Where is your god now?

“Where is your god now?”

This phrase was uttered to me recently by my mother. It’s a difficult phrase, one that has not been far from my mind since it was throw out at me. It was said in pain and anger so I’m trying not to dwell on it, chalking it up to the pain of possibly losing a close friend. For you see I’m been praying for quite sometime for someone who is by all accounts, dying.

It is not easy to experience the pain and suffering that come from a long drawn out death and even while I write this I’m cautioned from sounding too certain that death will be the ultimate outcome of this struggle. But I can hear it on my mother’s voice when we talk about it, her feelings of the inevitability of this outcome for her friend. My first reaction was “it isn’t my god, its just god, your god, mine, everyone’s” but I held off on the snarky comment that was itching to pop out.

In the course of our talk I happened to mention to my mother that I’d been praying for her friend to which those words were then thrown out at me “yeah well it doesn’t seem to be doing much good…where is your god now?” I could hear the sarcasm, the naivety and the pain underling those words. Its hard enough I’m sure for my mother to deal with the pain that I know she’s feeling. The pain that I can do nothing to ease but say I love you, I’m here for you and yes I’m praying for your friend. I wish that my prayers would be answered but I’ve never been naive enough to think that I’ll get everything I want or that I can even approach knowing what purpose this pain serves.

Questions about why good things happen to bad people and why bad things happen to good people have been pondered by people far greater then myself throughout the centuries. At one point in my life I thought that somehow understanding that there is a plan, that good is not always rewarded with good and that we are merely dust in the wind would somehow make me feel better in times of pain and sorrow. But for me knowing why does no such thing, there is a disconnect between my intellectual ability to know why and my emotional feelings of but why me? Why now? I tried to convey all this to my non-believing mother with little success. I could hear the bitterness in her voice, and I understood. But still its hard not to feel in moments like this that she does not understand my commitment to an observant life. I’ve learned through experience that non-believers seem to think that leading an observant life, dedicating ones life to god is an escape, that it’s a shield used to deflect facing up to the grim realities of life. For me it has never been this way in fact it just the opposite. Being observant doesn’t let me run away from the harsh realities of life: it forces me to confront them.

Everyday in the early hours of dawn I think of my mother’s friend and others, fighting for their lives. I take time in my prayers to ask god that they be given the strength and courage to keep going and to overcome the sickness that’s ravaging their bodies. I don’t know what the outcome will be, that I leave up to god. What I do know is that in asking for them to be granted all those things I am reminded of them myself, and it makes me more aware and more easily able to face my own battles each and every day armed with those tools.

The Chief Rabbi of England Jonathan Sacks says that prayer is not about transforming the world around us, it’s about transforming ourselves. That through this internal transformation we can bring about a transformation in the world around us. It is impossible on an emotional level to truly understand the place of suffering in this world. But that shouldn’t stop us from fighting, from living, from laughing and from thanking god each and everyday for each and every moment we’re given, and that is exactly where my god can be found.

L’Shalom

Thinking outside of the box

Is it possible to be both ‘liberal’ and ‘frum’, I’m asking this question not because its incredibly original but because one of my best friends from yeshiva and I often have this conversation. It’s a tired subject in many ways but for those of us who have spent time learning Torah, who have made difficult and often painful changes to our lives in response to what we’ve learned it’s a pertinent question.

The short answer is yes it is possible, the easiest way to do it when someone asks about a controversial issue like gay marriage, or evolution or anything else is to say I don’t personally agree with it but everyone is entitled to their opinion. Its how I’ve managed to reconcile the opposition to many decisions I’ve made, you don’t have to agree you just have to accept that I’m making a valid choice for myself and I’m not asking you to make the same decision or to agree with me, just to accept me.

So again I ask the question is it possible to believe in the Torah, to accept it as truth, to live by it and still accept people who live in ways that are against it?

For this I’d like to point to a few sources first is Dov Bear, a wonderful writer who is both a god fearing Jew and a liberal, to quote:

Rav Sa'adya Gaon states in Emunot v'Deyot 7:2 there are four conditions under which the Torah is not to be taken according to its literal meaning (1) When the plain meaning is rejected by common experience, or your senses; (2) When it is repudiated by obvious logic; (3) When it is contradicted by scripture; or (4) When it is opposed by tradition.

My next source is Rabbi Schmuley Botach in is most recent article title “No Holds Barred: The Jewish view of homosexuality” he writes:

People of faith insist that homosexuality is the most serious of sins because the Bible calls it an abomination.

But the word appears approximately 122 times in the Bible. Eating nonkosher food is an abomination (Deuteronomy 14:3). A woman returning to her first husband after being married in the interim is an abomination (Deut. 24:4). And bringing a blemished sacrifice on God’s altar is an abomination (Deut. 17:1.). Proverbs goes so far as to label envy, lying and gossip as that which “the Lord hates and are an abomination to Him” (3:32, 16:22).

As an Orthodox rabbi who reveres the Bible, I do not deny the biblical prohibition on male same-sex relationships. Rather, I simply place it in context.

There are 613 commandments in the Torah. One is to refrain from gay sex. Another is for men and women to marry and have children. So when Jewish gay couples come to me for counselling and tell me they have never been attracted to the opposite sex in their entire lives and are desperately alone, I tell them, “You have 611 commandments left. That should keep you busy. Now, go create a kosher home with a mezuza on the door. Turn off the TV on the Sabbath and share your festive meal with many guests. Put on tefillin and pray to God three times a day, for you are His beloved children. He desires you and seeks you out.”

The mistake of so many well-meaning people of faith is to believe that homosexuality is a moral rather than a religious sin. A moral sin involves injury to an innocent party. But who is being harmed when two, unattached, consenting adults are in a relationship? Rather, homosexuality is akin to the prohibition of lighting fire on the Sabbath or eating bread during Passover. There is nothing immoral about it, but it violates the divine will.

Next up is the Rationalist Jew who quotes Rav Hirsh on the theory of evolution:

Even if this notion were ever to gain complete acceptance by the scientific world, Jewish thought, unlike the reasoning of the high priest of that nation (probably a reference to Thomas Huxley, who advocated Darwinism with missionary fervor—N.S.), would nonetheless never summon us to revere a still extant representative of this primal form (an ape—N.S.) as the supposed ancestor of us all. Rather, Judaism in that case would call upon its adherents to give even greater reverence than ever before to the one, sole God Who, in His boundless creative wisdom and eternal omnipotence, needed to bring into existence no more than one single, amorphous nucleus, and one single law of “adaptation and heredity” in order to bring forth, from what seemed chaos but was in fact a very definite order, the infinite variety of species we know today, each with its unique characteristics that sets it apart from all other creatures. (“The Educational Value of Judaism,” Collected Writings, vol. VII, p. 264)

To wrap this up, does one have to be a conservative to be an observant Jew? Absolutely not, all one must do it accept gods sovereignty, accept the Torah’s law as binding, and do their best to live their life accordingly, the rest is commentary.