Rabbi Eliyahu Stern: January 2006 Archives

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.

Either we have all become prophets or everyone has forgotten the third commandment.

Based on the Rev. Pat Robertson and Israel's Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s prediction rate, I am inclined to think the latter. Repeatedly throughout the Bible we are told, Do not use God’s name in vain.

Yet, for religious people today, God has become a “shmatta” (a dirty cloth used to wipe up disasters and messes). All over the world God’s name is invoked to clean up that which is beyond our control.

Here are a spattering of some recent pronouncements made about God’s involvement in X, Y, and Z all said with the straightest face and with supreme certainty.

On Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s illness:

Bill Clinton: His illness "puts yet another obstacle in the path of the peacemakers," Clinton said. "It's almost as if God were testing them one more time to rise again, to keep on."

Pat Robertson: "He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club."

On Hurricane Katrina:

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef: The founder and spiritual leader of Israel's Shas party, declared, "The hurricane is God's punishment on George Bush" for the Gaza pullout.

Michael Marcavage, director of Repent America: The hurricane was sent by God because New Orleans was a city given to holding events at which it was common to find "drunken homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets and bars." In a statement released by his group, Marcavage was quoted as saying, "We must not forget that the citizens of New Orleans tolerated and welcomed the wickedness in their city for so long. May this act of God cause us all to think about what we tolerate in our city limits…This act of God destroyed a wicked city. New Orleans was a city that opened its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. May it never be the same.”

Al Qaeda: The hurricane in America was the "wrath of God…God attacked America and the prayers of the oppressed were answered.”

On the Holocaust:

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef: History's greatest mass murder was not "all for nothing," said Yosef. The Jewish victims, he explained, were "the reincarnation of earlier souls who sinned [and who] returned ... to atone for their sins."

On 9/11:

Jerry Falwell blamed "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists and the gays and lesbians ... the ACLU, People for the American Way" and groups "who have tried to secularize America… I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen… God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve."

Although in most cases these comments sound at best pathetic and at worst abusive, I think they highlight people's need to bring God into their lives to make sense out of their surroundings. In some sense it is very fair; people want more out of God than just some distant concept invoked vacuously at a prayer service.

Nonetheless, most of the time their words end up sounding more silly than substantive, more blasphemous than holy and more political than religious. There is just something about Rabbi Ovadiah and Bill Clinton that makes them …how should I say this…un-prophetic.

The rabbis in the Ethics of our Fathers (3:17) were right when they said, “seag le-chachmah shtikah”--“a fence for wisdom is silence.”

It a shame there is so much noise in this world.

So much surrounding the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito comes down to two simple words: "life" and "choice."

Simply put, for many in Washington the question of whether he is pro-life or pro-choice is the be-all and end-all of his nomination. The extreme division that certain groups have created between these two concepts is precisely what at first glance makes it so difficult to pin-point a Jewish position on his nomination.

The Jewish tradition endorses neither life nor choice as ultimate ends. Both are critical elements in God’s master plan. On the one hand, life is God’s first and greatest gift to humanity. However, Judaism’s emphasis on life is matched by the weight it places on the concept of choice.

Maimonides makes bechira chophshit, freedom of choice, one of his 13 primary principles for understanding Judaism. For Maimonides, true observance of the law can only come about through one choosing through their own free will to follow what they have been commanded. Even regarding repentance, he argues (Mishna Torah, Laws of Repentance 2:1) that “to truly repent” involves the ability to have the opportunity to sin but choose not to. The choice to sin must be present and available before someone has fully repented.

Today, in American society, the concepts of life and choice have been hijacked by absolutist political and religious figures asserting that human beings either live by the credo “the sanctity of life” or the motto “life without choice is not worth living.” What both of these noisy sides fail to recognize is the overwhelming silent majority of this country standing in the very grey, murky and complex terrain called real life. Those who stand in the world of the living realize that ultimately each of us chooses life. As the Jewish position states, “ubacharta bachaim,” "And you shall choose living." Living points to the quality and meaning of one's life.

Ultimately, the Jewish tradition stands in opposition to both extremes of the debate, offering a sober worldview that gives dignity to the often-conflicting rhythms of human existence. While the tradition worries about "partial-birth" or late-term abortions, there are times that even under such circumstances the most stringent of rabbinic voices would allow for a fetus to be terminated. Likewise, there are almost no rabbinic authorities who contest the importance of stem-cell research, and while the vast majority of the tradition opposes physician-assisted suicide, much debate and legal room exists around the status of those who are brain dead.

When taken together, these rulings can be seen as contradictory, but on closer examination they give testimony to a theology not of life or choice per se, but a theology of the living.

In Hebrew, the word emet begins with an aleph--the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet--and ends with the letter taph--the last letter in the alphabet. Ultimately, any notion of truth must take into account opposing worldviews.

So the next time you hear someone tell you that the Jewish tradition follows in the ideological footsteps of the right-wing element in the Republican Party or the left wing of the Democratic Party, do yourself a favor: Close whatever section of the newspaper you are reading and open up the comics, pick up your T.V. remote and change channel to the Yankees, and if you heard it on the radio, don’t even bother switching the dial to find a more sane station on a.m., just flip on the f.m., sit back and listen to some of your favorite music. Because anything you’re about to be told is only a half truth at best and an outright lie at worst.

Therefore, the real question confronting the nation as we consider the Alito nomination is not so much whether he would vote to favor a pro-life or a pro-choice perspective (besides, he would never answer that question, anyway). Rather, the important question is: Will he ignore a jurisprudence of living and instead privilege a more dogmatic and principled form of legal interpretation?

In recent weeks, Alito has gone back and forth on so many different issues. On the one hand, one is tempted to see his flip-flopping as precisely the type of non-dogmatic jurisprudence that most Americans are looking for in a Supreme Court justice. On the other hand, many fear his fli-flopping is more about doing whatever it takes to get on the high court. Let us hope that it is the latter and not the former.

Mr. Klinghoffer, I just do not understand what you are trying to say.

In your Forward article, you suggested that Jack Abramoff should be left alone because the money he got through illegal means was given to charity--an idea that most would find to be at best morally and Jewishly troubling. Where does it say in the Jewish tradition that one can steal so long as you give the money to charity?

Yet, as I pointed out in my earlier post about Abramoff, the charity you mention--an Orthodox yeshiva--is precisely the way Abramoff laundered his money!

If using an Orthodox yeshiva to launder ill-begotten money does not embarrass you, then what does?

Let's cut to the crux of the issue: Jack Abramoff is an embarrassment to Orthodox Jews. His rabbis and the religious figures supporting him and living off his dirty money are embarrassments to Judaism.Lest you have forgotten the way Abramoff--the...