Thoughts on God

As a Jew, I listen to and learn from the many voices on God in our traditions - Moses’ God places the Israelites first, Jonah’s God loves all peoples equally, and Job’s God cautions us that we can never understand God’s ways. Maimonides wrote that we can only say what God is not.

For me, God is the mystery at the center of existence. When we imagine something beyond ourselves we get some perspective on our lives. That’s my intellectual God.

When things work, when all goes according to plan, or despite our plans, all works out beautifully anyway, I can feel God. This can happen anywhere - on a mountain with all the earth spread out below me in awe of creation, in a prayer service sharing an insight or a moment of singing together, sharing time with a loved one. Listening closely, with all of my senses, I can tune into the God I feel.

When great ideas come together - usually through a combination of conversation and contemplation - I sense something bigger at work. That hugeness connecting with my small self and helping me find something new - that’s my spiritual and inspiring God.

My Jewish God asks me to use our connections to our people, our texts, our traditions, and our land to find the divine in all these ways, and then share them, teach from them, discuss them so that we can use them together to improve ourselves, our families and our communities.

Reality-Based Spirituality, Part 2

Martin Buber writes, in the opening of his work “I and Thou”, about the different ways that we treat others - in his words, we either create an “I-You” relationship, or an “I-It” relationship. Buber seems to indicate that the relationship chosen - one that treats another like a real entity (“I-You”), or one that treats another like an object (“I-It”) - impacts far more greatly on the self, than on the other. 

In other words, when I relate to a person, place or thing as if that entity were an object, regardless of the possible negative impact I may have on that entity - say I was off-putting or disregarding to a person - the greater effect can be felt by me in the way that I have diminished myself by being someone who so diminishes another. Objectifying people, or things for that matter, diminishes ourselves, because we in turn objectify ourselves in the process.

How is this a spiritual insight?

Judaism teaches through the doing of things, the observance of commandments that place behavioral requirements upon us. Many of these behavioral structures fall into society building and improving categories - standards of reasonable behavior to get along with others. Buber’s insight leads us to the notion that behaving well towards others leads us to internal growth as well - entering into real relating, subject to subject relating, transforms us.

And so, Jewish spirituality begins with good conduct. One cannot be a private mystic in Judaism - the mystical path requires pursuing the path of the mensch, the good human being, as well. By continuing to struggle to be the better person to those around us, we engage in psychological, emotional, and spiritual growth. By becoming the better mensch, we become the better mystic.

Let us view this as a slight corrective to the popular concept of religion and spirituality in current American culture. Sitting by oneself, meditating, and reading holy texts - laudable pursuits, all of these, yet not enough on their own. Where the insight hits the interaction is where progress is made. Let us all start with being better neighbors and citizens, and see what that does for our spiritual growth.

 

[The full quote from Martin Buber’s I and Thou (Kaufman translation, Touchstone, 1970, page 53), reads:

The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude.

The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two basic words he can speak.

The basic words are not single words but word pairs.

One basic word is the word pair I-You.

The other basic word is the word pair I-It; but this basic word is not changed when He or She takes the place of It.

Thus the I of man is also twofold.

For the I of the basic word I-You is different from that in the basic word I-It.]

Getting back into it

After a long hiatus, I have returned to start this project again.

Upcoming posts will include an expansion of Reality-Based Spirituality - including some commentaries stemming from the study of Martin Buber's I and Thou, and Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Bright Sided.

Today, I am merely working on the challenge of return - returning to an old place as a new person.

Ginny, my wife, recently got struck by the insight that with the universe in constant motion, we never return to the same spot, ever - an expanded view of the old adage about never being able to step into the same water in a river twice.

We have returned to Northern Nevada after a long hiatus - a rabbinic sabbatical of nearly four months. During that time I worked quite a lot on personal emotional growth, and our return to our home has been punctuated by a need to feel like we will not slide back to where we started. And of course, we can't really.

Yet, that is little solace as we try to return to regular habits and rhythms - especially the positive ones. I am working on a consciousness of things, a deliberation, so that I think deeply about my responses to events going on around me. I hope to work on being a better agent for the values that I care most deeply about - compassion for others, reverence for the universe, and agency for bringing those values into the world.

In all of this, what I find to be spiritual is the breathing in the moment of reaction, working to opt for saying, "Give me time to think about this," as opposed to coming up with an answer right away. I hope to find some connection to deeper meaning in better pauses.

Reality-Based Spirituality

When we speak of religion and spirituality often people associate such ideas with an “other world” perspective. Yet, for a spiritual path to work we should find it rooted in the reality of our experiences, not in some idealized but unreal notions.

Hence a quick look at what I call the spirituality of pessimism.

Barbara Ehrenreich speaks of this in her new book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, which sounds fascinating. One can also understand relentless optimism as undermining spirituality.

When we face difficulties, someone telling us that they must spring from something we did wrong – we didn’t eat right and thus we got cancer, God forbid; or some corners of the fundamentalist Jewish world, a tragedy happened because we had incorrect scrolls in our mezuzot (see explanation below) – neither helps us, nor offers a helpful spiritual understanding of the universe.

If our actions truly could avert every difficulty, then we would possess supernatural powers. Furthermore, this supports a theology of the rich, who must be wealthy because they deserve it, and those who suffer must have done something to deserve that as well. Both of these perspectives – a sense that we can change everything, and a sense that thus everyone is getting what they deserve – deny the universe any real power beyond humans on the one hand, and pervert a fatalist idea that our fate is determined by our position of birth.

A spiritual path should work to connect us with that which dwarfs us in the universe, with those powers beyond our understanding and control, from which we may gain solace and strength in troubled times, and celebration in better times. When we place ourselves at the center of the universe, with no power above us we act out of great hubris, or what one scholar called, functional atheism (continuing to live in the Mississippi flood plain expecting there to never be another flood could be an example of this denial of a power greater than ourselves).

Grappling with what we really find in the universe, even when it may not be “all good” causes us to reflect deeply on how we deal with the good and the bad. This promotes growth, thought, and innovation on personal and communal levels, which a notion that “all will be well should we only think good thoughts” tends to avoid.

Healthy pessimism helps us grow as people, and as communities, just as healthy optimism does – let’s aim to keep them both in perspective.

 

Note on mezuzot – a mezuzah, the Hebrew plural is –ot, is a small container affixed to the doorway of many Jewish homes which contains, in very tiny calligraphy or print, the passages from the Hebrew Scriptures that say, “and you should inscribe these words on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Some Jewish sects claim that difficulties and tragedies may stem from flaws in the text on the scroll in the box of a family’s mezuzah.