Searching for the Divine – An Exploration of Jewish Theology | Rabbi Benjamin H. Spratt

[SPEAKER_04]: Good morning and Namaste, this morning, it's a pleasure for us to invite Rabbi Benzprat again to the center to our Ashram to give his talk.
[SPEAKER_04]: Rabbi Sprat serves at the senior Rabbi of Congregation Rodef Sokshalom, close by.
[SPEAKER_04]: right here at 7 West 83rd Street.
[SPEAKER_04]: Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Rabbi Sprats spent his early years exploring his Jewish identity.
[SPEAKER_04]: His journey took him through the conservative renewal, orthodox and reconstructionist worlds of Judaism before finding a home within the reform movement.
[SPEAKER_04]: He graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2001 from the Honors College of the University of Oregon as a member of Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in Psychology and Religious Studies.
[SPEAKER_04]: He earned distinguished honors for his thesis on Early Jewish Mysticism.
[SPEAKER_04]: He was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in May 2008.
[SPEAKER_04]: concentrating in Jewish philosophy.
[SPEAKER_04]: In his years of the seminary, the rabbi was the recipient of many awards and prizes in Talmud, philosophy, homiletics and the Bible.
[SPEAKER_04]: He sent us his
[SPEAKER_04]: Rabbi Sprat has also served as a religious school teacher, a religious school director and a chaplain at Lennox Hill Hospital and Bellview Hospital in Manhattan.
[SPEAKER_04]: His highly reviewed book Awakenings, American Jewish transformations in identity leadership and belonging was published in 2022.
[SPEAKER_04]: The subject of the stock today is searching for the divine and exploration of Jewish theology.
[SPEAKER_01]: Good morning everyone, and an honor to be with you, and I know that in the midst of clock changes and things we may find our neurons in a different time period than we are right now, and it is such a gift to be back here, Swamiji, Swamiji, Swamiji Sarapriya and Anda as a person, I consider my teacher and grateful to be with you all this morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many of us in the journey of our life can acknowledge that the most difficult experience to have is the experience of uncertainty.
[SPEAKER_01]: We would prefer knowing for certain something that is false, then we would sitting in the sea of uncertainty.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I want that to just be the backdrop for a moment, because when we talk about theology,
[SPEAKER_01]: and we talk about the divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Many of us find ourselves focused on very clear ideas that have been handed to us in a previous era of our life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we often will let the conversation be, do I agree with that idea or not?
[SPEAKER_01]: We make it a binary idea of either I agree with this concept or I don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: For many of us, and I will say for me, growing up, when people said the word God, I thought of a old, bearded, probably rather strong, ripped man up in the sky, I'm thinking about Zeus, ready to zap me with the lighting bolt if I did wrong, and that was the concept of God, and so for much of my life, the question was, do I believe in that or not believe in that?
[SPEAKER_01]: And for at least this moment right now, and I think sitting in a group and in a community where I imagine many of you have already upended some of these very clear concepts.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love for us to set that aside for a moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Voltaire very famously said, If we were created the image of God, then we have more than reciprocated.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you think about that for a moment, okay?
[SPEAKER_01]: That if we look at a pattern across faith traditions, across philosophies around the world, we will often see that we almost always describe God or the divinity around us in very human terms, and usually in terms that suit us very, very well.
[SPEAKER_01]: We find ourselves to be rather angry or aggressive.
[SPEAKER_01]: We might find ourselves claiming a sense of the divine that is looking for justice in action in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those of us who are feeling perhaps a bit helpless, or those of us who are finding a desire to simply elevate our own compassion, might imagine a God that is embracing or meek.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those of us who imagine ourselves to be at a time where we need wisdom.
[SPEAKER_01]: wise in sage, we will often imagine God is such, and what Voltaire is getting at is that when we fail to recognize the linkage between our own psychology, our own needs, and the way we can see the divine, we end up, perhaps, unknowingly creating idols.
[SPEAKER_01]: We create surface images that do not point to the truth that is there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wanted to begin with a famous story, to a story that actually was read in synagogues all around the world just yesterday.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of those who were familiar with the story, it's famous, they called the Story of the Golden Calf.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the ancient Israelites have been freed from Egypt.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've wandered in the wilderness.
[SPEAKER_01]: They find themselves standing at Mount Sinai.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have received revelation and countered the divine, something that I certainly would love to have experienced myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then Moses says, I'm going to leave you, I'm going to go up and spend time with God on the mountain for 40 days.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know the rules behave.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you could imagine what comes next.
[SPEAKER_01]: The people immediately lose their mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: They do the exact thing they were not supposed to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is they go and fashion a golden calf.
[SPEAKER_01]: They make an idol and they worship this idol.
[SPEAKER_01]: God and Moses get very angry.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the aftermath of this, many people die and are punished.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Moses goes back up the mountain to speak with God.
[SPEAKER_01]: but what's interesting is we get to find in that encounter that Moses himself has doubts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Moses asks of God, please, would you be willing, let me see your face?
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me see with certainty your essence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me see what you really are about.
[SPEAKER_01]: And God's reply is, you cannot see me and live.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can step into this cleft and a rock.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can step into this cave and I will cover your face.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as I pass by, you won't be able to see my face, but I will let you see my aftermath, my wake.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can see what is behind me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I love this experience, I love this encounter, because even Moses, in the Jewish tradition, the person who was closest to God, is not allowed to see God's face, not allowed to see God's essence with any certainty.
[SPEAKER_01]: the very best Moses is allowed to see only God's aftermath, the wake of God in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And with this is a backdrop.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to let us see this as a Jewish tool.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, every faith tradition philosophy has its own tools in, but this becomes in many ways the paradigm for God's searching, for seeking the divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: This desire, like Moses long ago, to see God's face, and it best we are only able to see the aftermath, the wake of God in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for those of you who have read Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, these are often seen as two of the great patriarchs that are looking to see the demise of religion.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in many ways point out very fair critiques of God and theology.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Richard Dawkins said the following, I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: It really is, just said, I'm against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world that in many surface encounters with faith traditions or theologies we encounter this idea of simply blind faith of whatever an idea has been handed to us we simply lift that up and refuse doubt or uncertainty at all and so what it does in Richard Dawkins critique is that allows us to shut down our minds our hearts our spirits because we think we have already arrived.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have nothing no more seeking to do, and so we don't need to understand any more about this world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I could only really speak with any certainty about Jewish wisdom.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I find in a bit of a humorous way around the same time, a former Prime Minister of Israel, Shimon Perez summarized Judaism this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, people ask me, what is the greatest contribution of Judaism to the rest of the world?
[SPEAKER_01]: My answer is dissatisfaction.
[SPEAKER_01]: A good Jew cannot be satisfied.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's simply not Jewish.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what makes us great contributors to creativity.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are seekers of betterment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I lift this up not to say, this is a unique Jewish attribute.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure some of us in this room would say that we also are very gifted at being dissatisfied.
[SPEAKER_01]: My wife would tell you I'm a complainer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So,
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I love is to lift up dissatisfaction as a virtue and as a counterbalance to Richard Dawkins.
[SPEAKER_01]: When we find ourselves with comfort and certainty, we find ourselves making the misstep of the ancient Israelites.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have made a golden calf and thought that that idol is actually essence, as opposed to an idea that inspires us to journey forward further towards that essence, and that like Moses, if we are yearning to try to find that sense of comfort and satisfaction, we want to see God's face and that certainty that we will forever be dissatisfied, and that is a good thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: how do we lift up the virtue of dissatisfaction as perhaps the greatest and most important attribute on the journey of theological exploration.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's gonna be our backdrop for today.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm gonna speak for a little while longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Along the way, please, you don't have to wait to the end for questions and things.
[SPEAKER_01]: So please raise hands, interrupt at any point.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want this to be as interactive as you are open to making it be.
[SPEAKER_01]: So with that in mind, I am going to immediately disrupt us and bring us into something that I hope is going to both be startling and difficult and I hope open us into some deeper explorations here.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in the 1970s, Rabbi Yitzkreenberg, whose Rabbi was still alive and a great teacher today, he was grappling with the Holocaust.
[SPEAKER_01]: As many of you may know, during the Holocaust, about 10 million people were murdered by the Nazis, 6 million Jews, and almost half-world jewelry was decimated.
[SPEAKER_01]: And from the theological perspective, this challenged many Jews around the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: If there is God, if there is a sense of divinity, how could such obliteration have occurred?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's Greenberg speaking into this, believe that this was an opportunity to be dissatisfied with the theologies that did come before.
[SPEAKER_01]: that whatever ideas of divinity exist before that time that such a horrific destruction had to challenge us to a deeper understanding.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so he offered this idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let us offer then as a working principle of following.
[SPEAKER_01]: No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that could not be credible in the presence of burning children.
[SPEAKER_01]: The no theology should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.
[SPEAKER_01]: of the six million Jews murdered one million of them were children.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, Yitzkreenberg is lifting this up as a paradigm.
[SPEAKER_01]: We live in a world where still today, children all around the world are victims of the most horrific cruelty.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they are the embodiment of innocence in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: We may decide which adults deserve it or not, but certainly for the child, the symbol of innocence.
[SPEAKER_01]: We should reject any theology that makes that acceptable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Any theology that imagines a God that would wish the destruction of children.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that, as you can imagine, wipes out some of the classic mindsets that I grew up with the, you know, the bearded Zeus with a lightning bolt, which would, in a simplistic fashion say, that if a child dies, it's because they deserved it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, Yitz Greenberg says we must wipe away those theologies as comfortable as they may be.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the moment that we wipe those theologies away, we find ourselves in a very uncomfortable, slippery slope of theology.
[SPEAKER_01]: If all of a sudden, we cannot go and say that terrible things that happen are because God wishes it to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then how do we understand the terrible things of our world?
[SPEAKER_01]: and one might infer from that.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we cannot assume that the terrible things that happen are directly related to God, then what about the good things?
[SPEAKER_01]: The child that plays in the playground with joy in their life is because God wishes it to be so, allows it to be so or is God completely distant from that encounter.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we map beyond children for a moment, what about us, those of us
[SPEAKER_01]: Do we see challenge, cruelty, horror, injury in our life as being divine punishment?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or do we have to let go of that for a moment?
[SPEAKER_01]: And once we step into these uncertain waters, it invites us into much more difficult questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, our early stages,
[SPEAKER_01]: in the rabbinic tradition.
[SPEAKER_01]: Go and look and study the Bible and notice that in the Bible, God has never portrayed the same way twice, really.
[SPEAKER_01]: In some places, God has described as being ordinary and stiff-necked, and sometimes, God has described as being compassionate and loving, sometimes vengeful and jealous.
[SPEAKER_01]: They raise an interesting idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: They ask the question, why does God appear as a warrior?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the shores of the Red Sea is the Israelites are fleeing from Egypt.
[SPEAKER_01]: And is a wise and sage on Mount Sinai?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then is a nursing mother in Babylonia and the exile.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why does God appear in so many different forms?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are these different gods?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the answer they give is that God appears in the way people need in that moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: that all of these are simply aspects of the same divinity, but they reflect our own need in that moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: In more modern parlance, William James, the famous American theologian and philosopher said, a person's theology is always an extension of their own psychology.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if we were going to go and look at descriptions of Krishna, where we're going to look at descriptions of Jesus or Allah, we would go and see in these descriptions the reflection of the theologian who is describing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps is a more accurate rendition than actually any authentic rendering of what is the divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the moment that we start to expand this idea that our theology, these specific descriptions are actually a more reflection of human encounter than they are essential divine elements.
[SPEAKER_01]: We start to find the ability to put threads together.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we end up finding
[SPEAKER_01]: In the medieval era, my monodies, one of the great medieval Jewish philosophers, he said that the only thing we can say about God is what God is not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then he positive statement about God is the creation of an idol.
[SPEAKER_01]: To say God is good, we are taking our concept of human goodness in my personal experience of goodness and trying to map that onto the divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment we go and say God is just, we take our own individual idea of justice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of us could acknowledge in the room right now that when people say justice in a modern world, what they typically mean is the world looks the way that I want it to look.
[SPEAKER_01]: What I think is fair is what is just.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, part of what my modernity suggests is that even our language itself can become an idol.
[SPEAKER_01]: He believed that God simply was that which set the universe in motion.
[SPEAKER_01]: And nothing else we could really say about God on positive way makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can simply say what God is not, to take away these human elements.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what it does is it leaves us even in deeper waters of uncertainty.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we cannot speak about the divine, if any words or attribution we give to God or simply an idol, what do we do with these elements?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so moving forward, we get to see an interesting pattern in Judaism.
[SPEAKER_01]: So my monadies ended up being excommunicated from the Jewish faith.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just so you know, he was excommunicated not because of his beliefs of God and necessarily but because he tried to take Jewish law and the parables around that law and separate them out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was seen as too radical.
[SPEAKER_01]: that law and lived experience and analogy need to be combined together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was cast out of his Jewish community.
[SPEAKER_01]: You should know that he was immediately re-embraced and now, pretty much by every Jew around the world, is seen as one of the greatest medieval commentators.
[SPEAKER_01]: To continue in interesting pattern.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Baruch Spinoza, who, by many modern philosophers, was seen actually as the father of modernism.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, he lived in the 17th century.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was also excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community, later Reembrace, you're gonna see a pattern here about theologians here.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Spinoza said that God and the universe are one and the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: that when we speak about the universe, we are speaking about God, and when we speak about God, we are speaking about the universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: The these two things are intertwined and they cannot be disconnected.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now some people think that Spinoza was a pantheist, where God and the universe are exactly equivalent, some believe that he was a pan-enthist, you know, that the universe is within God, but there are aspects of God that go beyond the universe, but regardless for those of us who exist in the universe, it is simply the encounter with God and the universe being one.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if we encounter a chair, a human being, the sky up above, we find ourselves encountering aspects of the Divine, please.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so this fantastic question is repeated back.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when God and Moses are having this encounter and God says you can see my aftermath Is this a symbol of the universe?
[SPEAKER_01]: Does that make quoting you right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to try to get that right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, wonderful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, is the universe then So it's be read as God's aftermath and what a beautiful way to kind of look at the idea of creation.
[SPEAKER_01]: to kind of link these different ideas together.
[SPEAKER_01]: If God and the universe are one and the same, how do we look at this physical experience here?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I do think that this is a perfect way I do think this is exactly how my monodies would read this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that the universe is God's aftermath.
[SPEAKER_01]: My monodies did not believe in miracles.
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't believe in a God that speaks, he didn't believe that God needed anything from us.
[SPEAKER_01]: That all of the rules of different religious faith traditions, that all of the stories of miracle, all of these are because we need these elements, but not because they actually point towards anything that is essentially God.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yes, I think to look at this world as the aftermath of God,
[SPEAKER_01]: And that invites us to go into this journey of so from the wake, from the aftermath, what can we understand about the God that inspired that wake?
[SPEAKER_01]: Beautiful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So from Spinoza, we'll move forward to Hermann Cohen, another 17th century rabbi, who was also cast out of the Jewish community.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's often seen as the father of the reform movement in Judaism, and he believed that God simply an ethical idea that we created to promote civil society.
[SPEAKER_01]: that all of the supernatural understandings of God actually missed the deeper point, that we need a concept of God that is not tangible, that is beyond the human form, because without it, we can't really come to ethics.
[SPEAKER_01]: He believed that the real purpose of a God concept is a first principle of ethical behavior, that if we cannot believe in some idealized form of existence, that we have nothing that inspires us to do good in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: that we can't simply derive it from individual in ethics because we'll always make it self-serving.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we need to have some concept that goes beyond the limitations of humanity to do so.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll move from there into what I would say an interesting concept from the Hacitic world.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the 19th century, Hacitic rabbi, rabbi Schmuel Scherson,
[SPEAKER_01]: When you carefully examine the nature of all physical beings, when you contemplate them well, you will find that material things are not actually material.
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, the substance of wood is actually made up of the four elements, fire, water, air, earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, while it has all four elements, its existence is not any one of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rather, it's being is the power that combines the four elements, so the essence of its being is the word that causes it to be and sustains it, the divine utterance.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you separate the elements, nothing remains.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thus there is no material thing without godliness.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were going to map this 19th century conception into more modern language, perhaps, for any quant of visits here.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we were to go and bring this down to the most minute elements of the universe, we find that actually what we are made up of are things that spin in different directions and are actually not tangible physical elements but our probabilities.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I grew up, I was studying chemistry, we learned that electrons like to live in set orbits around the nucleus, so I don't know if any of you learned that growing up.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is not how it's taught anymore, that electrons exist as probabilities in a cloud.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment that we identify them and lock them in, we have actually when we observe them, that we've actually taken them out of their niche initial state, that they are everywhere all at once.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a almost impossible concept to have, and yet we've rigged down all of reality to its most minute elements.
[SPEAKER_01]: We get to see this very spiritual teaching here that we are all of us made up of the very same stardust of the universe and yet expressed in so many different ways and that we are everything all at once and by observing it, we limit it.
[SPEAKER_01]: By observing elements, we actually take them out of their true state of being.
[SPEAKER_01]: that is in difficult concept.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet we find modern science reflecting this again and again that is our observing of things, the changes them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so again, if we are trying to find the aftermath of God, how do we find God without observation?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because in observation, we fix something into a state that is simply a shell of its initial being.
[SPEAKER_01]: which moves us forward into the 20th century here.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Mordakite Kaplan, also excommunicated, all of these people, by the way, are re-embraced.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you get to see an even in a Jewish world where we say that one of the great attributions is dissatisfaction.
[SPEAKER_01]: We get to see what happens when people lift up ideas that challenge our conceived notions we immediately want to reject them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then eventually over time, when we often will come back and re-embrace them, and this is true in Mordecai, Kaplan, I would argue probably the most influential rabbi of the 20th century.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've ever heard of a Jewish community center, where they ever walked on 86th street and passed by the Jewish center, that was a synagogue that he started.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the first person to come up with the idea of a school, which is a synagogue, with a school and a pool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, this idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: This idea of Jewish life not just being a religion, but a cultureist civilization, all these aspects coming together.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've ever heard of the idea of Jews giving gifts on Hanukkah, you can offer got it to to Mordecai Kaplan, his prediction about a century ago was that,
[SPEAKER_01]: Jews living in a majority society like America would come to see the joy of Christmas and want to lift up the technology of that and bring it into our own winter holiday celebrations.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so many of the current manifestations of Judaism today have been impacted by him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mordegae Kaplan was a person who did not believe in a supernatural gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: He believed that God is the process that makes for salvation.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a mouthful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Effectively, he believed that when a group of people come together like this, and this group of people creates a shared hope for the future and collectively chooses in their behaviors to move towards that future, that is God.
[SPEAKER_01]: That God is made manifest in the world by our willingness to go and be sheepers of a more salvific world of a more redeemed world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then when we come together towards promoting ethical behavior as a collective, when we come together with that shared hope and let it in being fused in our words and actions, we are bringing God into the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: God is that collective process.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this brings forward an interesting concept that the human experience of God is indelibly entwined with God itself, that what is the purpose of divinity if that divinity has no agency or reflection of the world going back into the idea of the universe being the wake of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The universe is in motion, which means perhaps God is also in motion, and this is part of what Kaplan was putting forward that perhaps one of the greatest idols we create is when we think that God is static, that God is static in the universe moves, and
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we see that as the universe moves, as we move so to as God moving, it opens the door to something far more confusing, perhaps, points towards something where we get to see a little bit of a glimpse of hint that God is itself in motion.
[SPEAKER_01]: The divinity is itself evolving and changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so then to bring it further.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we find Abraham Joshua Heschel, probably the most famous rabbi of the 20th century.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a person who believed that God is encountered through the experience of awe.
[SPEAKER_01]: If any of you have ever left New York City and
[SPEAKER_01]: the light pollution of an urban landscape and you've gone out into other aspects of the world and you've at night time looked up at a clear night sky and you've seen the band of the Milky Way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or you've gone to the hidden planetarium here in the southwest side and you've gone experience this idea that we are this infinitimal spec.
[SPEAKER_01]: on this one little planet in this one little solar system and this one little galaxy amongst trillions and trillions of galaxies and when we look up at the night sky and we think about how incredibly awesome is this universe and this magnitude of it goes beyond our comprehension and we feel this overwhelming feeling of awe that maybe even feels scary that is the encounter with the
[SPEAKER_01]: And for him, that feeling of awe allows us to break through all of the idols, to see that in this infant has a little speck that is us, we are also still reflecting and trying to contemplate our own existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: And how wondrous and magnificent, and powerful is that the this tiny, insignificant little piece of dust is yet still contemplating existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that in that moment, in that encounter with awe, that we get to feel a sense of the divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so all of our behaviors are meant to help us expand our awareness and that in that expansion and the fear and the awe that comes from that, we get to encounter a little bit of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then perhaps another element, around the same time period, Emmanuel Levinas, he believed that God has found not in the magnitude and awe up there, but in the smallest encounter.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you have ever walked by a stranger who is suffering or weeping, and you felt this initial immediate desire to help them,
[SPEAKER_01]: You have no idea who they are, no idea they're backstory, no idea even whether they will hurt you or help you.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you felt that initial desire to want to reach out and help them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then a microsecond later your mind kicks in, you might wonder, wait, are they going to mug me?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they diseased?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is this a bad idea?
[SPEAKER_01]: But then a initial microsecond encounter that you felt the desire to help them?
[SPEAKER_01]: For many will let me ask that is God.
[SPEAKER_01]: that it is something we can't rationally explain that we feel bound to one another, even if all the other impulses in our brain and kick in and create distance, that we are neatly wired to believe and feel that we are connected and bound to one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The what is God?
[SPEAKER_01]: It is inherently showing us that everything is threaded together and every being is threaded together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, unfortunately, all of our teaching and our lived experiences often become the things that get in the way
[SPEAKER_01]: So I bring all of this forward as a whole range of different theologies here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know if anyone's feeling confused and wondering, okay, Ben, this is great.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we do with all of this?
[SPEAKER_01]: But to be able to show very clearly, and if we had another six hours, I could go through and show you that least in the context of Judaism, we've tens of thousands of theologies that exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know that especially in this community, that is not a foreign concept.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are well aware of the fact that the divine has tens of thousands of faces.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what I find so remarkable is that in almost every faith tradition around the world, we have this same message coming through with different vocabulary.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I wanted to talk about why I think it's important for us to be trying to dive into these confusing waters.
[SPEAKER_01]: So going back to Yitz Greenberg, the rabbi who said that we must reject any theology, the tolerates burning children.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this culture, the primary alternative to religion is secular man and a world closed off from any transcendence or divine incursion.
[SPEAKER_01]: This world grows out of the intellectual framework of science, philosophy, and social science.
[SPEAKER_01]: A rationalism and human liberation, which quid the enterprise and modernity.
[SPEAKER_01]: This value system was and is the major alternative faith, which Jews and Christians joined in large numbers in the last two centuries, transferring allegiance from the Lord of history and revelation to the Lord of science and humanism.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so many ways the Holocaust is the direct fruit and will of this alternative.
[SPEAKER_01]: Moderny fostered the excessive rationalism and utilitarian relations, which created the need for and susceptibility to totalitarian mass movements and the surrender of moral judgment.
[SPEAKER_01]: After the Holocaust, it is all the more urgent to resist the absolutization of the secular.
[SPEAKER_01]: For Greenberg, secularization, the belief that there is no divinity,
[SPEAKER_01]: is the ultimate end of humanity, because when we believe that physical substance, that separate individual atoms, that separate individual human beings, is all there is, we come to the place of simply seeing everything as utility.
[SPEAKER_01]: that the purpose of this chair is simply to serve my own experience, that the purpose of other human beings to serve my own experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And without a belief in divinity, we allow this world to simply become something we use in discard.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we look at the worst expressions of humanity, we see what happens when we treat the world as simply a tool, when we treat human beings as simply a tool to be used and disposed of.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so for Greenberg, he believes that especially in this modern era, more than ever, at any other moment, we need to reclaim a sense of theology, belief, and divinity.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it also means we have to reject the theologies and divindies of idolatry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because idolatry is its own form of secularization and secularization's own form of idolatry.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment I go and believe that this one surface object,
[SPEAKER_01]: is something that I have certainty over and can control is the moment I open myself to see it as a tool.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment that I go and see that I understand the face of God is the moment that in my hubris I've forgotten that every encounter is simply the wake of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we confuse the wake for the face, when we confuse the surface for the essence is the moment we have lost
[SPEAKER_01]: So, after Moses encounters God, again, not God's face, but God's aftermath.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's interesting is God passes by and says the following words.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's the direct quote.
[SPEAKER_01]: Arunay, God, past before Moses and proclaimed Arunay, Arunay, the generic name, the essential name in Judaism is spelled in the Hebrew letters, Yudhye Vavhay, which we traditionally say has no pronunciation.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you ever heard of anyone say the word Yahweh, or a person who is a Jehovah's Witness, that's an attempt to try to pronounce the ineffable name.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when we encounter the ineffable name, we will use a word, but we say it's not actually the word itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, you can see we're trying to play with this idea of, we need words.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we think that the word is actually pointing to the essence, we've created an idol.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we will say, Adonay, which just means Lord or Master, but it really is not with the word itself even we'd say.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Adonay Adonay, God is compassionate and gracious, slow, anger, abounding, and kindness, and faithfulness, and more and more attributes.
[SPEAKER_01]: This God passes by.
[SPEAKER_01]: God says to Moses, what is my essence?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is my true name?
[SPEAKER_01]: It is kindness.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is mercy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is compassion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, if we were to go and sit in this room and take a poll, actually we'll do this right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: How many of you believe in love?
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, hands down.
[SPEAKER_01]: How many of you believe that everyone in this room is the same definition of love?
[SPEAKER_01]: OK, we have one person who believes, OK. How many of you believe in justice?
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe in it, although I have not yet seen it, at least a face, OK?
[SPEAKER_01]: How many of you believe that we all share the same definition of justice, I'm curious.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I could go through, okay, we may have some people who do, okay, but in general it's interesting to see that many of us are believing in these large intangible concepts, but also recognizing the same breath that we might not agree on how to attribute the facets of these large ephemeral concepts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what's interesting is we could go through each and every one of these elements, but all the list of attributes that God is offering to Moses in this moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Many of them are the very things that we see as essential to our own experience of the world, and yet we cannot define with any clarity.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is God?
[SPEAKER_01]: God is love, God is compassion, God is just, God is hope, God is kindness, God is a thousand more concepts that we need in all of these concepts are about how we relate to one another in the world around us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Love makes no sense to an individual Adam or an individual being.
[SPEAKER_01]: Love only makes sense in relationship in that which binds Adam to Adam and being to being.
[SPEAKER_01]: Justice makes no sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I am separate from the universe around me and this moment is separate from every other moment, Justice only makes sense to the greed that we are connected together and this moment is connected the moment before it and the moment after it.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the wake that is this universe, and our lived experience of these universe, we see that relationship calls out to us from every direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: We see it in nature and the shifting of seasons, we see it in the pain of the human heart, we see it in the fulfillment of society when it comes together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, for me, when I think about the Jewish tools of theology, they in many ways map into the tools of theology you might find in Hinduism, or Buddhism, or Islam, or Christianity, or so many other philosophies and paces around the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: But all of us, we are simply touching a different part of the same elephant.
[SPEAKER_01]: For all of us, we are using words that can become idols.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are offering expressions that are much more an expression of ourselves than anything essential.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like Moses long ago, how do we see our dissatisfaction with what we have already discovered as the most important tool to look deeper?
[SPEAKER_01]: And in that journey, in the wake of God and the aftermath of God, see that it is in relationship that we come the closest to God and that God calls out to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: in compassion, in love, in hope, in justice, in every moment we find connectedness, between ourselves and a chair, between ourselves and other human beings, between one moment and another, we come closest to finding God's face in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to open for questions, reflections, and opportunity for me to learn from you would welcome it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much for your talk of course talking about idols and how human beings create these idols and therefore limit the divine essence and stop seeking the divine essence.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hinduism is full of idols, and Swami Vivekananda has kind of taught us about how it can be a source of spiritual
[SPEAKER_02]: So why do we create idols?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I think, you know, we humans only know to do, you know, we can only see figures with hands and feet.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we see somebody more powerful, we give them four hands and five heads and imagine these things and worship them.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yet they have a role in my spiritual growth wherever I am in that pathway.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you say that idols limit,
[SPEAKER_02]: our seeking the essence.
[SPEAKER_02]: How does that translate to the other one?
[SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful.
[SPEAKER_01]: And despite the prohibition of idolatry, we have loads of idols and duties in tune.
[SPEAKER_01]: And hence why I started with the story of idolatry.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting, if you've ever been to a synagogue before, especially on a Shabbat on a Sabbath morning, you'll see that the focal point in a synagogue is in Ark, a closet where we keep
[SPEAKER_01]: our torus, our scrolls of our sacred scrolls.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we open the arc, we all stand up.
[SPEAKER_01]: We take that scroll out and we bring it around and people will kiss it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we read from it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for anyone who's coming from the outside, that looks an awful lot like idol worship.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting because what is the difference between a sacred object in an idol?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually not the object itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's what we do with that object.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what's the difference between a statue at that's an idol?
[SPEAKER_01]: And a statue at that actually is sacred and divine is the object and end unto itself, or is it inspiring us to lift our metaphoric eyes?
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, this is, for me, I think, an interesting element we get to see in the Torah, just a couple of chapters separate.
[SPEAKER_01]: We get to see the prohibition of the golden calf, and we get the commandment to build the golden arc.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've ever received Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones movie, okay?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've seen the visual representation of this, okay, golden arc where the 10 commandments were kept.
[SPEAKER_01]: And on that arc, are these two cherubim, these animal-like figurines.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's very interesting, so they're prohibited from building a golden cow, but they can have two gold animal objects, and they're supposed to orient their prayers there, and so the early rabbinic commentators asked the question, what's the difference between these two things?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why is one golden animal okay, but another golden animal like thing is not okay?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the answer is that the golden chorubim, the golden angel like figures on the arch of the covenant, their wings are pointed towards one another and up.
[SPEAKER_01]: That they're inviting people to focus not on them, but on what exists between them and above them.
[SPEAKER_01]: That, I think, is where I would say so.
[SPEAKER_01]: we have to use symbols, we have to use words, we have to use objects, we need to have some tangible elements that ground us, because I don't know, maybe someone else has reached an enlightenment beyond me, but without them, how do we find relationship, but the key is, how do we see them as that which points us towards what connects us together and elevates our perception to find the divinity around us in within us?
[SPEAKER_03]: you are asking the question that how does different people have different ideas of love or justice and all that?
[SPEAKER_03]: But if God is perfect love and perfect justice, so how can you have different ideas about that?
[SPEAKER_01]: it should all be the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think some of this is the difference between what is our encounter experience and belief and what we might see is being true.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this gets into perhaps a little bit of, you know, kind of Plato's cave, kind of concept.
[SPEAKER_01]: To what degree do I Ben Spratt believe that I have experienced the ideal form of love with a capital I, you know, love with a capital L.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to what degree do I believe that in my limited experience, I have only experienced a small facet of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I will say as I look back over what I thought I've loved 10 years ago and 20 years ago, I am still very much learning about love.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so for me, it would be to say, do I believe that a concept of a large uppercase letter L love exists in the universe?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and I would have coined that with God.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the moment I think I've arrived there, I've created an idol.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm excited that it is in certainty that in many ways we have prevented our ability to continue on the journey towards the divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for me, at least, that's where I try to draw the line as I do believe I know love, but I don't believe I know all of love.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do believe I know mercy, but I don't believe I know all of mercy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And invites me to see in every encounter, I might find a person who's experience another facet of that, who might take me deeper into that experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: So please.
[SPEAKER_03]: as a follow-up, but that would mean like when you say, I feel that we are assuming that I'm this limited self, this limited this body, this mind or whatever, that's when you feel that you're limited and you can only understand a little bit of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you think for the absolute, then there is no difference then.
[SPEAKER_01]: beautiful.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that is the, for me, and I think from many of the faith traditions that I've encountered, I think this is the ultimate goal is, can we get to a point where we are able to pierce beyond the veil of my individualness, my separateness?
[SPEAKER_01]: And in those moments, we encounter something that is ineffable.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the moment we try to turn that into human concepts, words, ideas, we have all of a sudden brought it back into the idea of limitation.
[SPEAKER_01]: That I think is one of the most difficult and frustrating encounters we have in our world.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure many of us in this room, we've had moments of encountering the ineppable and then wanting to somehow convey it, wanting to show it, wanting to hold on to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the moment we do that, we've already ended the experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is, I think, the most challenging encounter.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, it's why many traditions imagine that the person who achieves true enlightenment, you know, in Judaism, there's these ideas that there are beings that never die, that ascend to a different plane, so Elijah, the prophet, is one of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: and inoc is another that these individuals that encounter enough of the divine or enough of the essence that they never come back into their individual physical selves again, but it means that for any of us who are in our individual physical selves we have to deal with this constant tension.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we try to step into that encounter that which is beyond definition and boundary only to then have to step back into it the moment we think about it and
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Rabbi.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a quick question.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've talked about the openness to the uncertainty in the theological tools But is there any theological tools or from your only experience that we can verify we are closer to divinity?
[SPEAKER_00]: Beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I do think that this comes into these words that God offers to Moses after this encounter of God's wake, that these are the attributes of relationship building.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so for me, I am more and more realizing that the greatest teachers of God, I find I'm not coming from text, but coming from relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: For any of us who have had our heart broken, for any of us who have found our understanding of the world stretched, we're living right now at a time where society and the belief and unity is under attack from all sides, and there are fewer and fewer spaces where we can find that which binds us together across different ideologies and perspectives.
[SPEAKER_01]: For many of us right now, we think the only way to hold relationship is to agree in always.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if we don't agree in all ways, then we shouldn't be in relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we see this in every layer of leadership around us coming from old, every center around us, and we're daily with this idea that if you don't agree with me, my job is either to destroy you, convince you to join me or to walk away from you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, what are the practical tools?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it is to counterbalance exactly that force around us.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is to see that actually when we encounter somebody who sees the world differently from us that is an opportunity.
[SPEAKER_01]: That the best way for us to expand our own encounter with the Divine is to go beyond the limitations of our current understanding, which means we need somebody who sees the world differently, who's experienced a different facet of the world, it does not mean we to change our own feelings, it just means we have to open our hearts to encounter what is this other person bring my way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I don't know about any of you, but I'm usually not sitting on my couch saying, you know what I really want?
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to sit down next to a person who's going to really upset me, then I'm going to disagree with in every way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet for most of us when we think about the most important people in our life who've changed our lives, they're not simply the people who just pat at us on the back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, we need the people who just lovingly embrace us totally totally for who we are, but usually the people who've changed us the most are the people who rattled us the most, who unsettled us the most, who challenged us the most.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that to me as I think one of the most important practical tools is how do we sit with a person who sees the world differently and see this is a gift and opportunity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if I can sit with them long enough to find that which connects us together, I've expanded my mind heart and soul.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you again, Rabbi.
[SPEAKER_04]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_04]: Wonderful.
[SPEAKER_04]: One small question you mentioned when you were describing Rabbi Greenberg and, you know, the thing about burning children all that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: What was his, and then ultimately he spoke about kindness as an attribute of God, what was his solution to the problem of evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it is interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll come around to answer that directly.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many people, especially from a
[SPEAKER_01]: Jewish Christian background would give these attributions to God.
[SPEAKER_01]: God is good.
[SPEAKER_01]: God is just, and God is unnipotent.
[SPEAKER_01]: God is all powerful.
[SPEAKER_01]: And an 11th-century Christian monk made the point that we can't understand the world with all three of these at the same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can only have two at any one point, and think about it for a second.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, if we take again the horrific example of a burning child.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we explain the burning child?
[SPEAKER_01]: If God is good and God is just, okay, a good God would never have a child burning.
[SPEAKER_01]: A just God would never be able to burn an innocent being.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what does it mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: It must mean that God doesn't have the power to stop it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, or if we say, God is all powerful and God is just, we then would have to say God is not good.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, it's greenberg comes around to this idea that when we look at the world and we see the cruelty of the world, we need to let go of this idea that God is in any one moment all of these things to us, because we cannot conceive of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, what does it mean in God's essence?
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know, but what it does mean is that in our encounter of God, we will have to look at evil as something that is beyond God outside of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: For anyone who looks at the arc of history, we will see that sometimes it is out of evil that the greatest goodness comes for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of us have encountered this in our own lives that of some of the worst pain, the pain and the heartbreak we would never wish on any other being that we have come to find the most important aspects and blessings of our life.
[SPEAKER_01]: That does not mean that that evil was good, but it means that we were able to create goodness out of that evil.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the Jewish tradition, we look back and say that the universe was created out of darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the beginning of the universe, there was chaos and void and out of the darkness, God creates light, but does not banquish the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: that we always will need that darkness, but where we find potency is what we create out of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if we get greenberg, this is one of his responses, is that when we go and try to give causality to evil, when we try to say that evil is actually good because God wishes it,
[SPEAKER_01]: is where we warp the real divine energy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where we really get to see the power of God is how we can partner with God or be create the image of God is one who can create light out of darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, that was one of his enjoiners is that we need to in the wake of the Holocaust or today and the wake of any you know, myriad kind of inhumanities that exist around the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to be able to see that we have the agency to create light out of that and to ensure that that evil is not a necessary thing to perpetuate Okay, it seems we thank you all.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have such a chance to be with you this morning.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you so much again, Rabbi, for coming, and please come again.