Why Judaism?

This is the sermon I gave during the week of my Gregorian birthday.

This week, I’ve been ruminating on how to express my Jewish perspective to you. I want my “birthday sermon” to lay bare some of my underlying assumptions about the Bible and Judaism. So I’m going to take you on a journey from the beginning of our parshah to the truth about Passover to why I care about Judaism.

This is a refraction of God’s Call in the year 5783. My rabbinate began last year on both the Gregorian and Hebrew calendars. So, perhaps in some ways, this is a reflection of my first year as a rabbi and as a certified 45 year-old. 

You might recall that the story we retell during the Passover seder says that we are compelled to see ourselves as going out of Egypt and the child who does not see himself in that story is labeled wicked. 

Perhaps, if you’ve paid close attention to modern Jewish history, you heard about the great public seder kerfuffle. In 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe of the Conservative Sinai Temple in Los Angeles announced to 2,200 congregants at a seder that  “The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”

So, what does this mean for us? Let’s not get bogged down in the details. Richard Elliot Friedman who wrote the book Who Wrote the Bible? More recently published a book The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters. You can get the Cliff Notes version of his 300 page book by listening to his interview on Judaism Unbound, where he explains he doesn’t think it happened to all Israelites, but specifically to the Levites and tells the story of their integration into the Israelite community. 

Here’s the thing that biblical archaeologists have known for decades: the Hebrew Bible is not a verbatim story of how the Israelite people came to be the people of the land. Back in the old days, there were probably three clans that believed in monotheism that came together to become Israelites. Jacob was the most powerful and the most prolific. Isaac may have been the oldest and had the least stories connected to him. In any event, there’s no archaelogical evidence of massive wars between Canaanites and Israelites. Over time, they probably came to identify more with the idea of being God wrestlers. 

As Teresa Watanabe explains in the LA Times article about the furor over Rabbi Wolpe’s seder statement:

Today, the prevailing theory is that Israel probably emerged peacefully out of Canaan--modern-day Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan and the West Bank of Israel--whose people are portrayed in the Bible as wicked idolators. Under this theory, the Canaanites who took on a new identity as Israelites were perhaps joined or led by a small group of Semites from Egypt--explaining a possible source of the Exodus story, scholars say. As they expanded their settlement, they may have begun to clash with neighbors, perhaps providing the historical nuggets for the conflicts recorded in Joshua and Judges.

Right, so basically both Wolpe and Friedman can be right about this and a straightforward, fundamentalist reading of the Hebrew Bible is factually incorrect. I’ve never been as deeply interested in the Bible as I am in the culture that arose from that foundational text. 

I don’t have to believe in the perfection of the Bible, in the idea that the entire Bible and the Oral Torah (aka the Talmud) was given to Moses on Mt Sinai to take Judaism seriously. This is the beginning point of the “sacred” statement of transmission on which both Orthodox and Conservative Judaism rests. In other words, normative rabbinic Judaism for centuries expected people to set aside their logical minds and believe in a holy myth about words in order to connect all forms of Judaism back to the source, back to the original connection to God. 

During one of my first sermons here at Temple Israel, I admitted that I’ve been through many crises of faith. I noted that even The Women’s Torah Commentary is filiopietistic, that is: it takes as a given that the Bible stories happened in the way they are transcribed and does not provide a feminist, historical-critical analysis of the text. No Bible commentary exists that provides such a comprehensive analysis. 

Robert Alter’s translation provides deep context for the words and concepts of the entire Bible, though it does not approach the project from a feminist lens. 

Judith S. Antonelli wrote a brilliant commentary In the Image of God: A Feminist Commentary on the Torah, which provides an Orthodox rebuke of Christian and progressive Jewish descriptions of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible. It also provides clearly sourced material on what sections of the Bible may have been describing, based on what modern scholars know about the cultures surrounding the Israelites. But it again does not approach the project from a feminist lens. 

What do I mean by a feminist lens?

Simply this: making space for how profoundly alienating it is that the entirety of Jewish religious text and the majority of Jewish history and literature is told from and for the male gaze. 

Women are The Other. They are objects and property. While women may have been treated better in Israelite and Jewish societies than they were in surrounding cultures, they were never elevated to equal status until modern times. Even the most conservative Catholics have more examples of female icons, saints, mystics, and teachers than Jews have had prior to the 1900s. 

As a Jewish spiritual leader, I’d be cutting off a core aspect of my identity if I did not bring this lens to everything I do. For a long time, I tried to cast it off and live in the shadow of my male teachers. They had so much to teach me and their insights were so profound. 

I don’t have a book to offer to provide the feminist take on the Bible. I don’t agree with all the ways feminine-energy has been infused into modern Jewish practice. I’m a spiritual seeker. I’ve been known to buy semi-precious stones based on folk traditions regarding their healing powers. I think understanding our personalities can deepen our spiritual journeys and I believe the Enneagram paths can align with a Jewish spiritual journey. Heck, I think Tarot can help refine one’s thinking. At the end of the day, my goal isn’t a pure Judaism. No such thing ever existed and never will exist. 

The call I’ve been walking towards is not the call that was provided to me in the 1980s and 90s. I don’t think you need to pledge allegiance to a denomination to be a good Jew. I don’t think you have to be a Jew to be a good person. 

So why do Jewish?

I can only answer these questions from my personal perspective. 

Doing Jewish offers me a place to explore the meaning of life. 

Doing Jewish offers me a connection to my ethnic identity.

Doing Jewish guides me toward ethical mysticism.

The meaning of my life is to behave ethically with myself, with other people, with the world beyond humans, and with the Divine Source of Creation. Through an ethical life, I prepare myself for connecting more closely to Ain Sof, The One Beyond Definition. 

Grounding my actions in goodness, reminding myself that my voice and my life are not the most important things in the world: these things help me make sense of life. 

Even before I started an ethical practice, I dipped my toe in the spiritual practice of Counting the Omer. 

Step by step, from the second day of Passover through the day before Shavuot, I meditate into ideas that create space in me to hear Revelation on Shavuot. 

Why this synagogue, Temple Israel of Alameda?

Well, we’re a haimish group of East Bay Jews whose doors are open virtually to anyone in the world. You don’t have to know the prayers or be interested in the deeper meaning of life. But if you have those questions, they’ll be taken seriously. 

This is a holy place to live more completely into the breadth of our lives. Whether through deep text study or light-infused music. From Tot Shabbat to graveside and beyond. 

We are a community that holds space for everyone and works hard to ensure that everyone feels like they belong. 

Let’s work together to make the coming year, the coming cycle of months, the most impactful year yet for our community. We are the community of God-wrestlers.

It’s not just about what I think. Together, we are creating a future for everyone’s deepest selves to be encountered and to be strengthened by Jewish wisdom. Are you ready to leave the mundane world of Mitzrayim and journey toward liberation with me? Let’s go.