Tag: neviim

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.

debate · sermon · torah

Did the God of the Bible have a body?

levtaylor



After our wedding, everyone was excitedly sharing photos and videos. Laurence pored over them and made albums.

I liked them, but the pictures felt a bit flat. What I was craving was words.

I wanted to re-read everything everyone had said. I went about collecting the speeches people had given, and recounted them again. On honeymoon, Laurence and I re-read our vows to each other, this time pausing and discussing them.

I discovered anew how much more I loved words than pictures or videos. Pictures are static. Even videos, because they only caption one moment from one perspective, feel too final.

To me, words feel so much more alive. Stories are such a great way to engage with events and ideas, because they can be retold so many times and in different ways.

Isn’t this, after all, what religion is: storytelling to access something sublime and unfathomable; a collaboration by people sharing their best narratives and ideas?

We have inherited a literary tradition, our Torah, which is an exercise in storytelling:  a process of openly wondering at the world through poetic sagas and emotion-filled songs.

For some, however, these stories fall flat. They see the words the way that I see pictures.

Fundamentalists will look at our story of a donkey talking to a prophet about an angel and think: that must be the historical truth of what happened.

Similarly, the New Atheists look at this beautiful poetic piece about the prophet Balaam and think: how stupid must religious people be to believe this nonsense?

This is not just a misunderstanding of Scripture. It’s a misunderstanding of storytelling itself.

Seemingly, it does not occur to them that this might be an invitation into conversation. They can’t comprehend that this might be a poem, crying out to be read aloud, sung, chanted, interpreted, and retold to make sense of all the wonders of the world.

Perhaps these talking animals and sword-wielding celestial beings aren’t part of history textbooks but reveal a different kind of truth altogether.

In Britain, we are mercifully spared from most of these types of fundamentalist reading. We don’t have to deal with as many evangelical Christians as our American cousins do.

But we have our own local brand of biblical literalists. They are the radical atheists who have got to know our sacred texts solely for the purpose of showing how irrational they are. The most famous of them is Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a biblical scholar at the University of Exeter.

In 2021, Stavrakopoulou brought out her most recent work, God: An Anatomy. The book’s objective is to show that the God of the Bible was an embodied being. He was a gargantuan man with a big beard who sat on his throne in the Jerusalem Temple, gobbling up the sacrifices priests burned for Him.

The God of the Bible, Stavrakopoulou argues, was just like any other ancient god: basically a massive person with all the associated wants and desires. She collapses about 4,000 years of history and three continents into one culture and seeks to show that the biblical god was just like all the others.

And, like all the others, the biblical god had a body.

Sometimes, her evidence for this scant. There are entire pages dedicated to making quite wild claims about the biblical god, appended with just one footnote that points to an obscure translation of a verse from the Psalms.

But, overall, there is plenty of material to go off. If you open up any page of Tanach, you will probably find God described in anthropomorphic terms.

Take our haftarah.

This week’s reading comes from the book of Habakkuk, a 6th Century BCE Prophet in Judah. The book is a vivid war fantasy, where the prophet describes the Judahites crushing the invading armies, some time in the mythic past, and hopes that it will happen again.

Throughout the text, God comes alive as a warrior. He (and I’m going to use the masculine pronoun advisedly here) is an embodied fighter on behalf of the people.

God’s hand lights up with radiance; God’s feet trample over mountains; God’s piercing eyes make the nations trembled with fear. 

God has all the equipment of an ancient military commander. He rides in on a chariot  with His horses and shoots out arrows from His archer’s bow. God rips the spear from the opposing general’s arm and stabs it into his head.

How are we supposed to read this?

Well, for a biblical literalist, you have to take it at face value. That’s exactly what Stavrakopoulou does. She makes the case that this was precisely how the ancient biblical authors and audience understood their god.

Their god was a big bloke with some massive weapons and blood lust.

Stavrakopoulou draws on other ancient gods, whose worshippers also describe them in embodied terms. The Canaanite high god El also had radiant arms. The Akkadian god Enki also trampled over mountains. The Assyrian god Ashur also fought with a bow.

The Israelites, then, were just riffing on old themes. Like the Pagans around them, they were silly enough to believe in all that religious nonsense of big beings. The biblical god was no different to Zeus or Jupiter.

Overall, reading Stavrakopoulou, you get the impression of someone listening to a concerto who can identify every note from every instrument but cannot hear the music. Her entire objective is to show that the tune isn’t even that good because other songs have been written before.

All the way through, it seems like a strange motivation for going to all the effort of learning Scripture and Ancient Near Eastern texts. Then, we get to the final chapter, entitled “Autopsy,” and we understand her true objectives.

She concludes: “the God of the Bible looks nothing like the deity disected and dismissed by modern atheism. […] Their dead deity is a post-biblical hybrid being, a disembodied, science-free Artificial Intelligence, assembled over two thousand years from selected scraps of ancient Jewish mysticism, Greek philosophy, Christian doctrine, Protestant iconoclasm and European colonialism. In the contemporary age, this composite being has become a god who forgot to create dinosaurs and failed to account for evolution; a god who allows cancer to kill children but hates abortion…”

Stavrakopoulou despises religious belief. So, if she can demonstrate that the biblical god was just like the Egyptian pantheon, and that this embodied god could be killed, then she can also strip the modern god of His powers and kill Him too.

This is the worst of Enlightenment hubris. 19th-century anti-religionists imagined that all religion was just silly superstition, which would eventually be washed away by the cold science of reason.

Our movement, like all progressive religions, has consistently argued for an alternative approach. We see all of history as an evolving effort to understand the sacred mystery beyond our comprehension.

It almost certainly is true that, before Ezra led the exiles back from Babylonian captivity in the 4th Century BCE, most Israelites did worship a small pantheon of Canaanite deities. The Prophets from before this time regularly condemn them for it.

But, while they may have been idolaters, they were not idiots.

If you told one of them that you’d just seen the fertility goddess Asherah out for a stroll in the marketplace, or that the storm god Baal came to your house this morning for a cup of tea, they would think something was wrong with you.

Another scholar of ancient religion, Iraqi Assyriologist Zainab Bahrani, helps us make sense of the ancient worldview. For the Mesopotamians, images were not reproductions of originals like portraits and photographs are for us today.

Instead, they saw their icons as ways of writing existence into being. They were in an active process with their gods of creating reality.

In matters of religion, literal interpretations are dead-ends. Words like metaphor don’t do it justice. Symbols like clay deities stand in for whole cosmologies. They are ways that human beings have tried to understand something that, by definition, is beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps most importantly, Stavrakopoulou misses what a massive departure it was that ancient Israelites abandoned all images in favour of a predominantly literary culture.

In a society where you cannot depict God, but can only engage in description and storytelling, you have to be more imaginative when you try to make sense of infinity.

Poems, sagas, and speeches, like those from our Tanach, are never fixed in their meaning. They are openings that invite listeners to think with them, talk back to them, and struggle for deeper understandings.

When someone reads a text too literally, they strip it of its vitality. Atheists and fundamentalists, both literalists of different kinds, strip the soul from the search for divine truth.

Tell stories, make poems, create art, look for that great truth beyond our reach… and don’t take any of it too seriously.

sermon · social justice

Were our prophets crazy?

levtaylor

There was once a magician, a wicked magician, who constructed a mirror whose purpose was that everything good and beautiful, when reflected in it, shrank up almost to nothing, whilst those things that were ugly and useless were magnified, and made to appear ten times worse than before. The loveliest landscapes reflected in this mirror looked like boiled spinach; and the handsomest persons appeared odious, so distorted that their friends could never have recognised them. 

This is the opening of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Snow Queen. I begin with this story because there was a time when this was how the world looked to me. I once saw the world as full of threats, violence and despair. 

I received a diagnosis of anxiety and was placed on medication. I began talking therapy, which I have now done on and off for many years. I changed my diet and began regular exercise. For what felt like the first time, beautiful landscapes looked like beautiful landscapes, instead of boiled spinach. Friends looked like friends instead of enemies. The world looked… normal. I felt like I could finally think.

Today is Mental Health Shabbat. Across the Jewish community, we are encouraged to spend this day reflecting on our own mental health and that of those around us. 

Sometimes, today, preachers will come up with prescriptions, about how everyone can just sort themselves out. Like how everyone needs to talk more, or we could all do with being kinder, or perhaps we just need more walks in the woods. I find these sermons quite patronising, oblivious to people’s individual circumstances, and insensitive to the realities of psychosis and personality disorders. Not everything can be so easily solved. 

One of the problems with advocating for everyone to be more well-adjusted is, well, adjusted to what? Do we not live in a world that really does pose depressing realities? Do we not see around us a society gripped by isolation and defeat? 

If we want to seriously think about mental health, we need to ask much more probing questions. I want us to think about what sanity and madness really means. I want us to ask real questions about how anyone can be sane in a society gone so wrong. 

That, I think, is part of the question our Prophets were trying to answer. Since the dawn of biblical criticism, scholars have asked whether our prophets were crazy. These great men and women of ancient times saw visions nobody else could see; wept in the street when everyone else went about their daily lives; shouted angrily at a deity that nobody else believed would listen. If they were alive today, they would surely be committed, imprisoned, or put on some very strong drugs.

The greatest of these crazy prophets was Jeremiah, whose haftarah we read today. He is so associated with depression that, as a noun, the word ‘jeremiad’ means “ a writing or speech in a strain of grief or distress.” His very name conjures images of sadness and despair; of a tortured soul who saw unfolding doom and was ignored in his predictions.

He was, in his time, treated like a madman. For the crime of speaking his prophecies, Jeremiah was placed in stocks and ridiculed. When his visions came true and Babylon besieged Jerusalem, he was imprisoned by the Judean King in the courthouse. Rulers even tried to kill him. Mocked, assaulted, tortured and imprisoned, Jeremiah was treated as a crazy menace throughout his life, and ended it weeping over the destruction of his city.

We should not be surprised that others saw him as mad. From the moment he received his first prophecy, Jeremiah was assaulted by visions of mundane objects revealing hidden messages to him. In the branch of an almond tree, Jeremiah saw the fulfilment of God’s promises. In a steaming kettle, he envisioned warmongering enemies descending from the north. Modern psychologists might interpret these as paranoid hallucinations, and perhaps it is only the holiness of the ancient text that stops us from agreeing with them.

To meet in public, Jeremiah would have been a frightening sight. He stood at the gates of the city. He ranted at the perceived sinners of the city, telling them that their carcasses would be eaten by birds; that their graves would be dug up and desecrated; and their wives handed over to their enemies.  If you heard such things from someone standing outside a train station, you, too, would likely conclude that the speaker was mad. 

But, perhaps, Jeremiah saw his society more clearly than the sane people who surrounded him. Jeremiah saw widows and orphans attacked; the wealthy hoarding all the resources; the privileged living in luxury while refusing to support those in need. 

If Jeremiah had looked upon such a society and accepted it, or tried only to tinker with it and reason with it, who would he be? We might well accuse him of being callously indifferent.

Yet that is how most of us get by. The way most of us function in this sick society, surrounded by exploitation and greed, is to ignore it. If we truly reflected on all the injustice in the world and saw how complicit we were in its continuity, we would all join Jeremiah in going mad.

So, where does this leave us? I know I’m not going to give up my medication or all the tools I have found to live a better life. I actually want to participate in society, and love that I am no longer gripped by anxiety. 

But I also don’t want to impose a world where everyone sees the same reality. People with mental health issues are often detained and restrained, rather than understood. 

The message of Mental Health Shabbat cannot only be talking more, but also listening more, especially to people who have been labelled as insane. 

I want us to hear people in their depression, in their anxiety, and in their psychosis. I want us to truly listen to what everyone has to say, even if it doesn’t conform to the worldview we know.

That doesn’t mean agreeing with everything others say, or never challenging it. It just means taking it seriously. Just as when we approach sacred texts, we can oppose them while recognising their holiness, so we can do with people. 

So, on this Mental Health Shabbat, I urge you: if you can listen to the Prophets, you can listen to your neighbours in their distress too.

Shabbat shalom.