Rabbi Rami posed these questions. Good blog fodder, I figured.

1. Do you think your faith is the one true faith, or do you believe that there are many paths to Truth?

I believe that Judaism is the True Faith for Jews. For a whole variety of reasons, some cultural and historical, and some fuzzily metaphysical. I believe that Judaism points to deeper universal objective truths, but there are perhaps infinite ways of obtaining and living by that truth. Furthermore, I do not think that any faith or religious system guarantees living a Godly or “Truthy” life. It is up to the individual to heed the message embedded in their faith/moral/ethical/philosophical system.

2. If your faith has a Holy Book, what makes it holy? How do you know your book is true? Are the Holy Books of other religions as holy as your own? If not, why not?

Our Holy books are holy because they are an expression of God’s will and Truth, and reveal a face of God. I know that this is true because every text contains such potential truth, including King Lear and Spiderman. Some texts and textual commentaries are more self-aware than others and reveal their messages more or less explicitly than others and from within their varying cultural and temporal contexts. Are other books as holy as those of my religion? Perhaps, maybe even probably. But not to me. Why? Cause I’m a Jew, silly.

3. As a person of faith, what is your obligation to all the other peoples in the world?

My obligations as a person of faith boil down, I believe, to three basic principles: Love God. Love my neighbor. Pursue justice. These all come down to recognizing the ultimate THOU, and recognizing the spark of THOU in every YOU, thus recognizing the “I” in every YOU, which makes my obligation to other people and other peoples, in principle, the same as my obligation to myself. Practically, however, this of course doesn’t work out, because if I do not put myself first, I lose my means by which to be of service to others. Same, I think, goes for peoplehood. It is our place as a people, especially Jews who are meant to be “A light unto the nations” to be of service not only to God but to the peoples of the world. But there is a need to care for our own peoplehood as a prerequisite to caring, as a people, for other peoples. Service starts at home, but must ultimately be to the end of reaching beyond the self.

4. When they die, what happens to those who do not accept your faith?

How am I supposed to know? I don’t even know what happens to those OF my faith when we die!

5. When your theology disagrees with scientific fact and proven theory (theory as understood in scientific circles not everyday speech), do you adapt to science, or insist science adapt to your theology?

My theology doesn’t disagree with scientific fact or proven theory. Never really has.

6. Why do you believe what you believe about God, creation, humanity, and the afterlife?

Oh boy… that’s a big and complex question. Problem with answering this question is that it involves some terms that need defining, like “believe” “God” “Creation” etc. The simple answer is that my belief system is a narrative view of reality, and that the narrative is one of my People and religion, and therefore an appropriate one for me to hold by. It is not my only narrative, as I am a multifaceted person, as are we all, but it is a lens through which I view everything and which informs every aspect of my life. Also I find the Jewish narrative to be one of exceptional complexity and beauty.

I suspect the next time I write here it will involve some defining of terms.

Ok, so I have something Jewish to write about. Or, you know, semi-Jewish. Or not Jewish… Jewish related. Depending on how you define what is or is not “Jewish.” I’m talking about the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding. This was the subject of a d’var Torah I gave last week at my shul. Before I begin, let me reiterate the basics of how I think about and practice my religion:

I am Jewish. I hold by The Conservative Movement of Judaism, as I understand it, because it it what makes sense to me. I also happen to have been raised in this Movement, but my practice and philosophy have changed since I was a child and are currently quite different from that of my parents. I believe that Jewish law, halacha, is binding upon each individual Jew. I believe that a Jew, halachically speaking, is someone whose mother is halachically Jewish at the time of their birth, or who undergoes a kosher conversion. I believe that, since it is against Jewish law for a Jew to marry a non-Jew, it is obligatory upon Jews not to do so, and not to facilitate such an occurrence.

I also believe that we are commanded to love all Jews, even those who do not uphold or adhere to the law. Further, I believe that we are commanded to love all people, and that to be a “Light Unto The Nations,” a “Holy Nation,” a “Nation of Priests” necessarily entails our living and demonstrating three principles above all: Love God. Love your neighbor. Pursue justice.

So now, we come to a question of humility. Humility is a Jewish value. It is high praise indeed to be referred to in Judaism as a humble person. It is said that even God practices humility (nice midrash, Breishit Rabbah 1:12 that I learned from my Rav, Shmuel Lewis). Humility, I believe, is an essential quality in anyone who hopes to work with people in a religious capacity. In the field of “doing God’s work,” one must always be cognizant of where ego creeps in and blinds us to the needs of our employers, God, and the People. I try to remind myself daily of how little I know, and that I must remain teachable. I must remember that my job is to trust in God and God’s will for me and for the world, and to remember that I do not have all of the answers.

On the one hand, my humility in my religion very often means trusting in the Tradition, setting aside my personal biases in favor of the Law and the Text and the Rabbis, learning and DOING what I can, while being patient about understanding. The commandments are not contingent upon my being satisfied with their reasons, and often I must first do the practice in order for the Truth to come to me, to realize where the value lies in something that might initially seem distasteful to me… realizing why I should adhere to a law that is particularly inconvenient, why the seemingly ridiculous minutiae of Shabbat observance makes sense, what makes texts which, on the surface, are contradictory, fit together with a little Midrash and why that process is good, and how it can be understood as The Word Of God… my holding by the binding nature of Jewish law is an exercise in humility for me. It is my challenge to the comfortable easy “well this is how I feel and this is what I want” attitude which is so seductive in our society. It is acknowledging that God has a will that supersedes my own, that what *feels* right is not always what *is* right, that sometimes you cannot understand until you get down to the *doing.*

Of course, the other side of this coin is that everything I stated above constitutes a belief system… a belief system to which I strongly adhere. On the inside, it is a practice of humility. From the outside though, it may seem like an arrogant certainty. I am studying to be a rabbi. A rabbi is a teacher. In order to teach something, you must have something to teach. We no longer have prophets, it is the rabbis who carry the prophetic message to the people. I have been already blessed with the opportunity to do more study of Judaism and Jewish law than your average Conservative Jew can even dream of… and I’ve only been at it seriously for 3 years, and I have another 5 to go at least before, God willing, I am ordained. I have some knowledge… I know some things that they don’t.

Marc Mezvinsky, a Jew, has married Chelsea Clinton, a non-Jew. They were married in an interfaith ceremony where clergy from two different religions, a Reform rabbi and a Methodist minister, co-officiated. This is something that Jewish law forbids. For a person who doesn’t believe that Jewish law is binding, they’re likely not going to care about that… though even the Reform Movement’s main Rabbinic body, the CCAR, advises their clergy not to co-officiate with non-Jewish clergy in performing marriages. For someone like me, who does believe that Jewish law is binding, I have to look at this marriage, and I have to say that it is forbidden, I believe, by God’s law for us, the Children of Israel, the Jews.

So. Love God. Love your neighbor. Pursue justice. Above all. Do I condemn Jews who do not adhere to Jewish law? Nobody is a perfect adherent to Jewish law, even the most observant. Nobody knows everything about Jewish law. Not everybody has been given sufficient reason in their life to believe that Jewish law is binding. This is reality. This is understanding that other people live different lives. This is knowing that I don’t walk in other people’s shoes, have their experiences, fully understand their thought processes.

This is not me congratulating myself on how tolerant and accepting and open-minded I am… this is rather something of which I have to constantly remind myself. When you take the time to study very intensely in Yeshiva, and then you come back to the real world, it is very easy to be become very intolerant. I know I was after my first year of study. When I first stepped into the Beit Midrash of The Yeshiva, one of my earliest lessons was one of humility: the realization of just how little I knew, and how much there was to learn. Stepping out after a year and coming back to visit home and my community, that humility was flipped on its head. Here I was, only a year of study, knowing that if I studied nonstop for the rest of my life I would still not know all there was to know, even all I wanted to know about my religion. And here I was suddenly thrown back into an environment where the people around me didn’t have even that… and didn’t care. Not only didn’t they have the learning, not only didn’t they know, they had NO IDEA even what it was they didn’t know. And it didn’t even matter to them. It tore me apart inside. I didn’t know how to handle this new reality, how to live in such a community after spending a year with a learning community, a group of people who learned and grew Jewishly alongside me, who helped each other along in coming to understand the vast richness of our tradition. Suddenly I was in a barren soulless wasteland. How was I to cope?

I have since calmed down. I have come to be gentler with others and with myself, trying to teach wherever the opportunity arises for me to do so, if it is wanted and welcomed. I have worked hard to get better at accepting people where they are and celebrating what they, what we have rather than lamenting what they, and I, do not. All that said, I am not willing to do or say certain things.

I am not willing to disregard Jewish law, to say that it is unimportant, ever.
I am not willing to say that I think someone is living in accordance with Jewish law when I truly believe that they are not, based on my learning.
I am not willing to perform an action that I believe to be in violation of Jewish law for the sake of pluralism.
I am not willing to say directly that it is ok for a Jewish person to violate Jewish law. What I will say is that Jewish observance is a journey that we all travel at our own pace according to our own abilities. The best any of us can do is to be as honest with ourselves and with God as we possibly can, and to try our best to do what we hear as God’s will. If we live with honesty and integrity, we are on a path of holiness, and God always loves us no matter what.

There are multiple legitimate interpretations of halacha, and what one person may hold as halachic another may hold as a violation. That is nothing new. That is one thing. Sometimes, some people, for some reason, are compelled to violate halacha. Sometimes it is out of ignorance, sometimes it is out of a personal necessity. That is another thing. It’s not for me to judge them morally. I do not believe it makes someone a “bad Jew.” I do not believe that it makes God love any of us any less. But it doesn’t mean that the halacha is in accordance with whatever they do. It doesn’t mean that the halacha goes away.

I have my understanding of what my religion dictates. That understanding is not my own invention. It is based on the learning I have been blessed to receive from many wonderful teachers, who in turn learned from their teachers, and so on back until God only knows how long ago. I work very hard at using the language of humility when speaking of my religion, but I also have to take a stand at some point and admit that there is a limit to the boundaries of Judaism. In many ways Judaism is about boundaries, about distinctions. Many call this exclusivism, tribalism, elitism. Arrogance. That may be true in some ways, to some people, and in the way some Jews practice and speak of the faith and the peoplehood. Personally, I believe it is about something else… about having the humility to admit that you don’t understand everything, that those who came before had wisdom worth listening to, and that we do dishonor to ourselves and to our predecessors by forgetting who we are and where we came from.

Sometimes I feel as though my even having any sort of belief or boundary is grounds to be accused of arrogance and small-mindedness. But if (future) clergy can’t have beliefs and faith and principles, then where have we gotten ourselves to?

I’ve been wanting to post about this here for a while… might as well use the momentum.

I remember a Saturday afternoon in Jerusalem last year spent with my friend Paul (Yankele) from Yeshiva. We sat in the living room of some classmates and talked for hours. The subject of much of the conversation was how much we had come to like Shabbat.

Here’s the thing about Shabbat for a halachically observant Jew… it comes. And you have to let go of everything. You simply have to. It is required. You put down your phone, you put away your money, you put on nice clothes, light candles, walk to shul, and you can’t worry. Whatever you might be worried about, there’s nothing that you can do about it for the next 25 hours. All you can do for right now is look around you, breathe in and breathe out, praise God, eat, rest, laugh, hug, talk, study… Shabbat forces you to take a break. It gives you an excuse to be with people, to not stray too far. You have to be where you are. Shabbat forces you to appreciate the world as it is at this moment.

On Shabbat, we don’t change things. It is not our place. This is the day we let go and leave everything up to Not Us.

There are a lot of laws of Shabbat observance, mostly about what one is not allowed to do. There is a set of laws about what is called muktze, dealing with the category of things that one is not allowed to touch or handle on Shabbat. You are not supposed to handle anything on Shabbat that doesn’t have a legitimate Shabbat use. You are also not supposed to pick any plants, anything attached to the ground. You are not supposed to write. You are not supposed to engage in commerce or touch money, or even discuss commerce. Though there is some debate about this, most accept that you are not supposed to use electricity on Shabbat. You are not supposed to make fire or cook.

A lot of people have a problem with these laws. They see these laws, they see the whole thing, as unnecessarily restrictive, bothersome and annoying, and not conducive to what they regard as “rest,” which they equate with enjoyment. I didn’t get it either until about the middle of my first year in Yeshiva. I was walking to shul Friday evening. It was not yet Shabbat but I had davened Mincha already and lit my candles and consciously accepted shabbat early. I was walking down Derech Beit Lechem and all of Jerusalem smelled like honeysuckle. I love honeysuckle. I love the smell, and the flowers are beautiful, and they remind me of the happy parts of my childhood. As I passed a honeysuckle bush, I had an urge to pick one. But I couldn’t. Because it was Shabbat (for me) already and you don’t pick things on shabbat. And so I stepped back, and I looked. And it was so beautiful.

And suddenly everything was so beautiful. I stepped back and I saw a vision of the world on Shabbat… a world where you don’t touch the pictures. You don’t mess with it, you just live in it. That is what Shabbat is. It’s the day on which you just live, and you don’t touch the things that you don’t need to just live. Why touch them if they are just going to take you out of the space? Why carry your phone if it will just tempt you to try to control things? Why carry money if it will lead you to do business, or to even think about business, and worry about how much you can or cannot acquire? It is healthy, I would say even necessary, to have a day where you let go of the desire to control the world, to make marks and changes, to have an impact. Six days out of the week you have for that. One day, you can just let it go. One day you can reassess your place in the grand scheme and realize that the world won’t end if you don’t have your cellphone.

Shabbat is about acceptance. And that is rest in a very true sense.

The kids I think of as my baby cousins are the ones who, about 15 years ago I realized, didn’t know who Mr. Hooper was. At 28 and a half years old, it is getting more and more difficult to deny the fact that I am, in fact, an adult… maybe even a grownup. Any my baby cousins… well, they are clearly no longer babies. They are in high school and college and even graduated, some of them. And they now inhabit many of the same worlds of culture and media as do I. They’ve caught up with the online world I’ve watched develop through my own adolescence and young adulthood, and I’m encountering them on Facebook and Twitter, giving me a window into their lives, and them a window into mine, that was once screened from mutual view by the venetian blinds of age discrepancy. Now the blinds are open, which leaves me pondering a glaring question about my own status as a member of the first wave of the Internet Age.

We all remember when our parents and even *gasp* our grandparents started to figure out email and AIM and slowly started to trickle onto Facebook. Many of us felt threatened, invaded, even a bit disgusted at the prospect of sharing online space with the generations above us. We were embarrassed by their clumsy mass-emails, forwarded jokes, tactless comments, as they tested the waters of this new pool we’d grown up splashing about in. Even for those of us whose parents were part of the development of the technologies we used with such dexterity, it was our generation that made a culture of the internet, who made it a home. Our parents’ halting forays into this world seemed child-like to us as we are reminded of our first clumsy websites written in awkward HTML with blinking text and primitive clipart at age 13 or so.

So for my 12-year-old cousin Sam, my 18-year-old cousin Daniel, or even my 22-year-old cousin Rebecca, what is it that they see when they notice a friend request from their older cousin Gella? How do they experience my comments on their statuses and pictures? Do they have the same awkward feeling we had when Mom or Dad or Uncle Paul wanted to be our internet buddies? Do they cringe at our ability to see the pictures of where they’ve been, what they’ve done and with whom, with whom they are currently in a relationship, the sort of language they use with their friends? Are we, the former young and hip internet generation the old fogeys of this world already?

I can’t help but ponder the differences in how we developed with the internet, we and the internet growing up together like classmates, learning as we went. We who started with Bulletin Boards and IRC and Prodigy and listservs, we who remember the start of AOL, we who learned to type on Apple IIe computers in elementary school… whereas these kids today, they are coming into maturity a world in which the Internet is already grown up and established. They learned URL along with ABC. And whereas we grew up in an Internet of which our parents were largely ignorant, they are growing up in an Internet which their parents have learned to regard, to use, and to try to monitor. It’s a different world for them, but I’m troubled by the question of how different.

When I first saw my kid cousins had gotten themselves Facebook accounts, I must admit, I had mixed feelings. A combination of “Oh, isn’t that cute!” and “They’re growing up so fast!” and “I’d better watch what I say” and, I’ll confess, a measure of the same sense of invasion that I felt when Mom figured out how to create her own profile. I find myself now, somewhat pathetically, wondering if I am the embarrassment to Sam that Grandma was to me when she sent that first IM, formatted like a letter, opened and sealed with salutations “Dear Gella” and “Love Grandma.” We are not clumsy, we know what we are doing. But do we know better or not as well as the young’uns now joining our ranks?

I have no answers.