Some people may accept the cultural or religious world they are raised to be part of without question. Others may reject that world and search for a different way of ordering meaning in their lives. Berger argues that we are hard-wired to “build a world” and impose meaning on reality through choices we make about culture and religion, whether we choose to live in the cultural and religious world given to us by our family or origin or whether we choose to live in a different world of meaning. He says that whatever each of us decides to do, we each make a choice. We aren’t passive recipients of a “world” even if we choose to refrain from questioning it. Here’s how he describes this choice (go ahead and substitute the word “religion” for the phrase “social world” in this quote, as Berger later goes on to say the same thing applies to one’s experience of religion):

…the social world (with its appropriate institutions, roles, and identities) is not passively absorbed by the individual, but actively appropriated by him [or her]. Furthermore, once the individual is formed as a person … [she or] he must continue to participate in the conversation [with the social world] that sustains him as a person [with an] ongoing biography. That is, the individual continues to be a co-producer of the social world, and thus of [him- or her-]self. - The Sacred Canopy, p.18

Here’s where it gets more interesting to me as I think about what makes an approach to religion healthy or unhealthy.

Berger writes that “All socially constructed worlds are inherently precarious (p. 29).” Events happen that contradict previously held beliefs. Neighboring peoples introduce alternative “worlds” that are more appealing to some people. Religions compete for followers. Children ask “why” and aren’t always satisfied with the answers that worked for their ancestors. Times change. Chapter 2 of his book is called “Religion and World-Maintenance,” a title that points to one of the key activities religions engage in - attempting to stave off threats to the world they have constructed.

A couple thoughts this brings up for me:

Without the ability to control the access to so many “worlds” that humans now experience, it is not surprising that fundamentalism is such a powerful force on the world stage. The perceived threat to the certainty of these fundamentalist worlds must be enormous. Perhaps many of these true believers are trying to account for these many potential challenges to their respective worlds by describing the time we’re living in as a time of siege against them. For some, the world they live in makes more sense if this siege is seen as an indicator that a final, apocalyptic battle is immanent. There’s comfort in co-creating a world in which the rising up of all these other threatening worlds is merely a prelude to the final victory of one’s own world. But how frightening that so many around the globe - members of different religions - are actively choosing such a world of religious meaning. People living in such worlds are in many cases inflicting violence on others or hoping for a cataclysmic war. The final battle should start already - what a relief it’ll be - so much better than this sinking, unspoken doubt that our world (ie. our religious sect) might be replaced by a different one.
The theologian, Sam Keen, writes like a person who has become aware of Berger’s observations about how we tend to build worlds of meaning through culture and religion. He has sought to articulate a theology - or a “world” - that acknowledges that we can’t know for sure a whole lot of things about ultimate reality. I like how he puts it here:

In truth, we cannot know enough to be either theists or atheists. We have no alternative except to decide whether to trust or mistrust this encompassing mystery. It seems to me that the best theological position is one that combines agnosticism with trust. I choose to trust the surrounding mystery out of which I emerged and into which I will disappear in death and to rest secure within the darkness of the unknowable One. -Hymns to an Unknown God, p. 69

To me, one of the cardinal elements of a healthy approach to religion is a healthy not-knowing. If Berger is right, then this choice may require us to do a certain kind of resisting of our impulse to have a well-defined “world” that we inhabit. We choose to co-create a religious world in which we acknowledge our act of creation, refraining from over reifying that world, and incorporating into it a healthy dose of not knowing.

The difference between melodrama and drama is both simple and telling. It has nothing to do with plot. Both drama and melodrama can feature a plot with many twists and death-defying turns. But in melodrama, as the plot develops, the characters remain static. [The characters in a melodrama] are as two-dimensional after their ordeals as they were before. [The characters in a drama] are not. In the course of the human drama, whatever the plot may be, character develops. - pp. 118-119

What this reminded me of is how I perceive the difference in the way that fundamentalist or ultra-orthodox religious groups tend to look at things, such as the conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories. When I listen to the way the religious right wing of each of the Abrahamic faiths characterizes the conflict, I feel like I’m hearing a melodrama described. When I listen to how moderates and progressives within the Abrahamic religions describe the conflict, I feel like I’m hearing a drama described

The groups viewing the conflict from the perspective of Church’s “melodrama” seem to share in common a vision of “final victory,” with the defeat of the evil Others. The various “players” in the melodrama are starkly defined in two-dimensional renderings. The outcome of the “melodrama” is as certain as the fixed nature of the various players.  God is on one and only one side in the “melodrama.”  God may love the people on the “other side,” but God’s hope for them is that they switch from the evil side to the good side.  If they don’t, they’ll be punished eternally.

The groups viewing the conflict from Church’s perspective of “drama” may differ somewhat on their political goals, but they seem to share in common a vision of human transformation - co-existence, mutual respect, justice, forgiveness, and the transcendence of violence.  The various “players” in the drama are defined as human, complex, fallible, tragic, and yet capable of growth and change.  The outcome of the “drama” is unknown, and there is more than one possible road ahead towards peace or further suffering.  In the “drama,” God is on everyone’s side and is in everyone and present everywhere.  No one side is all good or bad.  God is found especially in the potential for human transformation - from violence to peace, from hatred to respect and ultimately trust.

Something that’s been on my mind a lot lately is the so-called Christian Zionist movement, as energetically led by CUFI - Christians United for Israel, Rev. John Hagee’s group. This is, in my view, a Christian manifestation of an unhealthy approach to religion, combining several forces that I believe can be very dangerous: biblical literalism, absolute certainty, and apocalyptic fantasy. I’m especially bothered by the fact that some in the Jewish community, in part moved by CUFI’s emotionally warm overtures to Israel, have decided to support CUFI’s work.

Right now I’m pondering whether the US needs a new major organization to campaign across the land in the name of a healthier approach to Judaism and Christianity vis-a-vis the Middle East. (I also support this kind of movement within Islam, but right now my instinct is that a Jewish-Christian joint endeavor could be powerful as a counterweight to CUFI’s agenda.) Could it be called something like Jews and Christians United for Israel and Palestine (JACUFIP)? JACUFIP would organize churches and synagogues, rabbis and pastors, and lay leaders too in support of a set of principles that affirm Israel’s right to exist, the right of the Palestinians to a sovereign homeland too alongside Israel, and common religious values that represent the healthiest, most life-affirming elements of our faith traditions. JACUFIP would make a concerted outreach effort across the land to Jews and Christians who might be subjecte dto CUFI’s message, offering a clear critique of the unhealthy elements of their message, and providing a different way to show love and support to Israel (which, needn’t and in fact mustn’t exclude showing love and support to the future state of Palestine). Just sharing some thoughts here….

The True Believer

Rev. Kathleen McTigue
Sunday, April 16, 2000

The polarization that characterizes so much of American life is risky business in [any setting], but especially so in a monastic community. The person you’re quick to label and dismiss as a racist, a homophobe, a queer, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a bigoted conservative or bleeding-heart liberal is also a person you’re committed to live, work, pray, and dine with for the rest of your life. Anyone who knows a monastery well knows that it is no exaggeration to say that you find Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh living next door to each other. Mother Angelica and Mary Gordon. Barney Frank and Jesse Helms. Not only living together in close quarters, but working, eating, praying and enjoying…recreation together, every day, often for fifty years or more…. How do they do it?…They …have the wisdom of St. Benedict, who [taught]…that there are two types of zeal; one which is bitter and divisive, separating monks from God and from each other, and another which can lead them together into [more abundant] life. [Benedict defined] this ‘good zeal’ as acts of love…[and taught] that this means ’supporting with the greatest patience one another [through all] weaknesses of body or behavior.’

From Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace

When I was on sabbatical last year, part of my discipline of spiritual exploration was a series of retreats in different settings. One of these, a four-day retreat, was at a Benedictine Abbey in Bethlehem, CT. I discovered on my arrival that a part of the rhythm of monastic life offered to retreatants, no matter what their faith or their reasons for retreat, was the assignment of a member of the community as a kind of guide or liaison. The person I was assigned was a nun in her seventies, about four and a half feet tall, with the unlikely and deeply incongruous name of Mother Placid. She spoke rapid-fire and nearly nonstop with a strong New York accent, although she had been a member of that cloistered community for half a century. I found her to be a splendid companion for my stay there, full of humor, encouragement and acceptance, easily able to converse although the vocabularies of our faiths were so different.

During my stay at the abbey I also met an almost opposite incarnation of faith, in the form of a young fellow retreatant who turned out to be a Catholic fundamentalist. Our one brief conversation began with her question, in an interrogating tone, as to whether I was Catholic. On learning that I was not, she immediately began preaching conversion. When I politely interrupted to let her know that I had been raised Catholic and had chosen differently as an adult, my status plummeted from merely pagan to apostate, and she got all the way into preaching exorcism before I finally told her quietly that the conversation was necessarily over.

What do we do with fundamentalism? In her poem, “The Fundamental Truth”, Marge Piercy writes:

The Christian right, Islamic Jihad,
the Jewish right bank settlers bringing
the Messiah down, the Japanese sects
who worship by bombing subways,
they all hate each other
but more they hate the mundane,
ordinary people who love living
more than dying in radiant glory,
who shuffle and sigh and bake bread…They need a planet of their own,
perhaps even a barren moon
with artificial atmosphere,
where they will surely be nearer
to their gods and their fiercest
enemies, where they can kill
to their heart’s peace
kill to the last standing man
and leave the rest of us be.

Not mystics to whom the holy
comes in the core of struggle
in a shimmer of blinding quiet,
not scholars haggling out the inner
meaning of gnarly ancient sentences.
No, the holy comes to these zealots
as a license to kill, for self doubt
and humility have dried like mud
under their marching feet.

They have far more in common
with each other, these braggarts
of hatred, the iron hearted
in whose ear a voice spoke
once and left them deaf.
Their faith is founded on death
of others, and everyone is other
to them, whose Torah is splattered
in letters of blood.

We might go a long time in between conversations like the one I had with my fellow retreatant. But on a daily level we will see the true believers out there in the news, bent on crusades that mingle religion and politics. Sometimes it’s truly in the form of a holy war, where the flame of religious passion burns so brightly that each side is entirely blinded to the humanity of the other, and both killing and dying seem to become frightful sacraments. In our own country, where we reap the great benefit of a long and stable history separating church and state, we get the language of the holy war without as much of its blood.

So we hear about the Southern Baptists choosing the holiest days of the Jewish or Hindu calendar to launch a focused effort at conversion. We listen to the founder of the Promise Keepers, Bill McCartney, say on CNN, “We have no political agenda; we just gotta make sure the Constitution doesn’t find itself in violation of God’s law”. We watch as Kansas allows a religious belief about the origins of life to be taught alongside science in the schools. But even here, the language of holy war can be twined into physical violence. When doctors who perform abortion are called ‘murderers’, for instance, or homosexuality is named a sin or perversion, who’s to measure the weight of these words to someone whose hands pick up a club or a gun?

What do we do with fundamentalism? How do we understand our own religious mandates of tolerance and respect when we come face to face with a ‘true believer’, one who greets us with the zealous certainty that we are damned or dangerous — or both — because of our beliefs? Despite the plaintive suggestion in Marge Piercy’s poem, we can’t find a separate planet for the zealots among us. We don’t have to live in quite the level of forced intimacy of the cloistered Benedictines. But we do need to learn, as surely as they do, how to live together and find common ground across our differences.

To keep eyes open for common ground is not the same as passivity. When the creeds of fundamentalism are brought into the public realm as they so often are, we have no choice except to respond from the teachings of our own faith. When we hear the language of rejection and condemnation, our own religious mandates call us to speak just as clearly and firmly our language of inclusion and respect.

But it may be that our faith calls us to something else as well, not just an external but also an internal response. I think we’re also called to understand, as compassionately as we can, even those who show no compassion or understanding. When I found myself face to face with the Catholic fundamentalist last year, my first internal reaction to her was anger. How dare she presume so much? Words like ’self-righteous’ and ‘fanatic’ immediately sprang to mind, and when I ended our conversation it was with neutral language but a seething heart.

It was only later, replaying her words in my mind, that I was able to wonder what might lie behind her certainty, what might drive her to her rigid beliefs, so far removed not only from mine but from the open-hearted serenity of her fellow Catholic, Mother Placid. I didn’t want to re-engage with this fundamentalist; but I did want to step behind her eyes enough to feel something toward her other than anger. I wanted to carry away something in my own heart besides judgment and indignation.

In an interview a few years ago the quintessential liberal Christian, William Sloane Coffin, was asked about fundamentalism. He said, “Fundamentalism of any kind, political or religious, is deeply rooted in anxiety, and that which is emotionally rooted is not intellectually soluble…It is very hard to argue intellectually with people who believe doubt is the great enemy…” One of our difficulties, in responding to fundamentalism when we meet it, is that we are so much more comfortable on the intellectual than the emotional plain. We want to have a rational conversation, a movement of give and take, listening and response. We are so sure of where we stand intellectually that we keep trying to make rational inroads, and when we fail we throw up our hands in despair at how irrational the other person seems to be.

But if we can remember the degree to which absolutism is rooted in anxiety, maybe we can begin to look for some other ground for communion. We will not change the mind of a fundamentalist, because his or her conviction is rooted in the heart. But can we respond in a way that diminishes anxiety? Can we resist the rise of our own self-righteousness, and look for ways to cultivate compassion instead?

UU minister Scott Alexander often cites the early Universalists and the teachings they proclaimed over two centuries ago, as models for us in our own struggles with intolerance. Universalism was born within a theological world that was dominated, much more than our own, by rigid visions of God’s will and coercive movements of what we’d now call fundamentalism.

The early preachers of Universalism had a different vision to offer against the doctrine of human depravity and the certainty of hellfire. The early Universalists ‘could see human weakness and wrong-doing just as clearly as the Calvinists’, writes Alexander, ‘but theirs was a bold faith about human …possibility, a dream of what we might yet be and build together as a struggling human family…They saw the oneness and worth of humanity more than its separateness and sin.’ John Murray, one of the people who brought Universalism to this country, put it this way: “Go out into the highways and byways. Give the people something of your new vision. You possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not hell, but hope and courage; preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”

It’s important to remember these deep historical roots of ours — not because we will change a modern-day fundamentalist by quoting John Murray, but because we need to stay grounded in the power and promise of our own faith. If we are not so grounded, then we have nowhere to go when an intellectual conversation fails. We will wrap ourselves in the robes of our reasonableness, and without even noticing will slide toward the smug certainty of our own correctness, adding new walls and barriers to those erected by the fundamentalists. But if we remember that our vision has heart as well as head, we might surprise ourselves by discovering common ground — at least enough to build a few stepping stones.

A year or two ago, it became something of a fad among some Christian youth to wear bracelets or clothing with the letters “WWJD” printed on them. This stood for a query — What would Jesus do? — that was supposed to remind the one who wore it, or saw it worn, of some fundamental values to guide the decisions of the day. Our denominational magazine, the UU World, reported that some industrious young folks from within our own faith began sporting their own version: WWUUD, for ‘what would Unitarian Universalism do?’ One of our ministers, Tom Schade, had an interesting response to this. He said that within an increasingly sectarian dialogue, the original question, ‘what would Jesus do?’, could be a patch of common ground where our children and their more orthodox friends could meet.

Schade suggested that we had not served our youth well if they did not realize that our own UU teachings were rooted in centuries of pondering what Jesus taught, what he showed us, what in fact he might do with the moral dilemmas we meet in our lives. “By responding with ‘WWUUD’”, he wrote, “we offer a model of polarizing behavior rather than bridge-building. We show them we consider our identity more important that the shared system of ethical values we might find in considering the same questions with the Christians. And we place our name in the position of the name of someone they worship, which they can only interpret to mean we worship ourselves. Should we answer the Islamic cry of, ‘God is Great’ with ‘UUs are great?’”

Tom Schade’s words might also remind us of a specific part of our interdependent web. We’re fond of contemplating it on one level — the wondrous ways in which we’re connected to all of life. And that’s true and worth contemplating. But we don’t often focus on what might be the shadow side of this belief, less appealing but no less true, and it is this: we are also connected to all that goes wrong in our world, linked to all the capacities for harm that are out there.

In other words, we all have the seed of a righteous little fundamentalist lurking within us, and that’s critical for us to remember whenever we try to reach out, however tentatively, to those with whom we disagree. In addition to the lack of available empty planets out there, the other reason we can’t separate out the fundamentalists is because the same anxiety, rigidity and lack of humility lie potential within us all.

Even within our famously open circles, I have heard the voice of righteous intolerance speak. We all have. In the congregation I once served a woman rose one Sunday during the sharing of joys and sorrows and indignantly denounced the hymn we had just sung as ‘one that wasn’t really a UU hymn’ — despite having been drawn from our hymnal. In a different UU circle I once heard a man declare that it was absurd to think a true UU could also claim to be a Christian — despite our roots solidly anchored within Christian history. I’ve heard UUs sneer that those who have spiritual yearnings need to seek a therapist, not our religious community. And even in this congregation, as joyously affirming as it nearly always is, there are times when people imply that a good religious liberal can’t possibly be a political conservative.

There will always be some people in our world toward whom we cannot extend bridges because they’ll dismantle them more quickly than we can build. There will always be some who are too anxious or driven to ever hear the sweet music that comes sailing through humanity only because of harmonious diversity. Some of these closed souls will cause us grief, and some may even be dangerous to us, or to others we need to protect.

But in our struggle to respond wisely and kindly even to fundamentalism, we must try to remember the legacy left by our Universalist forebearers. Their theology was born from their stubborn refusal to give up on any member of the human family. They used light and love and generosity and joy as antidotes to the grim teachings of others, and those same tools belong to us. We must also remember to speak even our most passionate truths with a small ‘t’, guarding against the poisons of self-righteousness in ourselves. Anais Nin wrote, “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.” We need to leave ourselves room to glimpse truths available even in very foreign theologies.

And we might also do well to learn a little bit about the Rule of St. Benedict, which still guides some of the monastics who struggle, as we all must, to live together. Benedict taught a virtue that is so old-fashioned in name that we hardly every hear it spoken anymore: ‘forbearance.’ It means to be tolerant and patient. If we can practice forbearance we might not feel that our encounters with fundamentalists are measurably more successful. But we might walk away feeling something gentler than anger, something that leaves us less vulnerable to our own failures of humility and our own righteous judgments. Perhaps we could develop some version of daily prayer for ourselves that might echo this one drawn not from Benedict, but from the Sioux tribes of this country: Great Spirit, fill us with light. Give us the strength to understand and eyes to see. Teach us to walk the soft earth as relatives to all that live.

Amen.

I became a rabbi because I couldn’t stop wrestling with Judaism. Not because I found uninterrupted joy in Judaism, not because it always felt like home, and not because I was drawn like a moth to its spiritual flame. For me, it was the path of Jacob - of Ya’akov - our biblical ancestor who wrestled with God. For those of you who don’t remember the story, one night while Jacob was alone by the Ya-bok River, a mysterious man appeared, and they wrestled throughout the night. Jacob won the contest, and later discovered that he had been wrestling with a Divine being, possibly God, Godself. For many Jews, Jacob is the ancestor who symbolizes the experience of struggling with God - and also of struggling with Judaism. Or, to mix religious metaphors, Jacob is the patron saint of those who see the path of wrestling with one’s tradition as a holy path.

That’s been me for my whole adult life.

… I’ll tell you how I came to identify my story with our ancestor, Jacob the God-wrestler. First, you’re going to have to picture me 17 years ago as a freshman in college. For those of you who’ve seen me when I’m not wearing my kippah, that means you’re going to have to picture me with hair. Lots of brown, curly hair.

My first two years of college, I was the kind of Jewish student who would go to Friday night services once or twice a month. I was looking for something in Judaism – there was something calling me to walk through the door – but I couldn’t name it. Sometimes the beauty of the tradition would fill me with joy and a sense of God’s presence… But those moments of spiritual embrace would always give way to painful moments of disappointment and alienation. Mixed in with sweet and uplifting Shabbat songs were prayers that felt chauvinistic, that seemed to boast of the people Israel as God’s favorite children in the human family – something I didn’t believe in then and still do not now.

My junior year, I joined a Havurah [an informal Jewish community on campus]. I was still seeking something from Judaism, and still unable to name it. The same pattern unfolded. One moment I’d be inspired by the Torah’s compassion for the stranger, the next moment horrified by its stories justifying conquest and slaughter. And so, on it went. I’d draw near the fire and get warmed, and then somehow get burned. So then I’d walk away from the fire, and, after a little while, I’d feel cold. Then, you guessed it, I’d draw near the fire again, and the cycle would continue.

I talked to the campus rabbi about this, and she said that the wrestling had an integrity of its own. She would often say that the struggle with the tradition is Judaism, and she encouraged me to embrace it. Hearing that was significant for me, but I didn’t entirely buy it.

I didn’t want to spend my whole life being a wrestler. There was something I wanted from Judaism, and in the years that followed, I began to be able to name it. In fact, there were two things I wanted from Judaism: number one, that Judaism comfort and reassure me, and number two, that it inspire me and challenge me to be the best person I can possibly be. Put differently, first, I wanted Judaism to give me a God I could turn to in my deepest vulnerability, a God I could snuggle with. And second, I wanted Judaism to be a religion more focused on serving others than on protecting itself.

Now that I could name what I wanted, I wanted Judaism to deliver. Something deep inside me was telling me not to ignore this impulse, not to let Judaism off the hook and resign myself to a revolving door relationship with my religion. I took my inspiration from Abraham, who had the audacity to argue with God. “Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do what is just?” he asked. I decided that Judaism was strong enough, old enough, and tough enough to lend an ear to my demands, too.

So I shouted my demands to Judaism – “These are the two things I want from you!” and I named them. And Judaism replied. “But I already do both of those things for you, some of the time.”

It was at that moment that I realized that I wanted … a third thing.

“And I also want you to be consistent!” I shouted, and waited for an answer.

To that demand, I got no reply. It reminds me of dear old Jacob. After the wrestling was over, Jacob asked the mysterious stranger to please tell him his name. The stranger refused. “Why do you ask my name?” was all he would say.

Gradually, I began to realize that the question for me was becoming one of whether I could embrace an inconsistent Judaism, a Judaism that would sometimes bring me God’s truth and other times bring me human misreading of the Divine will. I tried to work through this question by taking jobs with Jewish organizations that were trying to give expression to the aspects of Judaism that I found the most inspiring. In the course of that work, I met some remarkable rabbis – women rabbis, who, perhaps by their very presence as women in the rabbinate, had also had to wrestle profoundly with Judaism. Despite negative judgment from much of the traditional Jewish world, these women saw something in Judaism that they loved so much they decided to spend their careers working to build and nurture that potential. They were wrestlers of the first order.

Inspired by these rabbis, I finally gave in and went to rabbinical school.

I had one condition for going to rabbinical school. It had to be a place that would embrace the beauty and depth of Judaism, and yet it had to also be a place where it was completely okay to question anything and everything. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College was just that place. More than anywhere else I think I could have gone for my rabbinic training, RRC welcomed me as I was – a lifelong wrestler with Judaism.

At RRC, I learned three ideas that had a huge impact on me.

The first is that Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people. It sounds simplistic, but it’s actually a powerful statement. Judaism has been and will be what we make of it. In every era it has adapted and changed, and grown like a living organism. And who is the Jewish people today? Who will inherit our tradition’s wisdom and make choices about what Judaism brings to the world? Us. This first lesson taught me that Judaism is in our hands, and it will be what we make of it.

The second idea is that Judaism – like every other religion – is not perfect. I already had felt that way, but at RRC I realized that if I was going to hold out for Judaism – or for that matter, any religion – to come along and be perfect, I was going to chase my tail for a long, long time. I came to see my cycle of inspiration and alienation in a new light at RRC. Religions are our way of seeking for God, and when they connect with the Divine – pow – Justice rolls down like waters, and Righteousness like a mighty stream. But when religions miss the mark – when they misread the Divine – look out. They can be agents of hatred, division, and violence. The impact of the second lesson – that religions are imperfect - was to remind me that, once again, what we do with our tradition is up to us. Walking away from the debates within the Jewish community would be like giving up my right to vote. I just couldn’t do that.

The third lesson I learned was that Judaism – like other religions – has such amazing potential. The potential for Judaism to continue evolving, to continue its 5,000-year wrestling and seeking after God, to keep offering its ancient wisdom as a corrective to secular society’s failures, and to keep up its tradition of relentless hope, of dissent and even of self-criticism – this potential is something to be very excited about.

At RRC I realized that the reason my wrestling with Judaism resulted in my going to rabbinical school – and not in my relegating Judaism to a minor role in my life – was that I never stopped feeling excited about the potential of Judaism. And RRC made me realize that each of us has a voice to contribute to the shaping of Judaism today. Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world.” I realized that what was driving me to become a rabbi was a call to be the kind of Jew I wanted to see in the world, and to help build a Jewish community in which collectively we can be the kind of Judaism we want to see in the world.

What is the kind of Judaism I would like to help manifest in the world?

I’ll just say this much. The Judaism I want to see in the world is what I call a Judaism of service and humility. A Judaism whose heart is focused on service to others, and a Judaism that draws on the story of our liberation as an instrument of identifying with the Other, including our enemies. It’s a Judaism that shares with the world our tradition of debate, of seeing ethical questions from many different angles. It’s a Judaism that recognizes that the Unifying Mystery we call God goes by many names and by no name at all. And finally, it’s a Judaism that understands that all religions contain fragments of the ultimate truth, and that no religion holds a monopoly on the truth. All these values already exist in Judaism – indeed, much of what kept drawing me back to Judaism over and over again were these Jewish teachings. But in our Jewish world, often these values take a back seat to other agendas that, to me, seem either misguided, or at times, chauvinistic, and even dangerous.

I guess I realized that if I wanted to help create the Judaism whose potential I’m in love with, I needed to claim my citizenship, take my seat at the table, and vote with my heart.

…The Judaism we build will be what we make of it. And on Yom Kippur, when we are individually and collectively doing cheshbon ha-nefesh – an examination of the soul – it’s fitting to be talking about what we want to make of our Judaism. If we make of it a tool for community joy, for peace-building, for service to others, it will be that. If we make of it a tool for worry, for fear of the outsider, for defensiveness and even of aggression, it will be that. It’s yours – it’s ours – we’re not just inheritors, we’re shapers and participants. The first step is to get involved.

I don’t presume to hold the key to knowing for certain what makes an approach to religion more or less healthy - I want to make that clear.  For now, this blog is a place for me to jot down some of the things I’m exploring.  I’m also new at blogging, so I expect a very choppy and uneven start.