Right to pray?

Did my fifth-grade teacher, in public school, cross the line when she taught a lesson about the story of Palm Sunday?

My parents thought that she had. So did the parents of the two other Jewish students.  On the other hand, my parents didn’t object to the school’s having a Christmas tree, as long as we weren’t instructed in the Christmas story.
This happened when school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading were still permitted in public schools; the Supreme Court ruling that ended them was a year away.

The situation today is different. Many Jewish parents are pleased if a teacher asks them to teach the class about Hanukkah. (It is rare to be asked to teach a class about Passover, Rosh Hashanah, or any other Jewish holiday.) In general, we support multicultural education as long as it doesn’t become indoctrination.

Some states, in fact, require multicultural education and have set curricula for it. Where multicultural education is required, school children will be taught a certain amount about each of many cultures whether or not there is a child of that background in the class. Ideally, the presentation is accurate and neutral: it should be a form of social studies, not a form of religious education.

A different issue arose recently in Missouri, where the legislature has voted to place a “right to pray” measure on the November ballot. On the surface, this seems unnecessary, because the right to pray is already guaranteed.
The Missouri measure includes something else: in essence, the right not to learn. It would exempt children from having to learn anything that was contrary to their family’s religious belief. They could be excused from attending certain lessons and, presumably, from being tested on that material.

The issue, of course, is evolutionary biology, although it could extend to other subjects. A friend who teaches classical mythology at the college level has had problems with students who wrote Biblical rebuttals of the myths instead of answering the questions on her tests.

I have toyed with the idea of creating a religion that is opposed to division (in mathematics) and, therefore, to any mathematics that might require it. The reasoning goes like this:

1. The Bible says, “Be fruitful and multiply.”
2. Nowhere does the Bible command humans to divide.
3. God, however, divides (for example) the light from the darkness.
4. Therefore, division is reserved for God and humans aren’t allowed to do it.

Accordingly, children brought up in this religion should be excused from math classes beginning in the grade in which division is introduced, and should be allowed to graduate without knowing any math beyond multiplication.

Does this sound ridiculous? I hope so.  But I don’t see science education as indoctrination, nor does my classicist friend see mythology classes that way.

Similarly, I don’t see a grave threat if our children are required to learn a bit about other religions. I would object if they were required to practice any part of another religion or if a school requirement interfered with their practice of Judaism.

Good for the Jews?

In May, Congregation Kol Ami was the starting point for an “Abraham Path” walk, organized by the Southern Tier Interfaith Coalition. About 50 people of all ages and various faiths walked from CKA to The Park Church and back, and then carpooled to the Islamic Center in Big Flats for a meal and a presentation.

An Abraham Path walk recognizes Abraham and Sarah as the common spiritual ancestors of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The original idea is for groups of people to walk parts of the actual route that Abraham and Sarah would have taken from Ur, to Haran, and then to the Land of Israel. Think of Bruce Feiler’s book Walking the Bible, but with interfaith groups. The route passes through remote areas of several countries and is becoming an important source of tourism in those areas.

An alternative, for those who can’t travel to the Middle East or walk for weeks on end, is to walk a local route that includes a synagogue, a church, and a mosque. Even that is difficult here: there are plenty of churches within walking distance of either the synagogue or the mosque, but CKA and the Islamic Center are seven miles apart, with no safe walking route between them.

A confirmation class from the Caton Methodist Church arrived early with Rev. Beth Bouwens for a tour of CKA. In addition to pointing out the artifacts in the large sanctuary that would be found in any synagogue, I explained how the stained-glass windows depict the Jewish holidays in calendar sequence, plus Shabbat. Then I took out a sefer Torah, explained how one is written and how the reading is done, and invited everyone to take a close look.

As we were finishing, a group from the Islamic Association of the Finger Lakes arrived with Imam Zaman Marwat and I repeated the lesson for them. How often has a group of Muslims been invited to the bimah of a synagogue to examine the Torah scroll, here or anywhere?

As we talked, both on the bimah and during the walk, I was struck by the similarities between Jewish and Muslim practices.

To begin, we both have holy books written in a language that most of us have to learn in school (A majority of the world’s Muslims live in countries in which Arabic is not the vernacular.) Furthermore, both the Torah and the Koran were originally written in forms of Hebrew and Arabic that even native speakers of the modern forms of those languages can’t necessarily read easily. We’re both supposed to pray together several times a day—three for Jews, five for Muslims—but not all of us do so. And we both have traditions of chanting our sacred texts according to fixed melodies that aren’t indicated in the texts themselves.

We have special dietary rules that no one else follows. Furthermore, the rules of kashrut and of halal are very similar. At Mt. Holyoke College, there’s a dining hall in which all the food is both kosher and halal.

The similarities should not completely surprise us. Both rabbinic Judaism (the modern, not Biblical, form) and Islam originated in the Middle East and in about the same period. Our rabbis completed the writing of the Talmud only shortly before the composition of the Koran.

Through much of history, Jews and Muslims got along better than either did with Christians. In the Middle Ages, Jews living in Muslim countries had it better than those living in Christian countries.

A few days after our Abraham Path walk, Kansas enacted a law intended to preclude the use of Muslim religious law—sharia—in that state, not that anyone has attempted to impose it. Unlike an Oklahoma law that has already been set aside by a Federal court, the Kansas law does not specifically bar sharia. Instead, it bans the use of any law not originating in the United States. As a result, it is possible that it will meet Constitutional tests and be allowed to stand.

This should concern us because it would also preclude the use of Jewish rabbinic law. Although communities like ours convene a bet din, a rabbinic court, only to formalize conversions to Judaism, Orthodox communities also use a bet din to resolve disputes between their own members.

In New York, the decision of a bet din can, if necessary, be enforced in a civil court. That’s possible because a bet din constitutes a form of binding arbitration: it will only hear a case if both parties consent and if both promise to abide by the decision. That apparently won’t be possible in Kansas. How many Orthodox Jews are there in Kansas? More than you might think, because most of the Jewish community of Kansas City lives in the Kansas suburbs, not in Missouri. There’s a thriving Orthodox community in Overland Park.

Numbers, however, aren’t the point. We tend to ask about anything, “Is it good for the Jews?” Although the Kansas legislators expressed no fear that there would ever be an attempt to impose halachah—Jewish law—on the populace, civil laws intended to prevent the use of religious law even by adherents willing to abide by it are not good for Jews.

The Vilna Gaon did not invent Judaism

This is part of a drash that I gave on Shavuot morning at Congregation Kol Ami.

In Hebrew school we teach our students that Shavuot is the anniversary of our receiving the Torah. Sometimes we teach specifically about the Ten Commandments, which are part of the Torah reading for the first morning of Shavuot. 

We also teach them about the historical function of Shavuot in celebrating the spring grain harvest. So: how many of us brought a sheaf of fresh-cut barley as an offering this morning?

I suppose I could have come up with an offering of fresh-cut lawn grass, or perhaps asparagus, the only produce of my garden that's ready this early. The Torah does not say anything about bringing offerings of asparagus.

In The First Jewish Catalog, Rabbi Everett Gendler suggested that we resume the practice of cutting an offering of spring grain for Shavuot, waving it heavenward since there are no Temple and priests to receive it. He recommended planting winter rye in the Northeast, as the most likely grain crop to produce in time.

The point of this is to make a connection with the history of Judaism as a religion concerned with agriculture. Not many of us are farmers and herders these days, and we tend to lose track of that. 

Furthermore, it's not easy to teach students about the aspects of Jewish practice that have, or had, to do with farming: the offerings at the pilgrimage festivals, the sabbatical year, and so forth. It's not even easy to teach children how to choose the correct brachah for each kind of food, because that requires knowing how the food is produced. For many of our students, all food comes from the supermarket, end of discussion.

On top of that, a full understanding of the pilgrimage offerings and of many other laws pertaining to agriculture requires some knowledge of ancient Near Eastern agriculture. That would also be an important corrective to our (mis)understanding of Judaism as European culture, when its roots are in the Middle East, not central and eastern Europe.

The Vilna Gaon did not invent Judaism! Jewish life did not originate in the yeshivot of Poland and Lithuania, any more than it originated in Berlin and Vienna. To the extent that we can identify a specific origin for what we think of as modern Judaism, it's in the Land of Israel in the time of the mishnah (second century C.E.). That's when the transition from Biblical Judaism to rabbinic Judaism became codified.

Too many of our congregations treat Jewish life as a celebration of Jewish ethnicity, by which they mean mostly eastern European Jewish ethnicity. That has been a continuing problem in Israel, where many of the early Zionists took pains to identify themselves as European, and it's a problem in North America today.

Our ties to the shtetl world grow ever more tenuous. That world means little or nothing to most of our students and not all that much to a lot of adults. Most students in my school have one parent who did not grow up Jewish and to whom the whole "Yiddish" business means nothing at all. Some, children of Jews by choice, have no Jewish ancestry.

So we need to rethink our misguided emphasis on ethnicity. If that's all there is to modern Jewish life, we're doomed.

What science and religion are really telling us

Delivered on Evolution Shabbat, 11 February 2012/18 Shevat 5772,
at Congregation Kol Ami, Elmira, NY

My father hated the metric system. With a passion.

Because he died in 1976, you might think that the metric system should have had little or no effect on him, that it might even have escaped his notice.

The truth was that the metric system wouldn’t leave him alone. The state highway director—this was in Ohio—at that time thought that the United States would soon adopt the metric system, and he began installing highway signs that used kilometers as well as miles. Along with

COLUMBUS 60 mi

a sign would read

COLUMBUS 100 km.

(Those numbers aren’t exactly equivalent, but it’s close enough for government work.)

My father’s blood pressure rose every time he saw one of these signs, and it was high enough already.

Worse, he did business with some Canadian companies and traveled to Canada several times a year. Worst of all, my mother often went with him, and she hated the Queen of England almost as much as he hated the metric system.

You may wonder what this has to do with religion and science. My sense is that many people who dispute the theory of evolution or oppose teaching it are reacting the same way my father did to the metric threat. That is, I think that my father’s antipathy to the metric system grew out of fear: the fear of having to adapt to something he didn’t understand.

It’s certainly clear that most religious people who are hostile to science don’t understand science very well. And many of the so-called New Atheists—atheists who actively and publicly oppose religion—don’t understand religion very well. Typically, when atheists attack religion, they’re attacking a form of religion that you and I wouldn’t comprehend, either: something overly simplistic, reductionist, and arbitrary.

This is why Rabbi Harold Kushner, when someone proclaimed to him, “I don’t believe in God,” would answer, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God, either.”

But it doesn’t stop at that. It makes a certain amount of sense that traditionally religious people might not understand science or that scientists might not understand religion. If you listen to their arguments, however, you have to ask whether either group understands their own subject all that well—that is, whether religious people understand religion and whether scientists understand science.

Rabbi David Kay suggests an example that draws from the Torah. There are many statements in the Torah that a modern, scientific person might question. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. degree–our sixth-graders ask these questions. For a traditionally religious person who inclines to Biblical literalism, as do both Protestant fundamentalists and some Jews, these questions cannot be asked. It is a matter of principle to interpret every statement in Scripture absolutely literally. Some would call this hewing to the faith of their fathers.

But it should be apparent to us that our ancestors, both our forefathers and our foremothers, were not such literalists. The second paragraph of the Sh’ma, part of every worship service, quotes from Deuteronomy 11 (it’s on page 112 in Slim Shalom):

If you will earnestly heed the mitzvot I give you this day, to love Adonai your God and to serve God with all your heart and all your soul, then I will favor your land with rain at the proper season, in autumn and in spring, and you will have an ample harvest of grain, wine and oil. I will assure abundance in the fields for your cattle. You will eat to contentment. Take care lest you be tempted to stray, and to worship false gods. For then Adonai’s wrath will be directed against you. God will close the heavens and hold back the rain; the earth will not yield its produce.

Now, the ancient Near East didn’t provide a lot of privacy. For safety, people lived packed closely together. Even farmers lived in towns and walled cities, and walked to their fields each day; in Biblical times, the sukkah served as a temporary shelter for sleeping in the fields during the harvest season. Grace Metalious said that she got some of the material for her novel Peyton Place by eavesdropping on the party line. Our ancestors didn’t need to do that; everyone already knew what everyone else was up to.

Contemporary theologians might disagree with the statement that, if we follow God’s mitzvot, then God will provide rain at the proper seasons. To the ancient mind, that presented no particular problem: propitiating one or more gods to ensure a good harvest was what everyone did. The problem for our ancestors was with the second part. Again, if there was no rain and the harvest failed, there was no theological problem: God was punishing us, and you couldn’t prove that it wasn’t so.

The inherent problem is that sometimes there would be adequate rain and a good harvest even though sin and sinners were plentiful. If the neighbors were worshipping Baal or some other false god, you knew about it, just as Grace Metalious knew who was sleeping with whom. People might even have realized, however dimly, that they weren’t totally righteous themselves. And yet the rain came when it was needed and there was plenty of grain, wine, and oil. That’s the theological problem, and it’s why our ancestors did not take everything in the Torah quite as literally as we might have thought.

The idea that literalism is the only way to interpret the Bible is a comparatively modern one. In Jewish tradition, a literal strain of interpretation has always coexisted with other ways of reading.

Strict literalism is a largely Christian response to advances in science. We can think of Galileo’s problems with the Catholic Church, although Catholic teaching in modern times is more sophisticated than it was in Galileo’s time.

In the same way that what we now call “Orthodox Judaism” did not exist until the stirrings of Reform Judaism early in the nineteenth century, what we now call “fundamentalist Christianity” came into existence only after Darwin. As Jews, we do not write dates using the abbreviations B.C. and A.D., but in the history of religious thought, “After Darwin” is an almost equally important form of “A.D.”

The reaction that followed Darwin’s work and everything that grew from it changed an orderly, comprehensible world into one that seemed altogether incomprehensible, but it need not have been that way. The basic attitude of fundamentalists today is that, because God created the world, science cannot and should not explain it. The world that God created has to be incomprehensible.

It wasn’t always that way. In 1604, the astronomer Johannes Kepler was developing an astronomical theory that explained the elliptical orbits of the planets. In that year, a new star, a nova, appeared. Nothing in his theory predicted it; nothing in his theory could explain it.

Kepler need an explanation. And he was religious, a Catholic. According to the Paul Wallace, a physics professor,

He began to consider special creation: a deliberate, separate act of God unconnected with any other natural event, direct and special tinkering by the divine hand. But in the end he withdrew from that conclusion, writing "before we come to [special] creation, which puts an end to all discussion, I think we should try everything else." Over 400 years ago, Kepler understood that to claim special creation is to put an end to scientific inquiry.

In other words, Kepler’s conclusion was that, rather than impose a narrow explanation, we should keep trying to understand what we observe. Kepler believed that, because God created the world, it must be comprehensible, even if we don’t understand it yet. Modern fundamentalists seem to believe that, because God created the world, it has to be incomprehensible: any scientific explanation that makes sense has to be wrong.

I will say that it is arrogant for anyone to use the Bible to dispute science. One of my friends in the clergy who will be speaking about evolution tomorrow in her parish encountered some resistance: a churchwarden worried that she would “place Darwin above God.”

I’ll also say that scientists who oppose any and all religious teaching are being arrogant, and in a way that is contrary to the principles of science.

Oddly, the politicians who introduce laws to restrict the teaching of evolution or to advance the teaching of creationism in public schools, appear to understand scientific principles better than some of the scientists. Because this is an election year, the volume of the shouting on both sides is increasing and the number of new laws being introduced seems to be multiplying exponentially—not only in the Bible belt, but also in states like New Hampshire. The proposed laws typically require teachers to state the evolution is a theory, not a fact.

Which is completely true. Science works by advancing theories that explain the facts that scientists have observed, and right now the theory of evolution is the best one we have. It has been modified since Darwin’s time, because new observations and further thought often cause changes in scientific theories. From the point of view of scientists, the best theory available stands in the position of fact, but it may still be changed if new data require that. If a theoretician of the stature of Einstein comes along, an entirely new theory might replace it. That’s the way science works.

Scientific theories develop out of observed facts. In antiquity, so did religious theories. Religious theories—the stories of creation and pre-history—had to be compatible with the world that could be observed, had to explain what people knew to be true according to the science of their own time. For example, some stories in the Torah explain the origins of neighboring peoples such as the Edomites. If there had been no Edomites or the Children of Israel had never encountered them, or if they had not exhibited a degree of kinship to the Israelites, there would be no story of their descent from Esau.

One ostensible advantage of Biblical literalism is that it simplifies the world: in the view of religious fundamentalism, believing everything exactly as the Bible states it answers every possible question. Science, on the other hand, keeps raising new questions, making the world harder and harder to understand. In the nineteenth century, many advances in scientific knowledge were made by members of the clergy. In our time, scientific knowledge has grown so immensely that even professional scientists can’t keep up with all of it.

Nevertheless, the New Atheists want to tell us that science can and does explain everything. Almost the opposite is true: every question that a new scientific discovery answers leads to more and more questions. That, I think, is what most disturbs Biblical literalists.

It is possible that science may eventually explain everything, but it shows no signs of doing so now. Furthermore, knowing the origins of life would leave the basic question of religion—the purpose of our lives—still unanswered.

What I’m suggesting is that the role of religion, the role of Torah, is not to answer every possible question, but to teach us that we don’t know all the answers.

That’s also what science teaches us. Each new scientific discovery opens the possibility of rethinking all that preceded it. Evolution is “only” a theory because, in good science, no theory is ever final. There is always the possibility of learning more and understanding it better.

In other words, science and religion are telling us the same thing: that we don’t know as much as we might like to think we do. Rather than fear scientific advances, a religious person should be grateful for them.

Government and us

Jewish tradition refers to the Ten Commandments, the Torah reading  for February 10–11, as aseret ha-dibrot, the Ten Statements, not Commandments, but both Jews and Christians revere them.

The Ten aren’t exactly the same for Jews and Christians. In fact, they aren’t exactly the same for all Christians.

I’m not referring to the two versions found in the Torah, one in Exodus and the other in Deuteronomy.

Exodus tell us to “remember” the Sabbath day, while Deuteronomy says to “guard” it.

The difference between Jewish and Christian versions is in what is stated in each commandment, regardless of which text you follow. All versions start and end in the same places, and cover the same ground, but the division into commandments is different for Jews, Catholics and Lutherans, and most Protestants.

That’s only one reason that I’m uncomfortable with proposals to post the Ten in public buildings. Somehow I doubt that our version would be used.

The more important reason is that doing so is disrespectful to Americans who follow other religions or no religion.

The Torah tells us to write certain verses on the doorposts of our houses; it doesn’t say to post those verses, or any others, in secular government buildings.

Today, too many extremists are eager to force their religious views on others. They demand that others, not of the same beliefs, follow their religious dictates, and in some cases, that secular governments recognize and enforce their practices.

These extremists aren’t limited to any one religion. It’s not just Muslim governments in the Middle East, some of which use government power to enforce what we would consider religious law. The number of Christian and Jewish examples of extremism and intolerance is disturbingly large.

In the United States, for example, there have been repeated political demands to prevent the imposition of sharia (Islamic law), even though there has been absolutely no attempt to establish it here. More to the point, many of the politicians who call for a ban on sharia seem all too eager, themselves, to establish some form of Christian religion as the law of the land.

Some of them want to establish civil and criminal penalties for violations of Biblical laws. Many of the laws that they want to enforce come from the Hebrew Bible, but no rabbi would recognize their interpretations.

For example, the Torah states that parents may take a disobedient son to the town elders and have him stoned to death. Centuries of rabbinic interpretation prohibit this, but some radical Christians want American law to allow it.

These radical interpretations set the Christian extremists apart from all mainstream Christian denominations.

Most Christian denominations believe— for reasons different from ours—that these laws no longer apply.

Jews, unfortunately, are not immune from this kind of extremism.

Recent news reports from Israel describe haredi (ultra-Orthodox) conflicts with Jewish neighbors in Jerusalem who are merely modern Orthodox.

These reports include attacks on an eight-year-old girl on her way to school, and harassment of women who refuse to move to the back of the bus (literally).

Nor is it only ultra-Orthodox Jews. In several American cities, liberal and secular Jews have opposed the construction of new Orthodox Jewish facilities on grounds that seemed disingenuous.

As Jews, we have been served well by a society that saw religion as individual, personal, and to a considerable extent, private. Government involvement in religion, even in Israel, isn’t good for Jews or Judaism.

Advice, mine and others'

An online magazine, EdJewTopia, asked Jewish educators for eight pieces of advice on Jewish education. Here's what I said:

1. Israel education isn’t a magic bullet. While visiting Israel has a powerful effect on anyone who feels even the slightest bit Jewish, studying Israel in class is only meaningful if the student already feels Jewish. Otherwise it’s just social studies.
2. Learning prayers doesn’t make a person religious. The experience of praying, and of attending religious services, is different from that of studying prayers.
3. Time on task matters. Less class time = less learning. Also, less attendance = less learning.
4. It takes commitment. Modeling mature Jewish belief is more important than transmitting information.
5. Students need multiple role models. On the other hand, a teacher, principal, or rabbi is automatically in a different category from anything that most students imagine for themselves.
6. Parents have more influence than do teachers. Family support for students’ education—in the form of living Jewishly—is essential.
7. It takes a village. Well, a Jewish community. Learning to be part of the Jewish community is an essential goal of Jewish education. The school, the family, and the whole community need to work together.
8. You’re still Jewish after the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony. Teaching only what is needed for the Mitzvah Event is a recipe for disaster. Jewish learning is a lifelong process.

Read the rest of the submissions here.

The Tebow Effect

One subject seemed to dominate the religion news this fall: Denver quarterback Tim Tebow’s overt religiosity. Many conservative Christians admire and imitate it, while it makes some others—including liberal Christians, Jews, and Muslims—uncomfortable.

In any case, it’s hard to miss. In addition to kneeling on the field, Tebow habitually refers to God, and specifically to Jesus Christ. At the end of every game, he says, “First I would like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

There has been, however, very little criticism of Tebow from Jewish, Muslim, or mainstream secular quarters. It’s not because we’d be afraid to speak our minds: there are other reasons.

First, we all know that football, however public its appeal, is a private enterprise, not the government. (Stadium construction sometimes receives support from local or state government, but the teams don’t.) Football is a business, and businesses are free to endorse religion, tolerate it, or oppose it, in accord with their owners’ beliefs and their conclusions about what is good or bad for business overall.

Second, Tim Tebow is, by all accounts, exceptionally decent and likable. The Muslim author Ibrahim Abdul-Matin writes:

Tebow is unique because he is both an underdog and a winner. He is both humble and non-judgmental—a dynamite combination for any human being. Finally, his fellow teammates love him, he does not drink, smoke or do drugs, he is celibate, unmarried, and he has a winning smile and personality.

Hardly anyone claims that Tebow, the son of Baptist missionaries, is trying to force his religion on others. There’s wide consensus that he’s merely expressing his own belief—something that everyone has the right to do.

This hasn’t stopped news media from trying to stir up controversy. Fox News attempted to connect it to their annual complaints about the so-called war on Christmas, claiming that those who questioned his public displays of religion were waging war on Christians.

The Wall Street Journal asked representatives of various religions about Tebow, specifically whether they might preach about him. Rabbi Joe Black, of Temple Emanuel in Denver, replied,

Tim Tebow is broadcasting the fact that he believes in God. God is actively involved in his life. We call ourselves people of faith. Is that how we perceive God? And if not, how do we perceive God?

At Temple Sinai in Denver, Rabbi Rick Rheins, a Colts and Bengals fan, said that he might preach about Tebow if the Broncos made it into the playoffs.

The chairman of the Colorado Muslim society, Khaled Hamideh, said,

I know I’m a Muslim and he’s a Christian, but I admire somebody who thanks God for everything that He gave him. The team has rallied around him not because of his religious beliefs but because they believe this guy has something in him that pushes him the right way.

Almost all American Jews over the age of 50 know the Lord’s Prayer—a Christian text, although it expresses Jewish theology—from memory, because we were made to recite it every day in public school until 1962. Abdul-Matin, observing that football tends to be a very Christian sport, says that he knows it, too, but because he played football, and teams at all levels pray it in the locker room.

That’s the only part of this that is a genuine issue for us. Pro football can do whatever it wants, but I’d be concerned if Jewish players were, or felt, marginalized in public-school sports because they chose not to participate in non-Jewish prayer.