Judaism for the Thinking Person
Religion & Spirituality:Judaism
Judaism is a Way of Being a "Wise and Discerning" Human Being, not a way of being Jewish: Torah as Spiritual Technology and Our Future
My Yom Kippur Sermon (2017). With all congregants having a handout of Rabbi Irwin Kula's "Paradigm Shifts," I argue that there has been a complete misunderstanding of what "culture" and what "religion" are. Drawing on my years studying and teaching American immigrant patterns, I show "culture" and "religion" to be uniquely American constructions of immigrant communities to make it possible to allow their children to assimilate while still being proud of their heritage especially among their relatives, while demanding nothing "religious" except to follow American Christianity in attending occasional Protestant-style worship services. I provide a real standard for "culture" and "religion" which is actually the key to our Jewish future in America, and the standard comes directly from the Torah. God has Moses tell the Jewish people before he delivers the laws that when these are done correctly, "other nations will say of you, 'Surely, this is a wise and discerning people!'" When people --Christians, atheists, MILLENNIALS...-- say that to you after watching you do a Seder, or go through High Holidays, or eat Kosher, or go through the Bar or Bat Mitzvah year, then you know it was "religion." If they don't, you know it was "culture." And when you use this standard, you come to the epiphany that Orthodoxy is just as much of a culture --if not more so-- than "bagels and lox" culture. The laws are a spiritual technology, Rabbi Kula correctly puts it: if they are doing no work except that you did a "correct" one, a really "Jewish" one, then they are not religion, and they are certainly not Torah.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free