New Rabbis?

A recent issue of the Jewish Forward featured an article on new rabbis. The new rabbi is called to be: a scholar, educator, CEO, community organizer, pastoral counselor, chaplain, fundraiser, public speaker, etc., but what about this is “new.” Back in the late 1970s my colleagues and I drew up the same job description, and thought that we too were doing something new. We weren’t then, they aren’t now. And what’s worse, both then and now, is that the “spiritual” is still missing from the rabbi’s job description!

For decades our rabbinical schools and Jewish institutions have secularized the rabbinate in hopes of staying relevant to a largely secularized Jewish community. The problem is that the secular needs of our people are being well met by secular institutions and professionals. What isn’t being met is their need for meaning, wisdom, and spiritual depth. This is the work that rabbis should be trained to do, but are not being trained to do.

One of the things that was supposed to excite readers about the new rabbi was all the work opportunities open to them outside of congregational life: rabbis working as chaplains, social workers, CEO’s of non–profits, and more. I’m happy for new rabbinic grads that there are job opportunities for them outside congregational life, but the reason they need them is that the congregational structure of American Jewish life is failing. Rabbis are entering unusual jobs because the usual ones aren’t there.

You want something new? Try this:

Rabbinical schools should train rabbis to be wisdom teachers, spiritual mentors with the skills to help people make meaning out their lives, and contemplative practitioners who can teach the skills of meditation, prayer, chanting, and the like—skills that people desperately need to survive the madness of an America spiraling downward morally and a planet on the verge of ecological collapse, and that just might keep the worst effects of consumptive capitalism from becoming the norm.

Rabbinical schools should subsidize graduates (not all, but those with promise) and send them out to transform the world rather than get a job. Subsidized rabbis can dare to be bold. Instead of going to wealthy philanthropists to fund a new building project, rabbinic institutions should go to venture capitalists with business plans for transforming the world, and put their best and brightest in charge of these ventures.

There is a real need for rabbis, but not the rabbis we are training. And simply tricking new rabbis into thinking that what they are doing is new rather than training them to actually do something transformative is just mean.

Jesus is the answer. How sad.

The bumper sticker on the dirty Chevy S-10 in front of me says simply, “Jesus is the answer.” Its simplicity belies the enormity of its message: Jesus is the answer, so stop asking questions.

“Jesus is the answer,” and its equivalent thinking in other religions, is what’s wrong with religion in the early 21^st century: it presumes to answer what cannot be answered; it presumes to know what cannot be known; it shuts down the human capacity to imagine and create and think outside the box whose very self-proclaimed importance depends on never opening it, let along thinking outside of it.

Religion up until now has been about answers. Wars were fought over competing answers. And once an answer got control of a society, that society’s ability to think and evolve died.

If religion has a future—and that may be a big “If”—it will have to reclaim the power to question. If clergy have a future, it will have to shift from being the caste with the answers to the caste that helps you sharpen your questions. If churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples have a future they will have to reinvent themselves from communities with answers to communities of shared questioning.

Stop Worrying About CO2 Levels

Here’s the cool thing about CO2 numbers that the Green Agenda folks don’t want us to know: in the end the amount of CO2 will fall, and fall to zero. Forget Bill McKibben’s 350 parts per million, how about no parts per million? You heard me, Tree Huggers—zero CO2. Now that’s clean air! And it’s coming. In about a billion years.

Sure that is a bit of a wait, but it’ll be worth it. Without CO2 there will be no greenhouse effect at all, and that means no plants, and without plants there will be no photosynthesis and that means no oxygen, and without oxygen there will be no animals or people, and that means no Animal Planet or reality television shows. Birds will hang on for a while, as will fish and insects, but by the time global temperatures rise to 130 degrees Fahrenheit these fellows too are gone. That leaves microbes hiding in the last vestiges of ice hugging the equator after the earth has titled on her access and Santa and his reindeer look like slabs of Slim Jim. And even the hearty microbe dies of thirst in about 2.8 billion years. So there is hope for this planet yet; if by “hope” you mean it’s turned into barren rock.

Of course by then we earthlings may be living on a Klingon outpost in another star system, or maybe the best of us have been raptured to be with Jesus in Heaven. As a Jew I prefer the former outcome, but not because I don’t love Jesus, I do; but because, like Hebrew, Klingon has that “ch” sound that the Rapture Ready cannot pronounce, and I think it would be fun to watch them order a smoking glass of chech’tluth at an upscale Klingon bar.

So as I crank up my AC to compensate for what promises to be a middle Tennessee summer modeled on the Amazon Rainforest, I look forward to knocking back a few steaming glasses of chech’tluth with my Klingon friends. 'LwlIj jachjaj!

Beyond Worship

This morning I want to explore the message of three stories that hint at a religiosity for our time.

The first is the story of Abraham arguing with God over the destruction of Sodom (Genesis 18:25 ff). God wants to kill the innocent along with the guilty. Abraham insists that the Judge of all the Universe must himself do justly. In other words that Justice trumps God. Abraham wins.

The second is the wrestling of Jacob with the angel at Jabbok’s Ford (Genesis 32:22-30). As daylight comes the angel, who may well be God, begs Jacob to release him. Jacob agrees to do so only when given a blessing. The blessing is a new name, a new self-understanding: Yisra-El, one who wrestles with God and wins.

The third is the rabbinic story of Akhni’s Oven where God intervenes in a rabbinic debate over the kosher status of an oven and the rabbis, with one exception, tell God to back off citing Torah, lo bahamayyim he, the Wisdom we humans need is no longer in heaven, but in our hearts that we might live it (Deuteronomy 30: 12–14). God’s response to this rebuke is positive, “At last My children have defeated Me,” (Talmud, Bava Metziah 59b).

The message in all three stories is the same. God isn’t to be worshipped and obeyed, godliness is to be internalized and lived.

Most people didn’t get this and continued to worship God. In the Christian story God gets even more daring in “his” attempts to set us free. God incarnates as Jesus and then dies. It’s as if God is saying, “Look people, what more do I have to do to get you grow up? You’re like kids who refuse to leave home. I didn’t raise you to be dependent. What do I have to do? Die? Fine! I’ll die, and maybe then you’ll get the message.”

Of we didn’t get the message, and Christians await their God’s return.

The Prophet Micah summed up the entirety of God’s message this way: Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God,” (Micah 6:8). Our rabbis read into the meaning of “your God” rather than “our God” or simply “God” the teaching that even though we will continue to invent gods for ourselves, we should hold them lightly, and not take them too seriously. We should be humble in matters of theology and religion. Just the opposite is the case.

When Ecclesiastes tells us how best to live, he never mentions worship, and focuses on eating and drinking moderately, keeping our clothes clean and our hair groomed, finding meaningful work, and cultivating two or three good friends. So daring was this teaching, that later editors sought to undo it by adding a false summation about fearing God and keeping his commandments, something Ecclesiastes himself never said.

When Rabbi Hillel sought to sum up the entire Torah he made no reference to God at all, saying, “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.”

The Jewish writer Franz Kafka wrote in his book of parables, “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.” The messiah will come only when we no longer need him; only when we have made the world right by ourselves. Then he comes to celebrate our achievement, not to do for us what is our task alone to do.

The reason the Jewish messiah has not yet come, and the reason why Jesus has not yet returned is that you and I have yet to do what is asked of us: beat our swords into ploughshares, our swords into pruning hooks; cease to learn war; and create a world where each of us sits unafraid beneath our own vine and fig tree (Micah 4:3-4).

ReligionNext: What's Next for Beyond Religion

I changed the name of my blog from Beyond Religion to ReligionNext. The reason is simple: I never seem to get beyond religion, and what I am constantly drawn to is what is next in the world of religion and spirituality. I believe we are in the early decades of a spiritual revolution that will not (as I may have thought) take us beyond religion, but may lead into an new kind of religion or a new way of being religious. So, at least for now, welcome to ReligionNext.

Dr. Jung, Dr, Jung, You're Wanted STAT

I think dreams speak to us from our personal and collective unconscious. I rarely remember my dreams, but last night, the fifth night of this week-long retreat I dreamed the same dream three times. Chalk it up to my fever, if you like, but we Jews say that if you have the same dream three times running it is an important message. So here's the dream, see what you make of it.

I am flying home, where I am to give a lecture before returning to my house. The plane lands in Murfreesboro (we don't have a commercial airport), and as I deplane I walk down a flight of worn and cracked gray wooden stairs. No one else is going down, but lots of woman are going up. Three in particular stand out: Two elderly twins wearing identical white dresses with a yellow flower pattern, and one younger woman in pink. I am descending on the right side of the staircase, everyone else is ascending to my left. The two woman in white block my path. I step further to the right to allow them to pass, but they insist I walk by them first. They smile and nod as I do. The woman in pink greets me with a slight bow. They say nothing, but I know they are glad to see me.

When I get to the bottom of the stairs I am in a muddy village. Three roads leads out from the airport, and I can see Middle Tennessee State University at the end of one of them. Though I am certain I parked my car on one of them right next to the place I am to lecture, I cannot remember which road to take. I then realize that I forgot to take my luggage off the plane and my car keys are in my bag. The airport, however, has disappeared. I begin to panic.

I look around and notice a very run down village just behind me. I recognize the place and know there is a medicine woman there who can help me. I climb a mud embankment and walk through the village to find her. People are washing clothes on their porches and the dirt road is quickly turning to mud.

I see the medicine woman's house but before I get there my cell phone rings. As I answer a woman on the other end says, "Are your eyes open?" I realize they are shut. In fact I realize that I'm dreaming and that the reason I don't have my luggage is because I haven't even gotten on the plane yet. I am instantly calm, but sad that I won't get to talk to the medicine woman.

I wake up.

If anyone knows how to reach Carl Jung you can email him this dream for interpretation. Otherwise, you can post your own.

iDoctor

Last night I came down with a sever fever. I was freezing, shaking uncontrollably, with terrible pain in my joints and even my teeth. I was up all night. Today I looked up my symptoms on the Internet and found that they could relate to the following:

Mononucleosis, Diabetes, Tuberculosis, Multiple sclerosis, and Sarcoidosis.

I feel better already.