Torah reading: Deuteronomy 11:26 to 16:17.
Haftarah: Isaiah 54:11 to 55:5. (3rd Haftarah of Consolation).
Today, I'm going to focus on the Deutoronomy passage. To a modern reader, this section -- mostly a series of laws -- probably strikes us as a rather odd mixture. Some elements might seem progressive and liberal, even utopian: the setting aside of tithes for "the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows", the command that debts be cancelled and slaves be freed every seven years, the emphasis on lending freely to the poor without expectation of repayment.
But then there's the other half. We'd call these commands rigid at best, and savage at worst: the idea that God can only be worshipped in certain state-mandated ways and at certain times and places. Some foods that must be eaten (e.g. the Passover dinner) and others that cannot be (pigs, rabbits, shellfish). The differentiation between Israelites and foreigners (e.g. in applying the seven-year rule about debt forgiveness.) And, worst of all, what we could call extreme religious intolerance, even theocracy: the command to destroy, smash, burn, kill, and utterly obliterate any trace of any other gods or the people who dare to worship them.
To us, such an approach seems bizarre. Surely any sort of God worth worshipping can see and hear us no matter where and how we pray, what name we use for the Divine, and what sort of foods we eat! Aren't love, mercy, forgiveness and justice the things that really matter -- not whether we had bacon for breakfast or followed a particular ritual before praying?
Well, of course they are -- I think that's a given. (Any readers who disagree are probably on the wrong website.) However, though much is gained through our modern emphasis on inclusivism and universal tolerance, something is invariably lost as well. When we declare every time and place sacred, we tend to subsequently forget (unless we work very hard to remind ourselves) that anything at all is sacred. Rather than all of creation becoming somehow "special" or mystical, the entire world slips into a grey haze of mundanity, where the sense of God's presence is to be found not in specific places -- but nowhere at all.
Perhaps this level of abstraction is inevitable, even necessary in the modern world. Our military capacity and weapons technology is such that if we all truly believed our means of worship was the "only" right one, and set out to force it upon others by whatever means necessary, the human race probably wouldn't survive the next week. But is it possible for human beings to jump directly to this advanced understanding of God as a universal abstraction -- bypassing entirely the notion of the specific, the concrete, as the only revelation of God?
The Christian writer Brian McLaren argues that such a leap is impossible, given the limitations of the human mind:
"Experts in math education have determined a set of skills that need to be mastered in a sensible order: addition before subtraction, subtraction before multiplication, solving for single variables before solving for multiple variables, and so on. What if something similar must happen in the theological education of the human race? What if people who live in the second-grade world of polytheism need to learn about one God as superior to others before they can handle the idea of one God as uniquely real? What if, in order to properly understand God's concern for social justice, they must first have a concept of God being pleased or displeased, and that concept can only be developed through ceremonial rules and taboos? What if God must first be seen as the God of our tribe and only later as the God of all tribes? What if we need to find God in the face of our brother before we can find God in the face of the other, the stranger, even the enemy?" (A New Kind of Christian, p. 104, condensed slightly).
When I think back to my own childhood, I remember certain times (mealtimes, my birthday, Christmas) and places (church, the grove of spruce trees behind our house, the water park) which were to me either sacred or in some sense "magical". And each of these had certain associated rituals that were either religious (saying grace, exchanging gifts, etc) or creative on a personal level (playing imaginative games like "travelling to Narnia") -- rituals that were
only performed in those times and places. I was pretty rigid about this (particularly in my own imaginative play!), and it made complete sense to me -- as it does for most young children, at least until they've reached a more abstract level of thinking.
In summary, it's quite likely that people have to go through this very concrete, specific stage before they can intellectually move to generalized abstractions, and that when we do move to the more abstract stage, we invariably lose something of the immediacy and vividness of religion. Perhaps, in this light, we can see even the most intolerant passages in Deuteronomy as in some sense necessary -- even if, in our own time and place, such commands would be destructive and unthinkable.
Any thoughts?
Shabbat Shalom!