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Welcome to Hillsboro United Methodist Church! If you are searching for deeper meaning in your life that includes lasting relationships, spiritual growth and service to the world you have come to the right place. We offer a safe place in which to ponder important life questions within an atmosphere of support. Our hearts, our minds and our doors are open. We hope that as you visit with us that you will find a place to call home.
Sermon - August 22nd, 2010
World Religions: Judaism
Rev. Gwen Drake
Genesis 17:1-8; Genesis 32:24-30 & Exodus 3:1-6
Prayer: O Holy One, let us listen with open minds and open hearts. May your grace and love flow freely through us. Amen.
As I talk about Judaism, I want to begin by saying we already know a lot about Judaism because we are Christian. We share stories, and writings, and poetry and prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. I studied the Hebrew Scriptures in seminary. I learned some Hebrew in seminary. Like some of you, I have been to the Holy Land. I sailed on the Sea of Galilee and stood in the muddy Jordan River. I walked the streets of Jerusalem and watched people pray at the wailing wall of the Temple.
Then one time out of the blue, just a couple of years ago, my Mom told me I had a great, great grandmother who was Jewish. That gave me pause. I thought, doesn’t that make me Jewish? Isn’t Jewish ancestry passed on through the matriarchal line? So, I haven’t followed up on this, I’m not even sure it is possible to follow up on it. My Mom said, it was one of those secrets in the family, primarily because her father was anti-semitic. Families are complicated, aren’t they? Just so you know, though, you may be looking at a United Methodist pastor who is also Jewish.
Ever since I read “Exodus” by Leon Uris, early in my life, I have felt a passion for the Jewish people and the State of Israel. I attended just this last year several United Methodist-Jewish dialogues and I am still drawn to the story and struggles of the Jewish people. Maybe it is because it is in my blood, I don’t know. I need you to know that my research and study comes from this perspective.
Judaism begins and ends with story. Judaism is about narrative, telling and retelling the story and wrestling with it about the character of God and God’s people and the problematic relationship between the two. It is not a missionary religion, Judaism survives mostly through inheritance, not evangelism. Conversion to Judaism is discouraged rather than encouraged. So there really is no practical reason for Jews to define their message to others on the outside. Judaism has no creed. Excommunication is extremely rare. The shema is their only thing that is sort of like a creed. The Shema is a commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might.” Then what follows is what you need to do to put this love to practice.
Judaism centers on community, not the individual. The motivating tragedy of Judaism is exile. If God is all-powerful and we are God’s people, why aren’t we in our land, why aren’t we home? The Jewish people are forever on the move--from the garden paradise to the desert wilderness to a New Jerusalem someday because it is not complete yet, because the movement from exile to home is chronic. There is not peace and prosperity yet in the world, so the Messiah has not come yet. It is the job of the Jewish people to make things ready and to make things right—to “repair the world” and put an end to exile. Right now, it is about life in the middle of almost and not yet. And the story continues in moving from exile and return.
They also live between liberation and law. This saga of enslavement and escape not only belongs to the Jews; it belongs to the whole world. No other story has been more influential in our country. Starting with the Pilgrams coming for the freedom to practice their religion to the various civil rights movements of our time.
However, in the midst of liberation, God gave Moses the law. God entered into sacred covenants with human beings. God promised blessings to those who follow the commandments. Freedom from bondage wasn’t about getting to do what they wanted to do, following the escape from Egypt came 613 commandments which Rabbi Hillel sums up as “Do not unto others that which you would not have them do unto you.” He said, “That is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. Now go and study.” The law is not just about ethics, it is also about ritual. When Jews speak of observing the law, they are invoking not only the ethical but also the ritual practices of their religion.
It is important for us to understand the Judaism isn’t just about the Hebrew Bible, what we call the Old Testament. Contemporary Judaism, as we know it today is more than that. Jewish creativity did not stop with the biblical period. In the year 70 of the common era, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem that had been rebuilt after the return from the Babylonian exile 400 years prior. After that destruction, perhaps because of that destruction, the focus of Judaism changed from the sacrificial rites of the Temple to the study of the Torah and all its Oral Tradition. The focus shifted from the priests of the Temple to the rabbis of synagogues who were the ones who held Judaism together. Synagogues became the centers for study and worship.
Judaism is both a faith of a people and a faith in a people and it is more than a faith; it is a culture and a nation. It is a total way of life, defying description, including mores, art forms, styles of humor, philosophy, literature, and affinity for a land.
Judaism also orders the world in time and seasons, through holidays, rituals and festivals, through the observance of rites of passages like birth, adulthood, marriage and death. The Jewish answer to life’s routine-ness is tradition. Holiness and history inseparable. The Sabbath eve has its candles and cup of sanctification. The Passover feast is full of symbols of bondage and liberation—it is the past in the present. Remembering the past is a priceless treasure. It is where Jews God’s acts were clearly visible, bringing God more vividly into the present. Ritual is about hallowing life, all of life. What we can learn from Judaism, and have, I believe is ritual enriches our lives. Without it, we may find ourselves lost in a life without meaning.
What Judaism gives me and all of the world is a passion for meaning. What is the meaning of it all—all of life, from the very beginning when there was God, to our existence in community and history? This passionate search for meaning is what formed a wondering group of nomads in a desert wilderness into a nation and a culture. Houston Smith believes their passion is the key. He writes: “What are the ingredients of the most creatively meaningful image of human existence that the mind can conceive? Remove human frailty—as grass, as a sigh, as dust, as moth-crushed—and the estimate becomes romantic. Remove grandeur—a little lower than God—and aspiration recedes. Remove sin—the tendency to miss the mark—and sentimentality threatens. Remove freedom—choose ye this day! And responsibility goes by the board. Remove, finally, divine parentage and life becomes estranged, cut loose and adrift on a cold, indifferent sea.”
Contemporary Judaism has been split into three branches, reformed, conservative, and orthodox. Reformed Judaism emphasizes the prophetic tradition and its commitment to social justice, believing it is their job to repair the world by their own hands, not waiting for a messiah to do it. Orthodox Jews, by contrast are defenders of the Torah and tradition. They try to observe all the laws. Under the Orthodox umbrella is the ultra-conservative Hasidics, the pious ones, the Modern Orthodox Jews who are more open to modern life and ideas, and everyone inbetween. Conservative Jews are middle of the road, between Reformed and Orthodox.
Just as there is humor that pokes fun at the different denominations we have in Christianity there is Jewish humor that takes a jab at Orthodox and Reform Jews, such as:
A Conservative Jew living in a small city bought a new Ferrari. He wanted a rabbi to say a blessing over it, but there were only two rabbis in town, Orthodox and Reform, not a Conservative rabbi. So he went to the Orthodox rabbi, “Rabbi,” he asked “Can you say a blessing for my Ferrari?” The rabbi asked, “What’s a Ferrari?” The Conservative Jew thought, this isn’t going to work, I’m going to the Reform rabbi. He went to the Reform rabbi and asked, “Rabbi, can you say a blessing for my Ferrari?” The Reform rabbi asks, “What’s a blessing?”
Maybe you have heard that wherever you have two Jews there are always at least three opinions. More than any other religion, the Jews love the questions. Only in Judaism is there a religious teacher who is famous for asking the question, “Why?” If you walk past a Jewish school study their sacred texts, the first thing you would notice is the noise. They read aloud from the texts and they argue even louder about the meaning of the text. Jews revel in a good debate, arguing, and trying to get to the truth. There is a Hasidic saying, “If you are proved right, you accomplish little; but if you are proved wrong, you gain much: you learn the truth.”
The name Israel, as we heard in one of the scripture readings today, refers to one who has wrestled with God. For a millennia Jews have done just that, they wrestle with God and each other and with their own tradition’s tensions between the story and the law, between priest and prophet, exile and return, mercy and justice, movement and past.
What is required in Judaism is not to agree, but to engage. Elie Wiesel said, “If a Jew has no one to quarrel with, he quarrels with God, and we call it theology; or he quarrels with himself, and we call it psychology.”
Beyond the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament, there is the Talmud, Judaism’s second sacred text. It is unruly, and vast tangle of various lines of arguments, two and a half million words designed around contradictions. “Turn the pages,” a rabbi say, “turn them well, for everything is in them.”
Most of us find this kind of ambiguity intolerable. I find it inspiring and exciting…must be my Jewish blood again. We would rather chase after certainty and run away from contradictions. We are determined to bring what is blurry into focus, as if our determination could make it so. It doesn’t. The reality is that life is ambiguous, uncertain, and contradictory. We can learn how to live in this messy life from our Jewish brothers and sisters for Jews are trained not just to abide ambiguity but to glory in it.
One of the great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century was Sigmund Freud. He built his discipline of psychoanalysis on the insight that there are competing voices not only among individuals, but also inside each individual. One of pyschotherapy’s tasks is to attend to these voices, and to find a way to live with the ambiguities and contradictions they conjure up.
We Christians can learn from Judaism to thrive in ambiguity and thus glory in it. For the meaning of life is not in the answers, it is in the journey of living with the questions.
An Orthodox rabbi was asked which of the two elements of Judaism was more important: telling the story or following the law? The rabbi replied, “I will give you a Jewish answer. You can’t have one without the other. Those who forget the law eventually forget to tell the story.”
This tiny (in numbers) people and religion started a monotheistic revolution that gave birth to both Islam and Christianity. It gave us the prophetic voice which continues to demand justice for the poor and oppressed—or else. It gave us the grand narratives of slavery and freedom, exile and return. And Judaism stands at the crossroads of today’s most vexing and volatile international conflict between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle East. And what binds them together more than their beliefs, (some Jews do not even believe in God), is their shared sense of community.
May we Christians learn to engage in life passionately and revel in ambiguity from our Jewish brothers and sisters, as we struggle together to find peace in the world.
Amen.