When I graduated from college, my then-partner and I moved to Turkey, to the capital city of Ankara. We had gotten jobs there teaching English, and we were excited for this new adventure. But we soon realized why it is that some people visit a country before moving to it. Does anyone know what a muezzin is? In many Muslim countries, the muezzin is the person who sings the call to prayer from the minaret of the mosque, and who is amplified to be able to be heard by everyone in town. The call to prayer is five times a day, including at dawn, which I thought was a hilarious thing to discover waking up on our first morning in Turkey. I am hard of hearing and my partner eventually got used to it, and we ended up having a great year of making new friends and visiting ancient historical sites.
When that year was finished, I still hadn’t gotten my fill of living abroad, so I moved to the People’s Republic of Berkeley, California. My best friend from college had started working as the personal assistant to Rabbi Michael Lerner, who leads a synagogue, a magazine, and a progressive non-profit activist organization in Berkeley. I didn’t have a paid position under Rabbi Lerner, but I was able to volunteer at the synagogue, known as Beyt Tikkun synagogue, while I supported myself as a substitute teacher. Kids, don’t try this at home! I dipped into my savings and still barely scraped by that year, and the economics of such a lifestyle have only gotten more difficult since 2008.
Shabbat services at Beyt Tikkun quickly became my favorite part of the week. There is no physical location for Beyt Tikkun synagogue, they don’t have their own building, so we would meet at Rabbi Lerner’s house in the Berkeley hills. The services usually went for about four or five hours, including prayer, Torah study, a vegetarian potluck lunch, and singing and blessings after the meal.
My favorite part of this extended weekly ritual was the breaking of challah at the beginning of lunch, including singing the HaMotzi, a blessing over bread before a meal. We would all sing and take a piece of the challah loaf to pull on as we broke it apart. Then, as a symbol of our mutual sustenance in spiritual community, we would turn and feed each other from the pieces of challah. I truly loved the symbolism of this ritual. The first time I went, I found myself standing next to a very friendly and outgoing man, and we each fed the other, hand to mouth. This was before I realized that most of the group just read the feeding each other part as a metaphor and usually ate their own piece of challah. But the man who had fed me was enthusiastic and unbothered, and he soon became an important mentor for me.
Above all, the genuine caring and friendliness of the whole synagogue is what defines Beyt Tikkun, and elevates it as a spiritual community. Much like Northwest, Beyt Tikkun is a special community with a positive culture, and an important place for members and friends to find spiritual sustenance.
American spiritual progressivism is a small world, and Unitarian Universalists are often collaborators with members of the Jewish renewal movement. Rabbi Lerner has often spoken at UU congregations, perhaps most notably as part of a large anti-war rally at All Souls UU Congregation in Washington, DC in 2006. Contemporary liberal theologians in sympathy with UU principles are an important source of wisdom in our tradition, so let’s take a look at how renewal Judaism might inform our faith journeys.
One of the stories that gets lifted up as instructive in this often-meta faith tradition is the story of the life of Abraham. Abraham was the common patriarch of the Abrahamic religions and founding father of the covenantal relationship between the Jews and God. UUism as a covenantal faith traces our roots back to this relationship also. Abraham’s behavior in the Torah has often been criticized. Rabbi Lerner describes one such instance as “the manipulative and demeaning treatment …(he) affords to his wife Sarah, when he presents her as his sister to the pharaoh of Egypt, who, in turn, assuming Sarah to be single, takes her into his house while Abraham saves his own life and builds up his store of sheep…Why (do we) honor him?”
One of the things that I appreciate about the tradition of textual study in Judaism is that it relies not only on the Torah, the first five books in the Hebrew Bible, or even the Tanakh, all of the 24 books that compose the Hebrew Bible, but also sources like the Midrashim, the collection of stories that came to accompany the canonical texts. While there is little written about Abraham’s childhood in the book of Genesis, we find out more about him in the Midrashim stories. Abraham’s father was not only an idolator, but a manufacturer of idols in the Sumerian city of Ur. One Midrash in particular tells us what it was like when the rebellious Abraham would mind his father’s shop.
One man came into the shop and wished to buy an idol, and Abraham asked the man his age. The man said he was 50, and Abraham said, “Woe to such a man! You are fifty years old and would worship a day-old object?” On another occasion, a woman came in with a plateful of flour, and requested Abraham offer it to the idols. Abraham took a stick and used it to break all of the idols except for the largest one. Then, he took the stick and put it in the hand of the largest idol, and when his father returned to the shop, Abraham told him the idols had gotten into a fight over who was going to eat the flour first, and the largest one had beaten the rest of them with the stick and broken them.
These stories are intended not just as comic relief, but also to demonstrate that Abraham had a high level of conflict with his father. Not only is he messing with his family’s livelihood by driving away customers and breaking the merchandise, his father responds by seizing Abraham and delivering him to the ruler, Nimrod. Nimrod tries to get Abraham to worship one of the other elements instead of the idols made from the earth, but Abraham recognizes the fundamental limitations of fire, air, and water, the limitations of “ancient science”, and refuses to be intimidated. Nimrod becomes enraged according to the Midrash, and throws Abraham in a fiery furnace. Abraham emerges unscathed and unburnt, but we see evidence as his life goes along that this punishment has affected him internally.
Reflecting on this lifelong damage, Rabbi Lerner writes:
“What the Midrash tells us is that Abraham had a traumatic childhood. Unable to accept the political/religious system in which he grew up, he is immediately placed in conflict with his own father, the mediator and representative of the reality principle. What gives Abraham the strength to challenge existing reality? It is the recognition that there is something more in the universe, something that transcends daily reality–and it is this belief that saves him.
Yet at the same time, Abraham is a victim of intense cruelty. If he emerges alive from the fiery furnace, it is not that he has emerged unharmed. On the contrary–Abraham is a man who has been traumatized, to some extent made insensitive to others, a man whose experience of pain in childhood will remain with him in adult life, just as each of us carries into our adult life the pain and oppression of our childhood.”
Just as good art is multi-layered, here we find complex religious analysis that refuses to be content with the story as it is told at a surface level. We are being asked to delve further into Abraham as a character and interrogate not just his actions, but how his upbringing contributed to them. Rabbi Lerner explains why this is important, saying: “…Abraham’s behavior (is) what patriarchy is all about–the subordination of women to the power needs of men. But to use patriarchy here as an explanatory tool doesn’t get us very far because we need to know what makes it possible for an individual to participate in a patriarchal reality.” This is a profoundly important religious teaching to keep in mind, the idea that people do not perpetuate unjust systems of oppression because they necessarily believe in them, even when those systems are serving their narrow self-interests. Gender iniquity is not perpetuated by men waking up each day asking themselves “How can I prop up the patriarchy this morning?” Rather, each of us brings our wounded and damaged selves to this work, the inner child who has been thrown into a furnace of fire and thereby learned to distance himself emotionally from those around him.
This is the essence of what it means to be a covenantal faith tradition, whether you are talking about Judaism or Unitarian Universalism, a congregational covenant or a marital one. In covenantal relationships we see each other as humans connected to one another and to something larger than ourselves by a bond of faith and love. We know that because we are humans and we are fallible that sometimes we will break those bonds and need to repair them. We can only do that when we see another person not as a means to an end, but as an end in and of themselves. That’s why it matters that we look at Abraham not just as a perpetuator of the patriarchy, but as a wounded healer himself, a survivor of childhood trauma and abuse. Attacking the ideologies of patriarchy and other structures of injustice will only get us so far, because they are rooted in the harm caused in the past to those who perpetuate them. Only taking seriously their humanity will ultimately undue systems of iniquity, not just debating the ideas behind them, because it is people’s woundedness that leads them to perpetuate such systems, more so than belief in the systems themselves.
Creating a loving community that helps people to heal their own wounds and their own trauma as a part of the journey towards wholeness, towards a more just and equitable world, that is a tall order. In his book Jewish Renewal, Rabbi Lerner describes how folks ought to evaluate whether their communities are places where people can be their authentic selves and bring about healing in their own lives. Here are some of the questions he poses:
“Do people talk to one another in an honest fashion, or are they on ‘good behavior’?… Do they feel free to express a full range of emotions and feelings?… Do people feel free to acknowledge the ways that they don’t fit in? Do people feel free to express love and caring or excitement for one another without feeling that they are embarrassing other people or acting inappropriately? …Do people feel free to cry when they are sad, or to jump for joy when they are happy, or are these allowed only at specifically ritual moments? Can people really talk about the complexities of their experience with one another without fitting into some pre-established norm about what people are supposed to be feeling or thinking?”
It is worth asking ourselves from time to time whether we truly feel free to express a range of emotions in our faith community. This is part of how we do good multiculturalism work, how we become a multicultural community; feeling like you need to mute your emotions, or like there are only specific times and places to be emotionally expressive are fairly WASP-y cultural traits.
I will leave us this morning with this wonderful blessing from the Beyt Tikkun Shabbat Manual:
Y’varech’cha Adonai v’yishmarecha, Ya-er Adonai panav elecha v’yichuneka, Yisa Adonai panav elecha v’yasem l’cha shalom.
May the Universal Love bless and protect you
May the Infinite Abundance of the world grace your life,
May the Source of Harmony lift you in joy and peace and answer all the wishes of your heart for good.
Peace, salaam, shalom, and may it be so.
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
October 14, 2018
© Rev. Jonathan Rogers