This month, we begin our third trimester of congregational study together. As you may remember, we received a Legacy Heritage grant to rethink our congregational education and came up with our Family Track option for the religious school. As part of this process, we have engaged the whole congregation in a four-year cycle, with three trimesters each year, in which we will be studying together the same theme. We began this year with the book of Genesis. We just completed a trimester on the history of the Biblical period and March through May of 2011 will be a chance for us to study Jewish theology - different Jewish understandings of God and the Divine.
Our trimester’s enduring understanding is: Judaism balances between the dichotomy that we are a chosen people in covenant with God from the encounter at Mt. Sinai, and that we are the “children of Israel” – descendants of our ancestor Jacob renamed for wrestling with God and humanity. Holiness/K’dushah is the language we use in pursuing this relationship. We see God in many different ways and how we acknowledge the Divine tells us how to treat other people and act in the world.
An “enduring understanding” is a densely packed statement which the Understanding by Design model of curriculum development uses to help guide the learning of a given topic. The hallmark of a good enduring understanding is that it needs “unpacking”. So, let us unpack our God Concepts’ enduring understanding, and, hopefully, help start each of us on a path of learning for this trimester:
One of the joys that I find in Judaism is its ability to embrace dialectical concepts. The rabbis of the Mishnah would say that all is predetermined and we have free will. The statements seem mutually exclusive, and yet they are both reflective of how we as human beings see (and want to see) the world. On the one hand, one cannot deny that the essence of Judaism comes from the revelation at Mount Sinai - the momentous face-to-face encounter with God that created the covenant between God and the Jewish people. On the other hand, we find it difficult to believe in the literal reality of that event, or even to imagine that an all-seeing, thunderous-voiced, judgemental God is not only watching us every at every moment, but even present in our lives at all.
If there were two things that I would wish each congregant of Temple Sholom would get out of this trimester’s study, it would be an understanding of these two concepts:
1) Judaism accepts a multiplicity of theologies under its broad tent. There have been different ideas of God - even within the Bible. The God that walks with Adam in the garden is not the voice out of the whirlwind in Job. Philo and Maimonides had a theology shaped by Greek philosophy. In the modern age, theologians such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Mordechai Kaplan have each come up with different understandings of the Divine, all acceptable withing Judaism. Don’t just stick with the “third grade idea of God” (the old man with the white beard) - there is a lot more out there. For a good start, take a look at the two books created by Rabbi Rifat Sonsino. The first Finding God (URJ Press), written with Rabbi Daniel Syme, is ten chapters with short descriptions and primary texts of different God ideas that have developed over Jewish history. The Many Faces of God (also URJ Press) is the same concept, but with contemporary theologies and philosophers.
2) Don’t give up the struggle. Each Saturday morning, at services, I explain that our prayerbook is a collection of different theologies; each prayer is a different metaphor for the Divine. Why? Because our views of God can change not only as we grow and mature, but sometimes from moment to moment. Our rational idea of God, which we might explain at great length in a class or at a cocktail party, may not be the God that we turn to in a hospital bed at 2 am or as our car skids on a patch of ice. We are called yisraeil - which the Torah tells us means the one who struggles with God and human beings. It is expected that we are never satisfied with what we can understand or comprehend about God, but that we must always be looking again. The trick is not to give up when God doesn’t match our expectations, but to push back and keep up the wrestling. For this, I recommend Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s Godwrestling (Schocken Books).
Take a look at page ? to see the opportunities that our Eitz Chayim committee is offering for your study of this topic. You can also join us for the adult learning part of the three havdalah programs where our Family Track will be exploring the trimester theme. In addition, look on our website, listen to sermons, read bulletin articles, and share your conversations. Don’t be afraid - the Temple is actually the place where you can talk about God without people thinking that you are crazy or trying to convert them. (And, give the atheists some respect - not believing in a theistic God is also an acceptable theology in Judaism, ask them what they do believe in.)
Rabbi Joel N. Abraham
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
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