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New Psalms for a Paradigm Shift in Judaism

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-3769078

2164-0041

Herbert J. Levine,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

These verses of a contemporary psalm came to me in Hebrew, the language of Jewish continuity and the one I find best suited for enduring Jewish creativity. I wrote most of the poems in this essay first in Hebrew and then translated them into English. They offer alternatives to traditional forms of Jewish prayer and psalmody that do not require a leap of faith. Think of them as post-theistic—that is, their author has been deeply imbued with theism, maintained a lifelong quarrel with it, and emerged as an unconflicted non-theist.My project of writing secular psalms was prompted by Shaul Magid’s call in the 2015 Winter issue of Tikkun for forms of Jewish worship to embody Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s paradigm-changing approach to Jewish theology. In an accompanying sidebar approving Magid’s message, Reb Zalman (z′l) admitted he had not been ready to initiate such a change during his life, but knew that its time was coming.In his book Paradigm Shift, Reb Zalman brought into Jewish discourse the Gaia hypothesis, formulated by biologists in the 1970s, which posits that biological organisms and the inorganic world form a unified, self-regulating system that preserves the conditions for continued life on Earth. Expressing this in evolutionary terms, humans are the embodiment of the cosmos becoming self-conscious, and, in moral terms, are therefore responsible for the future of that evolution. Gaia, Reb Zalman told us, was the living God, and we were Gaia’s vanguard.With the human crisis on the planet (climate change, population size, food resources) becoming ever more pressing, our rabbi-theologians have been following Reb Zalman’s lead in giving us various versions of God as Gaia—most recently, Arthur Green’s Radical Judaism (2010) and Brad Artson’s Renewing the Process of Creation (2015). In the past two decades we have seen God presented as a verb, as the verbal phrase is-was-will-be, as a transformative, liberating movement toward justice, as the interdependence of humans and plants—all formulations welcome, it seems, except those that attribute to God the power of being in charge, which we post-Holocaust Jews cannot accept.Over thirty years ago, I spoke to my teacher, Reb Zalman, about my difficulty with the traditional language of Jewish prayer. He asked me if I thought I could say “you” to the universe. As he did to so many others, he gave me permission to experiment—to use barukh ata olam, “blessed are you, world,” as an inner mantra, even as he urged me to continue to say the traditional words. After thirty years, I realized that I needed to go further, to claim Barukh ata olam as more than an inner mantra, by giving myself permission to say those words in prayer. That discovery led to the creation of these prayerful poems, which I think of as psalms for our time.Marcia Falk’s Book of Blessings and The Days Between opened the way for bilingual, non-theistic Jewish poems. Many Jewish poets have similarly offered prayerful poems with no God-term as contemporary psalms, including Karl Shapiro, Irving Feldman, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Celan, and Yehuda Amichai, among others. I think especially of the exemplary God-discourse of Yehuda Amichai in his final book, Open Closed Open. There he claims “Change is god and death is its prophet,” suggesting that our only bedrock is change itself, the mutability of the visible world to which lyric poetry has always been devoted. Amichai, in turn, was building on the committed secularism and Jewish allusiveness of Chaim Nachman Bialik. These iconoclasts loom large as paradigm-changing Jewish forebears, just as I hope, in my small way, to continue their work.Just as the lad Abram put a hammerin the hand of the biggest idolin his father’s workshopand pointed to it as the one who shatteredall the rest, so our father Abrahamput that self-same hammer in our handsso that we might destroy images of God,which, since then, have screened us from seeingthat there is nothing holier than the world.By adopting the familiar biblical model of the quarrel with God and by playing, especially in Hebrew, with resonances from the Bible and the prayer book, I understand my post-theistic poems to speak a Jewish language for Jewish seekers. The audience for them may be more apparent in contemporary Israel than in the United States. In Israel, there are seekers who have never experienced Jewish prayer, yet meet on Shabbat evenings in community centers and open spaces (a large group meets on the beach in Tel Aviv) to share spiritual poems in community. Here is one of my Israel-centered prayer-poems that both breaks with and embraces the past.In the archives at Kibbutz Beit Ha-ShitaI discovered forgotten hand-written notesof a Passover Seder from 1927.In the place of the holiday Kiddush was writtenBarukh ata kibbutz, ‘Blessed are you, Kibbutz.’Now let’s widen the blessing circleand say together, ‘Blessed are you, world,’to praise your fragile, complex beauty.Like that enthusiastic kibbutznikwho insisted on making his time newlet’s make new what’s old and make holy what’s newand join what’s called secular to what’s called holyand what’s material to what’s called spiritualuntil the gulf between them disappears.The 2013 Pew Research study, “A Portrait of American Jews,” found declining religious affiliations and a growing number that self-define as Jewish, not religious. Yet most of our synagogues and havurot continue to perpetuate Judaism as intergenerational religious nostalgia. We teach our children the forms we knew as children because they offer us comfort and continuity even though we mostly don’t believe in the God that we’re teaching our children to worship. Our children pick up our doubts, so that by the time they reach bar and bat mitzvah age—if they are savvy—they are proud atheists who stand at a remove from Judaism. But when their own children reach school age, they will likely once again offer them the same comfortable, but ultimately alienating forms, which replicate themselves like genes, but with diminishing returns, in each Jewish generation.I have written my contemporary psalms for this growing group of non-religious Jews who may become seekers. Spirituality begins in gratitude and awe. Gratitude—not an emotion, but an attitude—reminds us that we are not self-created, but limited beings dependent on many contingencies, especially other people, for our well-being. Awe is our response to powerful experiences—seeing snow-capped mountains, holding a newborn—that remind us of our finite nature in the face of what is grand and enduring. I often use autobiographical reminiscence like the following to explore paths to gratitude and awe.Every Rosh Hashanah during my childhood, my fatherWould ask my Bubbe, “Why are the cornersof your prayer book’s pages folded over?”Every year she answered him, “This is where we cry.”From her life of wanderings,my Bubbe understood tearsand what follows from them: in no waychallenge fate by failing to mentionthe One who watches over all,but hope with ‘the help of God’ and begrateful with ‘Praise God,’ and ‘Thank God.’I also want to express hopes andgive thanks for the good in my lifeand be amazed by the wonders of the universe.My tongue is getting used to new expressionswith the help of the world,with thanks to the universe.In these poems, I believe I am contributing to the next stage in the evolution of Judaism into a reality-based, cosmos-centered approach to the world that is not limited by our traditional narratives and rituals, but is nevertheless in an authentic relationship to them. So my paradigm-shifting poems integrate science and spirit for a world where Darwin and Einstein are what Moses once was, prophets of ultimate truth. Here are two stanzas that bring insights from biochemistry, evolutionary biology, geology, chemistry, and astrophysics into what I hope is prayerful speech.My life and yours began through a crackin the ocean floor, through which heat rose(and still rises) from the core of the earth and catalyzedthe salty waters. The amino acidswere created, containing the history of lifein the sea, on land and in the air.The psalmist wrote, “with you is the source of life.”Every day, I too acknowledge the source of lifethat warms every breath I take.From Einstein and his students I learnedthat the elements in me were forgedin the same furnace as the stars.From other great ones, I have learnedto sit, breathe, pay attentionwith watchful eyesto a world filled with glory and wonderslike me, like you and like the stars.The pillars of traditional Judaism are God, Torah, and Israel, or expressed in temporal terms, creation, revelation, and redemption. New Jewish prayer-poems inevitably create alternative ways for envisioning these categories. To reframe Torah for our time, I offer the following:This is the Torahthat was written by human beingsover many generations,that Ezra putbefore the people of Israelin the name of Moses,that Hillel the elder summarizedhundreds of years after Ezra:What is hateful to you, don’t do to your fellow.The rest is commentary that’s worth studyingand, afterwards, do what needs doing.Reenvisioning Torah requires a language for commandments that does not include a commander. I turn mitzvotav, God’s commandments, into mitzvoteynu, our practices for becoming more conscious of self and world, for taking responsibility for both self- and world-transformation. This is in line with the Torah’s view that God chose Abram because he would teach his children to do what was right and good.Our ancestors were right when they said that one mitzvahleads to another, and, likewise, a misdeed.This I know from the mistakes of my life.I don’t believe in a commander, but the languageof ‘Thou shalt’ reminds me that we inheritedthe mitzvot in order to be refined,like silver in the hands of the smith,like gold separated from its dross.The Torah concludes with the Promised Land always on the horizon, while the Tanakh completes the circle with Cyrus of Persia’s declaration that the Jews should now return to the land. Whether authenticated by God or by an earthly emperor, the overarching narrative of Jewish scripture ensures that we will fail to see the other people in the land, even as our legal codes urgently reiterate the need to treat the strangers among us with compassion and justice, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” With tragic consequences for ourselves and our ‘others,’ we continue to live with this unsolved tension. Several of the psalms retell the great stories of the Bible. In my revisionist versions of the Bible, I reintegrate the stranger into the narrative of the family circle.We sat, my brother and I, in the backof the family car and quarreled unceasingly,until our mother, may she rest in peace, would ask,“How will there be peace in the world if two brotherscannot live together in peace?” We knewfrom the Bible stories she had taught usthat Cain killed his brother Abel out of jealousy,that Ishmael beat up Isaac, even if it meanthis exile, that Jacob was ready to steal and Esauto murder to receive what he could never get,the one indivisible blessing.Nowadays my brother and I meet for mealson our birthdays, talk of our cholesterol levelsand sleep apnea, of the jobs that our childrenhave taken, and of the Israelis and Palestinians,he, embarrassed like a Diaspora Jew, and I, shakenby this quarrel of brothers who rise from their gravesto deceive and to fight, to die and to kill, unitedby their shared family plot, where theypause for a moment to bury their dead.The Palestinians celebrate their tragic Nakba,a holy day of remembering and mourning the lossof their nation. In days to come, when they celebratethe beginning of their state, may they also celebratea Palestinian Purim, with costumes, masks and hashish(the Muslims won’t be drinking alcohol),when they’ll wipe out the name of Israelonce a year, and then they’ll say what the Jews sayon Hanukkah, Passover and Purim: They tried to kill usbut they didn’t succeed, so let’s eat rich foodand tell funny stories so we keep living well and not fallto the bottom of memory’s black holeof tears and shame and fury.As a committed diaspora Jew, I know that redemption will not be finished when the Palestinians have their own state or are part of a binational state in the whole of the historic land of Israel, as envisioned by Martin Buber and Judah Magnes. We learn from Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution that “that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt . . . that there is a better place . . . a promised land . . . and that there is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching” through the wilderness. In a poem that juxtaposes the particular and the universal aspects of Judaism, I say thatI believe with perfect faiththat the Jews came out of Egypt to testifythat there are narrow straits in every placethat all of us must pass throughto march toward a promised landthat we will not reach,but which will never disappear.At a visit I made to the National Museum of the American Indian, I made note of a remark made by the father of one the artists, Calvin Hunt of the Kwag’ul band, about the tradition of the Potlatch, the ceremony of mutual gift-giving and feasting between tribes: “If we did not carry on, our hearts would break.” For many years, this was my rationale for maintaining a traditional Jewish practice. We inherited this tradition from our forebears at great cost to them. Who was I to throw it aside? But increasingly, I’ve been saying to myself, “If I carry on in this way, my mind will break.” I have written these bilingual, bicultural poems to bring heart and mind together.