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"The Failure of Secular Judaism and the Renewal of Spirituality"
Erev Kol Nidre 5769 Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Temple Emanu-El of Tucson, AZ
G’mar
Chatimah Tovah. Tonight,
Kol Nidrei Eve, is a time for honesty. Honesty about ourselves.
Honesty about who we have been in the year that’s passed. Honesty
about who we are now. [And
so, here is a new kind of spiritual confession, more current, more apt
perhaps, from poet Wislawa Szymborska (“Under
One Small Star”, excerpts): My
apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My
apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all. Please,
don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due. May
my dead be patient with the way my memories fade. My
apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. My
apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. Forgive
me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home. Forgive
me, open wounds, for pricking my finger and crying… Pardon
me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time… My
apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs. My
apologies to great questions for small answers… Bear
with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your
train. Soul,
don't take offense that I've only got you now and then. My
apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once… I
know I won't be justified as long as I live, since
I myself stand in my own way.] Here
we are, then; imperfect, confused, a bit sad on this night of Yom Kippur.
For we know we haven’t found all the answers in the past year.
We know that we failed many times, in some big ways and in many small
ones. As Rabbi Alan Lew puts it,
the questions we should ask are, “What is the recurring failure of my
life? What is it that I persistently refuse to see?” That’s
what brings us here on Yom Kippur Eve, a kind of ancestral search for
answers. Why don’t I get
better from year to year? How
can I change? Kol
Nidrei, in Lew’s view, "begins at the moment of heartbreak." As
Lew writes, "the tragic pain of the soul—the pain we hear in those
first grieving notes of Kol Nidre—is the pain of loss, the pain of
impermanence." It
is a call for help, really: help for those of us who are spiritually seeking
to change, to make our lives have greater meaning and purpose.
Knowing that we are not who we wish to be.
A melody that calls us to seek, and perhaps find, God.
Tonight
we are honest about ourselves. And
it is that honesty that can lead to transformation, true teshuvah.
We begin, in Shakeseare’s words, by admitting that the fault is not
in our stars but in ourselves. And
when we do that we can find our own atonement, and return—and, oddly,
return to a new place we have never been, in which we may actually be able
to come back next Yom Kippur having experienced truly transformative change,
sacred, spiritual regeneration. As
poet Louis Daniel Brodsky says, Atonement
is such a momentary negotiation Between
mind and soul That
you’ll never realize, if it succeeds, A
transfiguration has occurred. So
tonight we face ourselves, and our lives, with complete honesty, now and
through the day of Yom Kippur to come. And if we do that, we have hope that
we can find healing, and growth, and holiness. But
Kol Nidrei Eve must also be the time for honesty about what our Jewish
community is, what our temple is, and what we wish both to be.
And that, my friends, can be even harder than being honest about
ourselves. For we are invested
in our own ideas, our own habits, our own self-satisfaction—and our own
defensiveness. And
yet we must do it. We must be
honest about our community’s Judaism.
For with all of our emphasis on personal confession and teshuvah,
Judaism is not lived in a vacuum, alone.
It is a communal experience. And
we are failing as a community. But
it is not yet too late… In
fact, it is time to begin. And
there is great reason for hope. Allow
me to explain. A
congregant will say to me at shul,
particularly this time of year, “So how have you been rabbi?
I haven’t seen you for so long!” I
always answer the same way. “Well,
I’ve been here…” I say truthfully. “Oh,
rabbi! I guess I haven’t been here. You
know I’m not religious. I’m
more of a secular Jew.” I
hear it often, sometimes expressed in other terms.
“I’m a cultural Jew,” or “I’m just Jewish” or “I used
to belong to Temple” or “I went to Temple in New Jersey (or Michigan, or
Ohio, or California) but I don’t go here.”
I
hear it all the time. And in
community discussions I hear how important it is to reflect the views of
those secular Jews who are the backbone of our community—or something to
that effect. In other words, we
must embrace the views of those for whom Judaism includes no religious
component at all. There
you have it: secular Judaism, the most important Jewish movement of the 20th
and 21st centuries. A
new phenomenon in Jewish history: people who wish to remain Jewish in some
sense, but practice no recognized form of our 3800-year old religion.
We are just Jewish—you know, secular Jews. And
so, my friends, it’s time to ask: just what exactly is a secular Jew and
what are the long-term implications of encouraging a culture of secular
Judaism? Well
the truth is, we already know what a secular Jew is.
It’s someone who knows she is Jewish, likes some Jewish foods—the
ones that don’t have too many carbs—and celebrates holidays by going
somewhere for a meal with family or friends.
When asked, he will contribute to Jewish secular causes—umbrella
fundraising organizations like a Jewish Federation, or perhaps a Jewish
hospital or old age home or a day school scholarship fund.
She will support Israel when she agrees with its politics, and can be
persuaded to come to committee meetings or presentations that have to do
with some Jewish cause. A
secular Jew might work out at a Jewish community center—if the equipment
is good, and if it’s open on Saturdays, and the new LA Fitness nearby is
too expensive—and she might want to go see an Israeli orchestra or a
Jewish comedian or author. He
feels pride in the prominence of semi-Jewish ballplayers, enjoys the fact
that Jews really do control Hollywood, hangs out with other Jewish guys at
halftime, and thinks that finding somewhere to get a good bagel or corn beef
sandwich is an important part of civilization.
Where
kids are concerned, secular Jews send them to school on Rosh HaShanah and
Yom Kippur—mustn’t miss any exams—and take them to baseball and
cheerleading and football and soccer and ballet and gymnastics and band on
Shabbat, and any other activity that they might be interested in or that
their non-Jewish friends are engaged in.
If
they have a baby boy or a grandson a secular Jew might want a bris,
kind of for old-times’ sake, but probably it will be circumcised in the
hospital by a doctor. When there
is a wedding a secular Jew calls the nearest rabbi, but is satisfied without
the rabbi if there is a chupah and a broken glass.
There is a kind of general feeling that a bat or bar mitzvah is
important, but little sense that it is part of a life-long dedication to
Jewish religious practice or Jewish education. And,
of course, participation in any sort of Jewish religious experience is
viewed as a kind of sacrifice by a secular Jew.
“Did you know I spent three hours at temple the other day on Rosh
HaShanah?” The
fact is that secular Jews form the vast majority of our people today.
The statistics are truly startling: a Gallup poll two years ago
determined that 5% of non-Orthodox American Jews go to services regularly.
5%. We Jews attend fewer
services than any other religious group in America—except atheists.
One in twenty non-Orthodox American Jews attends services on some
regular basis. By contrast,
nearly one in two American Christians say they attend services on a regular
basis. But only one in 20
American Reform or Conservative Jews do.
The truly powerful thing about this survey is that the American Jews
who don’t attend services regularly—nearly all of us—feel perfectly
good about that decision, and see Judaism as valuable and worth continuing
in spite of their non-participation. This
level of collective non-participation worked for a while. American Judaism,
according to the sociologists, flourished well into the 1980’s.
Our secular Jewish lifestyle was just like everyone else’s secular
lifestyle in our society, except we didn’t go to church as much.
And it seemed to be enough for most American Jews for a time.
We stuck together because we had similar backgrounds, tastes, jokes,
preferences. A kind of ethnic
Judaism without any essential spirituality.
Secular Judaism. And
then—even now—the generational ethnicity of Jewish foods and Yiddish
phrases and shared memories of anti-Semitic biases began to fade.
And something else emerges: an unfortunate truth. That
truth is that secular Judaism is just like secular Christianity—in fact,
it is secular
Christianity, except with different holiday foods and a slightly different
voting pattern. And
it turns out that secular Judaism is no Judaism at all.
I
realize this might, literally, be preaching to the choir tonight, for you
are here in Temple, after all, unlike those Jews who celebrated Rosh
HaShanah just by attending a dinner or a lunchtime gathering, or who will
choose to commemorate Yom Kippur only by attending a lavish Break
Fast—whether or not they have fasted.
But what we are doing collectively as a society, creating a secular
Jewish model that is supposed to be self-perpetuating, is failing.
Dismally. The
polls tell us this repeatedly. The
American Jewish community is shrinking, not growing, in an era in which
religious observance in America is actually quite vital among non-Jews.
If we keep this up we won’t have to worry about the future of
liberal Judaism in America, because the only Jews left in 50 years will be
Orthodox Jews. Israel
understands this already, even if we do not.
Jewish organizations like AIPAC are already working hard to establish
non-Jewish support for Israel at a high enough level to compensate for the
expected disintegration of Jewish voting influence in the next ten to twenty
years. A disintegration caused
by the disappearance of liberal Jews. By
choosing to be secular Jews, and only secular Jews, we are teaching our
descendants to become, essentially, non-Jews.
Our young people, now being trained in the idea that being Jewish is
merely about donating to the right causes or becoming a young Jewish
philanthropist or perhaps going on a Birthright trip to Israel, have never
seen their parents, or even grandparents, model the behavior of regular
religious attendance or practice. Shabbat
means nothing much to most Jewish families in America.
It should come as no surprise that young people in particular are not
participating in Jewish communal life—secular or religious—in any
consistent way. And
what exactly have we put in place of religious practice? Attendance
at concerts and plays and ballgames? Work?
Working out? Meetings?
Emails? Dinner parties?
Watching TV? Psychological
counseling? Surfing the web? Al
cheit shechatanu lefanecha, Adonai—we have sinned before You, God, for we have created a secular model
for life—a lightly Jewishly flavored secular model, I guess, with a little
onion and garlic, but thoroughly secular nonetheless—that misses all that
is truly holy and replaces it with triviality.
When
we choose not to observe our Judaism by going to services regularly, and by
failing to make Shabbat a sacred day, we are rejecting our Jewish heritage,
and no number of committee meetings or cocktail parties or gallery openings
can change that. Secular
Judaism is a dead end, at least insofar as the Judaism part of it is
concerned. It is an OK way to
live, provided you don’t care about your own spirituality—and provided
you don’t care if Judaism survives. And
the great tragedy is that this secular model just doesn’t work in the long
run, and it isn’t an accurate reflection of who we really wish to be. It
doesn’t work because it misses an entire dimension of life—the
spirituality which is at the core of our very being. To
be fair, most of us secular Jews were never really introduced to Jewish
spirituality in any way that was meaningful.
We were never taught that holiness was something that could be
touched, experienced, and made personal.
Nobody ever spent time asking us about our feelings about God,
teaching us how to pray, why it was important, encouraging us to develop a
personal relationship with our Creator.
We learned prayers, perhaps—if even that—and some general images
of God as a Judge in front of a great book, or as a man with a white beard
on a cloud. And that was about
it. We
never had the opportunity to find one of the many paths to a personal, holy
connection to God in Judaism. We
never learned how to reach the holiest part of ourselves, the sparks of God
that are in each one of us. Nobody
every insisted that we take the time to find the spiritual center that lives
in every one of us. That was a
failing of American Judaism, and American Jewish education.
It
is time to change all of that. It’s
time to discover your spiritual heart. For, in truth, we live in a miraculous world. As the great Chasidic teacher, Chayim of Tzantz, said, “God places miracles in the world every day. Yet we take our little hands and cover our little eyes and see nothing…” There is wonder in this world, everywhere, if we just open ourselves to that possibility. There are miracles when we take the time to look for them. And, frankly, in times like these we might need some miracles. One small example. Do
you remember the tragic explosion of the space shuttle Columbia five years
ago? On board Columbia on that
fateful day when it disintegrated upon re-entering the atmosphere was
Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli in space.
Just a week ago at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem pages from his
personal diary that survived the explosion of the space shuttle and a
37-mile fall to earth went on display for the first time. It
turns out that a little over two months after the shuttle explosion, NASA
searchers found 37 pages from Ramon's diary, wet and crumpled, in a field
just outside the U.S. town of Palestine, Texas. The diary survived extreme
heat in the explosion, extreme atmospheric cold, and then was attacked by
microorganisms and insects in the field where it fell. "It's
a miracle that it survived — it's incredible," curator Yigal Zalmona
said. There is "no rational explanation" for how it was recovered
when most of the shuttle was not. The
U.S. space agency returned the diary to Ramon's wife, Rona, who brought it
to forensics experts at the Israel Museum and from the Israeli police. The
diary took about a year to restore and it took police scientists about four
more years to decipher the pages. And
now two pages are displayed in the Israel Museum—which we will visit on
our Third Temple Emanu-El Pilgrimage Tour to Israel and Egypt next summer.
One page contains notes written by Ilan Ramon; but the other is a copy of
the Kiddush prayer, the blessing over wine that we chant on the Sabbath.
Ramon copied the prayer into his diary so he could recite it on the space
shuttle and have the blessing broadcast to Earth.
Kiddush, by the way, means holiness or sanctification. Several aspects of this story are revealing. The first is that Ilan Ramon, a secular Jew, felt that he wanted to have the Kiddush with him in space so that he could do Kiddush and broadcast it back to Earth. The second is that he needed to have the text with him in order to do the Kiddush in the first place, that he couldn’t do it from memory. Remember, this is a prayer that all Jews—Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and so on—chant every single Friday night of their lives if they observe Shabbat at all. But even a secular Jew like Ilan Ramon, alav hashalom, knew that sanctity matters. And so we had Kiddush in space, and after the destruction its text was preserved miraculously through fire and ice. Kiddush in space. Perhaps its time we revived doing Kiddush here on earth. My friends, it’s time to return to temple, and to make Shabbat services a regular part of your life. It’s time to find your own Jewish religious identity, to actualize your own spirituality. I used to think that the reason so many American Jews were secular was that American synagogues didn’t offer quality religious experiences, that the same music and readings from eras past simply didn’t work today, or for most Jews today. We have shorter attention spans than our parents and grandparents, and we are a much more diverse community. And so here at Temple Emanu-El we began offering many different kinds of Shabbat and holiday service experiences, as we do to this day. We have Tot Services and Shabbat Rocks and Classical Reform Services and Kabbalistic Services and Chardonnay Shabbat and Wandering Jews Hike Services and All-Music services and some meditation and lots of special ways to express Jewish spirituality. And an interesting thing happened: some people came to all of them, and some people came to one or another of them. Our strategic planning survey found that people have positive feelings about lots of those services, and that different people attend many of them. A goodly number of people—but not most of the people. Not even most of you. And not regularly. That is why we are embarking on a new project this year. We are calling it our spirituality initiative. As we have done throughout the past 10 years, we are inviting you to participate in finding your own spiritual path to Jewish religious expression. But we are also challenging you to make an honest commitment to Jewish religious practice this year, to attending Shabbat services—one of the many kinds we offer—regularly. We will be adding spiritual elements, including meditation and other mindfulness practices, to the services we now offer. We will be offering new ways to help you find Jewish holiness in your life. We will be asking for your involvement and participation and leadership in seeking to make our Temple, and our Jewish community, glow with the religious fervor that secular Judaism cannot ever provide. We will seek sanctity together—here, and in our outdoor world, and in our homes. Here at Temple we ask one thing of you on this Yom Kippur Eve. We ask that you make a personal commitment tonight to come to services regularly this year. Try each of our offerings, if you would like, but simply commit to coming to Shabbat services, Friday or Saturday, at least twice a month. And make Shabbat at home, candles and kiddush and chalah anyway, on the other weeks. We ask you to commit to this practice, this spiritual practice, for a year. If you don’t find what you are looking for here at Temple, then tell us. Communicate to me or to Bonnie Golden, the chair of our Spirituality Initiative. Tell us what you need to find here, and we will help. We are planning projects in meditation and ritual that will begin to be introduced this fall. Your input will help us develop those efforts. Your voices will be heard, and we believe your spiritual souls will develop, and your lives will be enhanced. You simply must commit coming here, and trying. Twice a month—more, of course, will work even better. But twice a month. Frankly, a small commitment for a great reward. The goal is simple and achievable—but it would also be revolutionary. We can find, through this new commitment in this young year, a spiritual home that is meaningful and rich and inspiring and fresh. We can each find, in our own way, a path to holiness that will enrich and ennoble our lives. We can make this a true house of blessing. We can bring a profound spiritual life into our hearts and minds. We can bring ourselves blessing. If you make and keep this commitment to religious practice, and invite others to join you from time to time, you will also revolutionize this Jewish community. Imagine that: a Jewish religious experience draped not in cynicism, but in sanctity. What a profound gift that would be. And who knows? We may then all manage to remake this world. And then, in poet Brodsky’s words, we will be able to join in a prayer: Now, right this minute, Soaring easterly toward morning’s source, I exhort You, Lord, With more reverence than I’ve summoned before, To hear my heart’s meditations, Every syllable of my words, turn into music As they rise from silence to this height And stand at Your bimah, where my eyes bear witness. These notes I see coalescing Make me realize I’m one of the chosen people, That I, too, belong. --
“Toward the Torah, Soaring” Louis Daniel Brodsky G’mar Chatimah Tovah—may you make this commitment tonight. And may you be sealed, in the Book of Life, for blessing, spirituality, and holiness. |
