Rosh Hashanah At Congregation Beth Adam, Boca Raton

Here is my talk from Thursday morning:

Last night I was thrilled to have the opportunity to introduce myself to you and speak of the great joy that I feel sharing this holiday with you. I talked a little about the historical place of Rosh Hashanah and about how Secular Humanistic Judaism is the one way of being Jewish that allows us to be honest about why we are here, without the irrelevancies of traditional God-oriented themes to distract us.

I concluded last night by noting that as secular humanists it is our contention that all culture is human culture and must, therefore, serve human needs. As this has become sort of a mantra for me, I want to spend some time exploring this idea. I will first address the process by which we struggle to make Judaism relevant and then the implications our experiences might have for our whole society.

As secular humanistic Jews, we sometimes feel that we are the very first to ever pry Judaism apart from its obsession with God.

But this is not entirely true. In point of fact, our understanding of Jewish life has been developing for hundreds of years. I once taught a class for the Florence Melton School that I called “The Day Judaism Changed Forever” that traced the origin of our approach back to Benedict Baruch Spinoza. Maybe you remember from Renaissance history class that he was the 17th century Jewish philosopher who essentially put the first nail in the coffin of theistic absolutism. My students were truly thrilled to discover how Spinoza dared to question the divine authorship of the bible a full two hundred years before the rise of modern biblical scholarship. He was, of course, excommunicated for his troubles. And Spinoza was only the beginning. His philosophical following began as a trickle, but it rose to a tsunami that produced a world of secular Jewish and western culture.

There is, however, something that is brand new about the Secular Humanistic Judaism of modern times. It is the very first kind of secular Judaism to grow explicitly out of any kind of rabbinical soil. Our founders, Rabbi Wine and his colleagues were, like me, ordained in the Reform movement. They were interested in how Jewish ceremony could enhance our lives. In this sense it is fair to say that we are doing something completely innovative. This is not just another way to be a secular Jew. No other secular Jewish way of life has ever emerged that retained an organizational structure based on congregations and rabbis. They chose this vision because they believed in the power of ritual and celebration in our lives.

As a result, this movement has become an extraordinarily creative alternative for modern Jews. You can see that in these holiday services prepared so beautifully by BJ Saul.

But because of its originality and newness, the secular humanistic approach to Judaism has a large number of issues that it must address in every single sphere of Jewish life. We can leave no Jewish ritual or celebration unexamined. Nor can we make only the cosmetic or aesthetic changes propounded by Conservative or Reform Judaism. Our mission is much, much more difficult.

In our movement we have a unique duty to examine all the themes of this holiday and to judge their validity for preservation in a non-theistic environment. We must do so with the knowledge and confidence that our Judaism is just as authentic as theirs, and in fact, is more authentic for being more relevant and for being true. Let’s take a look at a central dogma of Rosh Hashanah to see how we apply this.

I mentioned last night that Rosh Hashanah does not go by this name in the bible. The Rabbis also gave it yet other names. For example they called it both Yom Ha-Din – the Day of Judgment – and Yom Ha-Zikkaron – the Day of Remembrance.

Here is a text that illustrates their view of the day:

…Israel is the people which knows how to win over their Creator with the blasts of the shofar so that He rises from His throne of judgment to His throne of mercy and is filled with compassion for them and turns His quality of judgment into the quality of compassion. (Vayikra Rabba 29:4)

Well, clearly we cannot adopt this theme of Rosh Hashanah! You don’t need my commentary to tell you that this is not a humanistic idea. And yet, consider just how central this theme is in the prayerbooks and celebrations of the holiday. This is not some minor leitmotif, but one of the key ideas of the entire holiday season. There are pages upon pages of poetry and prayer that are committed in one way or another to this imagery.

None of this has prevented us from blowing the shofar in our services. We simply have had to find new meanings for it. But again, it is not always easy. In preparing for this talk, for example, I searched through many different interpretations of the shofar. The 10th century sage, Saadiah Gaon prepared ten reasons and I could not adapt a single one for you! I came a little closer with Moses Maimonides who spoke about the shofar as a kind of divine alarm to wake us from our slumbers and remind us to change our ways and improve our lives. If we remove his many mentions of divinity, it is relevant. My point, however, is not really about the shofar per se but about the rebellious thinking that we secular humanistic Jews must, by definition, engage in if we are to participate in these holidays and rituals.

I would like to say that not all of our challenges are this difficult, but in fact, most of them are. Whether we like it or not, all of the prevailing options in Judaism today are filled with the same intensely theistic and other-worldly ideas that have characterized Judaism for thousands of years.

Our movement chooses to preserve the very same Jewish culture that was and is rooted in a religiously supernatural context. We are willing to make the effort because we seek to celebrate Jewishly and humanistically.

The ideas, rituals and celebrations that we have inherited from Jewish history are certainly not monolithic. They were, however, by and large supernatural. Unfortunately for us, while Spinoza spent a great deal of effort attempting to uncover the scientific and philosophical truths of the universe, he did not spend even a minute of his time trying to adapt the shofar or apples and honey to a non-theistic understanding of Judaism. No…we are the very first to do that and we have only just begun.

So once again I return to my theme that all culture is human culture and as such it must meet human needs. I want to push this idea a little further now and explore it within the context of the intriguing new intellectual developments we are witnessing emerging from scientists and thinkers.

It seems that we are living in a time of great opportunity for humanists and secularists and the lessons we have learned from our transformation of Jewish ritual should now have an even larger possible audience.

In the last few years there has been a plethora of books and studies about the state of religious faith. The studies have noted that the fastest growing demographic in this regard are those who, like us, are non-theistic.

The mounting piles of books by the so-called “New Atheists,” authors like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have eloquently made the case not only for the irrelevance of theism, but the dangers inherent in it as well. Just this week one of the world’s pre-eminent physicists, Stephen Hawking, joined the fray with a new book that says that the laws of the universe offer no need for a deity. Scientists and rational thinkers are finally taking up the challenge to call for a secular society based upon humanistic principles as at the same time they demolish ancient arguments for the existence of God.

The opening up of this discussion and the efforts to bring reason and rational thinking to the forefront of our value system affords us a great opportunity. It is time for we secular Jewish humanists to let the world know what we have to offer and to share with them the significance of our innovation. We must exploit this chance to show that we have something to offer that goes even beyond the rejection of theism.

We must begin to speak loudly about the fact that humanism offers a real alternative grounded in science and reality. This realization was the genius behind the creation of the Society for Humanistic Judaism. The founders of this movement spoke not only about what we reject, but about what we embrace. We must take advantage of the popularity and attention that this crop of intellectuals is providing for us. They have laid some fine groundwork for us to do so. For instance, I recently heard Richard Dawkins address this very point in answer to a question at a lecture. He said:

If it is the case that people find consolation and comfort in religion then I’m not in the least surprised but … what is comforting and what is true are two different things…. [W]e need to replace the roles of religions…to the extent that humans do need ritual, do need public meetings….I don’t see any reason why we should not put on secular equivalents of the religious ceremonies that mostly dominate our lives at the moment. …Dispense with all prayers…retain music…retain poetry…..

It is not enough to put aside the supernatural. Atheism, ignosticism or skepticism are not belief systems. Humanism is a belief system and it must be enhanced by ritual and celebration. Earlier I mentioned Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation and the soon to be released book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Here’s what he had to say in a recent article:

We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous. We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity — birth, marriage, death, etc. — without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality.

Isn’t this exactly what we secular humanistic Jews have been doing? Is this not precisely our agenda? For over forty years this movement has worked overtime to make this message known. It has been difficult, to say the least, particularly in the religious milieu of the United States. Last night I shared a bit of my background. Consider how long it took me, a person committed wholeheartedly to reason, rationalism and science, to apply this simple truth to my Jewish identity. Others like BJ and Rabbi Miriam Jerris, who will speak here next week on Yom Kippur, have been working tirelessly at this for years.

We must now build on their labors. Now is the time for us to take this message to the larger Jewish community. We must actively recruit the rabbis and other professional leaders who agree with us. We must encourage Jews to consider alternatives to a religiously-based Judaism that simply does not match the way they live their lives. We must join hands with other humanists and urge them, too, to take up this challenge on a widespread basis far beyond the confines of the Jewish community. We must be open and honest about our ignosticism, agnosticism, atheism or whatever non-theistic approach we take and let people know that they can be good without God and that they can flourish spiritually without prayer and other meaningless rituals; that they can replace them with rituals that are meaningful and human-centered.

In short, for human culture to meet human needs, ritual and cultural celebrations must be de-coupled from the supernatural and from fantasy. As secular humanistic Jews we can set an example for all peoples of the way in which a religious identity can metamorphose into a reality-based yet spiritually meaningful approach for our secular age of science and truth.

So let us celebrate this holiday loudly and proudly and let all of our fellow Jews and our fellow humanists know that this is the way it can be done. Let us blow the shofar, putting aside the ancient and irrelevant interpretations, and make it a clarion call for an age of reason that is also an age of the human spirit. That is our duty to our children and to humanity. The Jewish people needs us and the world needs us. We have the truth on our side…a truth based on evidence, not faith…it is our responsibility to share it with others.

Rosh Hashanah at Congregation Beth Adam, Boca Raton