WHAT SERMONS WOULD I WANT TO HEAR? Part 2

My answers to both questions Gordis asks are related to each other.  This isn’t a full 15 or 20 minute sermon, so my comments will be more suggestive than fully developed.

The core question I seek to answer in my life is what does it mean to be a spiritually mature adult.  This isn’t an obvious question or one which is much asked, unfortunately. Here I follow Bill Plotkin, who is Jewish but doesn’t think within a Jewish context.  Spiritually mature adults are folks who

• ·        Have a primary connection to the more than human world (nature)

• ·        Have a vision about how to embody that connection and transformed themselves to be that vision

• ·        And express it in a delivery system to a targeted community.

I’ve written about this a lot, and it is going to be a focus of the course I am teaching post Sukkot this year (5785).  Contact me or sign up for more info.

Why be Jewish?  My answer has to do with what I think it means to be human and the question of target community.  Modernity has lost the core grounding that humans have enjoyed for most of the existence of our species.  This grounding was place, family and tribally based. We were the Doughertys of Cork County Ireland and some of us still followed the old ways.  Or we were Shaul son of Yosef of the tribe of Benjamin (which gave us a place based identity).  Or we were so and so of the Mohawk Valley Mohawk. 

To me, our lack of being grounded is a core disease of modernity that underpins much of our dissatisfaction with our lives and much of the destruction we are causing for all beings.  The antidote is to find ways to be grounded in place, family and tribe. This is an incredibly difficult task.  One part of that is to ask yourself what tribe you belong to?  And when I ask myself that question, the compelling answer is that I am a Jew.

Plotkin’s answer is to create/find a target community.  But this seems to me to miss the place based nature of community that is our human inheritance.  It also is easy to have the community be ungrounded because it has no history with which people are strongly identified. When I lived on a secular commune in the US, it was great to read about utopian communities from the 19th Century, but none of us were descended from anyone who’d lived on them.  The connection was more theoretical than deeply felt.  And this lack of deep connection is a potential problem if your community is not people with an at least somewhat intact tradition that is being carried forward.  One of the great sadnesses for me when I read Wendell Berry (who is certainly a spiritual adult) is that the community in which he is rooted isn’t being carried forward.

Being Jewish hasn’t always been the most comfortable identity. After all, it is tough to be hated for who you are, and we have certainly been hated and kicked around for a long, long time. Further, Jewish thought has a lot of problematic elements.  When I was a graduate student in religious studies, half of the Buddhist studies department was Jewish because we were looking for a tradition that was more into spirituality than legalism, or the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient deity left us with insoluble problems and simply didn’t fit our experience. Look at all the leaders in Eastern Religions who are of Jewish origin and are busy teaching some kind of dharma rather than Jewish thought.

I am grounded in my Judaism.  That’s my answer for why be Jewish.  I don’t want to suggest that is has been an easy journey to arrive here, that it hasn’t had twists and turns, that there haven’t been years where I did absolutely nothing Jewish.  But I am a Jew.

What do I believe in more than my desire to enjoy my pleasurable life, apart from my family?  Following Plotkin, I have a primary connection to the more than human world, what he calls eco-awakening.  When I was 18, I had this transformative experience on top of a grain silo in Israel overlooking the Hula Valley where I knew that I belonged to the land.  

I’ve had even more of a struggle figuring out how to live this and I’ve done even more poorly than I have in being a Jew. A core challenge for me in my life right now is figuring out how to embody this connection. What I am doing, living in suburbia with a half ass garden isn’t working for me. I need to find a deeper connection to a particular piece of land, and I need to have people around me who also value and work their connection to the land. But I have no question that I belong to something bigger than myself.

Interestingly, this desire to find a way to express belonging to the land is a path far better defined than my Jewish path. Wendell Berry is a mapmaker.  Wes Jackson is a mapmaker.  Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mapmaker. I simply have to find and gift of good land, to use Berry’s phrase, and commit myself to it. That commitment is manifest in work even more than it is in words.

My two answers are related to each other.  If I could wave a magic wand, I’d want a group of Jews committed to both spiritual and practical relationships with the land. Not so easy to find within this ecosystem. Easier to find if I moved to Northern California—but then I would feel like I am in exile because that ecosystem doesn’t say home to me.  This is despite the fact that Northern California is very much like the ancestral homeland of Israel. Why am I attached to the green grass and trees of the East Coast?  Life is a mystery.