Rabbi Joshua Waxman: July 2007 Archives

It’s one of the most challenging situations that faces many American rabbis today, especially in the progressive movements: a young couple approaches a rabbi and asks about officiating at a wedding. One partner is Jewish and one is not. The rabbi is suddenly confronted with two young people--deeply in love and ready to make a commitment--who want to spend their lives together. More than that, the couple is sufficiently interested in having a Jewish ceremony, perhaps even committed to creating a Jewish home together, and they are seeking out a rabbi to perform the wedding to solemnize their relationship in a Jewish framework. If the rabbi says "no" he or she risks alienating these young people from Jewish life–a dangerous precedent given the high intermarriage rates in the American Jewish community. If the rabbi says "yes" he or she is contributing to the same demographic trend that threatens the community’s long-term existence given all the statistics and evidence that children of intermarriage identify with and affiliate with Judaism at an alarming low rate. What to do?

It’s interesting to see the tension between Rabbi Stern and Rabbi Grossman’s posts–the former portrays himself as the purveyor of substance and the latter as the purveyor of sizzle. What we need, of course, is both. It goes without saying that we need to make Judaism accessible and inviting, but it also needs to be grounded in a content that does more than take the things people are already doing and flavor them "Jewish." As a Reconstructionist, I’m a big believer in the collective wisdom of the Jewish people to make Jewish decisions–this is why Judaism has evolved over time and remained an organic and relevant part of Jews’ daily lives. So I don’t think we need to tell young people what their Judaism should look like, they can figure that out for themselves.

What we do need to do is emphasize the importance of Jewish identity and of proudly and publicly proclaiming their allegiance to Jewish peoplehood. We need to offer them ideas of what our civilization has created (abiding sense of holiness in the world, justice, ethics, belief in the perfectability of the world, beauty, humor) and the tools they can use (sacred texts, Jewish history, social action, liturgy, music, art) to help create a meaningful and dynamic Judaism in their own time. Then we watch them go in directions we can’t possibly imagine. The key is to get young Jews to care, to be invested in the Jewish project, to understand that being Jewish is important–possibly the most significant aspect of their being. It all flows from there.

Both Rabbi Grossman and Rabbi Stern grapple with the question of God’s role in calamitous events that befall us, either as individuals or as a people. If God is loving and good, it is difficult to understand these catastrophic occurrences–either God is somehow "not present" at these moments or is justly punishing us for our wrongdoings.

There is a danger, however, in identifying God only with those good things that happen to us, with making God overly "nice." If we affirm God’s presence only in the good, we suggest that God is absent from those moments of hardship and deprivation when we are most in need of divine comfort. Instead, it is important to recognize that God is equally present in everything that happens to us–hence the rabbinic dictum that we must “bless the bad the same as we bless the good.” The prophet Isaiah, himself no stranger to hardship and deprivation, records God as saying, “I form light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil–I the Lord do all these things.” (45:7)

As a Reconstructionist Jew, I don’t believe God ordains divine punishment or share Isaiah’s belief that God is the cause of the destruction that befalls us: God did not will the destruction of six million innocent men, women, and children. But I do believe that God is equally present in all parts of our lives if we are open to recognizing it. It’s easy to affirm God’s presence in the miracle of a new life, but God is equally present in the mystery of the end of life, even if we respond to these two events (both far outside of the realm of human understanding and control) very differently.

Tisha B’Av is an opportunity to look for God and affirm God’s presence even in the darkest of places.

Rabbi Stern’s recent comments on Pope Benedict and the direction in which he is taking the Catholic Church gives good cause for alarm. On the one hand, the Pope is certainly well within his rights (and role) to assert that Catholic doctrine is the sole truth and all those outside of the Church will suffer eternal damnation. On the other hand, this is almost surely not a helpful point to bring out when one also claims to be seeking greater interfaith understanding.

I certainly understand that in interfaith dialogue everyone is entitled to their theological convictions, as we discussed on this blog a few weeks ago, and no one should enter dialogue seeking to prove someone else is wrong. But I see real problems with the “fundamentalist relativism” Rabbi Stern describes. Fundamentalism is based on assuming your truth alone is complete and correct, without allowing the possibility for questioning and discovery. There is a great difference between saying, "I believe Jesus is the one and only path to salvation" and "Jesus is the one and only path to salvation." The former informs the listener while the latter seeks to make a claim upon him.

My freshman year of college, I was accosted by a classmate who lived across the hall in our dorm, a born-again Christian whose fervor and certainty I found both compelling and disturbing. Learning that I was Jewish, she immediately expressed her admiration for Jews as "God’s chosen people." She asked questions about Jewish belief and practice but the one question that she couldn’t get her mind around, the one she kept returning to was, "But you don’t believe in Jesus, right? So according to your religion, how are you saved?"

I, too, had difficulty wrapping my head around that question–it’s such a fundamentally un-Jewish question. My classmate was taking Christian categories and simply trying to find the analogous terms or concepts in Judaism. But of course it doesn’t work that way. Just as languages each have their own flavors and nuances and words that can’t be readily translated into other languages, a religious tradition is a rich system of symbol and meaning with its own integrity. There is no "Jewish" translation of the word, or, more importantly, of the concept of a "savior" like Jesus.