Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Making it up as we go along?

Frontline aired a special on "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" Monday night.

During this special they interviewed Rabbi Irwin Kula, a Conservative Jewish rabbi and president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in NYC.

On the Question of God, he had to say: (bold formatting mine, for emphasis)

For me, that there's something "out there," and that I'm here, no longer meant anything, because every time I thought there was something "out there," it turns into inevitably something opposed to me. Something I have to define myself against, whether that's God, or whether that's a Christian, or whether that's a Muslim, or whether that's a Buddhist. And that's not my experience. My genuine experience of life is that there is nothing "out there." This is all there is. And when you see the seamlessness of it all, that's what I mean by "God."

Every tradition has that. Every morning, three times a day since I'm five or six years old, I've been saying, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." Right? It's one of our few creedal statements, the Shema. Three times a day, since I'm six years old. If you ask what 9/11 really did, it made me understand the truth of that. The truth of that, "Everything is one." Not that there's some guy hanging out there who has it all together, who we call "One," but that it is all one. We all know it deep down. We've all had those experiences, whether it's looking at our child in a crib or whether it's looking at our lover or looking at a mountaintop, or looking at a sunset. Right? We've all had those experiences. And we recognize, "Whoa. I'm much more connected here." That's what those firemen had. They recognized -- they didn't have time to think about it, right? Because actually, if you think about it, you begin to create separations. They didn't think about it. All they knew is we're absolutely connected. We're absolutely connected to the 86th floor. Well, that's where God is. That's not "where God is"; God isn't anywhere. That's what we mean when we say "God." ...

So, if you can't handle your experiences or define them through your theology, change your theology. "The Lord is One" no longer means monotheism, it now can mean pantheism.

He went on to share how he had taken the final voicemail messages left by victims on 9/11 and now prays them every morning. You see, once you divorce yourself from what the Bible teaches, you have nothing. You have to take whatever you can find and try to make that your text. You have to fashion a god in your own image, bow down and worship it, and break the moral Law.
 
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