Sermons and Divrei Torah
Millennial Judaism
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Yom Kippur 5765)
A rabbi, a priest, and a rationalist skeptic are bound for the guillotine. The rabbi was marched up onto the platform first. There, facing the guillotine, he was asked if he had any last words. And the rabbi cried out, "I believe in the one and only true God, who shall save me." The executioner then positioned the rabbi below the blade, set the block above his neck, and pulled the cord. The heavy cleaver plunged downward, but then, abruptly, it stopped with a crack just a few inches above the would-be victim's neck. To which the rabbi said, "I told you so." "It's a miracle!" gasped the crowd. And the executioner had to agree, letting the rabbi go.
Next in line was the priest. Asked for his final words, he declared, "I believe in the Father and His Son who will rescue me in my hour of need." The executioner then positioned the priest beneath the blade. And he pulled the cord. Again the blade flew downward...stopping just short of its mark once more. "Another miracle!" screamed crowd. And the executioner for the second time had no choice but to let the condemned go free.
Now it was the skeptic's turn. "What final words have you to say?" he was asked. But the skeptic didn't hear. Staring intently at the ominous engine of death, he seemed lost. Not until the executioner poked him in the ribs and the question was asked again did he reply. "Oh, I see the problem," the skeptic said pointing. "You've got a blockage in the gear assembly, right there!"
Ah, the skeptic, with his own brand of faith in the rational. Everyone's got some kind of faith, even the skeptic, who has faith that he will find the root of why the machine doesn't work. We have faith in lots of things: in mystery or in chemistry, in the unprovable or in the rational proof. We believe in love, we believe in science; we believe there is nothing or we believe there is something "out there" bigger than us. And tonight we have faith that our being here together can make a difference in our lives in the year ahead.
For the past fifty years or so, though, we've done the "faith in the secular" thing. We've worshipped progress; we've worshipped Marx and Jung and Freud and the dollar and science but in the new millennium we came up dissatisfied and lonely. A decade ago Harvey Cox, a sociologist of religion, predicted the decline in traditional religious denominations, but he wrote in his later book Fire from Heaven that he had missed the parallel phenomena of "the disabusement of belief among the young concerning those beautiful promises that reason or science or politics were going to deliver us from our misery. All that stuff went oversold and went sour."
We really believed that we didn't need the mystical when we had the rational. Last night I referred to the culture of disbelief that makes it so hard for some of us to find faith. And yet in the last five years almost every Jewish institution has witnessed a resurgence of interest. Sometime recently a whole bunch of us figured out that when all is said and done, secularism isn't going to last, either. For all its terrible and sometimes tragic flaws, religion still offers us the opportunity to struggle to understand why we exist and therefore what we should do with our lives. For all its mistakes, for all its excesses and faults, religious institutions remain the major sources of community, volunteerism, and security; and according to a recent Gallup poll, their members are far more likely to donate both hours and money to charitable causes.
So pure secularism doesn't work any more for many of us. Some of us go back to that "old time religion." The phenomenon of ba'aley teshuva- "born-again Jews" is quite interesting. People "go back" big time and find comfort, familiarity, spiritual discipline and predictability. They use their new faith and practices to keep our material and often valueless society at bay. But those of us who have chosen to sit here today, in a liberal setting, know that for us pure "old time religion" doesn't work, either. While some of our friends or even family may choose theological certainties and strict interpretations, we are not knocking down that door, no matter how attractively it's packaged because the "old" religion is for us too rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical, rule-bound.
So some of us go "New Age." We chant mantras in Hebrew in a vegetarian-kosher retreat centre; our chamsa-amulets have stones for the proper chakras. It feels unjaded and speaks to contemporary concerns like feminism and ecology and offer a softer more immanent G-d imagery. But that also doesn't work for many of us: after all, we chose to come to a "traditional" service. For us the "new" religion is too loosy-goosy, too personal— almost narcissistic— generic and universal. No wonder so many of us, I think, feel confused and disenfranchised from the whole religious enterprise, as drawn to the idea of it as we may be. It's either too "New Age-y" or too "orthodox." Some feel we aren't contemporary enough. Some feel we aren't "authentic" enough. What's a Jew to do?
Even though we can't seem to define what kind of religion we want, religion is definitely in vogue again; we've got cool Jews wearing "Jewcy" T-shirts and reading "Heeb" magazine. G-d is not dead as we said in the 60s but was hibernating while we figured out what we really were looking for; so the question worth asking is what kind of religion will work in this postmodern, postdenominational, post Enlightenment, post scientific world? I'd like to share with you Winifred Gallagher's answer, suggesting a middle ground between the "old" religion and the "new." In her book Working on God she calls it millennial religion.
Beware: millennial Judaism is NOT a new denomination. I've got enough to worry about between right-wing Orthodox, modern Orthodox, left-wing Reform, traditional Conservative, traditional egalitarian, neo-Conservative, neo-Hasidic, Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Ladino, Mizrachi, Jews-by-choice, Jews-by surprise... I could go on and on. Millennial Judaism is an attitude, and it's up to us to bring it to Toronto.
Millennial religion appeals to a group I think is largely represented at Kolel: what she calls neoagnostics. Neoagnostics are "...well educated skeptics who have inexplicable metaphysical feelings. They sense something important that eludes their most trusted tools of intellect and learning. Defined by ambivalence and longing, their credos are various: 'There may be something perhaps,' or 'I'm spiritual, not religious.'" Neoagnostics like being here, they like the music and the familiar feeling, they are moved by Kol Nidre and are ready to listen to sermons that speak of existential questions and life's meaning. They are even ready to pray to a God they aren't sure they believe in, as long as it's in a pleasant and contemporary atmosphere. Maybe you or someone you love fits that description?
Millennial religion — and millennial Judaism in specific for us—will work in this new century of undefined belief, because Gallagher suggests, it tolerates three big questions. First: What is real? Second, what do I feel? and third what are my choices?
What is real? Although drawn to mystery and unanswered questions, we are not interested in bubbameises; spiritual dogmas and doctrines that contradict our objective knowledge. We know the world wasn't created 5,765 years ago and we don't want to be sold a series of rationalizations for that number. We'd rather call it a metaphor and then search for its meaning. Millennial religion is able to coexist with what people know to be objectively true.
What do I feel? 69 percent of people polled in 1996 by MSNBC on the question "Is God Alive" responded that religion was " a direct experience of God ." This is a striking return to one of religion's most ancient functions: the personal, and the coming together of the mind and body experience. The word "religion" comes from the Latin root religare, which means "to bind" and religion should bind us not only to G-d but to each other. Millennial religion is able to be highly personal while valuing community and shared standards.
What are my choices? Sophisticated 21st century citizens no longer look to a single source for all their ideas, much less Truth. I can google over a million hits for "the truth." Religious pluralism has modified many people's spiritual lives, with Eastern practices such as meditation and yoga, and western somewhat "fringe" practices like kabbalah and faith healing. We live in a veritable smorgasbord of spiritual opportunities: retreats and tapes and videos and adult education courses from every conceivable spiritual path are readily available to us. And we take them, and mix the best of them up with the best of what we remember from our versions of Judaism and millennial religion will be able to "deal with it." Critics call it syncretism, (as even I have before, in this very spot a few years ago), a fusion of identities that calls authenticity into question, but I've come to see how the most "successful" synagogues and churches— I'm talking about success in terms of touching people's minds and opening their hearts and souls, and not in terms of numbers—how those places touch people more deeply when they present a "toolbox" of elements with which people can build up-to-date religious lives. By the way, such "successful" places of millennial Judaism, like B'nai Jeshurun in New York, do attract large numbers that make every other synagogue in North America jealous. Critics like to say they use "gimmicks." But is it a gimmick to renovate a Victorian home by leaving the charming historical outside but refurbishing the inside with the most modern electrical appliances? Judaism does best when we retain the contents of tradition in a "brand new box." It's not a "gimmick" to teach Torah and yoga, as we do at Kolel, if yoga brings you a deeper connection to Torah. it's not a gimmick to do a Friday night service with a black Jewish "gospel" singer if that's what gets your toes tapping to Adon Olam. Millennial Judaism is not a la carte Judaism but recognizes that most of us are well travelled, well read, well experienced and because we live in a multicultural world we are willing to have other faiths and other ways of seeing the world teach us and inform our commitment to our own way.
Millennial religion will work because it regards questions themselves as religious expressions, and in response, offers practices and processes and not just formulas. If Judaism is going to speak to us in a language we are ready to hear, it's going to have to become a millennial religion, speaking in one breath of old and new, mystery and science, body and soul, contemplation and action. Its efforts to integrate these elements will determine its longevity. But I'm optimistic because of Judaism's inherent ability to evolve. We don't sacrifice animals anymore and sorry, but I for one am not prepared to pray that one day soon we will.
Millennial religion will work for people like you and me who have questioned and revised every value we were reared on—intellectual, political, social, aesthetic, sexual, even culinary—and religious. Our childhood versions of our religion may have, at one point, collided head-on with our secular education and our life's experiences, and we may have wrongly assumed religion is for emotional and intellectual weaklings. What if the problem though isn't our religion, but our childish conception of it? What if religion can really be about something else? Religion has changed alot since you may have dropped out of it. I am always flustered and frankly shocked when someone says to me, "oh, you're the first woman rabbi I've met." There are 6 of us in Toronto, and I've been here since 1991. Where'ya been I ask them? Stuck in a Sunday school classroom from 1962? Millennial Judaism can help us get out of that classroom in which so many of us are still trapped.
Millennial Judaism will work because it will help us balance the age-old paradox of Judaism: being an old tradition in constant dialogue with the contemporary reality. Judaism can mange to hold both polarities and not be destroyed by them.
Here's a personal anecdote to illustrate. This has been an interesting week for phone calls. I've been listening to Fran at our front desk field phone calls for last-minute high holiday tickets. Do you want traditional or alternative services, or a class instead of a service she asks. Well, what else have you got one lady asks. Another says, well I'd like the traditional service but the one with some alternative music and some creative readings with some classes in the middle. Another offers that they would like to go to the unservice, where no prayers are said at all, but they want to say yizkor. One fellow last week pulled me aside after services and said, You know why I like these services so much? They feel like the Conservative shul of my youth, but with a much more Reform feeling. His wife disagreed. Oh I like the alternative service for the opposite reason. It's so modern, but it feels traditional.
That's millennial Judaism, a Judaism both ritually traditional and socially progressive at the same time; a Judaism that lives peacefully in the divergent poles of modernity and tradition.
Millennial Judaism will have to find the balance between old time religion and New Age because the vast majority of us are balanced somewhere between those two. Millennial Judaism will work because it will be able to recognize that the challenge for the 21st century is in the words of the first chief Rabbi of Israel: hayashan yitchadesh v'hachadash yitkadesh: that the old shall become new and the new shall become holy. Then we'll truly be able to sing Chadesh Yamenu kikedem- renew our days as of old.
Shanah Tovah.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
