourselves on the back. As Jews, we were the first to carry this message, but we are not immune from our own fantasies. The prophets railed against our idolatrous instincts and we should learn to do the same. In an ever more complex world, we cannot assume that we have all the answers. Nor must we allow ourselves the fantasy that as Jews we can lived in our own self-contained world, with little regard for others, either here or in Israel. That is why it is important to listen to the stories of an immigrant neighbor speaking to us in Spanish. In Israel, Yitzchak Rabin understood this, and was killed for it. That "they" more than ever want to kill us requires of us to defend ourselves. But we should fool ourselves into thinking that "they want to kill us" is the whole of the truth.
Even our own Torah and halakha can be made into an idol. The teaching of the holy Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook should be taken to heart. In his book, The Lights of Holiness, he writes this profound warning: "It is forbidden for religious behavior to compromise a person’s natural moral sensibility. If it does, our fear of heaven is no longer ours. An indication of this purity is that our natural moral sense becomes more exalted as a consequence of religious inspiration. If the opposite occurs, and the moral character of the individual or group is diminished by a religious observance, then we are certainly mistaken in our faith."
We are living in an era in which the moral character of individuals, of religious groups and of nations is being not just diminished, but destroyed, by religious faith, by the fanaticism born of absolute certainty. Our Torah, our faith, and the meaning of this holy day begs us to publicly proclaim our opposition to post-modern idolatry. Pope Benedict, in his much-discussed and maligned speech last week, spoke at least these words of truth when he said: "Today, when we have learned to recognize the pathologies and life threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God’s image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism, it is important to state clearly the God in whom we believe."
As you sit here today during the rest of this service, and at lunch, and during this holy week, I urge you to consider the threat of this idolatry. I ask you to contemplate where in your own lives you see the seduction of fantasy, the idea that you can have it all your own way, that you are self-contained. I ask that you consider not just how , but when you might speak up against the perversion of religion that makes it hateful to be a human being. Can you feel in the beating of your hearts the essence of faith, that we are not here alone, that religion requires relationship and mutual understanding and the abandonment of self-centered fantasy? Are you able to take a stand and state clearly the God in whom you believe? Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: "To be a Jew is to renounce allegiance to false gods; to be sensitive to God’s infinite stake in every finite situation; to bear witness to God’s presence in the hours of God’s concealment; to remember that the world is unreedemed." " We are born," he writes, "to be an answer to God’s question."
How will you answer?
|
