No One Lives By Biblical Law
June 29, 2015

NO ONE lives by biblical law. No one. If they did: men would be allowed to marry multiple wives simultaneously, stubborn and rebellious sons could be stoned by communities (Deuteronomy 21:18), and anyone gathering sticks on shabbat could be legally killed (Numbers 15:32). Everyone would celebrate the sabbath on the seventh day of the week.

What, then, do people mean when they say, "The Bible prohibits people from doing that," if they don't observe what the Bible commands in other aspects of their lives?
In the case of Jews, they mean that they follow Rabbinic Law, halakhah, which interprets biblical law and applies it to contemporary life. No matter what anyone tells you, however, Rabbinic Law, halakhah, does not implement biblical law, unless you believe that the Rabbis have the God given authority to interpret God's word in the Torah. Jews live by the historic interpretation of rabbis as to what the Torah means.

Each movement within Judaism, and historically all communities, had their methods of performing such interpretations. Certainly not everyone agreed, and therefore there were enormous disputes, like the debates between Hillel and Shammai, between Ishmael and Akiba, the Maimonidean Controversy, the battles between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, and of course, the 19th century fighting over reform. Or, the arguments between any two synagogues in your community over correct practice.

The Catholic Church lives by Canon Law not Bible law, with its own logic.
Islam lives by the Koran and Hadith. Obviously Sunnis and Shi'as don't agree, and ISIS's interpretation is not the same as the Imams of Saudi Arabia or the Ayatollahs of Iran.
No one lives by biblical law.

If religious people do not live by the logical development of Biblical law, what do they mean when they say, "That's prohibited in the Bible?"
They mean, "By my method of interpreting the intention of the Bible, that's prohibited." But most often, the conclusion of the meaning of the biblical law is a foregone conclusion. In Judaism, that kind of proof is called an "asmachta," meaning a pretext rather than a biblical textual proof. They know the conclusion and prove it with a text, rather than the other way around.

Reform Judaism, an ethically and politically liberal religious movement, could not accept the inequality of women or gays and lesbians, and went in search of a principle by which to change what had been traditional practice. The principle they found was "God created humanity in the divine image...," found multiple places in the Torah, including the classic, Genesis 5:1. But we must understand that the revulsion at the inequality of women, and later of gays and lesbians, led to the search for a new principle of interpretation that would legitimate equality, not the other way around.

The same occurs in other movements. When the Hatam Sofer, Rabbi Moshe Sofer, in the 19th century wrote, "That which is new is prohibited by the Torah," he changed Jewish history and the principles of interpretation. When Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews claim that their conclusions go back 2,000 years, they are just plain historically inaccurate.

So what do people mean when they say that "the Bible prohibits" same-sex marriage? What they mean, I think, is that there is no precedent for it in the Bible, and by their interpretation of the Bible, gay and lesbian sexual relations are prohibited by the Bible. But the former is open to interpretation, and the latter is simply untrue, as the Bible says nothing at all about lesbian sexual relations. It's an extrapolation from the interpretation of Lev. 18:22 regarding men.

Furthermore, most of the people whom I have seen that say "The Bible prohibits that," don't live by other biblical laws, even as interpreted by their own religion. So what do they mean?

They mean that, "According to the prejudgments and understandings I bring to this argument, I think this is wrong." Rarely do I find someone who is consistent about such interpretations in their own lives. They simply demand that others conform to their prejudgments, without being aware exactly of the reason why.

If they say, "The Bible prohibits that conduct," I want to know several things:
Whose interpretation of the Bible are you using?
What method of interpretation are you using? (e.g.: rabbinic law as interpreted by which rabbi; church law, Muslim law?)
And finally, and most critically: Are you living the rest of your life consistent with that method of biblical interpretation, and if not, why do you think you can impose this on me?

Parashat Hukat -- June 27, 2015

This week's parashah opens with concerns regarding the power of life: first the Red Heifer that ritually purifies a person defiled by touching a corpse, and then the laws of coming in contact with the dead.
Once upon a time I thought such laws primitive. Who worries with ritual impurity from coming near or touching a corpse. Such primitive ideas! Such superstition!
But these ideas flow directly from the ineffable power of life, the mystery of the difference between life and death, the profundity of the sacred within all living beings, particularly humans. Anyone who has been present at the death of a person has experienced internally the polar opposites that occur in just a few moments: the presence and absence of life.
Our ancestors revered the difference, and embedded the respect for life in ritual. We often refer to such things as superstition. Yet, see how the absence of sensitivity to life's inexpressible sanctity has surrounded us with death. Pope John Paul II referred to the U.S. as a culture of death: supporting abortions freely obtained, our obsession with guns, blaming the poor for their poverty. Perhaps the Biblical world had it right: life and death both reveal a power that sanctifies or curses life.
This week we have seen, perhaps accidentally, the triumph of the power of life. After the obscene murders in Charleston, Americans coalesced to revere life, arm in arm, voices indistinguishable in song to overcome the fear, sadness and darkness. The Supreme Court first spread health care to the masses by allowing the ACA to move forward and enabling millions of Americans to continue to obtain affordable health care. The following day the Supreme Court declared that the love between same sex couples mirrors the love between opposite sex couples and is therefore deserving of the rights granted by government to those couples who choose marriage.
In each affirmation of life: coming together after murder, enabling healing care and overcoming the prejudices against same sex marriage, we witness and further the power of life over death. We witnessed the blind joy; the exultation not at victory but at liberation; the triumph of goodness over evil. "Therefore choose life," the Torah demands, "in order that you and your children may live."
Choosing life means rejecting death and promoting that which increases life. Perhaps our ancestors needed the impurity of death in order to reject the embrace of death, to choose life, in each and every circumstance.
Perhaps Americans face this same series of choices. Will we embrace death or life? The political culture of lies, the gun culture promoting fear and death, the denial of affordable health care to the poor, rejects the ineffable beauty of the divine our ancestors found in the purity laws and the entrancing power inherent in both death and life.
Perhaps the greatest repudiation of God in modern life is not atheism, but the embrace of death over life. This week's parashah leads us in the right direction, and this week's events, emerging from the death trap of the previous week, demonstrates that forces of life can surely prevail if we are willing to work to enhance life. "Therefore choose life, that you and your children may live."

Aging at 60
June 17, 2015

People our age, my age, in our sixties and above, need to be attuned to helping one another. What does that mean?
It means that everyone I know, EVERYONE, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, is in need of some sort of sensitivity and outreach. Most don't want to admit it. Whether it's acute or long term illness; recent or impending loss; constant, insistent pain; adult children or children adults; everyone has some tsarah, some hurt, that demands their attention. They need sensitivity to their hurt, a helping hand from time to time, a listening, sensitive ear even more frequently, reliable respite care, and someone to help restore their resilience.
This is a change over the last 6 years. A change occurs in life at 60, and another one at 80. After 60 everyone has some pain that is not likely to heal. That's entirely different than earlier, when we could expect to recover. Now we can't always expect to recover, and that's a significant pain of a different sort. Now, what ails us may not only be unrelenting, but without much hope of reprieve.
It could be depressing, but it does not need to be. And a primary antidote to depressing is resilience; a second, and nearly as important antidote, is a true friend or loved one to share through authentic presence. You'd be amazed how far sincere caring can carry us down the road to healing.
There's a difference between a cure and healing. A cure restores us to where we were. Healing enables us to live full lives, maybe even better lives, without a cure. It can be both physical and spiritual, but it's definitely spiritual.
So listen up: if you are younger, prepare yourself. If you have arrived, you already know this, and I am just trying to articulate what you've been thinking, and maybe even saying. There's strength in communal sharing, a small community or large. Let us not be silent to one another. Let us signal that we are prepared to reach out and help, not for the bragging rights, but for the kindliness that we have discovered we all need. We have come of age.

Kansas: The destruction of the soul

In this past week's Torah portion Israel leaves Sinai after many months. It's a year and a month after the exodus. They've been receiving Torah, and because they have remained in a single place things have gone well, with the exception of the Golden Calf incident.
Now they start out into the wilderness, and here theory meets reality. What happens? When things get tough, the people rebel. They rebel against Moses and Aaron and against God. They want meat to eat, and worry about their water supply when Miriam dies. They replace faith with worry about themselves and their own fortune. They revert to character, the character of slaves involved in their own lives and forget the miracles they have witnessed. They revert to self-protection, and forget about community.
A month ago my daughter, Amy, and I visited a newly opened plantation historical site in Charleston, S.C. Instead of a private enterprise, this plantation, The McLeod Plantation, is owned by the Parks and Recreation Dept and had just recently opened to the public. But the special part is this: the narrative is told from the perspective of the slaves.
There we saw slave cabins, probably 10 ft. by 15 ft of living space, with probably as many as 10 inhabitants.(See above) 
More significant than total space, the plantation owners had little regard for families. They broke up families, splitting up parents, and separating children from their parents. What a terror must have been built into the slaves' hearts.
Last week I was called by a friend about a sad case that we could do something about. A woman who had just gotten a job was driving on I-35 to work. A state trooper stopped her for something about her car. He discovered she was driving without a license because of an earlier problem, but she had to get to work. He arrested her and impounded her car, even though a friend said she'd come to pick up the car. She lost her job. Without a job and a car, she'd lose her place to live. Without a place to live social services would come and remove her children from her home and her custody. The result of driving without a license to get to work to support her children: lost job, housing, children, and homeless on the street.
Fortunately, the man who called me was raising the money to resolve the problems. I gave from my discretionary fund. Her car was damaged by someone while in the police lot, and the man who called me put out the money from his own pocket to get it fixed up. The woman is back out finding a job. Her fines are paid. She has her car and license back. The children will remain with her and they will not be homeless.
But I started thinking: just like in slavery, no one at the state level cared about retaining her family intact. No one cared that the traffic stop would result in the break up of her family and their homelessness, the loss of her employment and putting her out on the street. She's not on welfare. She's trying to return to the work force and keep her family together. The problem was solved with under $2000, kept a tax payer employed and a family together. But like the slave owner, no one in government cared about the family impact of their actions, or the deterioration of society that results. 
Kansas is in the process of losing its soul. The slogan that "we do better deciding where to spend our own money" is not only destroying our schools, increasing poverty, causing people to die rather than take care of their medical needs, destroying families, and costing more money than if we put systems in place to solve all of these problems. We are not dealing with a financial issue. We are dealing with the very soul of the society in which we live, and it is rapidly disintegrating. 
Slave owners didn't care about the families they separated. They were dealing with a financial question. We continue to deal with the fallout of that ethical problem embedded in antebellum southern society. 
Neither does the government of Kansas care about the destruction of families. And I predict, the results will be similar. The destruction of the soul of Kansas is the problem, not the budget or the level of taxation.
When you start out into the wilderness, the real world, it's absolutely essential that you keep Sinai in mind, the laws by which to live. Or the soul gets swallowed up in Sheol.

The Problem of God for Liberals
June 1, 2015

I FIND in my work that not only do most people possess a theology, they've actually thought about it and can speak about it. Most people I know either believe in God, or would like to believe in God if they could find it possible in their intellectual lives.

But often those same people hit a stopping point that confuses them or prevents them from arriving at helpful conclusions. When facing the challenges in life I offered on shabbat (see below), those obstacles may prevent a person from finding solace.

Here's the most frequent one: "I can't prove God's existence, and I'm not sure about it, so I can't depend on it."

Uncertainty is the modern liberal Jewish plague. Most Jews today are college educated, and they were taught this in college, in philosophy class (existentialists except for Kierkegaard), in psychology class (Freud), and certainly in the sciences (more in a moment). How did we get to this point? Well, Rene Descartes, who died in February 1650, wrote "Cogito, ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am," kicking off philosophical modernity by locating all reality in the brain of the individual rather than in God. No longer did the 3 medieval proofs for God's existence work! The only thing I can absolutely prove is my own existence, because I know I am thinking. Everything else may just be a product of my mind (solipsism).

What to do?

We live simultaneously in two worlds: a physical world and a spiritual world. We know about both because we have encounter both through daily experience. Everything we sense is part of the physical world. The spiritual world we were introduced to by being loved, and it progressed from there.

But there's a HUGE DIFFERENCE! They do not possess the same qualities. We live IN the physical world. We cannot live WITHOUT the spiritual world! And there's another difference: there are certain rules that we can prove about the physical, material world. We call those rules "science." One of them, perhaps the most important, is replicability. I can prove rules within the material world because of replicability: if it's true in the physical world, it's replicable.

I'll tell you one truth about the world of spirituality: replicability is NOT one of the rules! Instead, people prove stuff about the spiritual world to one another through narratives of their experiences. We identify ourselves in the narratives of others, and say, "Yup, that's my experience, too." So it must be true. Here's the catch: if you believe only scientific proofs achieved through the law of replicability, you'll always be uncertain about the spiritual world. But as I said before, we humans cannot live in the world without spirituality. What to do?

We can live with less than absolute certitude! We can develop a dependable theology without being 100% certain all the time. The longer we live with our theologies, testing them every moment we are alive, the more they reliably enable us to function, the more sure we are of the truth of our theologies. For instance: authentic love will get us through crises (more about this in a future post). What do I mean by authentic love? Is there non-authentic love?  By authentic love I mean what Eric Fromm described in a book that everyone read in the sixties, "The Art of Loving." Fromm, a social psychologist, described UNSELFISH, non-self-centered loving: giving to the other simply because that person exists and we love him/her. Authentic loving creates meaning in our lives. The fact of creating meaning points to a Creator (God), who has put a purpose (telos) into the world. Authentic loving is one of the bedrock components of spirituality, and of our spiritual lives.

We can develop theologies by reading the rational thoughts of others, like philosophers and theologians. We can develop theologies by listening and sharing with others who have them, like friends, family or peers. And most important, we can develop dependable theologies by living them ourselves, constantly testing and correcting our behaviors and our theologies until our theologies guide our lives.

If loving is a bedrock of your spirituality, you will encounter issues when the loving becomes self-serving. We all do! We are all human. That does not mean that loving is not foundational to our theologies. That means that we are imperfect lovers and imperfect human beings! Duh! That's why Jews repent. We are not perfect. But our imperfection does not mean that we cannot be spiritual, and it also gives us another spiritual opportunity: repentance.

Summing up: Of course you are uncertain! Everyone since Rene DesCartes has been, because in the spiritual world certitude does not exist as in the material world described by science. But since we cannot live without a spiritual side to our lives, which produces meaning and purpose in life, we must content ourselves with theologies that make us most certain, and then correct them as we fall short. But what a glorious enterprise: creating meaning in our lives that points us to relationship with God.