These days of judgement are my first time back in a synagogue in three and a half years. I'm going in gratitude to my father who has been a huge help in this health crisis, but I have no plans on returning to regular attendence, and hadn't been to shul since a few days before the pandemic. It's partially out of selfish reasons, partially out of my own mental anguish and terror, partially because I've lost so much faith in a benevolent overseer, partially because among synagogue people sit some of the most annoying people on earth, and mostly because there I've never found a synagogue that represents me.
I have little faith in the traditional sense, but I do believe in faith. I think there neither is nor could be a lasting society that arises from atheism. Belief that it isn't over when you get out is the only thing that propels most people to a work ethic that keeps civilization going. Love will get us some of the way, fear gets us some more, but awe gets us most of it. The belief that there is a transcendent realm more than our physical reality is what makes the physical reality better. Making our actual world eternal is a symbol for which to strive. It isn't mere fear of hellfire - plenty of civilizations rose without belief in hell - it's belief that there is a reason to respond to bad with good that is more than for goodness's sake. It may not be true, but I would bet 100x on the survival of the side that believes in gods than I would on the side that believes in science or justice, because only one of the three persists in the absence of proof.
The belief in an absolute is lodged in creation's fabric. Humans cannot live without a god. Atheists always dismiss the idea that they're a religion, but in the Age of AI, we may have built God: a god who knows everything about us, sees everything about us, and can use us for Its own purposes in manners we mortals cannot possibly understand. Who knows? Maybe AI was God the whole time and now we temporal beings just built He who always was.
On the other hand, maybe we didn't...
I don't believe in God and yet I do. I believe in the rational, but if there exists a quantum universe in which all possibilities may exist, then the irrational is equally possible to the rational, and together they composite a greater rationality that defies explanation to our limited brains.
Judaism is already the religion of hedging bets. Read, if you can stay awake, any page of Talmud and you read centuries of Rabbis ruling on every possible exception to every possible law, a discourse of rulings and exceptions that continues to this very day. Theology itself is the rational justification of that which cannot be rationalized, and finding practical ways to pursue beliefs that severely limit our life choices.
I believe in the rational as much as I believe in irrationality, and I find it difficult to believe a person can function cognitively without incorporating both into their worldview. All things of this world are irrational until they can be explained, as so many things are now, but just because we've found explanations to questions thus far does not mean that we will find explanations for everything else.
But for all our progress, we still have not explained human behavior nor how to reform it. With every human progression is an equal and opposite regression. Is it worth no longer living in huts and hunting with spears if every new era of human progress results in wars that claimed millions? Even now when we might have evolved past world war, we've declared war on the planet and a million species stand on the precipice of extinction. It would seem that our purpose in this universe is not to solve problems, but to struggle with them.
So my religion balances the rational and the irrational. The sacred is the sacred and you can't change what the sacred is, but you can honor the sacred by paying lip service to what it states without believing it. We've rid ourselves of all sorts of biblical commandments like slavery, genocide, punishment by stoning, why not rid ourselves of commandments over homosexuality and abortion and science? The old books say what they say, and it's too much trouble to change them, but we can laugh at these books even as we honor them, and we can laugh at believing in their dark aspects too literally. By taking these 'sins' as no more serious than a person who occasionally double parks, we do more to change the minds of the fanatics than launching a culture war ever could.
All the great religions teach one lesson above all - there is no such thing as overcoming a struggle. One victory leads to yet another struggle, and this world is the constant presence of problems that need to be solved, and solutions that create new problems. So my religion is to honor that no problem can truly be solved, but some problems can be ignored, and the less attention we pay to them, the less they seem like problems.
If I'm a Jew, then I call my brand of Judaism 'Liberal Orthodox.' It's an implied criticism against orthodox people who neglect modern developments that are clearly improvements, and just as much an implied criticism of revolutionaries who think we can progress without upholding tradition.
Our era, like every era, is divided in two: between those who embrace the rational and those who embrace the irrational; but no peaceful existence is possible when both sides terrify each other.
There is no progress without taking the ancient wisdom along with us into the future, and there is no wisdom without ditching the ancient foolishness for the sake of the future. We think of it as a cliche that there is no future without a past, but the point of remembering the past is not to uphold it but to critique it, to engage with it, to figure out exactly what went wrong and what went right so that the future goes more right than the past.
If we do not honor religion, religion will kill us. If we do not honor progress, progress will kill us. The world needs religions that make its most fervent believers feel accepted, and the world's religions need to accept their most rejected peoples.
That's why I call my denomination 'Liberal Orthodox.' It is meant to be a denomination of only one, and I'd excommunicate anybody who tries to join me. It preserves the traditions without update: no changes to the old liturgy, no mixed seating, no women on the bimah, 'don't ask don't tell' about LGBTQ in the service, but with the understanding that anything more would be useless changes because they're distractions from the issues that matter. I say, throw the orthodox these bones that matter so much to them so that they do not stand in our way for the modern issues that matter to us. Show them that we honor the religion, and maybe, just maybe, 1-3% of them won't fight so hard when it comes to the issues we need progress about.
The world is at its best when it lives peacefully with itself, regardless of the details. If we can live peaceably with our past, we can live peacefully into our future.
These are my beliefs.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment