Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

A cautionary word. The tragic record of intolerance in God's name against those who cannot or will not believe or practice as we do, the documentation of cruelty by those who raise the sacralized word to savage the lives of those who fall outside the circle of our definition, the history of religious beliefs baptized in the threatening waters of absolutism are reasons enough to temper the apodictic declarations of belief. I would gladly sacrifice a measure of passion and certainty in belief for a humbler, civil and sane body of principles. Theological modesty has pragmatic as well as moral reasons to commend it. Moshe Leib of Sassov taught that God created all things for a purpose, including doubt. Faith seasoned with a grain of doubt is necessary so that our beliefs are not used as excuses to humiliate others. Seek certainty and suspect it.

(1) "I believe..."  What about the existence and character of God?

With that self-admonitory caution in mind, I believe, with Franz Rosenzweig, that "Truth is a noun only for God; for us it is an adverb." I know nothing of God as a noun. I know, from the collective experiences of my people, recorded in sacred texts and from my own experiences, only the gerunds of God: healing the sick, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, pursuing peace, loving my people and my neighbors. I am bound to testify to the verbs of God by the adverbs of my conduct. God is behaved.

The arguments for God's existence and goodness are not furnished by inductive or deductive logic. The evidence is in our mouths, hands and feet. Individually and collectively we are the verifiers of God's reality. "If ye are My witnesses, I am God; if ye are not, I am, as it were, not God." Religious beliefs are conditional. They demand our behavioral testimony.

God is nameless and it is blasphemous to pronounce it as if to say that we know His essences. On this, rationalists and mystics are agreed. It is equally blasphemous to deny the name of God's qualities, those attributes our tradition has ascribed to Divinity for us to emulate. How is God to be known, in what sense believed? "Did not your fathers eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is this not to know Me, says the Lord." (Jeremiah 22:15,16)

What does it mean that you or I believe? What does the answer tell me about you or myself? Not whether we believe or not, not whether we obey or not, but what kind of God we believe and what kind of imperatives we are prepared to obey, reveal the meaning of our faith. Have we not been persecuted by religious believers? Have we not been protected by those who deny belief? Jeremiah sought believing behavior as evidence of God.

(2) "I believe..." What about the locus of authority beyond self?

I believe that the sources of authority that help form my life decisions are multiple and interactive. They are derived from inherited texts and commentaries, from the history of my people, from law and lore and from the sources of my Jewish conscience. They are the elements of revelation, understood not as fixed and final words cast down from above, nor as capricious projections thrown on high from below. Revelation involves an on- going process of listening and interpreting, receiving and giving, accepting and transforming. I accept revelation "like wheat from which to derive fine flour, or like flax from which to make a garment." (Seder Eliyahu Zuta, Chapter 2)

Which in revelation is divine and which is human? I do not accept the hard disjunctives insinuated in the question. I find it impossible and unnecessary to separate the two. To adapt a metaphor by William James: Does the river make the banks or do the banks make the river?

(3) "I believe..." What about the role of the diaspora?

I believe that "ahavath yisrael" (love of Israel) is the correlative and consequence of "ahavath ha-shem" (love of God) and "ahavath torah" (love of Torah). The three-fold cords of love must not be torn.

Love of Israel evokes the metaphor of marriage between Israel and the Diaspora. The sanctity of that union is not lodged in the "I" or the "thou" but in the "betweeness" of discovery. Like marriage, that relationship vows fidelity to each other and to the transcendent vision of making whole the shattered vessels of the world.

A healthy union disavows the absorption of the other. The negators of the diaspora who find nothing but fault in the other, and the denigrators of Israel who ignore its democratic sovereignty, prepare the ground for a tragic separation. For either to run to a third party to impose its will on the other, is to destroy the confidence and confidentiality of the relationship. There are limits to dissent and love knows its borders.

(4) "I believe..." What about the nature and content of our covenant with God?

I believe that the unique character of the biblical covenant articulates the distinctive nature of Jewish theistic humanism. The covenant runs both ways. One moral law in heaven as on earth. God does not exempt Himself from the rules and sensibilities of the compact. The reciprocity of the Jewish covenant encouraged the human holy dissent unparalleled in other theistic traditions.

While there is no biblical or rabbinic term for "conscience", its status and power within the covenant are instantiated throughout the prophetic tradition and in major portions of the rabbinic midrash. In moments of moral and spiritual conflict, particularly where two or more goods or rights clash, the inner witness to the covenant may rise to dissent even against an established law. That moral drama is played out as a sacred dissent against God in the name of God. Those wronged turn to the God within God as the court of last appeal. In numerous episodes recorded in the rabbinic tradition God recognizes the voice of moral conscience as His own. God honors the moral dissent without recrimination. The role of conscience implicit in the reciprocal covenant, demonstrates the condescension of God and the elevation of His human creation.

(5) "I believe..." What about death and the end of days?

I believe in the wisdom of our tradition that operates with a far-reaching reality principle particularly evident in the understanding of death and the after-life. There is no denial of the sting of death. The late orthodox philosopher and talmudist, J. B. Soloveitchik, characterizes the tradition as abhorring death: "A corpse defiles; a grave defiles; a person who has been defiled by a corpse is defiled for seven days and is forbidden to eat any sacred offerings or enter the temple." His halachic sentiments are rooted in the strong life-affirmation of Judaism.

The Jewish reality principle extends to the status of the deceased. Revered in memory, the deceased have no duties to perform, no imperatives to follow, no deeds for which they may be praised or blamed. With stark candor the psalmist declares, "The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down in silence." The Jewish reality principle places a limit on mourning. Maimonides warns against excess of mourning. "He who frets over the way of the world is foolish."

I do not understand the after-life literally or vertically. Gan Eden (Paradise) or Gehinnom (hell) for me do not refer to another place, another world, another time. The Mourner's Kaddish refers to none of these. It speaks of the mobilization of human energies to sanctify God's name here and now in our own time.

Despite the rich rabbinic literature and the daily prayers that speak of calling the dead to eternal life and refer to a celestial garden of Eden in practice the after-life does not appear to function as a major Jewish belief. Eulogies for the individual or consolations for the martyred victims of the Holocaust rarely if ever call upon the resurrection of the dead or the disposition of the soul in heaven as explanation or comfort. The yearning for another world I understand as a protest against the wretched status of the status quo. I believe in the immortality of influence that testifies to the ideals of the deceased and calls upon the living to keep faith with the noblest aspirations of those who sleep in the dust."

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