Like Losing My Religion

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That was just a dream . . .
That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spot. light. I’m losing my religion . . .

REM, Low(Bootleg) Album            

A few days ago, I awoke from a dream to find myself here at the ranch, sun pouring across the mesa outside my window and finch traffic at the birdbath. The dream was one of those weird ones that signal the changes of seasons and even deeper changes in me. And as I sat up in bed, feeling not quite awake yet, I thought: It must be Elul. I have these numinous dreams rarely, and when I do it is at this time and this season.

In this dream, there were no transitions, just sudden change of scenes, as if I had been dropped into the middle of filming an ongoing movie. There are two parts I remember quite vividly, and the rest is a blur of impressions that faded immediately upon my awakening.

First, I am suddenly inside our synagogue, in the social hall, floating among people, and I realize that I don’t know a single soul among them, and then I see that their faces are all the same.
Later, I am in the parking lot, down on the level of the pavement, and I  was looking at  two outdated jeeps parked against the wall, one listing away from the other, and both sitting on their frames, no tires. The plates are tagged with dates in the 5750’s. I reach out to touch the jeep on the right, and instead find myself placing my open hand on a pile of clothes. I know that I need to pick them up, take them inside, because somebody there has need of them. As I lift each article, I notice that one item belonged to me once, a red skirt I wore at my Bat Mitzvah, and I fold it up because it doesn’t fit me anymore. . .

That morning as we had our morning coffee in bed, I turned to the Engineering Geek and told him that it was the first of Elul and that we had to think seriously about the upcoming Holy Days, and make some decisions. He nodded. He knew. We’ve been putting it off for a long time. I said that there are two issues, and I think need to be considered separately. The easiest is the issue of dues. The hardest is whether we should end our membership altogether and what we should do for the Holy Days.

The EG nodded. He said that we cannot afford the dues we are expected to pay. This is a problem we had thought we resolved in March of last year, three months after the EG retired from Sandia. We made a personal visit with administrator there to put our dues in abeyance until we could see how long it would take us to begin bringing in money with our businesses, and what it would be like to live on the pension and our investments out here at Freedom Ridge. But despite the arrangement, the synagogue kept sending bills for the amount we paid before, and at membership renewal, they continued our membership at the old rate. They have a policy, I have been told, that if members do not renew and do not formally resign, we are continued at the previous rate. I don’t know what happened to our arrangements in labyrinthine depths of the computers where such transactions are preserved,  but I think it would be fairly easy to get this resolved.

Before we resolve it, though, we have to decide the hard question: should we continue membership? Even to consider this is almost like losing my religion, like relinquishing that which reconnects me again and again to my own past, our past and that of the people Israel who gather, learn and pray in that place.

All of my adult life I have been a member of this synagogue. My children had all of their life-cycle ceremonies there:  her naming, his brit milah,  their consecrations, bat and bar mitzvah, and confirmations. At that bimah, I was called to Torah for the first time as an adult bat mitzvah. Under the chuppah there, I was married to the Engineering Geek. From that sanctuary, I had expected to be taken to my final rest in the Congregation Albert Cemetery. There, I have celebrated the festivals, observed the fasts, heard the sound of the Shofar, welcomed the Sabbath Bride.

And yet, much of the connection has been slipping away of itself, as the Reform movement has become less about religion—the reconnection of people with the longings of their souls—and more about politics. When did Reform Judaism lose the prophetic voice of ethical monotheism for ritual without reason? When did it substitute “social justice” for G-d’s demand to choose life and reject death, made directly from the Mountain alive with smoke and fire, the Bat Kol resonating down through the centuries and into each of us, penetrating to our very bones? When did it replace the call of our Rabbis* to learn and understand and choose what is good with dictates from the Religious Action Center, replacing the majesty of Law with social-democratic political policy?

*The capital “R” denotes the Tanaim and Amoraim, the founders of Rabbinic Judaism whose discussions and arguments became the Talmud, the teaching and conversation across time that kept the flame alive throughout all the years and centuries of exile and pogrom, crusades and holocaust.

For a long while, beginning with our dissatisfaction with our last rabbi and his use of a Yom Kippur Sermon to stump for Obamacare, we have wondered if we were losing our religion. We also recognized that giving our hard-earned money to a Jewish institution that idolizes a president, and advocates spending our children’s inheritance to institute a collectivist utopia in place of our liberty is immoral, and is tantamount to funding our own destruction.

Part of the purpose of putting our dues in abeyance was also to wait and see. At the time, we had an interim rabbi whom we found to be a spiritual leader; one who respected the difference and the boundary between Jewish law and transient political policy, and who understood that his job was to provide guidance for walking the Jewish way to all of us. But we knew that we were getting a new rabbi and we had no idea how he would be.

We have now met the new rabbi and we find him distant and not terribly interested in talking to us. Perhaps this is unfair, because with our move to Freedom Ridge, we aren’t there often, although we have made an effort to be present when we are in Albuquerque. I do not expect hugs or effusive greetings, but warmth and small talk would be nice. Even a friendly wave and greeting would be welcome. But the man seems cold toward us, and I cannot help but take it personally. I was hoping that the man who takes responsibility for our Jewish needs and ceremonies would be, well, at least a bit simpatico.

I thought perhaps I ought to make the first reach, so I “friended” him on Facebook. And there I discovered that we had gotten another “social action” rabbi. I have seen very slanted posts there, ones that demonstrated the less than tolerant and charitable “Vision of the Anointed”  of the left. The first one condemned the Susan G. Komen Foundation in lockstep with the leftist attack on that private charity because of an innocent decision about the best use of funds by its founder and board. The second accused the people of Colorado Springs of hypocrisy because many of them are conservative and support cutting the federal budget and taxes and yet their local and state governments requested federal disaster funds for them.

There are political arguments for why the good rabbi is wrong in both cases, but I did not use them. I  did make comments expressing my concern that these posts betrayed a one-sided view that was uncharitable in the extreme, and that placed ideology over individuals. I remain dismayed at this rabbi’s lack of discernment, jumping on two leftist propaganda bandwagons as he did, without apparent thought and with some malice. This makes me uncomfortable at the thought that this man is the one I am paying to be on call for me should we have a family tragedy or even a simcha, in order to provide us with the Jewish rites and comfort that accompany such events. It is not that we disagree with one another politically, so much as the way in which he has made blanket condemnations without much depth about people whom he does not even know, because of his attachment to his political ideology. I would be one of those people.

There are other issues and events, things that have happened very recently and over a longer period of time that make me feel that we may be formally members, but we really don’t belong at this synagogue. Ten years ago, I leyned Torah several times a year, something I love to do. I have not leyned once since Cantor Jacquie left, and we have not been honored with a call to Torah either, even this year, when we celebrated our 10th anniversary. Recently, my brother-in-law and my son’s uncle died suddenly and tragically, and although we informed the synagogue, and we drove almost two hundred miles to say kaddish, his name was omitted from the list.

I have written before about my discomfort with some of the ways in which our ways of thinking and being do not mesh with the prevailing climate of this synagogue, and I suppose that sooner or later it had to come to a decision point. And yet it is not an easy one, as obvious as the misfit of our square pegs and their round holes may be.

We have talked about it, the Engineering Geek and I, and although he feels it less deeply, he is much more vocal about the immorality of continuing to support a synagogue where he has to walk out of the political sermons year after year. He tends to joke about it, but as money becomes more scarce—like most ranchers our wealth is not liquid—he says he doesn’t want to throw away the good after the “socialist” bad money.

We have made no final decisions. But we have given ourselves two options for the Holy Days, neither of which will be to attend services at Congregation Albert. We may pray at home for one or both of the High Holy Days. We may visit a small, egalitarian synagogue in Flagstaff. Although it is affiliated with the Reform Movement, its size and location mean that it draws Jews from many different Jewish backgrounds. Also, the rabbi did not study at Hebrew Union College (the seminary of the Reform movement), and therefore may be less indoctrinated in the current political “religion” ideology that seems to emanate from it. We would like to find out. Although neither of us are particularly touchy-feely types, we can tolerate that so long as the focus is Judaism in all its history and grandeur, and is not wasted in the weeds of ephemeral political dogmas and doctrines.

I know that if I never belong to or never darken the doors of another synagogue, I will remain a Jew in culture and commitment. I will never bow down to idols, be they made of stone or ideology. I will always see the world through the Jewish eyes I developed through all these years at Congregation Albert. But even the small steps that we have made away from a congregation in which I have experienced all of the joys, sorrows and frustrations of being a Jew cause me to feel like I am losing my religion. 

The Baby and the Bathwater III: Losing My Religion

Recently, I have been writing about the concerns that the Engineering Geek and I have about our synagogue membership. I wrote about how the rabbi's sermon on Rosh Hashanah caused me to think about his assertion that the organization is indeed a community, and I wrote more about that in light of my experiences when it felt like community and how that changed.

In the first of these posts I also wrote this: "Reform Judaism has a well-developed set of traditions." And I said I'd return to this idea in a future post. This is the promised post.

"Reform Judaism has a well-developed set of traditions."
For those who know anything about the early Reformers, those in Germany, and those in the United States, this may seem like an odd statement. Many Jews, Reform and otherwise, believe that the early Reformers threw the baby out with the bathwater, that they not only deprived the past of a veto, but also of a vote. In short, many believe that the phrase "Reform tradition" is an oxymoron. The Pittsburg Platform (1885) threw out kashrut (the dietary laws), as well as the ritual laws, in favor of a focus on the uniquely Reform virtues of Ethical Monotheism. Thus the Reform Movement entered the period know as Classical Reform.
During this time the service was mostly in English, nobody wore kippot (yarmulkes), synagogues were called temples (the reformers were not waiting for the rebuilding of the original in Jerusalem) and we were to be Jews at home, Americans on the street. In short, it looked like Reform got rid of tradition entirely. Tevye the Milkman was an embarrassing Ostjude (Eastern European Jew); an example of all that was wrong with unenlightened Orthodoxy. Reform tradition? It's as antiquated as a fiddler on the roof!

But, what was once a reform, if it lasts a hundred years, becomes a tradition.
And as Reform Judaism has been taught and passed down from one generation to another, a certain worldview has developed. (I see it in my husband, who is fifth generation Reform--from Austria to Cincinnati to San Franscisco). Of course, the Reform I was taught, from the New Union Prayerbook, had evolved from the High Classical Reform of the Union Prayerbook. After the Shoah, we had all become Zionists, and we understood the meaning of the People of Israel in a more traditional way. Hebrew had become more common, Bar Mitzvah ceremonies had been restored, Bat Mitzvah ceremonies added, and the use of ritual objects was no longer discourged.

At the same time, important aspects of the Reform worldview continued to appeal. Ethical monotheism--the idea that the ethics of the prophets--justice, righteousness, acts of loving kindness--combined with the rational worldview of the Enlightenment, was held to be the standard of behavior. The ritual commandments that the early reformers threw out wholesale were to be observed by the educated choice of the individual. The Chem Geek Princess is old enough to have been taught Ethical Monotheism as the essence of Reform Jewish life, but she is young enough to have been brought up with more ritual than was common in Reform Jewish households in my generation. The Boychick's formal Jewish education has been sadly lacking in Ethical Monotheism, which might give the mishmash of half-understood ritual some organizing idea that would last a lifetime. (This is why I homeschooled his Jewish education and Torah Talk at the Shabbat table-- I taught him a more comprehensive way of being Jewish).

And the truth to be told, I also think the early reformers did throw the baby out with bathwater. There is much to be said for the beauty and symbolic importance of ritual in the lives of human beings. Ritual defines who we are and who are not as we rub up against other cultures. Symbols send powerful messages of the meaning of our identity as Jews directly to the soul. When I wrap myself in the tallit--the prayer shawl--and say in Hebrew: "Eternal One, you are very great! Arrayed in glory and majesty, you wrap yourself in light as with a garment, you stretch out the heavens like a curtain." I feel that I am wrapping myself in light, that I am clothed in the majesty and glory. That I dwell in the midst of endless possibilities.

And when I wrap my middle finger with the tefillin straps and say in Hebrew: "I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me with righteousness, with impeccability, with loving-kindness, with compassion; I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know (physically, emotionally, spiritually) G-d"; I bind myself to G-d, Torah and Israel. But I bind myself also to those prophetic ethical precepts that I say--I bind myself as a Reform Jew with a very particular understanding of the prophetic values. I not only hear in them the voices of my rabbis and teachers, as well as the the voice of the long past; I also hear the call to be a moral human being, even in places where there are no moral human beings.

So although I understand the resurgence of ritual in Reform, I sense that I am losing my religion. The observance of half-understood ritual presented as an optional mishmash, combined with the loss of the organizing principle of Ethical Monotheism, is not a shortcut to a strong Jewish identity. The younger generation is losing an appreciation for both the baby and the bathwater. They are not being trained in the rubrics of ritual practice that will last a lifetime and uphold them during hardship and duress; and neither are they being given the ethical foundation that would give them the guts to stand up against evil and oppression. The moral fiber of Reform sensibility has been replaced with a schlock-rock, touchy-feely, short-cut to spirituality that is unlikely to survive assimilationist pressures from the dominant secular society.

Digression: In reading that last sentence, I see that I am placing myself squarely in the grand Jewish tradition. Ever since Jacob, who worried on his deathbed that his children would no longer be Jews, every generation has so worried. But will we hear the response, as Jacob did: "Sh'ma Yisrael . . . Listen, Israel (Jacob's G-d-given name), the Eternal is our G-d, the Eternal is One"? Will our children have the intestinal fortitude to so proclaim if they are pressed to the wall when they have not been taught the prophetic voice? When Judaism is reduced to an "our crowd" version of a country club?
See what I mean?

I see no harm in bringing back Hebrew. I see no harm in the use of carefully chosen ritual.
But I see great harm in losing the central tenents of Reform Judaism: Rational adherence to the Prophetic voice, crying out for Justice and Righteousness; in short, the precepts of Ethical Monotheism. Ritual observances should be carefully taught. The symbolic nature of the ritual should be elucidated, so that it is not misunderstood as a magic short-cut to holiness, or to the desired end of strong Jewish identity and the comcommitant moral absolutes and sensibilities that make up the Jewish worldview.

And speaking of those sensibilities: Reform Judaism has beautiful ritual and practice of its own. These include strong teaching from the Bimah, a firm tie to the American ideals of Liberty and Justice, and the ethical message expounded in beautiful English and a tradition of majestic choral music.

Nothing reminds me more of the Ethicial Monotheism inherent in the Reform tradition than these words, carried over nearly intact from the Union Prayerbook to the New Union Prayerbook:

" . . . Fervently we pray that the day may come when all shall turn to You in love, when corruption and evil shall give way to to integrity and goodness, when superstition shall no longer enslave the mind, nor idolatry blind the eye . . . then shall Your kingdom be established on the earth and the word of Your Prophet fulfilled . . ."

And I'd love to hear the majestic and beautiful old German-Reform melodies to Yigdal and Adon Olam, Especially the High Holy Day melodies.

Not hearing them for years on end: That's me in the corner . . . losing my religion.