Rosh haShanah Shachrit, Sept.14, 2015/1 Tishri 5776
One of my favorite examples of fanatic religious differentiation goes as follows:
Walking across a bridge one day, I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. A second may ran over and yelled, “Stop! Don't do it!” “Why not?” “Well, there's so much to live for!” “Like what?” The second man said, “Well, are you religious or atheist?” “Religious.” “Great! Are you Christian?” “Yes.” “Me too! Catholic or Protestant?” “Protestant.” “Me, too! Episcopalian or Baptist?” “Baptist!” “Wow! Me, too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?” “Baptist Church of God!” “Me, too! [We’re really getting some bonding going on here, as the split hairs get finer.] “Original Baptist Church of God or Reformed Baptist Church of God?” “Reformed Baptist Church of God!” “Me, too!,” exclaims the hopeful rescuer, as he presses on to make an even deeper connection with the jumper. “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879 or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?” “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!” To which the second man cries, “Die, heretic scum!” as he pushed the other one off the bridge.
This sort of humor reinforces my sense that the real aftermath of Eve and Adam’s fruit snack in the Garden of Eden has been humanity’s ever more sophisticated skill at spotting and naming differences – you remember, eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil bestowed, among other things, the power to distinguish (and judge) one thing relative to another. Nothing is too trivial for us not to find a way to differentiate ourselves into smaller and smaller categories:
Q. How many Christians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Three, but they're really one.
Q. How many Quakers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Ten to sit around in a circle until one feels the inner light.
Q. How many Zen Buddhists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Two, one to screw it in and one not to screw it in.
We do not exempt Judaism from this obsession with difference:
Q: How many Jews does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 30. One to change the bulb and 29 to discuss it and give contradictory advice to the person changing the bulb.
Q: How many Ultra-Orthodox rabbis does it take to change a light bulb?
A: This has not yet been determined. They are still searching for a Talmudic reference to light bulb.
Q: How many Jewish Renewal rabbis does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It depends. One if it's an eco-kosher bulb that isn't going to be lit by electricity from nuclear power. Two, as long as a man and a woman rabbi have equal turns replacing in the bulb. Three, same as above plus an additional rabbi to study the psycho-halachic implications of such a change and then lead a weekend retreat to evaluate the experience.
To distinguish one category of people from another can certainly be the stuff of humor; it can also become the stuff of horror. When we indulge in distinction as a means to separate ourselves from others heartlessly, we lose touch with the other part of the lesson from Eden, that the differences we note with such clarity represent variable manifestations of an underlying Unity – a unity in which all forms of being find their source.
ALEPH, the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, is celebrating 2015 as a year of Deep Ecumenism, with the tag line, “prays well with others,” and OHALAH, the Jewish Renewal Rabbinic and Cantorial Association, has selected as its January 2016 conference theme “Deep Ecumenism: V’chol Netivoteha Shalom” – “and all Her paths are peace,” referring to the spiritual diversity inherent in the Instruction, the Torah, Divinity has revealed to the many peoples of the earth. The spiritual orientation known as deep ecumenism represents one of Yavneh’s core values, and one of the most obvious ways in which we and Jewish Renewal worldwide are striving to reframe the religious ecology of our planet. Meister Eckhart, a thirteenth-century Christian mystic, described divinity as “an underground river that no one can stop and no one can dam up.” The contemporary theologian Rev. Matthew Fox adds that while we may discover many wells drawing from that One River, “we would make a grave mistake if we confused [any one well] with the flowing waters of the underground river [itself]. Many wells, one river. That is Deep Ecumenism.” Take a moment to hold that image in your mind: an unstoppable underground river accessible to all, unique to none. Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (zt”l) encouraged us to consider each religious tradition as an organ in the body of collective humanity: our differences are meaningful and our commonality is significant. When we honor both the differentiation and the unity, we enhance the possibility of collaborating with followers of other religious paths in our shared work of healing creation.
The expansiveness of our divine Source cannot be captured fully by any one tradition; if it could, we would have found a container big enough for God, we would have marked the limit of divine potentiality. Reb Zalman modeled for us how to safely derive additional nourishment in traditions other than our own, understanding that each religion provides some but not all possible spiritual vitamins. (See ALEPH.org, Yavneh-Raleigh.org, Paradigm Shift.)
Deep Ecumenism orients us to the potential for learning from and growing spiritually with teachers and adherents of all faith traditions. At Yavneh, one of our foundational kavanot (intentionalities) is to respond to the challenge of overcoming the historic hostility between faiths, primarily between Judaism and Christianity, but also to be open to learning from and growing spiritually with teachers and adherents of all faith traditions. This kavanah manifests in our membership policy, which welcomes all supporters of Jewish Renewal, regardless of whether they are Jews, and in Yavneh’s Center for Deep Ecumenism, offering its first programming in November.
In the delicate process of God-seeking, there is no way to overestimate the centrality of the experiential. Each of us shares in a holy obligation to open our minds, hearts, and souls to the Reality of God and to the reality that God loves diversity, nearness, and surprise. When we model how to give up a futile triumphalism that insists that Divinity can only be accessed along a single path, we open ourselves and others to a diversity in which all religious practitioners hold on to particular “shape and color . . . [only to] form the mosaic in which we are all God’s tiles,” not to proclaim our ownership of capital-T truth.
Deep Ecumenism neither minimizes our attachment to Judaism’s spiritual understandings, nor compromises our personal and communal religious practices. If ecumenism has a boundary, it’s in the realm of practice, at the point where we sense something damaging to our spiritual immune system, something that calls into question for us the integrity and beauty of Jewish teaching.
Still, why should Jews be interested in the wider spiritual ecosystem? Over 3500 years, Judaism’s survival as an independent religious practice has been so hard-won, why look elsewhere? We read this morning of Abraham and Hannah, both of whom faced the paradox of losing and gaining a spiritual future by offering to give up what was most precious to them. How can shopping elsewhere for spiritual vitamins be good for the Jews?
As a life-long practitioner of Deep Ecumenism, from decades before I could name it, permit me to share my top ten reasons:
Deep Ecumenism requires us to take our own religion seriously. If Jewish spiritual practice, learning, worship, community, history, culture – if the entirety of Jewish reality didn’t hold a primary place in my life – I would not be ready to engage with others in that open field where we all strive to yield our absolutes for the sake of divine unity.
As a corollary, Deep Ecumenism requires us to become better educated about our tradition. If I don’t invest time and energy delving into Judaism’s riches, what will I have to share in spiritual dialogue?
Sometimes, Deep Ecumenism helps us make sense of what puzzles us in our own tradition, requiring us to open our hearts to the varieties of Jewish spiritual experience. If I have no understanding of how followers of other forms of Judaism engage with tradition and its evolution, I am hobbled in my efforts to distinguish between the essential core and the outer layers of various ways of Jew-ing, as Reb Zalman would say.
Deep Ecumenism gives us an opportunity to explore the mystical heart of all faith, all yearning for connection to our shared Source. When we learn how to engage with other traditions from the sacred heart of the cosmos, we open ourselves to realms of beauty and inspiration otherwise denied us by narrower vision.
Deep Ecumenism also helps us moderate reflexive “truth claims” and to relax our adversarial posture relative to “the other.” We learn to hear the mythic truths embodied in alternative religious narratives and practices, and we begin to discern the particular gifts our tradition brings to the divine mosaic.
Deep Ecumenism calms our tendency to take rejection as permission to reject. We have good reasons to challenge the triumphalisms of religions whose followers have oppressed, persecuted, and murdered Jews. And, we have better reasons, rooted in Judaism’s essential commitment to shalom, to wholeness and peace, to share with anyone who will listen the unique blessings and insights Judaism contributes to humanity’s storehouse of spiritual riches.
It’s not about being nice; it’s about being our own best representatives, not leaving the definition of our tradition to those who do not live it. Engaging in Deep Ecumenism helps defuse false understandings of Jewish teachings.
When we undertake what Reb Zalman described as “the more intrepid exploration of Deep Ecumenism in which one learns about oneself through participatory engagement with another religion or tradition,” we discover what it means to open our hearts to the richness of personal and communal practice from multiple perspectives and to introduce our perspective into the mix.
In engaging with the other, we learn about ourselves. When we collaborate with fellow-travelers on other spiritual paths, our own practices are enriched — and we come one step closer to a world without religious prejudice or fear. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg teaches, every false belief we have about another religion is a mountain we have to climb over to reach God (One River, Many Wells Conference, July 5, 2015.).
It’s fun, a sacred game that rewards our attention and curiosity daily. A few quick examples from our summer vacation:
In July, Stephen and I drove a circular route from Las Vegas to Zion National Park, on to Bryce Canyon, along the Escalante-Grand Staircase to Capital Reef, from there to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and back to Las Vegas. We took a morning to visit Tuba City, AZ, which some of you may recognize from Tony Hillerman novels as part of the Navajo Nation. Our time at the Navajo Museum sparked numerous spiritual ah-ha’s:
First, the Navajo raise churro sheep. When you google them, you will note that they can sport four horns. Why there isn’t a thriving Navajo shofar industry is beyond me.
Second, we experienced intriguing “compare and contrast” moments. It is long-time Jewish practice to pray eastward to Jerusalem, and, during Sukkot, we honor our agricultural origins by offering blessings in six directions – the major compass points, up and down – with a swaying palm branch.
Similarly, traditional Navajo practice assigns spiritual meaning to each major compass point, daily marking the life processes of contemplation, planning, acting, and evaluating – a reasonable analogy to the traditional Jewish practice of daily self evaluation and teshuvah: “Every day the cycle is repeated, and in each cycle there is a lesson to be learned; even if we fall, we stand back up to see what we can do differently. Every dawn is a new start, a new life, a renewal (Museum text.).”
Third, the Diné, as Navajo call themselves, “The People,” have no separate word for religion – nor does Hebrew. They live in a sacred relationship with their land and enact healing ceremonies to connect themselves to one another in beauty and harmony. Navajo legend says that the Diné had to pass through three different worlds before emerging in the present fourth or “glittering” world, while Jewish mystical teaching identifies four interpenetrated worlds of action, feeling, thinking, and clinging to the holy in which we enact our being. Alternative four worlds theologies, one conceptually linear in its evolutionary path, the other cyclic. Much to contemplate here.
We, too, are inheritors of a sacred relationship with a particular land, a sense of the holiness of Creation that over time has expanded to include our entire fragile planet. Our mystical tradition also teaches that the ultimate purpose of our ritual practices, indeed, of all our actions in the world, is tikkun, repair and healing. As Reb Nachman of Bratslav was fond of saying, if you believe you can do damage, then you must believe you can effect repair – just as the Navajo way teaches that one may always find a path back to harmony with self, others, and the land.
It all comes back to the light bulbs. As Rumi writes:
If ten lamps are present in one place
each differs in form from another;
yet you can’t distinguish whose radiance is whose
when you focus on the light.
In the field of spirit there is no division;
no individuals exist.
sweet is the oneness of the Friend with His friends.
Catch hold of spirit.
help this headstrong self disintegrate;
that beneath it you may discover unity,
like a buried treasure.
“Ten Lamps”
The light is infinite; holy darkness is infinite; the sacred river is infinite. The more we honor the infinite Unity, the nearer we draw to infinite shalom. Keyn y’hi ratzon, so may it be our will and God’s.
One of my favorite examples of fanatic religious differentiation goes as follows:
Walking across a bridge one day, I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. A second may ran over and yelled, “Stop! Don't do it!” “Why not?” “Well, there's so much to live for!” “Like what?” The second man said, “Well, are you religious or atheist?” “Religious.” “Great! Are you Christian?” “Yes.” “Me too! Catholic or Protestant?” “Protestant.” “Me, too! Episcopalian or Baptist?” “Baptist!” “Wow! Me, too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?” “Baptist Church of God!” “Me, too! [We’re really getting some bonding going on here, as the split hairs get finer.] “Original Baptist Church of God or Reformed Baptist Church of God?” “Reformed Baptist Church of God!” “Me, too!,” exclaims the hopeful rescuer, as he presses on to make an even deeper connection with the jumper. “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879 or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?” “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!” To which the second man cries, “Die, heretic scum!” as he pushed the other one off the bridge.
This sort of humor reinforces my sense that the real aftermath of Eve and Adam’s fruit snack in the Garden of Eden has been humanity’s ever more sophisticated skill at spotting and naming differences – you remember, eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil bestowed, among other things, the power to distinguish (and judge) one thing relative to another. Nothing is too trivial for us not to find a way to differentiate ourselves into smaller and smaller categories:
Q. How many Christians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Three, but they're really one.
Q. How many Quakers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Ten to sit around in a circle until one feels the inner light.
Q. How many Zen Buddhists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Two, one to screw it in and one not to screw it in.
We do not exempt Judaism from this obsession with difference:
Q: How many Jews does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 30. One to change the bulb and 29 to discuss it and give contradictory advice to the person changing the bulb.
Q: How many Ultra-Orthodox rabbis does it take to change a light bulb?
A: This has not yet been determined. They are still searching for a Talmudic reference to light bulb.
Q: How many Jewish Renewal rabbis does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It depends. One if it's an eco-kosher bulb that isn't going to be lit by electricity from nuclear power. Two, as long as a man and a woman rabbi have equal turns replacing in the bulb. Three, same as above plus an additional rabbi to study the psycho-halachic implications of such a change and then lead a weekend retreat to evaluate the experience.
To distinguish one category of people from another can certainly be the stuff of humor; it can also become the stuff of horror. When we indulge in distinction as a means to separate ourselves from others heartlessly, we lose touch with the other part of the lesson from Eden, that the differences we note with such clarity represent variable manifestations of an underlying Unity – a unity in which all forms of being find their source.
ALEPH, the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, is celebrating 2015 as a year of Deep Ecumenism, with the tag line, “prays well with others,” and OHALAH, the Jewish Renewal Rabbinic and Cantorial Association, has selected as its January 2016 conference theme “Deep Ecumenism: V’chol Netivoteha Shalom” – “and all Her paths are peace,” referring to the spiritual diversity inherent in the Instruction, the Torah, Divinity has revealed to the many peoples of the earth. The spiritual orientation known as deep ecumenism represents one of Yavneh’s core values, and one of the most obvious ways in which we and Jewish Renewal worldwide are striving to reframe the religious ecology of our planet. Meister Eckhart, a thirteenth-century Christian mystic, described divinity as “an underground river that no one can stop and no one can dam up.” The contemporary theologian Rev. Matthew Fox adds that while we may discover many wells drawing from that One River, “we would make a grave mistake if we confused [any one well] with the flowing waters of the underground river [itself]. Many wells, one river. That is Deep Ecumenism.” Take a moment to hold that image in your mind: an unstoppable underground river accessible to all, unique to none. Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (zt”l) encouraged us to consider each religious tradition as an organ in the body of collective humanity: our differences are meaningful and our commonality is significant. When we honor both the differentiation and the unity, we enhance the possibility of collaborating with followers of other religious paths in our shared work of healing creation.
The expansiveness of our divine Source cannot be captured fully by any one tradition; if it could, we would have found a container big enough for God, we would have marked the limit of divine potentiality. Reb Zalman modeled for us how to safely derive additional nourishment in traditions other than our own, understanding that each religion provides some but not all possible spiritual vitamins. (See ALEPH.org, Yavneh-Raleigh.org, Paradigm Shift.)
Deep Ecumenism orients us to the potential for learning from and growing spiritually with teachers and adherents of all faith traditions. At Yavneh, one of our foundational kavanot (intentionalities) is to respond to the challenge of overcoming the historic hostility between faiths, primarily between Judaism and Christianity, but also to be open to learning from and growing spiritually with teachers and adherents of all faith traditions. This kavanah manifests in our membership policy, which welcomes all supporters of Jewish Renewal, regardless of whether they are Jews, and in Yavneh’s Center for Deep Ecumenism, offering its first programming in November.
In the delicate process of God-seeking, there is no way to overestimate the centrality of the experiential. Each of us shares in a holy obligation to open our minds, hearts, and souls to the Reality of God and to the reality that God loves diversity, nearness, and surprise. When we model how to give up a futile triumphalism that insists that Divinity can only be accessed along a single path, we open ourselves and others to a diversity in which all religious practitioners hold on to particular “shape and color . . . [only to] form the mosaic in which we are all God’s tiles,” not to proclaim our ownership of capital-T truth.
Deep Ecumenism neither minimizes our attachment to Judaism’s spiritual understandings, nor compromises our personal and communal religious practices. If ecumenism has a boundary, it’s in the realm of practice, at the point where we sense something damaging to our spiritual immune system, something that calls into question for us the integrity and beauty of Jewish teaching.
Still, why should Jews be interested in the wider spiritual ecosystem? Over 3500 years, Judaism’s survival as an independent religious practice has been so hard-won, why look elsewhere? We read this morning of Abraham and Hannah, both of whom faced the paradox of losing and gaining a spiritual future by offering to give up what was most precious to them. How can shopping elsewhere for spiritual vitamins be good for the Jews?
As a life-long practitioner of Deep Ecumenism, from decades before I could name it, permit me to share my top ten reasons:
Deep Ecumenism requires us to take our own religion seriously. If Jewish spiritual practice, learning, worship, community, history, culture – if the entirety of Jewish reality didn’t hold a primary place in my life – I would not be ready to engage with others in that open field where we all strive to yield our absolutes for the sake of divine unity.
As a corollary, Deep Ecumenism requires us to become better educated about our tradition. If I don’t invest time and energy delving into Judaism’s riches, what will I have to share in spiritual dialogue?
Sometimes, Deep Ecumenism helps us make sense of what puzzles us in our own tradition, requiring us to open our hearts to the varieties of Jewish spiritual experience. If I have no understanding of how followers of other forms of Judaism engage with tradition and its evolution, I am hobbled in my efforts to distinguish between the essential core and the outer layers of various ways of Jew-ing, as Reb Zalman would say.
Deep Ecumenism gives us an opportunity to explore the mystical heart of all faith, all yearning for connection to our shared Source. When we learn how to engage with other traditions from the sacred heart of the cosmos, we open ourselves to realms of beauty and inspiration otherwise denied us by narrower vision.
Deep Ecumenism also helps us moderate reflexive “truth claims” and to relax our adversarial posture relative to “the other.” We learn to hear the mythic truths embodied in alternative religious narratives and practices, and we begin to discern the particular gifts our tradition brings to the divine mosaic.
Deep Ecumenism calms our tendency to take rejection as permission to reject. We have good reasons to challenge the triumphalisms of religions whose followers have oppressed, persecuted, and murdered Jews. And, we have better reasons, rooted in Judaism’s essential commitment to shalom, to wholeness and peace, to share with anyone who will listen the unique blessings and insights Judaism contributes to humanity’s storehouse of spiritual riches.
It’s not about being nice; it’s about being our own best representatives, not leaving the definition of our tradition to those who do not live it. Engaging in Deep Ecumenism helps defuse false understandings of Jewish teachings.
When we undertake what Reb Zalman described as “the more intrepid exploration of Deep Ecumenism in which one learns about oneself through participatory engagement with another religion or tradition,” we discover what it means to open our hearts to the richness of personal and communal practice from multiple perspectives and to introduce our perspective into the mix.
In engaging with the other, we learn about ourselves. When we collaborate with fellow-travelers on other spiritual paths, our own practices are enriched — and we come one step closer to a world without religious prejudice or fear. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg teaches, every false belief we have about another religion is a mountain we have to climb over to reach God (One River, Many Wells Conference, July 5, 2015.).
It’s fun, a sacred game that rewards our attention and curiosity daily. A few quick examples from our summer vacation:
In July, Stephen and I drove a circular route from Las Vegas to Zion National Park, on to Bryce Canyon, along the Escalante-Grand Staircase to Capital Reef, from there to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and back to Las Vegas. We took a morning to visit Tuba City, AZ, which some of you may recognize from Tony Hillerman novels as part of the Navajo Nation. Our time at the Navajo Museum sparked numerous spiritual ah-ha’s:
First, the Navajo raise churro sheep. When you google them, you will note that they can sport four horns. Why there isn’t a thriving Navajo shofar industry is beyond me.
Second, we experienced intriguing “compare and contrast” moments. It is long-time Jewish practice to pray eastward to Jerusalem, and, during Sukkot, we honor our agricultural origins by offering blessings in six directions – the major compass points, up and down – with a swaying palm branch.
Similarly, traditional Navajo practice assigns spiritual meaning to each major compass point, daily marking the life processes of contemplation, planning, acting, and evaluating – a reasonable analogy to the traditional Jewish practice of daily self evaluation and teshuvah: “Every day the cycle is repeated, and in each cycle there is a lesson to be learned; even if we fall, we stand back up to see what we can do differently. Every dawn is a new start, a new life, a renewal (Museum text.).”
Third, the Diné, as Navajo call themselves, “The People,” have no separate word for religion – nor does Hebrew. They live in a sacred relationship with their land and enact healing ceremonies to connect themselves to one another in beauty and harmony. Navajo legend says that the Diné had to pass through three different worlds before emerging in the present fourth or “glittering” world, while Jewish mystical teaching identifies four interpenetrated worlds of action, feeling, thinking, and clinging to the holy in which we enact our being. Alternative four worlds theologies, one conceptually linear in its evolutionary path, the other cyclic. Much to contemplate here.
We, too, are inheritors of a sacred relationship with a particular land, a sense of the holiness of Creation that over time has expanded to include our entire fragile planet. Our mystical tradition also teaches that the ultimate purpose of our ritual practices, indeed, of all our actions in the world, is tikkun, repair and healing. As Reb Nachman of Bratslav was fond of saying, if you believe you can do damage, then you must believe you can effect repair – just as the Navajo way teaches that one may always find a path back to harmony with self, others, and the land.
It all comes back to the light bulbs. As Rumi writes:
If ten lamps are present in one place
each differs in form from another;
yet you can’t distinguish whose radiance is whose
when you focus on the light.
In the field of spirit there is no division;
no individuals exist.
sweet is the oneness of the Friend with His friends.
Catch hold of spirit.
help this headstrong self disintegrate;
that beneath it you may discover unity,
like a buried treasure.
“Ten Lamps”
The light is infinite; holy darkness is infinite; the sacred river is infinite. The more we honor the infinite Unity, the nearer we draw to infinite shalom. Keyn y’hi ratzon, so may it be our will and God’s.