A Touch of the Sacred

Frances Schwartz, Eugene B. Borowitz

Description

Our faith in God and our love of Judaism are tested daily by our turbulent world and personal challenges. In this special book, Dr. Eugene Borowitz, the leading theologian of liberal Judaism, offers a highly accessible guide to the questions we’ve all wrestled with in our spiritual lives. In these pages, Borowitz shares with you his rich inner life, which draws from both the rational and mystical Jewish thought that have inspired two generations of rabbis, cantors, and educators, and will now inspire you.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Israel
• Hebrew school
• Judaism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 13 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580236362
• Langue: English

Extrait

To the Shabbat Morning Bible Study Group of Temple Sinai, Stamford, Connecticut,
celebrating their having completed the reading of the entire Tanach.
-EBB
To the Torah Study Group of Temple Beth Or, Washington Township, New Jersey,
celebrating their continued joy and camaraderie in weekly learning.
-FWS
C ONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction.
Part I. Seeking the Sacred One
1. We Can t Talk about God but We Must.
2. Where Is God? Answering a Nine-Year-Old
3. God and Mystery
4. The Many Meanings of God Is One
5. Is Our God Experience Authentic?.
6. The Jewish Idea(s) of God
7. Relating to God: Substance or Style?
8. Accepting the World God Willed.
Part II. Doing Holy Deeds
9. Being Close to God
10. The Act and Art of Praying
11. Moses Prayer for Healing-and Ours.
12. How Shall We Comfort the Mourner?
13. Traditional Words of Condolence.
14. A New Phase in Jewish Piety
15. The Power of Creating New Religious Customs
16. Fanaticism and Zeal.
17. Who Is a Mentsh? .
Part III. Creating Sacred Community
18. A Mystical Model for Leaders.
19. How an Agnostic Community Came to Seek Spirituality.
20. The Appeal of Transdenominational Judaism
21. A Conflict over Interfaith Dialogue
22. How Liberal and Orthodox Jews Can Coexist
23. The Special Risk of Liberalizing Judaism
24. Catholic-Jewish Dialogue: An Autobiographical Note
25. The Historical Case for Interfaith Dialogue
26. Building a Community of God-Fearers
Part IV. Reading Sacred Texts
27. Letting the Psalms Speak to You.
28. Reliving the Sinai Experience Each Year
29. Weighing the Texts That Instruct Us
30. Putting Texts in Context.
31. Religious Authority in Judaism
32. Integrating Jewish Law and Jewish Ethics
33. Jewish Decision Making
34. Innovation in Judaism: Yesterday and Today
Part V. Thinking about Holiness
35. Why Do We Need Theology?
36. Theology as an Afterthought
37. Why Historical Theology Won t Do.
38. Jewish God-Talk s Four Criteria
39. The Brain-Heart Interplay in Faith
40. Four Ways to Understand God Says
41. Clarifying Some Feminist Ideas.
42. Jewish Beliefs about Evil
43. The Messianic Hope Today.
44. Life after Death
Part VI. Learning from Holy Thinkers
45. Why I Am a Theologian Rather than a Philosopher.
46. Seven People Who Shaped Modern Jewish Thought
47. Rationalist Thinkers and What They Can Teach Us
48. Two Misunderstood Messages of Martin Buber
49. Mordecai Kaplan: Ethnicity in Modern Judaism
50. The Greatest Contemporary Orthodox Jewish Philosopher
51. The Ethics Mystery and Abraham Joshua Heschel
52. Covenant Theology: An Autobiographical Note.
Glossary.
Bibliography of Titles Mentioned in This Book

About the Authors
Copyright
Also Available
About Jewish Lights
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

W e are grateful to the individuals and adult education groups who encouraged us while critiquing our early efforts. Our project editor, Lauren Seidman, showed noteworthy tact and graciousness in suggesting many essential changes, and we honor her for that. Kudos also to Emily Wichland, vice president of Editorial and Production at Jewish Lights, for her invaluable help every step of the way, and to Bryna Fischer, our eagle-eyed copy editor. We are particularly indebted to Stuart M. Matlins, publisher of Jewish Lights, for his sage advice about how to speak to the heart of today s readers by respecting their sincerity as well as their minds. May many more blessings descend on his God-serving enterprise.
We know we could not have done this-as so much else-without God s help and we therefore say:
For the wonders God has done for people,
Let them thank God for God s steadfast love.
Yodu l adonai chasdo
V nifl otoav livne adam.
Psalm 107:15
I NTRODUCTION

S o much of this book is personal that we thought we d say a few words about why it is different from what you might expect. Yes, A Touch of the Sacred is another book about Judaism, but this one, like Jewish life itself, is full of variety. There are many fine books on Jewish history or holidays or belief or ethics (we know, we wrote one). This book talks about the many moods, deeds, and concerns that make up a caring Jewish life, with special emphasis on the kind of living that leads to believing. We have tried to reach for Jewish breadth-check the contents to see if we re exaggerating-by limiting each essay to a thousand words, with a few exceptions. Lengthier treatments abound, including a few of ours. One advantage to this literary asceticism is that the concerns of the heart, when strong, do not need many words-and this book comes from two Jewish hearts.
Too often, books on religion are written either primarily for the head or for the heart-as if thinking people don t also feel intuitively, and spiritual types never think much at all. Bosh! Here is our special mix for you. The pieces started with Gene, and Francie shaped and nurtured them. It is our hope that these pieces will serve as unique windows into Judaism-in bite-size, sacred touches.
Please note that we use the term liberal as in liberal Jews or liberal Judaism in a transdenominational sense to refer to the great number of non-Orthodox, believing Jews.
A final comment: You don t have to read this book in any particular order. It wasn t written with one in mind. We ve arranged these touches of the sacred into six general categories, not because they mimic the Mishnah s (the first standardized compilation of rabbinic teaching) structure but to make it easier for you to further investigate an area you particularly care about. Unfamiliar-and some better-known-terms are listed in the Glossary at the end of the book. Deviations from the Jewish Publication Society s new translation of the Bible are Gene s responsibility.
I Seeking the Sacred One
1
We Can t Talk about God but We Must
W hat follows is a bit of what I call theological therapy, the clearing up of some intellectual snarls that unnecessarily frustrate people when they read thoughtful books about Jewish belief. My specific concern here is acknowledging and justifying the paradox at the core of talking about God, which in turn may help you talk about God and also listen openly to others.
In a way, the difficulty is quite easy to understand. Normally, when we come across a strange object, we try to think of something reasonably like it; once you see a horse, it s a small mental jump to then recognize a giraffe or even a hippopotamus. Somehow we know to compare the odd creature with the known one. But that won t work with God because we insist God is one, which means among other things to be unique, that is, incomparable. We can t really compare God to any other thing, and that means thinking about God will always have limits and will always involve uncertainty.
Early in Israel s history, the author of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) tried to praise God properly: Who is like You among the [polytheistic] gods, Adonai ? ( Mi chamocha ba-elim, Adonai ?) The answer is so obvious that the poet never bothers, and Jews have been singing the Mi Chamocha as part of our prayers for as long as anyone remembers. If, however, we insist on an answer, the author of Psalm 86 offers it unambiguously in verse 8, which is often chanted as part of the liturgy for reading the Torah: None of the [so-called] gods is like You, Adonai [my Lord] ( En kamochah baelohim, Adonai ). (Although Adonai literally means my Lord, it is used here and elsewhere in this book as a euphemism for God s Personal Name, YHVH, which is never pronounced.)
While that certainly is great praise, it does admit to a kind of ignorance on our part. If you can t compare God to anything, then you really can t say much positive about God, except that God is different from everything else.
We can put our problem with knowing God this way: We d really have to be as great and as smart and as wise as God in order to gain a reasonably accurate understanding of Who or What God is. Our predicament is given memorable form by the great twentiethcentury Jewish philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said: Every statement about God is an understatement.
The Rabbis of the Talmud-the Jewish compendium of law, wisdom, and folklore-dealt with this conundrum by instructively misreading Psalm 65:2. Its literal translation is Praise befits You. The Rabbis midrashically-that is, by imaginative interpretation-understood the Hebrew to say For You [ Adonai ], silence is [the only fitting] praise. In other words, what might a person say that would ever be adequate to God s reality? Isn t that why the soundless, wordless prayer-moments at the end of the Amidah, the standing, eighteen-benediction prayer, are many people s favorite part of services?
But for all our appreciation of the limits of language, it just isn t human nature to remain silent in the face of utter greatness. Here are some instructive comparisons for our refusal to stay dumb. We may bumble, but we still think it useful to try to say audibly why we find this painting or sculpture exquisite, or this wine exceptional. Note the prefix ex, which hints at something that stands out. And God help the passionate lover who, even stammeringly, doesn t try to find language to say how much he or she cares. We spend so much of our lives trying to find words that ex pose who we truly are and what we truly feel, it s no wonder Aristotle called us the speaking animals.
More than a thousand years after Aristotle, the kabbalists, medieval mystic Jewish teachers, resolved this paradox ingeniously. They said that God is ultimately the Limitless One, En Sof , of Whom, therefore, nothing at all might properly be said, not even this. But simultaneously, the kabbalists also insisted that God could be known in marvelous detail through ten spheres or nodes, s firot , arranged in a significant configuration, that name the divine energies. The many permutations