January 2006 Archives

Here are my top four reasons American Jews should care deeply and passionately about Israel:

1) Security.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg argues that absolute powerlessness corrupts as completely as absolute power because it invites persecution.

Jewish history is a catalogue of such powerlessness: expulsions, pogroms, blood libels…

The early Zionists understood that a sovereign Jewish state was the only answer to the cyclical, but unending vulnerability and persecution of a powerless Jewish people.

If Israel existed just 10 years earlier, Europe’s Jews not only would have found haven from Hitler’s ovens, Israel would have taken out the ovens.

Where other nations may be immobilized by “mitigating” concerns, Israel remains committed to the well being of the Jewish people everywhere, even here.

If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.

2) Identity.

Jews are not just adherents of a religion. We are a family, and Israel is our ancestral home. As such, Israel evokes the warmth of nostalgia, a longing for sights, sounds, and smells that we may only know from stories or the deep recesses of our souls.

Israel is the place we can most deeply and fully be ourselves.

There is nothing like being in Israel during Hanukkah and seeing the menorahs blazing in every town square, home, and store window. Israel is our true home, and we are stronger inside ourselves when we nourish that connection.

3) Covenant.

Longing for the land of Israel is perhaps the oldest covenantal tradition of Judaism, older than brit milah. The land of Israel links us with our past and our future. It links us with each other and with God. It provides us with spiritual transcendence.

Our passion for Israel contributes to the ongoing relationship between God and the Jewish people. Whenever we support Israel, financially, politically, economically, or emotionally, we are helping to keep the covenant between God and the Jewish people alive.

4) Hope.

Israel is all about hope: the hope that a ragged band of slaves, or survivors, could build a life of dignity and independence; the hope that the desert could bloom, the hope, currently much strained, that enemies can someday become friends.

I saw this most clearly last summer on our synagogue mission to Israel. On the Golan Heights, I was surprised by a profusion of statues lining the path to the defensive bunkers. Our guide explained that the fields had been covered with the remains of destroyed tanks after the ’73 Yom Kippur War. Israeli soldiers had converted the blasted metal pieces into these whimsical statues. The modern equivalents of swords were beaten not just into plowshares but into life-affirming art.

Anything is possible as long as hope remains alive. The very existence of Israel is a symbol of the hope not only that the Jewish people will survive but that someday every human being will be able to sit in safety and satisfaction under his or her vine and fig tree.

Israel protects us. Israel unites us. Israel gives us purpose. Israel gives us hope in a better future. What happens to Israel will affect us, whether or not we care about it or think it will. But if we do care, if we do think about it, if we participate in its wellbeing, we will be the ones to gain the most, through the inner strength, the communal connection, the spiritual fulfillment, and the energy to go on, even in the face of set backs. All this becomes possible through the promise and miracle of Israel, our Promised Land.

What does American Jewry offer Israel and what can Israel learn from America? As my teacher Rabbi David Hartman has suggested, specifically regarding spiritual matters, both populations have a great deal to offer each other.

Since its inception Israel has stressed a God of history. The early Zionists privileged the God of the Bible over and at times against the God of the Talmud. In the Bible, God is intimately tied to historical political and military events. Such a God created great highs and great lows.

In some sense, the Bible is a manic-depressive book. One day God is happy with his people; the next day, He is angry with them. Having God in history allowed Zionists to give religious significance to the awesome events of 1948 and 1967. For the early Zionists, God was part of history and his people had the power to overturn history in biblical proportions. Zionism, for many, was a new revelation ushering in new forms of Jewish expression.

Though such thinking opened the door for a revolution in Jewish thought and life, allowing Jews to reconstruct their Jewish identities in creative and vibrant ways, Zionism also brought with it a dangerous mindset that has ultimately caused a great deal of harm to the country's pursuit of peace and stability.

In contrast to the Israeli God of history, the sages of the Babylonian Talmud developed a God organized around Halakha (Jewish law). Hartman explains that this conception of engendered a sober religious outlook. This sobriety is expressed through the God of Halakha's consistency and stability. In this framework, God is slightly more distant from mankind. Here, history is the domain of humanity. Not every military victory is a sign that God loves the victors, not every defeat is a sign that God is angry with the defeated. While such a worldview empowers humanity, at times it promotes a somewhat static and conservative religious life. By taking God out of history, the Diaspora-based sages removed the ability of people to claim new revelations and thereby to radically re-envision religious life.

For many, Israeli society can be too manic-depressive. Its citizens live on a spiritual and political roller-coaster. God, history, and politics are thrown together like a bad cholent leaving everyone feeling sick to their stomachs. On the other hand, the ennui and lack of social significance that permeates much of Diaspora religious life leaves many numb toward their Judaism and Jewish peoplehood. The truth is the Diaspora needs a shot of the revolutionary spiritual potential of a Zionist worldview, and Israel could use a good dose of the spiritual sobriety that permeates Diasporatic religious life.

While many Jews in the modern period rejected both the conception of God in and out of history, these two perspectives still offer us a productive way to see the spiritual strengths and weakness of both Diaspora (out of history) and Israel (in history) and, most important, how each can benefit from the other.

When I was studying in Yeshiva, I heard the following sad but telling story about one of the great American rabbis of the twentieth century:

The rabbi took a plane trip across the country with his extended family. After boarding his flight and getting himself settled into his seat, he turned to the person sitting next to him and introduced himself. The passenger responded by telling the rabbi that he was a scientist and was on his way to a conference to study the origins of man. The rabbi said that he traveling with his family and was going on a vacation were he would have the opportunity to study and learn with his grandchildren.

Over the course of the flight, the two men continued to engage each other in conversation, arguing the world and everything beyond its borders. Every 15 minutes or so they would be interrupted, however, by one of the rabbi's grandchildren, who were sitting at the other end of the plane. One by one, each would gently ask, “Zaidee [grandfather] can I help you? Is there anything you need?

Finally, as the plane was preparing to land, the scientist looked at the rabbi and exclaimed, “Rabbi, how is it that your grandchildren have so much respect for you? I am lucky if my grandkids call me once a week. Yours come visit you every few minutes!!”

The rabbi then turned to the bewildered gentleman and, pausing for effect, explained, “You see, when my grandchildren see me, they see someone who is one step closer to Sinai. When your grandchildren see you, all they look at is someone one step closer to a monkey!!”

This pathetic story--originally told to me with the hope of demonstrating the so-called “brilliance” of this rabbi-- highlights everything wrong with much of religion’s relationship to science and scripture. (By the way, for a good overview of the different positions on this issue, see Religious Responses to Evolution.)

For whatever reason, it seems that it has become en vogue for rabbis, ministers, and priests to see the biblical word as fixed, literal, and dead. Although there has never been a weekly headline that an American clergyman/women could not fit into the biblical word for their Saturday or Sunday sermon, for many when it comes to Darwin all such homiletics and interpretive magic vanishes.

There is great irony in encountering the Bible as an interpretively dead text. Those who espouse such a perspective have not only diminished the relevance and reach of its all encompassing narrative but have actually created what has so famously been termed“bibliolotry.”

Bibliolotry is when the Bible is made into an absolute fixed text whose word is immovable and acts as an end in and of itself. When religious figures say that evolution is incompatible with a worldview rooted in the Bible, they mock the whole enterprise of exegesis and the dynamic nature of interpretation.

Every reader of sacred text makes interpretive decisions. No reading of the Bible is pure, unmediated, or authentic. We all bring to the texts our own ethical, communal, individual, spiritual, and historical baggage. Perhaps no better example of such interpretive behavior is the recent re-examination of the issue expressed by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn in an op-ed in The New York Times. In contrast to earlier, more modest church proclamations, the cardinal, in an age of increasing worldwide religious fundamentalism, now suggests that evolution is incompatible with Church doctrine and the biblical creation narrative.

Schönborn is not alone in his zeal to make the literal biblical story into a dogma for America. Although rich with a multiplicity of interpretive options, many in the Orthodox Jewish community have come to support such a position and have argued that the literal biblical word should be presented alongside the scientific theory of evolution. (See, for example, the Orthodox Union's position and the comments of Rabbi Avi Shafran).

What's most disturbing about so many religious figures who embrace the creationsim argument is that they act as though Jesus and the entire Shulchan Aruch [compendium of Jewish law] can be found obviously and clearly from a simple reading of the biblical text.

It's sad that the only things that can bring together Jew, Protestant, and Catholic seem to be those issues that pit religion against civilization and culture. To be sure, there are serious moral and ethical questions posed by evolution. But hiding behind a so-called "authentic" reading of the biblical text and claims to Sinai instead of seriously confronting and grappling with the challenges only cheapens God’s word and makes those who take it seriously sound like monkeys.

Let me start by saying that I think that evolutionary science provides the best description we have of how life came to exist in its present form, that intelligent design is junk science (at best), and that Judge Jones made exactly the right decision in the Dover School Board case. I.D., which is just creationism by another name, has no place in a public school curriculum. That said, the concept of intelligent design is central to my understanding of what it means to be Jewish.

Before we eat, we say a berachah (a blessing). When we wake up in the morning, we say a berachah. When we see the first buds blossoming in the spring–we say a berachah. A berachah is a way of acknowledging how astonishing the world truly is, of looking at everything around us with radical amazement and gratitude. More specifically, the berachah acknowledges God as the source of all of these wonders, honors the divine flow of life that animates the universe.

Intelligent design is rooted in a similar sense of awe and wonder. Science can describe the cellular structure of an apple, tell us how it grows and propagates in great detail, explain the organic compounds that make it sweet. But science cannot tell us that the apple is a miracle; intelligent design can.

Intelligent design at some level means acknowledging that the world around us is beyond our comprehension, cannot be fully described in terms of equations and chemical reactions–and I agree. Perhaps this is because as a rabbi, I am more interested in meaning than in mechanics.

Evolution, with its doctrine of survival of the fittest, would be a dismal model on which to base a system of ultimate moral meaning. The Jewish religious approach to how to understand the world–with radical amazement, with a sense in the world’s abiding goodness and purpose–is far more in keeping with intelligent design than with evolution.

When I say "intelligent design" here, I should be clear I’m not talking about a pseudo-scientific political movement for which I have no sympathies, but rather the core values that underlie the desire to see the world as more than the sum of concrete, describable parts. These values are mine as well, and I hope to pass them along to my children, pray never to take the world and its precious resources for granted.

But this is my choice and my role–the lens I use to see the world as a rabbi is just one of the many possible lenses that we can use and that people do use in this country. There are other religious traditions, and there are those who stand outside of any religious tradition at all.

The job of the public schools is to nurture the mind, and then families can decide how to nurture the soul. This is not the Dover School Board’s job, and I don’t want them teaching my children what to believe.

Let’s teach our children evolution in school so they will be educated, and the wonder of God in synagogue so they will be wise.

Thank God U.S. District Court Judge John Jones III ruled that intelligent design (ID) is not science and therefore has no place in the classroom. Thank God that the concerned parents in Dover, PA, had the courage to fight their school board on this issue. Our constitutional guarantees of separation of church and state and the disestablishment of religion are only as secure as we make them by our vigilance and participation in the political process.

That said, what are we, as Jews, to believe during this brouhaha about science, faith and evolution?

Ironically, the very science that is under attack by the “faithful” strengthens my own faith.

That a biblical story thousands of years old even loosely reflects the steps that science, in the form of Darwin’s theory of evolution, has uncovered, seems incredible, unless the biblical text was inspired by the very creator responsible for these events. (How else would an ancient people have conceived of such a thing?)

The whole six, 24-hour, day program, of course, seems clearly metaphoric: God’s sense of time is certainly not our own. I chalk up minor discrepancies between the evolutionary record and the biblical text to the way God needed to communicate in a simple manner to an ancient people. Nevertheless, to me, the seeds of evolutionary theory are there in the biblical text, as simple life forms are followed by more complex life forms. Darwin’s theory merely exposes how God’s hand worked behind the scenes throughout prehistory, as it so often has done throughout human history.

If that sounds like ID, in a way it is, because I believe in God as creator of the world. But that doesn’t mean I think ID belongs in the classroom. I believe there is a difference between personal piety and communal polity, between being an honest observer of the world while retaining one’s own personal faith and foisting one’s own faith upon others.

The most important point of the creation story, though, has nothing to do with science or the (pre)historical reliability of the biblical text. It has to do with the values that make the Bible eternally sacred and relevant.

In particular, these values are found in one little word that appears repeatedly in the Creation story: the word “good.” The physical world is good and was created for good.

Our lives here have a God-given value, meaning, purpose, and responsibility: to actualize that good in the world. That is the essence of the Jewish reading of Scripture. All the rest is commentary.

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