rabbi patrick aleph

What’s the Point of Religion? (or, The Journey Inside/Outside)

September 25, 2015 By punktorah

Every culture has a story about a journey. The hero, who we identify with, leaves home and goes on a journey through mythic lands, encountering amazing people and objects along the way, and in the end, after making some kind of accomplishment (slaying the dragon, taking land, marrying the beautiful woman), the hero not only finds whatever she or he set out to discover, but also discovers something about his/herself.

You are on two journeys at once.

One is the journey we call life. It’s traffic jams, gossip with coworkers, phone calls from family, meals out with friends, pushing a child on a swing set, and blobbing on the couch with your favorite TV show. It starts when we leave the womb, and it ends in our death. It’s the stuff that makes up life, when we think about what living a life is day-to-day. That’s the external journey: the things that we find ourselves part of either through our own design, or simply by accident. For the most part, we go through our daily life without thinking about it. If one takes a few deep breaths and looks around, one realizes the world spins without us, that life goes on without our approval, and that-is-that. The journey on the outside is a collection of experiences that come without anything mystical happening.

Then there’s the other life, something private, something internal. This is the journey of our secret nature, or what some call our soul or human spirit. This interior is where the unconscious takes its journey, and the landscape is a bit different from what is outside of ourselves. This stuff on the inside is a stew of every fantasy, every wish fulfilled or unfulfilled, every dream and nightmare.

Our outer journey is about us living in the world. Our inner journey is the world living inside us.

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The Bible Is Really Boring

July 17, 2015 By punktorah

The Bible is filled with tiny, mundane details that are boring at best and that frankly don’t apply to our lives today. Why would someone read the Bible when most of it is about people “begatting” each other and about a bunch of animal sacrifices?

Fair enough.

Well, details, details, details. It turns out details are somewhat important.

Some Assembly Required

Have you ever tried to assemble something from a set of directions? Say, like Ikea furniture? A baby’s crib? A light fixture?

It’s horrible, isn’t it?

You have this stuff; these elements that need to come together to form whatever your project is with a set of instructions, usually in Chinese, that will lead you down the road to completion. And sometimes you have another person watching you, hanging on in anticipation for the glory that is the whatever-your-making.

And it stinks.

The instructions are ridiculous. They don’t make any sense. Even if they are in English, it’s like a secret code you have to deconstruct in order to do the simplest task.

“Insert widget A into slot B by turning dial C.” What? Are you kidding?

It doesn’t help that widget A, slot B and dial C are these things that you have no other frame of reference for. It’s completely alien to you as to how any of this works. This is the first, and likely last, time you will ever be called upon to build this thing, but the process of creation makes you feel like it will never end.

Between the Exodus from Egypt and the settlement of the land of Canaan, the Israelites were commanded to build a portable religious building we call the Tabernacle. I talked about this in an earlier blog post, specifically about the connection between the priests, their clothing and the building. But let’s take some steps backwards and talk about the building and how boring the Bible is.

“This is the offering which you shall take of them: gold, and silver, and brass; and blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats’ hair; and rams’ skins dyed red, and sealskins, and acacia-wood; oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil, and for the sweet incense; onyx stones, and stones to be set, for the ephod, and for the breastplate.”

Cool, this seems easy.

“And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them. According to all that I show you, the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the furniture thereof, even so shall you make it. And they shall make an ark of acacia-wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length, and a cubit and a half the breadth, and a cubit and a half the height. And you shall overlay it with pure gold, within and without, and you shall make upon it a crown of gold. And you shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in the four feet thereof; and two rings shall be on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side of it. And you shall make staves of acacia-wood, and overlay them with gold. And you shall put the staves into the rings on the sides of the ark, wherewith to bear the ark” (Exodus 25:3-14).

Bored yet? Thought so. And that’s only eleven verses!

So why the details. Why not, “and you shall figure it out on your own. Yea, for you are smart enough!” God it turns out does not work that way.

Is it simply that religion is filled with rules that have no application today? That it’s just a bunch of made up nonsense designed to torture you?

OK, let’s go with that for a moment. Well, not the torture part. Let’s just assume that religion is just made up.

If it’s all made up, why bother making up the part about the tabernacle and its exact construction? There are more worthwhile things to make up, like plagues and worldwide floods. Holmes On Homes in Hebrew is just ridiculously bland.

Or is it?

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting a man named Rabbi Ron Herstik. Ron’s a sweet guy, very Zen. He’s one of those people you meet and you think to yourself, “damn, I will never know as much as he knows in ten thousand lifetimes.”

Ron held Shabbat services once a month in the community room of his suburban neighborhood. On one such occasion, he was delivering a sermon (dvar torah) about the particular Torah portion that talks about this temple construction nonsense. At a certain point in his sermon Ron asked the crowd if they had any questions, and a delicate woman’s voice responded “why all the details?”

If I had been in his position I’m not sure I would have known what to do. The benefit of age and experience is having answers to things like this in your pocket.

Rabbi Ron answered by saying that he has a hobby which is woodworking! From the perspective of someone who works with wood, he understands the need for details. The writer of this text is insisting we read all these minor points because of what it does to us as the reader. The text, through its intricate retelling of how the tabernacle was assembled, is meant to deeply involve us in the experience of the construction of the temple.

It’s not that we need to know how the temple goes together. We’re not rebuilding it any time soon. We read the text so that we enjoy each and every part of the temple construction. Anyone who works with their hands, someone who enjoys their craft whatever it may be, finds a certain kind of peace and completeness when putting something together.

In his book “It Was On Fire When I Laid Down On It,” author Robert Fulghum talked about his teen years when he learned the proper way to iron a shirt. He connected the detail-oriented approach of washing, drying, and pressing a shirt to zazen, the activity-as-meditation he would later learn in his spiritual explorations.

When we read the construction of the temple, we are being asked to be part of something. We are invited to the peace that comes with doing one thing really well, whether it’s woodworking in your garage like Ron or ironing a shirt like Robert.

Details Are Eternal

The Temple in Jerusalem was sacked many times by foreign armies. Each time there was some kind of construction project to rebuild it, until 70CE when the Romans destroyed the Temple and thus ended the priesthood and the sacrificial system.

What came out of this destruction was the rise of a group called Pharisees, or rabbis. Their approach to religion was slightly different. These rabbis deemphasized the sacrificial system and instead focused on ethical behavior, prayer, and a great attention to law, specifically how law was going to be applied in a new era and outside the land of Israel.

If you want to understand these people and their beliefs, the most comprehensive way to do it is by reading a series of books called the Mishnah. The Mishnah, surrounded by commentary, makes up a much larger series called the Talmud. Imagine a series of Facebook dialogues about the Jewish religion over a period of hundreds of years. That’s pretty much what we’re talking about here. Every minor detail of every aspect of life is brought up in this voluminous series. Scholar Ari Elon called the Mishnah the “theology of tiny details.”
Why the annoying rules?

Great Art Requires Suffering

What we call Judaism today is the aftermath of a great tragedy. The Israelites had a Temple, a priesthood, and a text that backs it all up. When that went away, God went away.

The Mishnah was a way for the Israelites to come back into relationship with the Divine, even if it was a shadow of what they once had. Like someone lingering over photos of their lost love, the Israelites poured over every letter of texts looking for the God that was once there, then gone.

Details are about creating a deep relationship between yourself, the person writing the sacred text, and the eternal message they are trying to convey. The more details, the more opportunities there are to experience the sacred.

What About Us?

When we allow ourselves to dance with the details, we become part of the story. We become Moses, the priests, the Israelites. We become part of their communion with God, and in that way, God is released from the bounds of time and history, and dwells amongst us again.

Religions have details. These details are like a code: an operating system for the spiritual technology that is the human spirit. We need the details, because we need the transcendent.

Guess the Bible isn’t that boring after all.

Written by Rabbi Patrick

God is Like a Ride Sharing App (How God Challenges the Past)

July 1, 2015 By punktorah

In his book The God of Old, author James Kugel makes a surprising observation about how the ancient Israelites saw God in their lives. God, it turns out, was something like an obvious, tangible presence. God wasn’t an abstract concept that one had theological debates over. God just was. And sometimes this God was in our space, and in our faces, in the form of miracles, prophets, angels (who were really just flesh and blood people), architecture, the weather and all sorts of things.

As the author states on his website:

The God of Old was not invisible or abstract. He appeared to people – usually unexpectedly; He was not sought out. Often, He was not even recognized. Many biblical stories thus center on a “moment of confusion,” in which an encounter with god is at first mistaken for an ordinary, human meeting. In the biblical world, Kugel shows, the spiritual and the material overlapped: everyday perception was in constant danger of sliding into something else, stark but oddly familiar. God was always standing just behind the curtain of ordinary reality.

Side note: I’ll never get over the fact that one of my favorite Bible scholars has a last name that translates to a casserole often made with noodles or potatoes. The fact that there is a genius in this world running around with a pot luck dish for a last name gives me a joy that is indescribable.

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Is Going To Starbucks A Spiritual Act? (Plus Drag Queens, Ponchos and Tents)

June 12, 2015 By punktorah

Three things to talk about here. First, let’s talk about clothes…what they communicate about who you are, what your life is about, and what you think of yourself and the world around you. And RuPaul. Then we’ll talk about a tent in the wilderness. And after that, Starbucks, sacred ritual, and how we’re basically living the same lives we were living thousands of years ago.

Let’s do this!

Holy Drag Queens

What a person wears says a lot about who they are, and what they represent. A cheap suit means an attempt to be upwardly mobile, in a tasteless way. A military uniform commands power from civilians, or shows rank among the troops. We can see a person’s lot in life from what they wear, and of course, how they wear it. The clothes don’t make the man, but in a way, they do.

Once upon a time we had these priests called the Kohanim, and yowzah, they had some drag man. The priestly vestments contain several “clues” as to the way in which a priest was to be understood in relation to the community: the mixing of linen and wool (shatnez) and the blend of crimson, purple and blue with gold interlaced.

First, the mixing of wool and linen must be addressed, because it’s really, really, really strange (then again, so is most of the Bible, so shocker, eh?) The commandment for the high priest to mix wool and linen comes before the prohibition of shatnez. This is arbitrary at first glance. Perhaps wool and linen represent two seasons that are not supposed to be mixed together, reflecting how the ancient Israelites thought of God as the maker of a world of opposites: light/dark, land/sky, sky/water, winter/summer, etc. Another possibility could come from a later prohibition on cross-dressing.

Drag.

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I Found God In My New Condo

August 11, 2013 By punktorah

Lovingly stolen from Mad Men, but a close approximation of my new place.

My fiance and I just bought our first home: a two bedroom, two bath condo in Toco Hills, the Orthodox neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. We’re looking forward to hosting High Holidays in our midcentury modern pad, complete with enough Ikea furniture to rival the GDP of the entire nation of Sweden and artwork straight out of the prop department of Mad Men. Don Draper would be proud.

But first, we have to go through Hell Week: moving.

A true fact of life: it costs approximately ten times as much to move as your budget allows, and takes twice as long. Doesn’t matter how you budget your time or money, it’s just a reality.

And moving is stressful. We went the easy way with Two Men and a Truck as well as paying extra money for primo boxes instead of stalking the nice man at the liquor store on delivery day. This contrasts with my past moving experiences of tossing everything you own in the back of an Oldsmobile and hoping nothing breaks or falls out the window onto the interstate.

The hours are the worst. From the moment I wake up, the first thought in my mind is not “modeh ani”, the Jewish morning prayer, but “jeez, yet another day of unpacking garbage I wish I didn’t own.”

Out of this experience, however, I have gained a spiritual insight that I wanted to share with you, my friends at PunkTorah.

Get rid of your junk.

Seriously. There’s nothing worse than hauling around the past. It’s over. Move on. You can have fond memories of your past without shlepping around your artifacts.

I draw inspiration from the saga of Rachel, Laban and Jacob. Laban was an idolator, owning some kind of household gods the Torah calls “teraphim” which Rachel stole (Genesis 31:34). Idolatry was clearly the past: at this point in the stage of the Jewish family, we’re at the third patriarch. By now, you would think that the first family of Judaism would have fully entrenched their extended family in monotheism. Well…not so much.

The past is impossible to shake, especially if you are carrying around its artifacts with you.

This desire to remember the past through “stuff” is an intense human emotion. Laban, in his experience of carrying around household gods, was probably not convinced they had magical superpowers. Rather, Laban held some kind of precious memory of those statues in his family’s home. Rachel, his daughter, probably felt the same way, even if she was marrying into the monotheistic royal family.

So please, declutter your life. Don’t hang onto things: hang onto memories.

Rabbi Patrick Aleph is the founder of PunkTorah and the executive director. You can friend him on Facebook and check out his info here.

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