{"id":3654,"date":"2017-06-25T09:05:14","date_gmt":"2017-06-25T06:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/?p=3654"},"modified":"2017-07-03T08:18:56","modified_gmt":"2017-07-03T05:18:56","slug":"when-words-and-belief-clash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/2017\/06\/when-words-and-belief-clash\/","title":{"rendered":"When words and belief clash"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It was Friday night, and as I was preparing to say the Shabbat kiddush<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the traditional sanctification of the wine \u00e2\u20ac\u201c one of our guests made a surprising request: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Could I, um, make my own kiddush<\/em>?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The question seemed innocent enough, but I knew what he was getting at. It was not that he had the minhag<\/em> (custom) of reciting the kiddush<\/em> for himself, as some people do. Rather, he was not comfortable with me taking on the obligation of doing the kiddush<\/em> for him \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t an observant enough Jew by his halachic<\/em> standards.<\/p>\n

I sat in silence for a moment, saddened and stung at being spiritually dissed yet still wanting to be respectful and wondering what (if anything) I should say in return.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Of course,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d my wife, Jody, jumped in, reaching over and handing him a kiddush<\/em> cup and bottle of grape juice.<\/p>\n

After dinner, Jody and I discussed what happened.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why do you care so much?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she asked. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe the words in the kiddush<\/em>. You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even like saying them that much. Why get so upset if someone else wants to take that on for the night?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Jody was right: Since my observance has waned, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve tiptoed along a spiritual tightrope, in some cases scrupulously adhering to the traditions I followed for so many years, in others, blazing a personal path toward unorthodox authenticity. In this delicate dance, my choices and public displays of Judaism are not always logical.<\/p>\n

My kiddush<\/em> crisis triggered another, deeper question: What do you do when the words you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re saying don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t match your internal belief system?<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just the kiddush<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all of Jewish prayer, with its supernatural implications, that no longer speak to me. Even the sing-along chants of Kabbalat Shabbat at Jerusalem\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nava Tehila<\/a>, that most non-judgmental of minyanim<\/em>, are written in language that reflects an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153immanent\u00e2\u20ac\u009d conception of the divine that I used to find seductive but, as I hinted at in my most recent column, now seems archaic and out of touch.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve come up with three responses to this liturgical dissonance.<\/p>\n

One is simply not to say words I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t relate to. Let Jody or a guest say the kiddush<\/em> for everyone. Hum along when I go to shul. Meditate if I find myself at Ma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ariv<\/em> (the evening prayer).<\/p>\n

A second response: change the words. I have a friend who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s written his own version of the kiddush<\/em> in Hebrew and English. He sings it with great passion, yet while I admire his creativity and lack of self-consciousness, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always sounded strange to me.<\/p>\n

A third option: still say the traditional words but think<\/em> something else. There is precedent for such an approach: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You yourselves saw that I spoke to you from the very heavens,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d God says to the Israelites in the Book of Exodus, mixing two senses at once.<\/p>\n

How might this work? Here are a few examples from the Shabbat service.<\/p>\n

On Friday night, when we say the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mi Kamocha\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c who is like you among the heavenly powers? \u00e2\u20ac\u201c just a single word reinterpreted makes all the difference. Not who is mighty, but what is mighty becomes an opportunity to reflect on power and its proper use in the world.<\/p>\n

In the next paragraph, the concluding line, ga\u00e2\u20ac\u2122al Yisrael<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a reminder of past (and a prayer for future) supernatural redemptions of the Jewish people \u00e2\u20ac\u201c has always rubbed me the wrong way. Poet and liturgist Marcia Falk<\/a> has a beautiful alternative rendering in her Book of Blessings, where we save the world through our own \u00e2\u20ac\u0153positive actions that correct and undo human wrongs [specifically] from the forces of narrow self-interest that have led to wide-spread injustice, social and economic inequities, violence, waste of resources and destruction of the environment.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

You can pick out a line or two from within a longer section to focus your reinterpretation.<\/p>\n

At the end of Kabbalat Shabbat, in the psalm \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mizmor Shir L\u00e2\u20ac\u2122yom Hashabbat,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d there are two powerful phrases:<\/p>\n

1) Tov l\u00e2\u20ac\u2122hodot<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it is good to thank the Lord \u00e2\u20ac\u201c can be seen as a broader connection to thankfulness and the power of gratitude; we continue that theme at home with a Friday night \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gratitude circle,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d replacing the traditional \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Eshet Hayil,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the Shabbat song of praise for a wife.<\/p>\n

2) Tzadik k\u00e2\u20ac\u2122tamar yifrah<\/em>, which refers to the righteous who will \u00e2\u20ac\u0153flourish like a palm tree,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to me emphasizes the value of being grounded rather than having one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s head \u00e2\u20ac\u0153up in the clouds\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a reminder that Jewish Law (however you connect to it) must be practical, not just theoretical.<\/p>\n

As for the kiddush<\/em> itself, which starts with a passage from the Book of Genesis, recounting how God created the world in six days, my best response has been to relate to it as pure poetry, a metaphoric lead-in to the humanistic value of unplugging from work once a week and spending time with family.<\/p>\n

There are some cases where I embrace changing words. For example, I replace baruch ata Adonai<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c blessed are thou, Lord \u00e2\u20ac\u201c with nodeh b\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ta\u00e2\u20ac\u2122almot ha\u00e2\u20ac\u2122haim<\/em>, which can be translated as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153let us acknowledge the mysteries of life,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a true statement no matter what you believe, as long as human knowledge remains necessarily limited. But I always say it to myself silently (washing before bread, for instance), never as part of a public blessing.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should – say it out loud when I recite\u00c2\u00a0kiddush<\/em>, and at the same time encourage guests to say their own version if they wish. This would be both authentic and respectful.<\/p>\n

I first wrote about words and belief in The Jerusalem Post<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kiddush cup image by Shalom Gurewicz (Flickr: 293 JUDAICA LECHAIM) [CC BY 2.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was Friday night, and as I was preparing to say the Shabbat kiddush \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the traditional sanctification of the wine \u00e2\u20ac\u201c one of our guests made a surprising request: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Could I, um, make my own kiddush?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The question seemed innocent enough, but I knew what he was getting at. It was not that he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[23,55,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3654"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3654"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3660,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3654\/revisions\/3660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}