I'm God; You're Not

Lawrence Kushner

Description

Flashes of insight—surprising, entertaining, inspiring—from one of the most creative spiritual thinkers in America.

"The goal of all spiritual life is to get your ego out of the way—outwit the sucker; dissolve it; shoot it; kill it. Silence the incessant planning, organizing, running, manipulating, possessing, and processing that are the ineluctable redoubts of the ego. Not because these activities are bad or wrong or even narcissistic … but because they preclude awareness of the Divine. To paraphrase the Talmud, God says, 'There ain't room enough in this here world for your ego and Me. You pick.’"
—from the Introduction

Tapping the experiences and wisdom of his career as a spiritual leader, Lawrence Kushner delights, surprises, challenges and inspires us. With his signature candor, wit and compassion, he helps us reconnect with the why and how of our spiritual lives. He encourages us to find new perspectives on the “life-stuff” that shapes them, and gently reminds us of the Source of it All.

These inspiring—often startling—insights will warm you during the dark times of your own doubts even as they brighten your quest for meaning, faith, identity, community—and holiness.

Introduction ⁄ ix
1. Rabbi
Who Am I? ⁄ 3
We'll Wait Back Here ⁄ 8
The Calling ⁄ 15
My Other Father Died ⁄ 18
The Tent Peg Business ⁄ 22
The Human Pyramid ⁄ 30
The Rabbi Business ⁄ 38
Being Somebody Else ⁄ 47
The Last Gift ⁄ 49

2. Judaism
Why I'm a Jew ⁄ 55
Filene’s Basement ⁄ 59
Intermarriage ⁄ 61
Getting More Jews ⁄ 67
Customs as Sacred Text ⁄ 69
Two Jewish Mothers ⁄ 73
(Re)Thinking Shabbat ⁄ 75
Kosher ⁄ 78
The Life of Torah ⁄ 84

3. Family
Visiting Your Children ⁄ 89
Understanding Your Parents ⁄ 91
Telling Kids the Truth ⁄ 99
Boompa ⁄ 101
And Unto Us a Child Is Given ⁄ 103
Babushka ⁄ 107
Turkey Shoot ⁄ 109
Generations ⁄ 111

4. World
What Israel Means to Me ⁄ 115
My Lunch with Jesus ⁄ 117
Cardboard Sukkah ⁄ 120
Bill Novak’s Questions ⁄ 122
NYPD Blue ⁄ 143
Resurrection of Flowers ⁄ 145

5. Mysticism
What Is Kabbalah? ⁄ 149
Reading Music ⁄ 156
Bosque del Apache ⁄ 159
Physician of Tsefat ⁄ 162
Spell-Checker ⁄ 170
Midrash as Hypertext ⁄ 174
A Kabbalah Lexicon ⁄ 175

6. Holiness
Open My Lips ⁄ 189
Spiritual Greed ⁄ 191
Silent Prayer ⁄ 193
A Blessing for the Czar ⁄ 195
Biking with Pelicans ⁄ 197
The Zen of Airline Tickets ⁄ 199
Memory and Redemption ⁄ 201
Death without Dying ⁄ 210
The Band on the Titanic ⁄ 214

Afterword: "Our Town" ⁄ 217
Sources ⁄ 224

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Lawrence Kushner
• Jewish literature
• Judaism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580235631
• Langue: English

Extrait

For Tricia Gibbs one of the finest students I have ever been honored to teach
I m God; You re Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego 2010 Hardcover Edition, First Printing 2010 by Lawrence Kushner All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or reprinted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please write or fax your request to Jewish Lights Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address / fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to [e-mail]. Sources constitute a continuation of this copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kushner, Lawrence, 1943– I m God, you re not : observations on organized religion & other disguises of the ego / Lawrence Kushner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-58023-441-2 (hardcover) 1. Jewish way of life. 2. Spiritual life-Judaism. 3. Cabala. 4. Kushner, Lawrence, 1943-Anecdotes. I. Title. BM723.K873 2010 296.7-dc22 2010028898 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Manufactured in the United States of America Jacket design: Lawrence Kushner Jacket photo: Lawrence Kushner Published by Jewish Lights Publishing A Division of LongHill Partners, Inc. Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237 Woodstock, VT 05091 Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] www.jewishlights.com
Contents
Introduction
1. Rabbi
Who Am I?
We ll Wait Back Here
The Calling
My Other Father Died
The Tent Peg Business
The Human Pyramid
The Rabbi Business
Being Somebody Else
The Last Gift
2. Judaism
Why I m a Jew
Filene s Basement
Intermarriage
Getting More Jews
Customs as Sacred Text
Two Jewish Mothers
(Re)Thinking Shabbat
Kosher
The Life of Torah
3. Family
Visiting Your Children
Understanding Your Parents
Telling Kids the Truth
Boompa
And Unto Us a Child Is Given
Babushka
Turkey Shoot
Generations
4. World
What Israel Means to Me
My Lunch with Jesus
Cardboard Sukkah
Bill Novak s Questions
NYPD Blue
Resurrection of Flowers
5. Mysticism
What Is Kabbalah?
Reading Music
Bosque del Apache
Physician of Tsefat
Spell-Checker
Midrash as Hypertext
A Kabbalah Lexicon
6. Holiness
Open My Lips
Spiritual Greed
Silent Prayer
A Blessing for the Czar
Biking with Pelicans
The Zen of Airline Tickets
Memory and Redemption
Death without Dying
The Band on the Titanic
Afterword: Our Town
Sources
About Jewish Lights
Copyright
Introduction
The first time I served as a rabbi was in a small town in West Virginia. It was not what I had expected. I m pretty sure it was 1965 but I am certain it was Yom Kippur, because Jan Peerce, the great operatic tenor, sang Kol Nidre .
I found out I was going to be the rabbi there only a few days earlier.A standard part of rabbinic education involves serving a student pulpit. This is a congregation too small to afford a full-time, ordained rabbi and is served, instead, by a student. Upper-class students, that is, fourth- and fifth-year graduate students, naturally, get their pick of the litter, which, in effect, means larger and biweekly pulpits. Below them are monthlies. And at the bottom, are congregations so small they can only afford inexperienced underclass students and only for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur-the High Holy Days. Since, at the time, I was in my second year of rabbinic school (age twenty-two), I didn t even rate a High Holy Day pulpit. That year there were only a few but I had missed the cutoff in the student-pulpit lottery.
Then, just two days before Yom Kippur, the student who had been assigned to conduct High Holy Day services in Logan, West Virginia, was taken ill and confined to bed. Since I was next on the list, within only a few hours, I found myself standing in the hallway outside a sick classmate s bedroom taking notes:
You take the Norfolk & Western to Huntington. Then you rent a car and drive through the mountains to Logan. There will be a room reserved for you at the hotel. When you get in, phone a mister so-and-so and tell him you re the replacement rabbi. He ll tell you where the synagogue is. Services begin at 7.
He gave me his prayer book, marked with all the cues for the organist and the choir, and explained that, when it came time for the chanting of the Kol Nidre prayer, I should reach under the lectern where, hopefully, there would be a phonograph ready to play a recording of Jan Peerce (nee: Jacob Pincus Perelmuth) singing Kol Nidre .
Have you decided what you re preaching on yet? my classmate asked.Preaching? It hadn t yet even dawned on me that I was supposed to give a sermon!Nervous would be an understatement. I was terrified.
Within two days, on the holiest day of the year, I found myself standing up on the bima leading a congregation in prayer. Everything went pretty much according to plan until we got to the Shema , the declaration of God s unity. (I am not making this up.)
Before I could invite the congregation to rise-as per the dramaturgical instructions written in my prayer book-I felt a slight rumbling in the floor of the building and heard a distant roaring sound. Then the chandeliers began slowly swinging back and forth. At first, I thought it might be an earthquake. But the rumbling and the roar steadily increased. Soon, the whole building shook. The noise was deafening. Maybe I was having a mystical experience. I can only imagine what the expression on my face must have looked like.
But-and this is the crazy part- no one else in the congregation seemed to take any notice at all. Some began casually whispering to one another. Others simply closed their eyes and seemed to be meditating. Excuse me but does anyone else hear this loud roar? Pardon me, but are we concerned that the building is violently shaking? Perhaps I had slipped into an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story and a village whose inhabitants had become inured to the earth shaking and the heavens roaring whenever they pronounced the declaration of God s unity.
My consternation lasted only a few moments. Thankfully, a member of the congregation, recognizing my obvious dismay, came up onto the stage with a whispered explanation: A few feet behind the back wall of the synagogue-he inconspicuously gestured, right behind the five-member choir-was the main line of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad s coal division, and as it happened, every now and then, a two-hundred-car-long coal train passed by.
Fifteen minutes later, when the rumbling and the roar faded off into the distance, we continued our worship: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
That winter, in my Hebrew Bible class, we read 1 Kings 19:12: And after the roar there was the thin, barely audible sound of almost breathing.
As I review the following essays, stories, and teachings, I am surprised by how many of them share a common theme: The goal of all spiritual life is to get your ego out of the way-outwit the sucker; dissolve it; shoot it; kill it. Silence the incessant planning, organizing, running, manipulating, possessing, and processing that are the ineluctable redoubts of the ego. Not because these activities are bad or wrong or even narcissistic-indeed they are indispensable to living and often potentially, themselves, very spiritual-but because they preclude awareness of the Divine. To paraphrase the Talmud ( Arakhin 15b), God says, There ain t room enough in this here world for your ego and Me. You pick.
I now suspect that the real reason for religion is to help you keep your ego under control. And the principal strategy for accomplishing this is to acknowledge the reality of an even more important Ego, the Source of your ego, the Source of everyone s ego, a Source into whom you might safely deposit and, then, dissolve your ego-with the natural but, of course, un-guarantee-able hope that it might be returned to you. What shall we call it? God? Schmod ? Whatever. In other words, it s not about you; it s about God. This same theme initiates God s theophany at Sinai.
The first two of the ten utterances at Mount Sinai are already in a class by themselves. According to gematria , the ancient system of assigning numerical equivalents to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the Hebrew word Torah -the Five Books of Moses-spelled, tav vav , resh , hey , totals 611. This is tantalizingly close to 613-the total of positive and negative commandments in the entire Torah. The discrepancy is resolved in the Talmud ( Makkot 23a–24b). There it is claimed that Moses gave us a Torah (611). Or, to put it another way: Moses, a human being, gave us 611/613ths of the revelation. But God, God s self, gave us the first two directly: (1) I am the Lord, your God … ; and (2) You shall have no other gods before Me.… And these two bring the total up to 613. They initiate and perhaps even contain the revelation yet to come.
On closer examination, these two utterances turn out to be the flip sides of one another. You take one, you get the other. I m God. Have no other gods. If God is God, then there can be no others. If there can be no other gods, then God is God. They are, effectively, two sides of one sheet of paper, inextricably joined. It s as if God gets us all together at the foot of the mountain and says, I ve just got two things to tell you: I m God; you re not. Indeed, it seems to me, we might distill the entire Torah down that life-changing but fleeting realization. The Torah is the story of what happens to people when they forget about that and when they remember it again. I m God; you re not.
Obviously, assembling essays, stories, reviews, and speeches written over a span of almost three decades poses unique literary challenges. Whenever possible, I have left the original texts as they were-deleti