I love
Chuppot.
I love
doing weddings, and going to weddings - who doesn’t love a good wedding.
But more
than that I love the symbol of the Chuppah - the canopy - itself - I love the
ideas the physical canopy directs us to understand.
Mostly, if
we think about the symbolism of the Chuppah at all, we only get half the story
of its power.
The story most
often told is that of Abraham’s Tent; open on all four sides, so when some
dust-addled strangers appeared over the horizon Abraham could see them, and run
out to welcome them into his home. For those of you here yesterday that’s what
you might call a Port idea, open, engaged, outward looking.
But it’s
only one half of the symbolic power of the Chuppah.
The other
idea is that the Chuppah is the bride and groom’s first home, the first ‘roof
over their head.’ The Chuppah is supposed to be a place of intimacy, or
seclusion. This is the driving intent of the legal literature - [1] which
refers to the the Chuppah as a place of Yichud - intimacy. It certainly feels
that way, when you are stood there with a couple, almost as if you are, as the
Rabbi, invading their private love. And if that is not quite a fort-idea, it’s
certainly a long way away from the image of Abraham’s tent. If the Abraham’s
tent idea is about being open, the Yichud idea is about being enclosed.
I suspect none
of us is worried about this apparent contradiction - the Chuppah as symbol of openness
and closedness. For this tension between openness and closedness is exactly how
marriage works. Those of us fortunate enough to get to stand under a Chuppah,
or even attend a Chuppah pick up, maybe in some unconscious way, something of
this relationship between internal strength and outward-looking strength.
That’s how religion works of course. In symbols and rituals and liturgies and
stories that gently shape us and allow us to pick up something about how we
should be living our lives. At its best these symbols and rituals are sophisticated,
subtle and enlightening.
The
problem is that so often, for one reason or another, we don’t get to understand
the full richness of a religious idea. Ideas get half told - like the story of
the Chuppah - which isn’t so bad, but also corrupted in the retelling, or
hijacked by those with no love for religion who paint some of the most
beautiful and sophisticated ideas in our faith as oppressive or childish, or both.
That’s more of a problem.
If a person
makes a decision to care less about religion, that’s one thing, but to make
that decision on the basis of a corrupt version of what is being rejected is
desperately sad.
Let me do
another example. Actually this example will always be the best example of how
Judaism does anything - Shabbat.
Six days
you shall work and on the seventh day you shall do Shabbat and - the last word
of this verse is hard to translate - vayinafash - be en-souled.
Six days a
week get out there. Change the world, drive forward, plan, achieve, create.
These are the open four walls of the Chuppah translated into the work of our
lives. Six days a week be outward-looking.
And then,
one day in seven pause, acknowledge what you have, test what you really need,
become a human being, rather than a factor production. Become en-souled. - be
inward.
Sound
reasonable?
Sounds
reasonable to me.
Too much
work can exhaust and empty us out.
But let me
set it against the most significant challenge of our age; a challenge so severe
that it could leave all our blustery concerns about refugees and US
Presidential Elections as nothing more than a tumbleweed blowing through what
our descendants might say of our time.
We are
destroying our planet. And it’s the only one we have. The problem is that we
humans don’t know how to stop wanting more. My favourite example is that of the
oligarch who decided they needed a new yacht since the first yacht had only one
helicopter pad on it. That meant that when he was on board, with his helicopter,
there was nowhere for anyone else to land. Such problems we should all have.
The historian
of human existence, Yuval Noah Harari[2] in his new compelling, but infuriating
book Homo Deus suggests we could learn a great deal by looking at the games we
play. From the board game Monopoly to the computer based civilisation strategy
games the principles are always world domination or bust.
But what
if the world can’t cope with our appetite for dominance?
Harari’s
idea is that knowledge will save us, new technologies and the like. Well
knowledge develops with astounding pace and the new technologies are exciting,
but I’m not sure it will be enough. In fact it might already be too late.
Pretty immediately we are going to have to learn to live with less; or more
accurately we are going to have to live with a sense that what we possess or
what we can bring into our possession is not simply there for our use. We need to
find something more important than relentless consuming … and then consuming
some more. And that’s where religion comes in.
At its
heart religion - this religion anyway - contains a message about what is yours
and what is non-yours. Ladonai Haretz Uumeloo - the earth and everything
in it is God’s - we say in Psalms. We get what we have as stewards. It’s
not ultimately ours.
It’s not
ours because there is something more important than we are, even if we don’t
understand what that greater force is, we are commanded to observe, recognise
and validate that we don’t place ourselves at the centre of Universe.
Shabbat is
a training in existential humility and we are in dire need of some existential
humility.
Is it OK to be excited
about creating and acquiring and accumulating? Yes, but not only to a point.
There are limits, responsibilities and most of all the requirement, once a week,
to stop entirely and reflect on what all this rushing around is for.
Religion -
this religion, on this day - is about standing before one’s creator and being
called to account for how one has lived, called to account for our obsessions
with material stuff. It’s about acknowledging that no matter how much stuff we
have accumulated our end is dust, we are only as strong as a pottery shard, as
life-full as withered grass, as permanent as a passing shadow. Those are all
images drawn from our tradition.
Shabbat is
the tool to inculcate a positive, sustainable, holy relationship with our
desire for possessing things and more things.
Religion
is the voice that guides us to live in peace with a creation that is not ours
to hollow out and devastate.
At least
that’s what I think religion is really for.
Noah Yuval
Harari on the other hand has a very different concept of religion. Harari
thinks that religion is all about forcing a person to do strange and often
unethical things for an invented fairy-tale of a fake divinity to ensure the
people respect their political overlords.
Harari’s a
smart guy, but reading Harari on religion is enough to drive a rabbi to
distraction.
Why do
people who understand so little about religion spend so much time writing about
it? Reading Harari on religion is a bit like encountering a writer on physics
explaining billion dollar space programmes are primarily designed to improve
non-stick frying pan technology, or a music-theorist who thinks the point of
Bach is to teach a person how to play scales.
You don’t
reconsider the value of the thing being described because you can’t get beyond
the notion that the writer has entirely the wrong end of the stick. At least
you shouldn’t.
I don’t
mind people pointing out damage done in the name of religion - for there is
damage done in the name of religion - even this religion. But if you are going
to do that at least give religion points for the good it has inspired - anyone
think that slavery would have been overthrown, in this country or the United
States were it not for religion, the notion of the creation of every human
being in the image of God and that glorious tale of the Exodus
And if you
want to put religion on a scale of the various forces that have caused
suffering in the world how would it line up alongside Hitler’s non-religious
malevolence, or Mao’s or Stalin’s or the atrocities of Rwanda or former
Yugoslavia or Cambodia and what about the Congo?
And on
what might be blame the relentless destruction of our planet? Where should we
place liberal values; or the right to consume on that scale?
I just
don’t get the notion that religion, done well, is a force for harm.
The quest
to live life well is challenging. Listening only to our own feelings we too
easily fall prey to what the Rabbis call the evil inclination. It’s not that
human beings are bad, it’s just we get seduced or distracted into wanting what
is not good to want. Having boundaries helps, training ourselves to act
decently helps, dedicating ourselves to practices of kindness and justice help.
Training our children in these practices helps. That’s what it means to be
religious. Being religious helps.
Here is
the plea. Support this kind of religion. If you don’t want to become a Salafist
Muslim or an Evangelical Christian, or even an Ultra-Orthodox Jew - that’s
fine. I don’t buy into any of those stripes of religion either. But I do buy
into this version of a quest to understand who we are and how we should live in
this world. I buy into the way we do religion here at New London Synagogue.
I buy into
the idea that the rituals, rhythms and stories are powerful enough to make my
life more meaningful, more full of the possibility of doing well in the world.
I believe that
if more of us adopted a serious relationship with Shabbat we would stand a
better chance of saving the planet. Not just because we would stop buying stuff
we didn’t need on the Sabbath day, but because the ideas of Shabbat seep into
our lives for the other six days of the week. Because that is how religion
works. You make space for it in your life, you give it a chance to change how
you see the world and you come out better. Not because of some marxist plot and
not because of some fairy-tale nonsense, but because for thousands of years we
have quested after the whispers of the divine and constructed pathways to
connect our lives to something more important than pursuit of base
self-interest.
Maybe the
way someone as smart as Harari gets away with writing such rubbish about
religion is that he doesn’t hear voices of people who do religion the way we do
religion sufficiently clearly. So we need to be clearer, we need to be clearer
not just in how we talk about the way we do Judaism, we need to deeper in our
engagement with Judaism.
This is
the plea; actually two pleas. Engage and talk about it. Engage with religious
life, make space to observe Shabbat, come to shul, come to our adult ed
programme, read a book - if you want a recommendation, let me know.
And talk
about it. Don’t accept the sloppy disregard for religion banded about by the Hararis
and Dawkins and the like. Speak up the value of living a life attempting to
walk in the ways of Hashem. Share an idea about Shabbat as you understand it,
as you love it. Share something you love about Judaism, doesn’t matter if you
only get half an idea. There is always more to learn.
And keep
an eye on the e-mail in tray. I’ll be running a series of classes a sort of Judaism
for intelligent adults who are concerned they don’t quite know enough yet in
the winter. If that sounds like something you would enjoy, let me know.
Just don’t
be put off by the people who don’t get it, or wilfully seek to subvert the one thing
that might just allow us to save this planet, and save our humanity. There is
indeed, much at stake.
Shannah
Tovah
[1] Shulchan Arukh
Even Ha-Ezer 55
[2] Homo Deus p.210
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment