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Harold Kushner's

"To Life: A Celebrations of Jewish Thinking and Being"

Random House, audiobook, 1993


I) This audiobook is about Judaism, a 4,000 year old tradition with ideas about to what it means to be human and how to make the world a holy place. ...mostly this is an audiobook about life, how to understand what it means to be authentically human and how to respond to that challenge. Judaism can teach you how to find the hidden rewards of holiness in the world, how to cope with its uncertainties and disappointments. �Being Jewish is easiest way to be a human being.� Where ever you may be coming from I�ll try to show you the relevance, the coherence, the importance of those fragments of Judaism you may have picked up along the way, how they fit together and make sense and speak to us today.

II) Rule #1: Anytime we ask the question �What does Judaism say about...?� the only correct answer will always begin �Some Jews believe as follows and other Jews believe something different.� The reason for this is that we have never found it necesary to spell out exactly what we�re supposed to believe. Jewish identity is not centered in belief; it�s centered in community and history.

III) Here is the story we tell about ourselves to help us understand who we are, who God is and what we and God expect from each other...

IV) But Noah too disappointed God and by the tenth generation after the flood things were as bad as they ever were. At this point, God decided to change his tactics. Instead of looking for one man who could be strong enough to stand up to his environment, God would fashion an environment, an entire community of people who were trying to be good, in the hope that they would support and sustain each other and bring out the best in each other. God chose

Abraham...and summoned him to be the founder of a special people. The rest of the book of Genesis is the story of Abraham�s family. V) The second biblical book, Exodus, is the hinge on which all of Jewish history turns. The world inhabited by Abraham�s descendents at the end of Exodus is totally different from that at the beginning. If Genesis is the basic biblical statement about what God wants and needs from human beings in general, Exodus is the definitive statement about God�s relationship to the Jewish people.

VI) The point of the Ten Commandments...is that they were delivered to an entire people; God invites the entire Israelite people to join with him in a covenant, a contract. The Israelites promise to live a distinctive, moral, God-centered life and God , for His part, promises to bless the people with his presence, give them a homeland of their own and protect them there. The idea behind the Covenant seems to be this: only the rare individual could live by a moral code significantly different and significantly more demanding than the one by which his neighbors live. So instead of asking individuals to rise above their society, God sets out to create a community where ordinary people, not saints, would reinforce each other�s efforts to do the right thing.

VII) While we regard the entire Hebrew Bible as holy, the Torah is given a special, higher degree of holiness. Torah is usually translated as �the Law.� A better translation would be the word Torah would be �the teaching.� Perhaps the most important word int he Torah after the name of God, is the word �brit,� usually translated as covenant. A covenant is like a contract, an agreement in which two parties make commitments to one another. The immense importance of seeing the revelation of Sinai as the forming of a covenant, and seeing the Torah as the record of that covenant, is that it proclaims the idea that God and man have obligations to each other. What does God get out of the agreement? He gets the one thing he cannot do for the world Himself, the phenomenon of people freely choosing to be good. And what�s in it for us the Jewish people? Our reward will be the sense of God�s presence, the feeling that we are doing something for God and entering into an especially close relationship with Him in the process.

VIII) The story of how God intervened to redeem a group of slaves, Abraham�s descendents and give them freedom...
...the concept of the sacred deed, the �mitzvah,� as a unique way of sanctifying an otherwise profane world, and thereby making God�s world complete.
...the notion of sacred time, days that would be different from other days, days in which we would disengage ourselves from our ordinary pursuits and remind ourselves of who we were summoned to be.
...the notion of sacred space, a return to Sinai as it were, a place set aside for us to go in order to meet God, to worship God, to be cleansed and strengthened by that encounter and to prepare ourselves to carry some of the holiness of that encounter back into the world.
...and the divine promise to give the Jewish people a home of their own, a showcase for the God-oriented life we were on called to live.

IX) These fundamental ideas of Exodus provide a table of contents for our discussion of Judaism:
The rest of the Bible and virtually all of what has been written about Judaism since biblical times is an attempt to answer the question �How do you hold on to the feeling of standing before God at Sinai? How do you hold on to the sense of standing before God? Exodus�s answer, Judaism�s answer, is that you do it with special deeds, and with sacred times and places. Three thousand years of scholarship and history are a commentary on that notion.

X) The ultimate vision of the Torah is that the whole world will be brought to recognize that the God worshipped by the Jews is only true God and that to follow His ways is to live as human beings were meant to live.

Some other important ideas * The first thing we need to say about the Jewish view of the Bible is that we see it as our book, it�s not only how scriptures it�s our family album. The second thing we believe about the Bible is that it is true, it�s true even when it�s inaccurate because there are many ways of being true. No document ever wirtten has understood the needs of the human soul as has the Bible; no other book has the power to change society. The third thing to be said about the Jewish view of the Bible is that Jews don�t read the Bible as one reads a novel for the plot; Jews read the Bible the way a person reads a love letter, trying to squeeze every last little bit of meaning out of it. * We learn two lesson from the stories we tell about ourselves: that God loves us and that God needs us. God shows His love for us by reaching down to bridge the immense gap between Him and us. He shows His love for us by inviting us to enter into a covenant with Him and by sharing with us His precious Torah. Jews have understood from the beginning that ours is a religion of love because it did not leave us to find our way through life unaided; it offered advice, insight and guidelines. The claim that God need us is not so much a statement about God as it is about us. We are called upon to do something for God and for the world. We are important.We are empowered. The foundation story of Judaism teaches us these two lessons: it is our obligation to be a role model for all nations and it is our obligation to make God�s world complete by giving Him the one thing he cannot do for Himself: by freely choosing to do good. God depends upon us to complete and sanctify. His world and we disappoint Him cosmically if we fail to respond to His challenge. * Everything in God�s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. One of the fundamental teachings of Judaism is that the search for holiness, for the encounter with God, is not confined to the synagogue. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience and encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world into the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy. * We tend to think of laws as restricting our freedom, but Judaism insists that living by God�s laws is a matter not only of obedience but of a more important kind of freedom. The freedom the law offerss is the freedom of the athlete who disciplines his body so that he�s free to do things physically that you and I are incapable of; it�s the freedom of being the master of appetite rather than its slave. It�s only be subjecting oneself to rigorous discipline as the athlete does, that we gain the ability to do demanding and impressive things. So many of the rules and rituals of the Jewish way of life are spiritual calisthetics, designed to teach us to control the most basic instincts of our lives: food, sex, anger, aquisitiveness and so on. We�re directed to rule them rather than have them rule us; and to sanctify them by dedicating them to God�s purposes.
* The first gift the Torah offers us is the freedom to say no to appetite.
* The second gift of the Law is the assurance that our moral choices are taken seriously at the highest level. There are three ways to handle our instinctual urging: we can yield to the them, as animal do; we can try to suppress them with the result that we become obsessed with them; or we can sanctify them, we can apply rules to them in a way that no other living creature can. We can then go on to enjoy them within these limits...food, sexuality, aquisitiveness (via Sabbath, sedaka: more than charity, �doing the right thing�), speech. If you can take the acts of eating, speaking, working and making love and invest them with religious significance, you�ve done a lot to liberate the religious impulse from the confines of the house of worship. You can be religious in the way you treat money, food, sex, in the way you speak to your child or your neighbor as well as the way you speak to God. Do that you have a lot to take the everyday and make it holy.

* The unit of Jewish religious curency is the �mitzvah,� the literal translation of which is commandment. A mitzvah is something you do because you feel you�re supposed to do it as a Jew. We come into the presence of God, we re-enact the moment of Sinai, by translating our Jewish identity into action, wherever we are, by performing a mitzvah; we bring holiness into our lives not by entering a sanctuary but by acting to sanctify the everyday, making the ordinary extraordinary.

* Jewish life is based not just on the Bible but on twenty-two centuries of interpreting the Bible. Periodically the oral law was written down, most prominantly in the Talmud. While the written text of the Bible could not be changed, the oral law was always subject to expansion and revision.

The premise of Conservative Judaism is that Judaism, when it�s healthy, constantly sheds forms and customs which no longer serve their original purpose and creates new ones to meet changing conditions. �There are only two kinds of Jews: serious Jews and non-serious Jews. Serious Jews try to do what Jews have always done: to bring holiness into their lives by sanctifiying their everyday activities. They try to pattern their lives on the insights of Judaism, whether in a reform, conservative or orthodox idiom, while to the non-serious Jew it doesn�t matter what style of synagogue service he stays home from, or which definition of mitzvah he ignores in his daily practice. The question is not how many of the hundred mitzvah you choose to follow. The queston is whether you�re interested in doing what Jews have always done: recapturing the feeling of standing at Sinai.

* Special days:
Sabbath & Sabbath rest: leaving the world alone, freedom from obligation and time of detaching ourselves for a day from all our problems. There is nothing about the day itself that is holy unless we pause to sanctify it, but when we do we find that somehow the Sabbath reflects holiness back into our lives and our homes. The high holy days:
* In a real sense Passover is where Judaism begins. This is what turned the descendent of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob into a people summoned by God, a people into whose collective life God suddenly erupted with his liberating message. The story of the exodus is familiar...

* The seder with which Passover begins, show the Jewish educational approach at its best. Passover is experienced long before the abstract ideals are taugh. Children eat the motsa and the bitter horseradish symbolizing the bitterness of slavery; they drink the four cups of wine year after year, and only later are they told this is why we do this. Before, during and after the meal we read the story of enslavement and liberation. The youngest child at the seder asks the four questions:
�Why is this night so different from all other nights?
Why do we eat motsa, bite the bitter herbs, dip our food in salt water?�
And the leader of the seder answers by telling the biblical story of the Exodus, explaining the motsa and all the other unusual symbolic foods.

* This may surprise you but Judaism stresses ethics and community more than it stresses the nature of God. And yet, when we talk about Judaism, it is clear that God has to be a part, the most important part, of that conversation. Without that God-dimension, the issue of how people treat each other would be a matter of good manners rather than morality. To understand and appreciate Judaism we have to talk about God, his existence, his nature, the extent of his knowledge of the future and the question of where God�s power and where human freedom begins. But how shall we talk about God?
There is a strange passage in the book of Exodus where Moses says to God, �Let me behold your presence,� that is, �let me get to know you face to face.� God answers, �No man can see me and live, but hide here in the cleft of the rock as I pass by, you�ll be able to see my back but not my face.� What are we to make of that statement? I take it to mean that we cannot seek God directly, but we can see God-in-action. We can see the differece God makes as He passes through the world. Just as we cannot see the wind, but only can see things blown by the wind and know that the wind is real and powerful; just as we cannot see electricity, but can only see things activated by electricity; just as we canot see love, but can see people behaving differently becasue they love; so we cannot see God. We can only see His aftereffects.
* When Moses asks God His name, He responds enigmatically in three Hebrew words which defy simple translation: EHYEH ASHER EHYEH. the usual translation is �I am that I am� or �I will be what I will be.� We cannot understand God�s name, any more than we can understand God. But it may mean any or all of the following: * God questions: Does God exist? What does God demand from us? What about heaven and hell? Is God all-knowing and all-powerful? Does God know the future befor it happens? Why does God permit evil? Is God a person? Is God male?

* The Bible makes a claim about God that is perhaps more audacious that the claim that He is all-powerful. It says that He has the power to turn human evil into good.

* What we believe about people:


* In Jewish thought, a sin is not an offense against God, an act of disobedience. A sin is a missed opportunity to act humanly. The verb to sin in Hebrew is also used in the sense of �missing the target.� When God created us free to choose between good and bad, He also gave us the capacity to know when we had chosen wrongly. God gave us the power to repent, which means not only to regret what we did, but to change as a result of what we have come to understand. In Judaism, repentance is not complete until you come into the same situation and this time choose differently.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

Why study Judaism?
How do you answer this question, �What does Judaism say about?
What is the hinge on which all of Jewish history turns?
What is the point of the Ten Commandments?
How are these important in Judaism, then and now?

What is �the Teaching?�
What are the four fundamental ideas of the Exodus?
What three things need to be remembered about the Jewish view of the Bible?
What is the ultimate vision of the Torah?
What is the goal of Judaism?
What is the Jewish view about law?
What two lessons do we learn about ourselves from the stories in the Bible?
List the gifts of the Torah.
List the thre major divisions of Judaism today. What is the difference between each?
What does Judaism stress even more than the nature of God?
Give some key ideas about the Jewish belief in God.
Give some key ideas about the Jewish beliefs concerning man.

Vocabulary:

� Covenant � � � � Torah � � � � mitzvah � � � � freedom � � � � Sabbath � � � � seder � � � � "Eyher Ahser Ehyah" � � � � sin
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