Sermon: Rosh Hashanah, Day 2 5773: Why I m Not a Fundamentalist Rabbi Eric Yanoff Three brisket pans, old book, Abraham costume, $20 bill Shanah tovah. First, pardon my appearance; I was just downstairs in our family service, where I made a cameo as Abraham. In that service, as Abraham, I asked for a volunteer helper to be my son, Isaac, on the day that God told me to sacrifice that son. Amazing how many hands were in the air But in the middle of the scene, I realized: I just can t pull this off. I just don t have it in me to be Abraham in that scene of the near-sacrifice of Isaac completely accepting of faith, without question, doing what God says, trusting that it will work out okay. And so, as I remove this garb, I suppose it is a proper time to share with you the title of the sermon: I ve entitled today s learning, Why I m Not a Fundamentalist. I m not a fundamentalist for many reasons but mostly, I just don t think I can pull it off. First, let s dispense with the stereotypes: I would make a terrible fundamentalist first and foremost because still, at the age of thirty-six, I cannot reliably grow a beard. It s better than it was a few years ago, and yes, I was, shall we say, a late bloomer but there are definitely embarrassing patches where no hair grows on my face. But a fundamentalist doesn t HAVE to have a beard. So that s not it. Maybe I m not a fundamentalist because when you get down to it, I m pretty much a wimp. I have no stomach for violence. So is that why I would not pass muster? NO, not really because it is actually a relatively modern phenomenon to assume that all fundamentalists are violent. Fundamentalism is not necessarily about violence. No the real reason I m not a fundamentalist is that, at the end of the day, I don t believe that anyone could ever be THAT ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. Fundamentalism is a belief in an absolute truth, a dogma, relying on a strict, literal interpretation of the Bible with no wiggle-room. Though I have deep faith and belief I don t think that there is just ONE faith or belief. And as religious leaders go, I just cannot believe in anyone who is that sure of himself. One of my favorite teachings from my father is to be wary of someone who is, as he says, Often wrong, but never in doubt. In my high-school yearbook, one of my quotes was If you re that sure, you re probably wrong. So today, I want to share with you a few anecdotes and illustrations about how firmly I believe in NOT having all the answers. And why, in the end, ours is a better brand of religion than anything out there that pretends to have all the answers. First, let s go back to Abraham: In today s Torah reading, he comes off as quite unquestioning a model of faith. But almost every rabbi in ancient times who tackled this story worked really hard to show how Abraham did question God. And why? Because would we really look up to a patriarch who just blindly accepted that commandment, to sacrifice his son? And would we really want a God Who would let that happen? Besides, we know from the Torah that, elsewhere, Abraham does question God: A few scenes before, he negotiates with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah, he questions God and haggles with God over and over again. Do we want a God Who expects us to swallow the religion whole OR do we want a God Who expects us to challenge and question and struggle? By the time we get two generations later in the Torah, the relationship God has with the Jewish People is already different: After Jacob s mysterious wrestling match with a divine being, God renames Jacob, giving him the name Israel, Yisrael which Sermon, Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5773, September 18, 2012: Why I m Not a Fundamentalist Rabbi Eric Yanoff 1 (of 6)
means one who wrestles with God and prevails. Not only does God want us to challenge and wrestle but God secretly wants us to win! So then, what do we do with all these stories and statements in the Torah and in our liturgy? Are we expected to just accept and believe? What do we do with the story of Creation, in the face of Evolution? There is a theme park under construction in Kentucky that claims the biblical story as history. Is that the way we are expected to believe? Now, I am pretty confident that no one here really believes that human beings lived side-by-side with dinosaurs. But I am also aware that I am on shaky ground here. Just a few years ago, Rabbi David Wolpe (a local boy) got himself in hot water by asking the question, Did the Exodus actually happen? Rabbi Wolpe actually was trying to make the point that, for his approach to faith, it didn t matter whether the story was historically true, in the modern sense of the word. But from their kishkes, people had a viscerally negative response to anyone who called any aspect of the story into doubt. And virtually none of the people listening to Rabbi Wolpe at the time were fundamentalists; they were modern thinkers. But one of the REAL reasons that I am not and our community is not fundamentalist, is because, for us, kishkes Judaism is often much stronger than the classical standards of observance. In our community, the idea that Judaism or God commands us to do something does not elicit nearly as much a sense of obligation as a long-standing custom or practice. Another way of saying this is that, in our liberal Jewish communities, we feel much less bound by halachah, Jewish Law, than we feel bound by minhag, or custom. This may be hard to hear but it s certainly true. How many of us feel bound by the Ten Commandments? [SHOW HANDS] ALL Ten? Sure, I think we can all get on the same page when it comes to no murder, no theft, no adultery but how good are we about false promises and swearing using God s name? How about coveting? What about Shabbat? And even the ones we DO: Do we mostly observe thou shalt not murder because we are COMMANDED as such in the Torah, or because we would have agreed to that one, even if it weren t in the Top Ten? In many ways, we feel much less bound by the Ten Commandments than we feel bound by what I call the eleventh commandment of Jewish communal governance: The Eleventh Commandment is Thou shalt do it the way we do it because we ve always done it that way. Because it is a custom, a longstanding practice. In truth, it doesn t even have to be that long-standing. I hear all the time: This is a new tradition we re starting. I love that term new tradition. It makes no sense but what I think we mean by it is, we are trying to give something a sense of rootedness, of kishkes Judaism because if we can do that, it will become a part of who we are, how we live, how we define ourselves, what becomes a part of our collective memory and psyche. Last spring, the author Jonathan Safran Foer, who published a new Passover haggadah this year, introduced his retelling of the Moses and Exodus story with an anecdote of his six-year-old son, asking the same question Rabbi Wolpe asked: Was Moses a real person? Now I have an almost-six-year-old, and I ll tell you: at that moment, if asked that question, I would wish that I were a fundamentalist, that I could believe every aspect of the Torah, literally as written, that I could tell the story as fact. And I would be just a bit sad that the cynicism and doubt that is so much a part of the modern world had crept into that question of my six-year-old son. I d wish I could say, Moses?! Of course! No doubt about it! But Jonathan Safran Foer gave his son what I think is a more beautiful answer he was honest, yet he managed to preserve the magic, the kishkes piece of the Jewish Story. Jonathan Safran Foer Sermon, Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5773, September 18, 2012: Why I m Not a Fundamentalist Rabbi Eric Yanoff 2 (of 6)
responded to his son s question of whether Moses was real by saying, I don t know but I know we re related to him. We re related to Moses. What a great way of appealing to that sense of kinship, of closeness, of emotional Judaism. For us, in a community that cannot rely on simple faith and observance of Jewish law because God said so that s what we have, that s the sense we must appeal to, in order to preserve these stories: We need that emotional sense of being part of it, of being close to it, even related to Moses. And in our community, NOT when it comes to literalism or observance of law - but when it comes to emotional, kishkes Judaism, we actually tend to be quite extremist. Think about it: How many of us would get angry if the Cantor or I changed too many of the tunes you ve come to know and love? There s nothing legally right or wrong, nothing obligatory about any one of those melodies but could you imagine if we came up here this year and said, We have a great, brand-new, jazzed-up melody for Kol Nidre, or a rockin Avinu Malkeinu?! Again, it s not about Divine commandedness for us, by and large but we are quite frum when it comes to the way we do things. There are tons of stories to illustrate this point: I imagine only a few of us warmly about the mitzvah, the commandment of putting on tefillin (the leather prayer straps and boxes)? But how many of us warm to the idea of owning (even in a drawer somewhere) our greatgrandfather s tefillin? Or you may have heard the story of the step-by-step recipe for Bubbie s brisket, passed down for three generations: The great-granddaughter s recipe card reads, This is THE proper way to make a brisket: Before placing it in the pan, slice the end off the brisket, place in another pan, and cook separately. And so the great-granddaughter, in her designer kitchen, with new cookware right off her wedding registry, is about to re-create her Bubbie s brisket, but first consults a great-aunt as to the reason we cut the brisket: The pan that your Bubbie used to cook brisket for yuntif wasn t big enough for the brisket so she cut off a piece and cooked it separately. That s the way that minhag, custom, becomes so ingrained. Or the story of the grand synagogue, which had an odd custom that the person carrying the Torah around in the procession would bow his head about two-thirds of the way down the aisle. A new rabbi comes to the shul, and can t figure out that custom until an older gentleman says, Well, in the old shul, it wasn t such a grandiose building like this one. We had a low-hanging beam across the chapel and you had to bow down, to get under the beam, as you walked with the Torah. Nowadays, we hold onto those aspects of our Judaism much more than the detailed laws which the Torah commands. In fact, we chafe against the whole idea of being commanded, with detailed, legalistic, mitzvot. I hear all the time: Rabbi, do you really think it matters? Does it make a difference? Does God really care if I do all of these detailed, legalistic, particular actions? Does God really care if I keep different types of crops from growing together on my farm? (Now those are the funniest words I ve said today My Farm. ) Does God care if I wear a forbidden mixture of wool and linen together (before or after Labor Day)?... Or if I give a woman I captured in battle time to mourn her family before marrying her as a second wife (sorry, Dava)? Does God really show God s love or anger by my whether my skin is free of any affliction or outbreak? (If so, is acne proof that God hates all teenagers?) Does God want a newlybereaved spouse to spit in her brother-in-law s shoe? Does God really want me to wave a celery stalk and a lemon together every October? Sermon, Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5773, September 18, 2012: Why I m Not a Fundamentalist Rabbi Eric Yanoff 3 (of 6)
I often hear this about all sorts of Jewish laws and rituals. And my decidedly non-fundamentalist answer is in the immediate, lightning didn t strike me, calculation of it all NO. By my understanding of it, God does not get involved enough that if you test God by eating a bacon double-cheeseburger, washed down with a crab-flavored milkshake, in synagogue, this Yom Kippur that lightning will not strike you down. But that s not really a test of whether God cares. But then, that s the danger of NOT being a fundamentalist: Because if I were a fundamentalist, the answer would be, DO IT because God says so, and if you don t you ll be schmeised so you better do what God says. It would be that simple. We d have our reasons no questions, no struggle, just do what we re told to do, believe what we re told to believe. But since we re NOT literalists, or fundamentalists in that way then why do we do this at all? If the Torah is NOT what God says, if it is not in the modern sense of the word, TRUE then couldn t we just scrap the whole thing? Or at least the parts that seem obsolete, tribalistic, hokey, old-fashioned? But then the kishkes approach to Judaism says to me, that would be a shame to break the 3500-yearold streak we re on, of living according to the Torah s vision of how to build a more perfect world. And part of subscribing to that vision means having the humility to realize that, even if it would make the Torah reading a lot shorter, and the Torah itself a lot lighter, it would be pretty presumptuous of us to assume we have a line-item veto on what to cut out of Judaism for all time. And besides, that question Does it matter? Does my action matter? Does God care? That question bothers me a bit. Because, in true Jewish fashion, I ll answer those questions with a set of questions of my own: Don t we WANT our actions to matter? Don t we walk around this earth, doing the things we do, keeping ourselves as busy as we are, because we WANT to have some impact, some significance? Would we really WANT to believe in a God Who DIDN T care about how we chose to live our lives? So, even if it s not true in the literal, fundamentalist sense of the word there s a part of me that WANTS it to be true or at least, believable. Or at least, inspirational. So maybe I ve come full-circle?... Maybe I need to reconsider [Pick up the beard]. Maybe we should believe that these stories are TRUE that these laws, and their punishments and ramifications are TRUE. So what do we do? Where do we go from here? The philosopher Paul Ricoeur had a term for this process of coming full-circle, back to a desire to believe, even if we struggle with the leap that that belief requires: He calls it a second naïveté that we are too rational to just swallow it whole, but we still need some anchor for our faith. And so, I want to leave you with just two more anecdotes that, perhaps, will help us recover our faith, will help us shore up a reason to observe even when our questioning minds poke holes in the entire system: The first is a story about the professor of my Rabbinical-School Professors. My rabbis rabbi an old-world personality named Professor Dimitrovsky. The story goes that Professor Dimitrovsky was teaching a bunch of rabbinical students one day, and was talking about the World to Come Olam ha- Ba, in Hebrew. And as he went on and on about Olam ha-ba, one of the students started to snicker. Professor Dimitrovsky stopped class and said, Boychik (they were all boychiks back then) what are you laughing about? Sermon, Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5773, September 18, 2012: Why I m Not a Fundamentalist Rabbi Eric Yanoff 4 (of 6)
The rabbinical student was caught; he figured he had nothing to lose. C mon Professor, he said, you don t really believe that old stuff about a World to Come, do you? At which point, the story goes, Professor Dimitrovsky took out a twenty-dollar bill, placed it on the desk, and said, Okay, if you re so smart that you know better than what traditional Judaism has taught us about Olam ha-ba for 2000 years, then here s $20. Sell me your place in the World to Come. Professor Dimitrovsky sat there calmly, staring down the student (who is now a rabbi) for five minutes of silence. Five minutes is a long time to sit in silence. And in the end, even though this student was so sure he wasn t a fundamentalist, so immune to a faith-based, traditional, literal understandings of a World to Come he couldn t bring himself to take the twenty bucks. In the end, even though he didn t believe that all the fundamental teachings about a World to Come were TRUE when called on it, he couldn t give up on the existence of that belief even if he was skeptical. So one final story about whether we, as non-fundamentalists, as modern thinkers, can reject the Bible, or Jewish laws and practices, or any of it as just UNTRUE. Because I m not sure I even know what it means for a story to be absolutely true anymore. Decide if this last story is true and maybe it will let us know whether, or how, the stories of the Bible are true. Once upon a time [is the story TRUE?] in a land far, far away, there lived a Princess. And this Princess was known throughout the land for her charm and her caring soul. She helped many people but there was one cause that was close to her heart: She wanted to rid the countryside of a dangerous species of exploding turtle, that would cause the children harm, when they ran to play in the fields, they would get hurt if the exploding turtles were underfoot. Of course, anyone as famous and charming as this Princess would have an antagonist and for the Princess, it was a species of strange creature, known as Pop-Pops. The Pop-Pops would swarm their target, flashing lights to disorient her. Now I ll cut straight to the end of this the tragic story: One night at a Royal Ball, the Pop-Pops came upon the Princess. She leapt into her coach, and told her coachman to flee into the dark night. The Pop-Pops descended upon her carriage, she urged the Coachman forward, faster, faster and no one knows what happened but when the sun came up, the carriage was smashed, and the Princess was no more. Is the story TRUE? [YES ask who is the Princess, the Pop-Pops, the Turtles]. You see, we don t need literalism or fundamentalism for our stories to be TRUE, to be MEANINGFUL, or INFORMATIVE on our lives. The Bible is TRUE not because it is literally factual but because it reveals and inspires truth in our lives. And the fact that we as a community struggle, and challenge ourselves, and wrestle to find that truth makes us heirs to the name Yisrael/Israel God-wrestler than anyone who claims to have a monopoly on THE truth, THE One Way. That s what gives us that feeling in our kishkes that our Judaism is worth sustaining because, somehow, we re not sure about how much God commands us or cares if we follow the commandments, but we feel bound by our family s observances and traditions. We may be skeptical about a law that our ancestors followed that now feels obsolete, but we don t want to be the broken link in the chain, the first time it s not passed to our descendants We don t know if we believe in a factual Jacob or Moses but we know for sure that they are mishpochah, that we are related to them, and to one another. Sermon, Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5773, September 18, 2012: Why I m Not a Fundamentalist Rabbi Eric Yanoff 5 (of 6)
That makes us terrible fundamentalists but really good Jews. May God give us the strength to challenge and question that which our Jewish souls hold most dear, as something worth preserving. Keyn yehi ratzon so may it be God s will. And let us say: AMEN. Sermon, Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5773, September 18, 2012: Why I m Not a Fundamentalist Rabbi Eric Yanoff 6 (of 6)