Tag: chassidut

social justice · spirituality · theology

One God, No Masters

levtaylor

We are, all of us, sparks of the divine.

There is something within each of us that is holy. 

We are more than moving limbs and functioning organs. We have a quality that cannot be reduced to DNA, or psychology, or narrative. 

There is something about a person that makes them who they are: more than their physical experiences, and more than our experiences of them. 

It is a feature that we can’t perceive by touch, sight or smell, but we know it is definitely there. It is the unfathomable essence within a human being that glows invisible and breathes without lungs and animates without moving.

This property cannot really be named, but it has been known in English as soul, spirit, or lifeforce; in Hebrew as neshama, ruach, nefesh.

There is something unique about life. And, if anything deserves to be called sacred, it is that.

In Judaism, we call it “the spark of the Divine.” As if God were one burning bonfire in which all of us were the flames. As if, inside every one of us, a candle was lit before we were born and cannot be extinguished after we die. 

There have been moments in my life when I have truly felt it. When I have seen the sacred spark in myself and realised, in a way I still cannot explain, that I am made in God’s image. 

There have been times when I have truly seen the sacred spark in others. Not just that another person was special or lovable, but infinite: that, qualitatively, their true essence could never be contained. 

I hope you have felt this at times too, or already know it to be true, because I want to talk about how radical this concept is.

If you truly believe, as I do, that we all have sacred souls, how could it ever make sense for one person to be better than another? 

In the light of God’s majesty, the divisions of gender, race, nation, and physical characteristics look like pale imitation of reality. Our bodies are real and diverse, but our spirits have a reality that is incomprehensibly more real and more diverse.

The Divine Spark within us comes from the Source of all Truth. And because God has implanted it within us, every life is equally, completely, and unassailably holy.

Every human spirit is remarkably equal. Not because each one is in some way alike, but because each one is infinitely different. 

In this week’s haftarah, the Prophet Isaiah proclaims: “O Eternal God, masters other than you have ruled over us, but we only remember your Name. Those others are dead and lifeless; sunken beings who will never rise. You, O God, have wiped them out and obliterated their memory.”

Who are these other masters? And why can God destroy them so decisively?

We might be tempted to imagine this as we do the Pagan pantheon, where one god comes in and destroys the others, as the Titan Cronus usurped his father, Uranus, only in turn to be vanquished by Zeus. 

But this is not a myth of many gods. In the Jewish understanding, there is only one God. So who else has ruled over us?

Midrash Tehillim says that this is referring to Nebuchadnezzar, the tyrant of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar ran colonial campaigns throughout the Middle East, suppressing all revolt, and establishing himself as sole dictator over the Levant. In 586, Nebuchadnezzar besieged and ransacked Jerusalem. He bulldozed Solomon’s Temple, conquered the Land of Israel, and carried away its leaders as captives. 

According to our tradition, Nebuchadnezzar demanded that the Israelites he had imprisoned bow down to idols. They refused. Nebuchadnezzar heated a furnace to seven times its regular temperature and attempted to burn the Israelites alive. But, by a miracle, God saved them, and the three pious believers walked out from the fire unscathed.

In this understanding of the text, there is only one True Ruler, and that is God. The lords who attempt to subjugate others are men. Sure, they may be able to win some wars, defeat some people, and make some people bow down to their will. But, ultimately, they are mortal.

Their lives are nothing in the span of God’s eternity. Their empires are worthless in the expanse of God’s universe. They are lying to themselves and others that they can be anything but dust and ashes. 

Only one being is immortal – that is God – and all are equal in the Eternal One’s beneficent eyes. The rulers of the world can never conquer us in a way that truly matters, because our spirits belong to something greater than their meager understanding.

If we deeply internalised this sanctity of every life, our entire world order would seek to function. Consider what it would mean to believe in the profound equality of every soul. How could anyone take more than they need from society, or abide for anyone else to have less? Surely nobody would ever be able to kill another and there would be no more wars. 

How would we have borders and checkpoints, when no human being can own the earth, because everything is God’s possession? Nobody could ever dominate or govern another.

And, in truth, if we truly got rid of all borders, states, laws, militaries, and inequalities, civilisation would fall apart. Society, as we know it, would cease to exist.

Well, good, said Rabbi Avraham Yehuda Heyn. He was one of the leading intellectuals among the Chabad Chassidim in 20th Century Ukraine. He taught that Judaism was a rejection of hierarchy, force, and inequality. We wrestle against the strong arm to make everyone strong and uproot weakness. 

He outlined a view of the world that would upturn all order. Absolute equality for everyone in everything. Complete refusal to participate in states or war. The abolition of all classes, and the levelling of all people.

Avraham Yehuda Heyn was part of a cohort of rabbis from Eastern Europe, profoundly educated in Talmud, as well as the modern thought of Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Kropotkin. There were many like him, in the 19th and 20th Centuries, who believed that the only logical conclusion to Judaism’s insistence on the sanctity of life was freedom and equality for all. In his recent book, No Masters but God, Hayyim Rothman calls this ideology of strictly Orthodox mystics “anarcho-Judaism.”

This idea may sound radical, and even intimidating. You can feel that it belongs to the heady days of a time when Jews were becoming free and anything felt possible. It belongs with the revolutionary optimism of mystics in another era. It is bold.

And yet: it is hard to honestly believe what we do – in God and the sanctity of the spirit – without arriving at some pretty bold conclusions. 

Think seriously about what it would mean to say that we are all holy embers. To say that we are sparks of the divine.

As if God were one burning bonfire in which all of us were the flames. As if, inside every one of us, a candle was lit before we were born and cannot be extinguished after we die. 

Breathe life into the flames. Give fuel to the candle. And, perhaps, something within us all, will set this world ablaze.

Shabbat shalom.

judaism · sermon · social justice

People! Remember that there is a God!

levtaylor

In the Zhitomyr Oblast of what is now Ukraine, there is a city called Berdichyiv. In the middle of the 18th Century, this was a great market town in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

To here, flocked all the great, the good, and the downright nasty from every quarter of their empire. But, of the permanent residents, three-quarters of those who lived here were Jews.

So, come with me, on any ordinary day, to the old Jewish city of Berdichyiv. You will find the streets lined with stalls; you will see shop fronts wide open; you will meet throngs of people moving to music and entertainment. Here, you can buy just about anything, and sell just about anything too.

You have to watch your wallet for thieves, of course; and be very careful not to get involved in any of the gambling games on the side streets, because you are sure to be hustled. And pay attention to the great crush and clamour of shoppers beating each other for products, or tradesmen jostling for space and trying to bargain.

But that’s not the main show. You have to really listen if you want to know why we’ve come here. Can you hear it?

Can you hear the man shouting? You have to strain your ear to get a good grip on the sound over all the noise of the market square, but you’ll catch it. There it is!

“People! Remember that there is a God! People! Remember that there is a God!”

Look. There he is, standing atop the clocktower. The man with the fluffy shtreimel and wispy beard and sidelocks. He’s thin and spritely, and he’s gripping the side of the wall and calling out with all his might:

“People! Remember that there is a God!”

To most of the people shopping here, that’s Levi Yitzchok. But to his supporters, that’s the Holy Berdichever, the great Hassidic rabbi, the disciple of the Maggid of Mezritch.

To most of the people here, he’s just a madman. But to his supporters… well, they think he’s mad too. But they love him.

Of all of the places in the world that this sage could go, he chose to go to the most corrupt town with the most unbelieving Jews with the most sinful dispositions and minister to them with fanatical spiritual messages.

Sometimes he did that by going out to the poorest and the most despised, and treating them with great love, as if they were the shining light of God on Earth. And sometimes, like today, he would stand on a platform ranting at everyone to remember that there was a God.

Now, you might indeed think this man sounds like he was mad. But I think he sounds… relatable.

I cannot tell you how much I would love to find a spot at the London Stock Exchange or the arms fairs at the City Hall or on the steps of Parliament and do exactly this. “People! Remember that there is a God!”

Would our politicians and corporations treat our planet as if it were their own dustbin to be discarded and destroyed if they knew that it was a gift from their loving Creator?

Would they treat human life as if it were something so disposable and meaningless if they understood that each person was created in God’s image?

Could they behave in ways that are so shamelessly venal and debased if they thought they would one day have to answer for their deeds?

No. They act as if there is no God but greed itself, as they sacrifice everything on the altar of the market.

Oh sure, there are those who pretend to believe in God. If you like, Donald Trump will sign a copy of his own version of the Bible, which he has hawked in American public schools to make as much as $300k. But does anyone believe that Trump actually thinks there is One above him?

His only faith is in the false idols of wealth and power.

The snivelling lapdogs around him from the Christian fundamentalist right know that Trump doesn’t fear God. That’s what they like about him.

They are impressed by his ability to manipulate and lie for their own purposes. Their religion, whatever god they worship, wants racial segregation, control over women’s bodies, war on every continent, refugees in cages, and queer people excised from public life.

This doctrine of reaction may be one of the world’s major religions. (In fact, I think it’s the true belief system shared by many of the world leaders, whatever their outward claims may be.) But it has nothing to do with the God of our Scriptures.

In our haftarah, the Prophet Jeremiah takes to task exactly these people who profess belief on the one hand and behave amorally on the other. The priests, the teachers, and the rulers, he says, have all given up looking for God and decided to waste their time on their worthless idols.

In the world to which Jeremiah brought God’s message, the leaders worshipped the work of their hands. They venerated material things, but treated life as something disposable.

They loved their possessions but turned their back on the Fountain of Living Waters. They did deals and went to war with all the empires of the world, but neglected the still small voice of conscience implanted within them.

Today, has anything changed?

Actually, I think it has. We can do far more damage now than ever before.

The kinds of weapons held in very few hands were unimaginable to the biblical prophets. The levels of environmental destruction that companies could reap on God’s forests, skies, and waters have never been so great. The cost of such cruelty and indifference has never been so high.

In our liturgical cycle, we are in the three weeks of warning: where we read the Prophets’ greatest indictments against the Jews. That is why today we read the words of Jeremiah, chastising our people to remember their God and cease lusting after vanity and emptiness.

In this build-up to Tish Bav, we are supposed to be confronted by the scale of the world’s wrongs and the dangers of our inaction. So, we could just leave it there, to feel angry and devastated by all the brazen ruination.

But, the rabbis taught, even in these weeks of warning, we should never go away feeling hopeless. So, in constructing the haftarah, they skip an entire chapter, to Jeremiah’s promise of restoration, where he vows:

“Turn away from your love of material possessions, and God will come straight back to you. You will be able to speak of your faith with truth, justice, and righteousness. Then you will be a blessing to the nations of the world, and everyone will come and praise my name.”

Jeremiah offers us a way out, available at any moment.

The great condemnations of the prophets might better be delivered at Davos or the United Nations, but we all have a role to play. We can remember, in our own lives, what it means to behave as if there is a God.

Let us conduct ourselves as though, one day, we will have to answer for our deeds.

Let us treat each human being as if they were created in God’s image.

Let us act as if this world is a gift from a loving Creator.

And, perhaps, through our example, the people of the world will come to remember that there is a God.

Shabbat shalom.

spirituality · story

God is sharing her location on WhatsApp

levtaylor

The king is in the field.

Last weekend, a new moon hung in the sky, marking the new month of Elul. This season, is a time dedicated to reflection on who we are and who we can become. It is a time when we turn back to God and aim at healing our relationships.

At this time, you may hear Chabadniks greet each other, saying “the king is on the field.” It comes from a story taught by the Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, who was the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitcher dynasty in the 18th Century. He used to explain the month of Elul using the parable of a king coming out in a field.

According to the analogy, the king’s usual place is in the capital city, in the royal palace. Anyone wishing to approach the king must go through the appropriate channels in the palace bureaucracy and gain the approval of a succession of secretaries and ministers. He must journey to the capital and pass through the many gates, corridors and antechambers that lead to the throne room. His presentation must be meticulously prepared, and he must adhere to an exacting code of dress, speech and mannerism upon entering into the royal presence.

However, there are times when the king comes out to the fields outside the city. At such times, anyone can approach him; the king receives them all with a smiling face and a radiant countenance. The peasant behind his plow has access to the king in a manner unavailable to the highest ranking minister in the royal court when the king is in the palace.

The king described by the Alter Rebbe in this metaphor is God. In his analogy, God is the ruler of all, but is hard to access except by an elite few. During Elul, the heavenly king comes out from his palace and makes himself accessible to all. In this month leading up to the High Holy Days, everyone has the chance to approach God, seeking favour and forgiveness.

It’s a beautiful analogy. But metaphors also have their problems, and we need to check them to see if they really work for us.

First of all, is God really a man? Well, of course not. God is too great and infinite to be held by anything as small as a body or a gender. Some Jews have therefore chosen only to use gender-neutral language to describe God, deploying words like “Holy One” and “Source of Life.” Alternatively, some Jews have chosen to reclaim divine feminine language, emphasising God’s femininity.

As Reform Jews, our belief in gender equality is essential to us, and that is bound to come through in how we think about God. To be honest, I’m happy addressing God by any pronouns because none of them capture what God really is. You can really insert whatever gender you like.

The much bigger question is what kind of personality this anthropomorphic God has. In the Lubavitcher parable, God is a king. There is plenty of precedent in Jewish tradition for such a reading: God is “adon olam,” the Lord of the universe; God’s throne is eternal and His sceptre stands upright; God is described as the king over all kings, and we are called upon to build God’s kingdom on earth.

I really don’t like this imagery at all. True, it tells us something about how powerful God is, but the image of a benevolent ruler isn’t very helpful to self-improvement. If a king tells you to change your ways, you’ll do it out of fear of violence or retribution. A king, to me, conjures up images of unearned power, and I want to deliberately rebel against it.

I prefer the idea of God as a loved one. When I approach Elul, I want to improve so that I can be the best possible version of myself. The people that make me aspire to that are my partner, best friends, and close family members. They remind me that I’m loved, and inspire me to do better by others.

This idea is also very present in Jewish interpretations of Elul. Some rabbis have noticed thar the letters of Elul could be an acronym for the beautiful love poetry of the Song of Solomon: ani ledodi vedodi li; “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” In this allegory, God and Israel are lovers working together. I much prefer this idea of equality and mutual partnership.

This idea of equality really doesn’t fit with how Chassids imagine God or social relationships. As they explain in the Alter Rebbe’s fable, God is only accessible to elite people most of the time. That is a core ideological belief for many Chassids. They see their rebbes not only as teachers but as holy men, who have a special connection to God. They advocate dveikus: cleaving to special people so that we, through them, can get closer to God.

They don’t hold this belief because they are somehow traditional and we are not. At the time when Chassidism was birthed, roughly contemporary with Reform Judaism, many of its greatest opponents within Orthodoxy criticised them for creating hierarchies and dynasties within Judaism. God, they said, had no intermediaries, and Judaism did not have hereditary hierarchies.

The story of the king in the field is quite beautiful, but when subjected to scrutiny, it looks much less appealing. It speaks to a worldview in which everything is divided up on a power ladder. Men above women; special Jews above ordinary people; and God as a king on top of it all.

That doesn’t mean we should completely abandon this teaching about Elul. The idea of coming back to God is helpful, and I adore the image of meeting God in the open country.

I want us to imagine an alternative. I want us to imagine what this theology would look like if all of humanity were equals. What would we say if our relationship to God was not a vertical one of subject to king but a horizontal one between lovers?

So, I submit to you, an alternative telling of the analogy of the king in the field, updated for modern times and modern beliefs.

God has turned on location sharing.

You receive a WhatsApp message. She is letting you know she’s on her way.

You haven’t seen her all year, so your heart immediately flutters with excitement. You can’t wait to see her again.

You love her. When she’s around, you feel like the best version of yourself. You laugh more. You give more of yourself. You feel more compassionate and honest. You want to bottle up the love you feel when you’re with her so that you can share it with others the rest of the year.

The little location sharing pin says she is inching closer towards you.

Only inching. She appears to be walking through fields. You calculate how long it might take him to reach you. Weeks, perhaps.

Still, seeing her is worth the wait. You wonder if you could meet her sooner.

You text back: “Can I meet you somewhere along the way?”

She answers instantly: “Yes.”

Your heart beats a little faster as you get dressed, tie your walking boots and head out. She walks faster than you. You will be reunited soon.

It is Elul. God is coming closer to you, and you are getting closer to God. As we trudge through the muddy fields of this month, let us relish the chance to draw nearer to our loving God.

Shabbat shalom.


high holy days · sermon

Grieving the Year

levtaylor1 Comment

Stage 1. Denial

At the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis, the grief expert David Kessler described our relationship to these unprecedented times as a mourning process:

“The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively.”

No doubt, over the past 6 months, many of us have felt that complicated array of emotions associated with grief. Indeed, today, it is hard not to feel some anxiety and dissonance that we cannot do Yom Kippur in our usual ways.

Kessler suggests that the best way to face up to this feeling is to know the stages of grief and understand them. Denial. Bargaining. Anger. Sadness. Acceptance.

Each of these feelings is important and needs to be honoured. The Jewish tradition has much to teach us about them. In each of these difficult feelings there is holiness and meaning. I am going to tell Chassidic stories about each of these stages of grief, beginning with stage one: denial.

Rabbi Shmelke once asked the Maggid of Mezritch, to explain a difficult theological concept to him. He said: “Our sages teach that we should thank God for suffering as much as for wellbeing, and receive it with the same joy. How is that possible?”

The Maggid told him to seek out Zusya. Zusya had known nothing but poverty and heartbreak in his life. He had lost his children and lived with chronic illness. “He will explain suffering to you,” said the Maggid.

Rabbi Shmelke found Zusya at the House of Study and asked him the question: how is it possible to thank God for suffering? Zusya laughed: “You’ve come to the wrong person. I haven’t suffered a day in my life.”

As Rabbi Shmelke left the room, he realised that he must accept all suffering with love.[1

Stage 2: Bargaining

Abraham bargained with God to prevent the utter annihilation of Sodom. Moses bargained with God so that not all of Korach’s supporters would be killed. ‘Perhaps,’ thought an old Jew in Jerusalem, ‘I might be able to intercede with God too.’

So every day she went down to the Kotel – the Western Wall in the Old City. Each morning, she davened and prayed to God: “Sovereign of the Universe, I beseech you. Please bring an end to this plague and to economic crisis. Please put an end to the bush fires and the wars.”

“God,” she cried out at the Wailing Wall, “if you grant us peace and stability, I will devote every moment of my life to Torah and prayer. I will be the most righteous person in the world.’

She went down every week on Shabbat. And then every morning. And then three times a day. And then she was praying every day three times a day for months on end.

Her daughter asked her: “how do you feel with your new piety?”

“Like I’m talking to a brick wall.”

Stage 3: Anger

Once, Rebbe Levi Yitchok of Berditchev saw a tailor remonstrating as he prayed, throwing his fists up in the air. After the service, he called over the tailor to ask him what he’d been saying to God.

The tailor said: “I told God what was what. I said: ‘Listen, God, you want me to repent of my sins, but I’ve only committed minor offences compared to You. Sure, I don’t keep perfect shabbat or kosher, and I’m sorry about that. But You – You have taken away mothers from their babies and babies from their mothers. You have allowed all manner of injustice to continue. So let’s call it quits: You forgive me and I’ll forgive You.”

The Berditchever Rebbe laughed: “You’re a fool. You let God off far too easy. You should have demanded the Messiah and the redemption of Israel. That would have been a much fairer exchange.”[2

Stage 4: Sadness

Once, in the middle of the night, one of the Mitteler Rebbe’s children fell out of bed. Entirely engrossed in his studies, he did not hear the child’s cries. However, his father, the Alter Rebbe, heard the cries, closed his Torah books, and went to comfort the child. The Alter Rebbe later said to his son: “No matter how deeply immersed you are in holy pursuits, when a child cries you must hear it; you must stop what you’re doing and soothe their pain.”

So too: we must hear the crying child within us, and acknowledge our own pain.

Stage 5: Acceptance

Professor Aisha Ahmad is a political analyst in Canada, who has worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Iraq, and Lebanon, often in some of the most challenging situations. She recently warned that, in her experience, the 6 month mark in a sustained crisis is always very difficult. She advises us:

“It’s not productive to try to ram your head through it. It will break naturally in about 4-6 weeks if you ride it out. This six month wall both arrives and dissipates like clockwork. So I don’t fight it anymore. We have already found new ways to live, love, and be happy under these rough conditions. Trust that the magic that helped you through the first phase is still there. You’ll be on the other side in no time.”

Once, Rabbi Mikhal of Zlotchev was asked: “You are poor, rebbe, and yet every day you thank God for taking care of all your needs. Isn’t that a lie?”

“Not at all. You see, for me, poverty is what I need.”[3]

The Baal Shem Tov in his carriage, by Eliezer Sobel

[1] Martin Buber, Tales of the Hassidim: Early Masters, pp. 237-238

[2] Louis Newman, Hassidic Anthology, p. 57

[3] Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire, p. 49