Eikev

So, Eikev.

Today I went to have lunch with some Christians I’d never met in person. I knew them from a blog I’ve been following for a little more than a year, Not the Religious Type, and I heard about the blog from a member of the church the blogger is pastor of, Greater Boston Vineyard. I met the member of the church because I happened to be there for an event that had rented the church, and my daughter, then two, did not want to be in the event. So I’d taken her out of it, and was sitting in a community room where some people were cleaning up from a church event, watching her hang on the stairwell like a little monkey, and she went up to the church member in question and sat down with her and started a conversation.

The great thing about having a charming, gregarious child when you are sort of an introvert yourself is that you meet all kinds of people through your kid.

Oh, well, I could tell the whole story, but I already have.

Anyway, the people who run the blog were having a conference, and I asked if I could come by and meet people, because it is fun to meet people in person you’ve gotten to know so well on the internet. And it’s a very unusual community, that blog, because everyone who comments genuinely wants to listen and explore and connect. I mean, everyone. There is never a flame war on that blog. And we talk about some really difficult things, at least difficult things in the context of the larger Christian community. We really challenge each other.

There is absolutely no good reason I should be hanging out there, really. Not only is it a Christian blog, it’s often discussing intra-Christian issues or issues about leadership in churches. It is not an interfaith blog. I am the lone Jew there, among a crowd of people who are really pretty into Jesus. It was very strange that I ended up there in the first place, and stranger that I stayed, lurking, but reading religiously all the posts and all the comments, and then stranger still that I began to comment myself, and then to write guest posts. I have really never understood any of that, but I have tried to trust that good things will come of it.

Dave, the blogger/pastor/conference leader, said he’d arrange a lunch. So today I went out to this church to meet a bunch of Christians to talk about God. I get there and it’s totally overwhelming, because there are a ton of people, and Dave had just quoted something I’d written in an email in a big talk he’d given the night before, so everyone knew about me. I was a minor celebrity at this conference of Christians. So I end up with this group of about eight people and we go to a greek place for lunch and we talk about God, and religion, and faith, and science, and theology, and prayer, and Shabbat, and GLBT issues, and Judaism and Christianity and someone brings up something he’d just read by Jonathan Sacks, who is the Chief Rabbi of something or other in the UK, and it is completely fun and comfortable and amazing. Nobody is trying to convert anybody, nobody’s arguing loudly about how they are right and the other people are crazy jerks. There are just a bunch of smart people talking about God, only they’re all Christian except me, and basically I’ve never been in a room before with that many really fun, smart, Christian with a capital C Christians before.

This is getting along to parsha Eikev, I promise. Sort of. A little bit, anyway.

So the most amazing thing about this lunch I had with these blog friends was at the end. We prayed together. We prayed together in a format that is very Christian, in that “let us pray” way that evangelical Christians do. Or spirit-filled christians, or something. I mean, it’ s not book of common prayer prayer. And it’s not “Now I lay me down to sleep”. It is communal, extemporaneous, prayer, and it’s not something that exists in Jewish tradition at all, as far as I can see. Lord knows Jews have plenty of prayer; the siddur is an unbelievable treasure trove of prayers, songs, meditations, prayers for being able to pray, blessings, readings, and psalms, traditional Jews say a whole bunch of fixed prayers every day, three times a day, and davvening, praying the Jewish prayers, often standing and rocking back and forth, bowing, motioning with arms, covering eyes, rearranging prayer shawl is a full-body, full-mind, full-spirit experience when it goes right. And there’s a fixed blessing for every occasion: upon seeing a rainbow, eating different types of food, hearing good news, getting up in the morning, going to sleep at night, using the toilet. The idea is that all these blessings that you say on all these different occasions sanctify your entire life, all the tiny otherwise mindless events of your life.

Of course, prayer can be mindless too.

So we have a lot of fixed prayer, and it can be really meaningful and beautiful, and then of course there’s an idea that people will pray personal prayers to, within and between and among and at any time.

Except it can be really hard to figure out how, because that kind of prayer is done in private, and no one ever models how to pray that way. And since no one ever models it, you never learn how to do it.

So this particular kind of Christian have this habit of praying together. And because it’s out loud, you learn how people do it. And because it’s communal, and people pray for each other in a communal way, it’s incredibly, beautifully powerful. Later I found out that they call this kind of prayer “conversational prayer” and that a lot of time and energy is devoted to teaching and practicing this prayer.

So there we are standing in a circle saying goodbye, and they’re all going back to their conference and I have to book it back home to meet the kids when they came back from camp. And I said “I would really love it if we could all pray together the way you all do.” And the two women in the group came and stood next to me lightly touching me, and someone said a few words of prayer for me, and there was silence for a bit, and I could feel their hands on me, their love and their strength and their presence, and then another person prayed, and another. It was a circle but we didn’t go around in a circle, and I think everyone said something, and I did too, and it was one of the most moving experiences of my life, just those few moments with these people I’d just met in the flesh two hours ago. There was an extraordinary sense of presence. Everyone was really there. People thanked God for everything I’d brought to the blog and to their lives. They asked God to help me stay healthy. They asked God to guide me tomorrow for this very difficult work meeting I’d told them all that I had. They blessed me and they asked that God give me every good thing and I thanked God for that moment, I told God and them how grateful I was for that very moment, shehecheyanu v’kiyamanu v’higiyanu lazman hazeh, blessed are you oh lord our god who has enabled us to reach this day. I asked God to give us more good fruits from this strange alliance we’ve made, the crazy jewish girl from the family of atheists, and the praying-out-loud christians. I prayed to God but with them, through them, almost. Like together we were a radio tower, with an antenna and a repeater, and we could hear more and be more heard together like that.

And the very light touch on my shoulder and my back, like reiki, almost, or the sweetest kiss you ever got from your mother, or a beautiful dream that you’ve almost forgotten but not quite.

So I am talking about prayer, and the power of prayer. And how much I am learning about how to pray from these Christians and their way of praying.

It’s incredibly scary to open yourself to God that way in the company of other people. It is a kind of nakedness. Just like it is incredibly scary to open myself as I have on that blog to a group of Christians, to open myself to what I might learn from them about God. There’s an almost instinctive desire to pull away the moment we are really touched by difference, the moment we are really challenged. What if I caught Christianity from them, like cooties? How would I explain that one to my friends and family, already hard pressed to understand how I caught God? To stand in communion and to pray together with Christians, given all the communal history and all my personal history, growing up surrounded by well-meaning or not-so-well-meaning Southern Baptists or others who told me all the time I was going to hell... That’s scary. You can’t fake that kind of open-ness. It’s a risk, and always a risk. Will I have to change, and if so, how? Where will this go?

So in Eikev Moses is re-telling the whole sordid story for what seems like the billionth time: slaves in egypt, mighty hand, signs and wonders, first set of stone tablets, golden calf, 40 days and nights, new stone tablets, rebellion and wandering and manna and the promised land. He tells the people what blessings they’ll receive in the promised land, and he warns them that if they do not honor the covenant that all their blessings will be taken away. So stop being so self-focused, people, he says. Just do only what God requires of you. Chapter 10:12-14: “And now, O Israel, what does the Lord, your God, demand of you? Only to fear the Lord, your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, and to worship the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord and His statutes, which I command you this day, for your good.” Then we get verse 16: “You shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart, therefore, and be no more stiffnecked.”

The idea here is of a carapace of sorts, or a callous, that is built up around our hearts and prevents them from being open. A constricted, hardened heart is not open, and it cannot give and it cannot receive blessings. An uncircumcised heart is also hidden: it hides from God and from others and even from itself. God called out in the garden “Where are you?” and Adam wished to hide his nakedness, but he could not. So he circumcised his heart and cried “Hineni!” (Here I am!).

Like the plain old physical circumcision, circumcising the heart is pretty scary, and not without pain. ( I think of Eustace tearing off his dragon skin to find his real self in Voyage of the Dawn Treader .) I think perhaps Christians maybe think of this as becoming born again and undergoing baptism, which I think is sort of strange, because the thing that is so very different about spiritually cutting away the covering of our hearts from the physical act is that the spiritual act is never done once and for all. There’s so much evil in ourselves and in the world that our hearts just keep getting calloused and encased and we keep needing to cut all that away again. It’s not being born again, it’s being born again and again and again and again. It’s not being, it’s becoming. Every day we must wake up and circumcise our hearts again so that we can greet God and our neighbors, and ourselves, even, with openhearted love and honor.

This would be a miserable prospect if it were not that even though in this world we must always pick up the knife and cut away, it gets easier to do it as we go on. We get better at wielding the knife and we get better at withstanding the pain of it. And also, more strangely, the knife itself seems to get sharper rather than duller as we go on, and the foreskin of the heart thinner and thinner and softer and softer.

These aren’t particularly original thoughts I’m having here, about the foreskin of our hearts. But this verse speaks to me so deeply now because of this relationship I have with these amazing and openhearted Christians, because of how I’ve had to open my heart to them and how they’ve done the same, and because of how that opening has changed me, how it has borne fruit. It has borne fruit not only because of the respectful exchange of ideas, but because of the practice it affords us in circumcising our hearts, and for me also it has borne fruit because it has introduced me to a technology of prayer that I think itself is an amazingly effective practice for opening/circumcising our hearts. In conversational prayer we lay ourselves open to God and to others and to ourselves: in words, in touch, in silence. I imagine such prayer is not always as moving as it was to me today; like all spiritual practice or like sex I’m sure it is sometimes rote, sometimes forced, sometimes fine but not spectacular, sometimes amazing, and sometimes transcendent. For me, it was transcendent. And if I had not opened myself to the risks of associating with them, I would not have had that experience.

This is not to say, at all, that my Jewish prayer experiences have not also run the gamut from bad to spectacular, or that this prayer technology is better than the ones in my own faith, or that the experience means that I should be a Christian.

It’s more about the perils and the rewards of interfaith friendship and dialogue and communion. Ironically much of the rest of Eikev is, as so often, entirely focused on the perils and very clear that there are no rewards:

7:25 “The graven images of their gods you will burn with fire; you shall not covet the silver or gold that is upon them and take it for yourself, lest you be ensnared by it, for it is an abomination to the Lord, your God.”

8:19 “And it will be, if you forget the Lord your God and follow other gods, and worship them, and prostrate yourself before them, I bear witness against you this day, that you will surely perish.”

11:16-17 “Beware, lest your heart be misled, and you turn away and worship strange gods and prostrate yourselves before them. And the wrath of the Lord will be kindled against you, and He will close off the heavens, and there will be no rain, and the ground will not give its produce, and you will perish quickly from upon the good land that the Lord gives you.”

Last week we had Deut. Chapter 6:14-15 “Do not go after other gods, of the gods of the peoples who are around you. For the Lord, your God, is a zealous God among you, lest the wrath of the Lord, your God, be kindled against you, and destroy you off the face of the earth.”

Chapter 7, verses 2-5, was particularly harsh about other peoples’ gods:

And the Lord, your God, will deliver them to you, and you shall smite them. You shall utterly destroy them; neither shall you make a covenant with them, nor be gracious to them. You shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughter to his son, and you shall not take his daughter for your son. For he will turn away your son from following Me, and they will worship the gods of others, and the wrath of the Lord will be kindled against you, and He will quickly destroy you. But so shall you do to them: You shall demolish their altars and smash their monuments, and cut down their asherim trees, and burn their graven images with fire.

And yet how are we to reconcile these admonishments with the simultaneous admonishment to love God, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to circumcise the foreskins of our hearts, to open ourselves? Our hearts cannot be both soft and hard at the same time. If we are to love God we must love God-In-Our-Neighbor, and other peoples’ Gods or other peoples’ Godlessness are part of those other people. There is no love without openness, and openness to change. There is no love without the risk that the love will change you. And yes, too, the risk that our hearts may be misled.

How can we be instructed to love at the same time that we are instructed to show no mercy to The Others who inhabit the land of Canaan, when we are instructed not to marry The Others and not to make any treaties with them and not to be gracious to them?

Can both these instructions be operative? Are both in some sense true? It doesn’t seem to me like they can be, and since I feel I have to choose, I choose love. Maybe there’s a way to think about it all that brings to mind the slogan of some brand of toilet paper: “Soft and Strong”. Somehow we must live our own spiritual lives with strength and conviction and yet open ourselves to the spiritual lives of others.

One way, perhaps to do that, is to share in and learn from the spiritual technologies of others. Skills-exchange, if you will. I think there’s been in recent years a lot of cross-fertilization between, say, Buddhism and Judaism, and between Buddhism and Christianity. I don’t see so much happening between Judaism and Christianity, probably in part because of the contentious and painful history between the two, needing no elaboration here, and maybe in part because the close relationship and intermingling mean that we’ve already exchanged all the good ideas we had to exchange, and maybe I just don’t see much because I haven’t been looking in the right places.

Of course ‘interfaith dialogue’ includes theological discussion too. But I like very much the framework in which The Dalai Lama and Brother Lawrence undertook their Christian-Buddhist seminar, chronicled in the book The Good Heart: it was a mix of theological discussion and sitting meditation practice. The spiritual practice together, all felt, was essential to or foundational for the theological conversation.

This is far too long a blog post, because it has too many different things shoved into it. I haven’t even gotten to the part about the interesting ethnographic research I’ve found about the practice of conversational prayer, research that actually took place at a church that is part of the Vineyard movement. I haven’t gotten to the book I’m reading by John Polkinghorne and the seriousness and humility with which he approaches the important question of the irreconcilable differences between some of the major faith traditions, and what that says about our ability to do theology and gain what he calls ‘verisimilitudinous knowledge’ of the world. That’s, like, another 3000 words, and honestly, no matter how good a writer I am, you really don’t have the time. I should be snappy and punchy like a TV ad. I should be on-point and goal-oriented, like a well-run meeting. I should not ramble and I should not use the week’s parsha (well,let’s be honest, LAST week’s parsha) as merely a jumping-off place to some other thing that’s what I really want to talk about.

But I’ll open my heart to what’s here for me now, to this Really Existing Moment. Maybe you will too, and maybe we will open our hearts together.*

Okay, here’s something my favorite Rabbi blogger, Rami Shapiro, wrote. (Oh, wait, he does interfaith stuff with Christians! So it does happen!):

“My religion is love. My method is Judaism as I define it for myself. Won’t this weaken community if we each define Judaism for ourselves? Maybe, but who cares? My goal is love not branded community. If I am loving, I will find others who are the same. Love will be our bond, and we will welcome any brand that serves it.”

* cue cheesy music and swaying celebrities; photoshop john lennon into the picture, and we’re all set.