Some thoughts on societal unrest, the Coronavirus pandemic, and religious pluralism...

We have enough divisions in our society.  Enough labels.  Each historical event, each natural or biological disaster, each news cycle, each discovery of another piece of reality, of human behavior, or systemic wrongs, even each new discovery of the ruins of ancient civilizations, seems to create more warring factions, turning enemies into mortal enemies, acquaintances into enemies, friends into acquaintances (or straight to enemies), and close friends into those occasional-awkward-beer-after-work friends who don't want to admit that they don't really feel close to us anymore and don't want to have an out-loud fight about why that is (especially when it's to do with politics or religion), but also don't want to hurt each other's feelings.  (Those are the absolute worst, just saying.)

And yet, taxonomies have some utility.  By describing the world around us, we can better understand it, and more importantly, we can have a better fighting chance of successfully making adjustments when we don't like what we see.

In these uncertain and turbulent times, while I would like to see everyone just get along, it is especially important that we identify the largest reducible groups with common ground.  Cultural and ethnic distinctiveness and even "exoticism" are very much in vogue.  Proudly celebrating and emphasizing various kinds of distinctiveness can illuminate much about our cultures and religions and other aspects of identity which are rightly extolled and lived into in times of prejudice and xenophobia, but such endeavors can also obscure common values even when not meant to.

In such a time, so-called "classical" Reform Judaism is a resource to be drawn upon for moderating wisdom.  The concerns that animated the ultra-assimilationist inculturation of Judaic monotheism into 19th and 20th century Western European and North American culture were not identical to our concerns today.  There is no reason to attempt to resurrect precisely their approach for our time--it would make little sense.  But one thing they were good at was identifying common ground between different religions and cultural groups, and articulating them passionately and beautifully.

The 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, for example, contained this:

We recognize in every religion an attempt to grasp the Infinite, and in every mode,
source or book of revelation, held sacred by any religious system, the consciousness
of the indwelling of God in man.

And then, there's this:

Christianity and Islam being daughter-religions of Judaism, we appreciate their providential mission to aid in the spreading of monotheistic and moral truth. We acknowledge that the spirit of broad humanity of our age is our ally in the fulfillment of our mission, and, therefore we extend the hand of fellowship to all who cooperate with us in the establishment of the reign of truth and righteousness among men.

I would argue that in the time since 1885, so much has changed in the world of interreligious understanding, and frankly, so much has changed in internal Jewish thought, that there is a need to state anew a robust Jewish theology of other religions and their place in the world, and importantly, their place in our cosmology and anthropology.

A large minority, if not a slight majority of non-orthodox Jews no longer believe in the personal God of the Torah--the concept of the deity held as axiomatic in all flavors of Abrahamic monotheism from each group's inception in antiquity until the present day.  The unspeakable trauma of the Holocaust was likely one catalyst for this shift.  But this pulls the rug straight out from under the strongest and most obvious basis for Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim relations: our shared God.

At the same time, many more adherents of non-Abrahamic religions are living as normalized participants in Western societies, and more and more "white" westerners are adopting spiritualities that are outside the Abrahamic sphere.  Furthermore, increased global consciousness has shown us how many complex and beautiful societies have survived and evolved from antiquity to this very day without being part of the Abrahamic monotheistic orbit.  Most of us know instinctively that these societies are worthy of respect and that their members are not "barbarians" for their lack of Abrahamic monotheistic religion.  We know that they are not to be hated or feared.  But how should we feel, then?  Should we feel much of anything, positive or negative, other than generalized respect?

I submit the following theory of God and of religions to remind my fellow Jews and any interested Christians and Muslims or other sympathetic neighbors of what we have in common and why we should be positively-disposed even to those who don't have those things in common with us:

God and Religion in the Age of Pluralism and Multiculturalism

While all human religion is socially-constructed and subject to ordinary historical development, the God posited by the Abrahamic monotheistic traditions is the One True God—the Master of the Universe, of all that is empirically observable, of all that we have not yet developed the means to observe, and of anything that we might never be able to observe or understand on this mortal plane.  God is ontologically One and indivisible in number and essence.  However, God is experienced in many ways by the peoples of the Earth.  Humans tend to develop spiritual or religious beliefs when they witness with awe the power and majesty of nature and seek to explain the mysterious.  

Different cultures or civilizations develop richly diverse means of explaining the world around them and the uncanny interconnectedness of living beings and natural processes.  God can reach out and provide real experiences of belief-confirming holiness through avenues to which a particular group is already receptive, even where these avenues do not involve conscious acceptance of the formal logic of monotheism, and even when these avenues include religious rituals and practices that have become iconic of "idolatry" in the collective consciousness of the historic monotheisms.  A Hindu may feel the presence and blessing of Ganesha when she nervously implores the icon on her car dashboard to get her safely home from work on icy winter roads in Chicago, and the earth-based neopagan may feel comfort from the nurturing spirit of Lake Ontario as he kneels along the shore and pours out his heart after a nasty breakup.  God meets us where we are, and does not desire to erase human diversity in order to commune with us.  It makes sense that God would use paths of least resistance; the Hindu woman is not going to expect or want to be guided home by a Biblical pillar of fire along the highway.  The neopagan who just had his heart broken is not expecting Elijah to appear and go for a swim with him to talk about his sorrows.  God speaks in the soul-language best-suited to each person's situation, because God is truly universal.  God's creative power called our diversity of human expression into being.  We humans are notoriously dense and oblivious, in general, to the divinity all around us.  Why wouldn't God consistently take advantage of these paths of least resistance to be in relationship with as many of us as possible?

Thus, one might question whether religious Jews and other kinds of committed monotheists are free to to look askance at the practice of non-Abrahamic religious traditions, or to deny that they contain truth and divine holiness and are thus worthy of significant respect.  Over time, God may influence or inspire visionaries in various cultures to refine and reform the deposit of wisdom inherited from their ancestors.  The gradual development of monotheism through stages of polytheism, henotheism, and monolatry in the Ancient Near East may be interpreted in this light.  Perhaps, rather, we should define idolatry as the worship of vanities which no true religion has ever worshipped--money, power, greed, hedonism, and other false gods which nobody has ever really thought were gods.  The early Israelites didn't deny the existence of Ba'al and Ishtar and Enlil and Anubis.  They simply didn't believe they were worthy of worship.  It was the worship of objects of stone and wood which was condemned, as they symbolized vanity, falsehood, and the notion that we can make our own gods to rule over us.  Religions which still exist today and use "visual aids" like icons and statues tend to believe that they are merely technologies for focusing the mind and heart on entities which cannot be contained by any physical object.  They are artfully manufactured surfaces alerting the devout to the presence of unseeable and ineffable depths.  In fact, some kinds of monotheists, such as Eastern Orthodox Christians, use these modalities for worshipping the God of monotheism.  Many of us, especially Jews, Muslims, and "low-church" Protestants, could never bring ourselves to do that, but no thinking monotheist would dare accuse those who do of worshipping a false god.  

So, we should respect each other, and I might add in passing that the theory of divine paths of least resistance is a potential way to bridge some inter-Abrahamic divides.  This is an opening, for example, for Jews to be able to believe that God is making wondrous and mysterious things happen and becoming deeply, mystically present at Christian gatherings in the Eucharist without our having to believe what they believe about Jesus of Nazareth.  God becomes present in response to their expectation and their sincere prayer, and perhaps God confers special blessing through the modality of the ritual of the Eucharist.  I submit that this is a potentially "kosher" affirmation that makes it as easy for us to acknowledge holiness in their worship as it should be for them to sense the presence of God when they sit as guests in our synagogues and we open the Ark and expose the Scrolls.

God is the Ultimate Intelligence—the Source of all being, awareness, and knowledge.  Therefore, reality has objective ontological existence.  The truth of things exists to be known objectively, independently of any thinking being’s opinion.  However, exhaustive knowledge about the true nature of things belongs to God alone.  Humans have made great strides in matters of the spirit and knowledge of the physical universe, but we must be cautious and humble.  We must behave as if all but the most time-tested assumptions are potentially subject to emendation at a moment’s notice.  What we imagine to be "settled" may not at all be so in the divine will and its accounting.  While standing up unabashedly for truth as we discern it with God’s help, and remaining true to our respective traditions, we must treat with respect and seek to learn from those who, owing to different experience or environment, see things differently.  This is the essence of being good neighbors as God wishes us to be, of being good members of the Divine household, all children of one Parent, each of us with seven and a half billion siblings.  We cannot and should not be identical or agree on everything or have the same beliefs or practices.  We can and should lovingly preserve our various identities and integrities and communities.  But good heavens, we can and should be generous and maximalist about affirming whatever common ground we can.  I promise, there are ways to stretch the boundaries with integrity and holiness and break nothing in the process.  We need only search a little, try a little, give a little.  And God help us to do so on the double.