To everything a season

Former New York Mayor Giuliani read from Ecclesiastes at the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan yesterday.

To everything there is a season, and
a time to every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born, and
a time to die;
a time to plant, and
a time to pluck up
that which is planted;

A time to kill, and
a time to heal...

As always, these wise words again offered some small measure of consolation (bordering on resignation). Mr. Giuliani attributed them to God. Jennifer Hecht points out that their author was in fact a Hellenized Jew of the 3d century BCE named Koheleth, who "doubted every aspect of religion."

But what else is new? As my colleague Rabbi Rami Shapiro says, not only is Judaism without belief in God possible, but he's seen it done. Himself.

The existence of “Judaism” only requires people willing to fill the meme “Judaism” with ideas that matter to them, demand that their ideas are somehow “Jewish,” and then spend their lives arguing in defense of them. This can even be done—and I am a prime example—when you know the entire enterprise is a literary creation fashioned and refashioned by thousands of Jews over millennia. 

A time to believe, a time to doubt, a time to think, a time to play...

more life

Very interesting post from Rabbi Rami, responding to the question Why do I talk so much about God? He writes: "'God' is just a word. For me it isn’t a matter of true or untrue, it is a matter of useful or unuseful."


So, with this view the Rabbi may be a kind of pragmatist or even Deweyan. In John Dewey's "A Common Faith," the word God names an active human will to close the gap between present reality and the envisioned attainment of our highest ideals. I prefer that to John Lennon's "God is a concept by which we measure our pain," but that view too can be useful. 


The Deweyan attitude seems less fatalistic, less stoically resigned than Lennon's (though in retrospect you'd have to say his fatalism was perfectly prescient). 


But it's also less reckless than William James's variety of pragmatism, insofar as being useful or not is still kept separate from the "matter of being true or untrue." 


I like William James's philosophy a lot, though I don't always share it. But I do share this view: "Not God but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is the end of religion." Shouldn't that be the point of living, period?

"Teflon spirituality"

My friend and colleague Rami Shapiro, the Rabbi, is walking the pluralistic walk many of us typically only talk. "Today I am a Hindu," he proclaims.


I'm a different variety of pluralist myself, claiming no firm anchorage in any of the historically dominant theological or spiritual traditions but happy to take truth wherever it can be found and put to work. And I'm also eager to find the spiritual core of atheism, humanism, naturalism, and whatever other names or labels people march under, though a bit dubious as to the "truth is one" thesis. That is, I don't think it's one yet, but I agree that unity-in-plurality is a worthy aspiration.


Rami: The Rig Veda’s teaching that “Truth is one, different people call it by different names,” frees me from both abandoning names and having allegiance to them. But being a Jew is all about names, especially The Name, and taking that Name very seriously. Yet I just can’t do so. I love languages, I love names, but I never mistake the menu for meal, the name for that toward which it points, and it is the meal I desire.

Judaism is my primary menu. It is the system of names I go to first and most often. But primary does not mean exclusive, and I find value in many names and many systems. And while I do love to explore the differences and incompatibilities between systems in an academic setting, in my personal life they all point me to the same reality, the nameless “—“ that is both the One and the Many.

So today I become a Hindu, but this label adheres no more tightly than any other. In the end I practice a Teflon spirituality allowing me to mix lots of ingredients without worrying that any will stick.


Me: That's one small step for a man (of whatever wisdom tradition), one exemplary leap for cosmopolitanism. Good going, Rami!

Afghanistan

Rabbi Rami, Garry Wills, Tom Friedman, and just about everybody I've spoken with is unhappy about the Afghan escalation. Not exactly the change we were expecting.

Bob Herbert: "It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each... We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war."