Rabbi Evan Moffic

Chicago Sinai Congregation

August 3, 2007

I’d like to start with a question: What percentage of Americans say in they believe in God? Surveys regularly show that 95 percent of Americans profess belief in God or some kind of higher power (See, for example, 2006 Pew Poll available at www.pewforum.org) What about American Jews? A recent survey indicated that about 60 to 70 percent claim such a belief (2003 Harris Interactive Poll). These statistics are reinforced by others.  Whereas about 35% of American Christians claim to attend services on a monthly basis, about 10 % of America Jews do so. (I suspect it might be a bit less!)

                     

Perhaps this relative lack of traditional belief stems from one of Judaism’s fundamental premises: that deed matters more than creed. What we do with our lives—our behavior, our choices—reveals more about our faith than the beliefs we profess or the prayers we say. Another explanation might argue that Jews have “evolved beyond traditional religious belief.” Influenced by Darwin, Marx, Einstein, and Freud—the big four thinkers of Modernity, three of whom happened to be Jewish—we need a different way of understanding the world. Judaism has always emphasized critical thinking. How, then, can we look at nature and belief in the same as the writers of the Bible? How can we say words from the prayer book that we don’t really believe?

 

Many of us have likely thought about these questions. We have come to different answers. Yet, one rabbi, beginning in the early 1960s, confronted these questions and offered a radical new answer. Rabbi Sherwin Wine, who died last week, was the founder of the Jewish humanist movement. Dubbed the atheist Rabbi by Time Magazine in 1963, he founded a humanist synagogue in suburban Detroit. It has about 500 members, and in the ensuing years, humanist congregations have been built across the US and Israel. There is even a humanist rabbinical program, which began in 2001. In the wake of the death of this provocative thinker, it’s a good to time to think and about clarify some of our own beliefs. Tonight we can look at some of the challenging things he said to try to think about our own sense of God.  

 

Wine answered Jews’ doubts about God by affirming then. Yes, he argued, we can no longer speak of a God. We see the world operating through science, not miracles. We see the righteous are not always rewarded and the wicked not always punished. We see that talking about God only confuses our beliefs. Why talk about such a God who raises the dead or splits the Red Sea when we really don’t believe it? Not only is it disingenuous, he said: it is harmful because it seeks external, easy answers to dilemmas that only we can solve.

 

So if we cannot believe in God, what then can we believe? We can believe, he contended, in humanity. Humanists believe that meaning and purpose in life come not from God, but from people. That answers to life’s big questions are found through reason and logic, not faith. That belief in a higher power distracts us from the real challenges of life and growth. That the goal of religion is not praise God but to sanctify and empower man. That is his philosophy. Now where does Judaism fit in?

 

At its core, Judaism is, he argued, an ethnicity and a culture, not a religion. This does not mean that humanist Jews do not light candles or study the Bible. Rather, they light candles because it is a Jewish cultural tradition, much like the Thanksgiving meal is an American cultural tradition. And the Bible is great Jewish literature, much as Shakespeare is great English literature. To simplify, humanist Jews embrace a Jewish culture and a secular humanist philosophy.

 

I admire Sherwin Wine and highly recommend his books. He asked hard questions, and that has been a Jewish value and practice for thousands of years. Ultimately, however, humanism is too simplistic and, paradoxically, too fundamentalist. What do I mean?

 

The God humanists reject is the one imagined by many kindergartners. An old man with a beard sitting on a throne, perhaps with a lightening bolt in his hand. This god has the power to split the Red Sea and bring the dead back to life. In an interview after the Virginia Tech shootings, Rabbi Wine reiterated his rejection of such a God by asking how we could believe in a God who can alter the world but chose not to stop the murder of 33 innocent students and professors. This same question emerges out of the Holocaust, which profoundly influenced Wine. How could God not stop that massacre?

 

The truth is that Judaism rejected this view of god thousands of years ago! In the Pirke Avot, the rabbis said, “It is not within our power to explain the prosperity of the wicked or the sufferings of the righteousness.” (4:19) If we Jews had given up belief in God every time something tragic happened to us—then we wouldn’t be sitting in this temple, and Judaism would have died out a long long time ago.  Even more naïve, I think, is the notion that belief in God undermines human dignity and development. The opposite is true. God empowers humanity. God sought out Moses to free the Israelites and lead them to freedom. God relied on Abraham, on Noah, on the Prophet Isaiah, to bring peace and righteousness to the world. Judaism is a humanistic religion. It is belief in God that affirms this humanism, that says each of us is a partner with God. To say we believe in God is to say that we are empowered and we are responsible to live our lives to their utmost potential, to respond to God’s call l’chayim, “to life.”

 

Belief in God also checks some of the harsher impulses in humanity. We need only look at history to see that human beings are capable of dark and horrific acts. We need a higher power, we need a standard outside of ourselves but that draws from the best in ourselves, to help us stay on the paths of righteousness. If humanity is our only standard, then what makes Hitler any more evil than, say, Mother Theresa. Both were human beings. But one made a mockery of God’s law, and the other made it the center of her life. If human beings are the standard by which we measure morality, then we cannot say one was morally better than the other.

 

For secular humanists, God is also a kind of crutch. We speak of God only because we are uncertain of our beliefs or because we need to believe that someone else is in control. That is to say that we talk about God because we need the reassurance of a father figure, as Freud might say, someone who knows all the answers. It is a modern restating of Karl Marx’s view of religion as “the opiate of the masses.”

 

The God of Judaism is the opposite of a crutch. God does not give us all the answer. Rather, God is, as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, an eternal question mark. God challenges us to live up to our human potential. God does not solve our problems. Far from it. Rather, God demands that we form communities to support the poor and the sick when they are in need. God demands that we study and learn so that we can understand more about the universe. God demands that each of us seek to improve ourselves and our world.  As we read again in Pirke Avot, this time from Rabbi Ishmael, “It is not your job to finish the work of the world, but neither are you free to desist from it.” (2:21)

 

Humanism rejects God because faith deters humanity from finding the answers and solutions to life’s challenges. Life, however, as one great rabbi said, is not a puzzle to be solved, but a mystery to be embraced. (Rabbi Samuel Karff, in conversation) I am not so sure that anybody, from Moses down to Albert Einstein, knew all the answers to life’s questions. There is a mystery at the core of the universe. There is something miraculous in the birth of a child, in listening to a Mozart piano concerto, in falling in love. There is also some power that tells us to treat others kindly, to seek justice, to seek to build, as Emil Hirsch put it, “a home for God here on earth.”

 

In Judaism, to say we believe in God is to say that we believe in humanity. We believe that God has put us on earth to live a life of meaning and purpose. And we believe that God dwells inside each of us, and gives us the strength and determination to reach out to one another.