Re'eh -- On gods whom you have not experienced

Sorry, devoted readers (hi Mom!), I was offline for a whole week in Vermont, and so I missed posting Re’eh on (late) time.

In Re’eh, we get admonitions to follow only Adonai, our God, and not to follow any other Gods, “whom you have not experienced.” We also get some of the classic Deuteronomic admonitions to only worship and sacrifice to God at His Temple in Jerusalem, and not to sacrifice at ‘high places’ all around the land of Israel, as had been done in the past. These admonitions reflect a priestly concern during the time of King Josiah to consolidate worship at the temple, and to root out practices like sacrificing at stone pillars that bring Israelites, so the priests worried, perilously close to idolatry. (No matter that all the earliest ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob among others, are specifically recorded to have erected stone monuments at sacred places all over Canaan, and sacrificed to their God at those places. Such is no longer to be countenanced, in this Temple phase of Israelite religion.)

It’s easy to be flippant about the ulterior motives of the authors and collectors of the Torah, this oddest of collections: Well, this guy was making a power grab. This was an old ‘just so’ story about how a place came to be named what it was named. These are records of wars; these are myths that came from Babylonia; everyone tells this story of a great Flood; lots of nations had legal codes with language just like this one. What’s so special about all this, that I should read it still and think about it still and struggle still with its words, infuriating, evocative, repetitive, inexplicable, dull, ridiculous, contradictory words?

The longer I engage with Torah, though, the more it seems worthwhile to do, and the less I like my flippancy and anger at its words. They take me nowhere but to a lonely corner where I sit, arms folded, watching everyone else, wound up in myself and constricting my heart. So I struggle with the words as Jews have done for thousands of years, and I sit myself down at the table, and I join the conversation.

This is the mystery of religious practice: from the place of not-practicing, its value is completely opaque. To judge the value of a spiritual practice, we must engage in that practice ourselves. We must taste and see: is the fruit good to eat? Will my practice cause me to blossom and give forth fruit, bearing God’s goodness into our shattered world? Does it quench my thirst? Does it give rise to compassion, to mercy, to peace, love, kindness, grace, strength, vision, and generosity? And does its value seem to stretch beyond those values, as though it is touching on their Source?

Of course, and here’s the kicker: you enter into a practice and it changes you, and you learn to value different things, and you become part of an interpretive community and you absorb that community’s modes of thinking and learning and being and whether or not there’s something ‘real’ behind it all, there’s something obviously real in front of it: the psychology and sociology and neurology of it. The mind-hackiness of it. The community of it. The functional MRI pictures of it.

It’s easy to say that that is the reality and the other Reality that draws me in is not a true Reality, but is something we made up, my interpretive community and I. Something we are making up right now, talking and talking and talking. From outside this world of depth and meaning, things look simple: here is a neurological change in response to prayer. Here is a mode of speaking Amy has learned from some Rabbis. Here is an image from her tradition, burnt into her memory from early childhood. Here is the Rabbi sitting next to her next to the corpse that was her uncle. It’s all very clear, the surface.

But wait, before I said it was opaque, and now I say it is perfectly clear!

It’s the meaning behind the meaning that is opaque to mere observers. The extra dimension itself, and the conviction or intuition or suspension of disbelief that the extra dimension is a true one, that it explains something about human experience that is not otherwise explicable -- that is opaque. But how a religious practitioner comes to find meaning in their practice, how they enter the community, what it does to their brains -- that’s perfectly transparent, it’s on this level of reality, it’s the how.

Last night my son said at dinner that “How” was the most important word in the world. My son is a scientist, an inventor, a seeker after technological knowledge. I said in response that “Why” was also an important question, and my father-in-law then said “but it is not a scientific question. It is a theological question.” “Of course,” I said. “And it is important even if we don’t know how to answer it.”

We should not allow our mere inability to answer questions prevent us from raising them. We should not allow our failure even to find a reliable method of studying a question prevent us from using what unreliable methods we have. All our methods for observing Divine Reality are unreliable; spiritual technologies alter us as we practice them, but they are the only means we have. As John Polkinghorne, the physicist-turned-Anglican-priest, likes to say, this is not so different from our relationship to quantum phenomena. Our observation alters that which we observe. It is difficult and mysterious and we get only glimpses and we are stuck with what we can get because that is it the nature of the object. “We know the everyday world in one way, in its Newtonian clarity; we know the quantum world in another way, in its Heisenbergian uncertainty. Our knowledge of entities must be allowed to conform to the way in which they can actually be known. If we are to meet reality at all, we must meet it on its own terms.” (Faith, Science, and Understanding, p. 7) So with our attempts to study the Divine Reality, or to ascertain its existence or its nature.

Only the Divine Reality is not an object for our study, but a Subject. We are limited to studying divine reality by way of entering into relationship with that reality, via the technologies that the world religions have developed for entering into that relationship. One can argue that the reality we thus experience is a put-on, explicable in terms of all the materialist realities we already know. One can argue that the sense of meaning thus experienced is an epiphenomenon of our pattern-finding, agent-assuming brains. Again, as Polkinghorne says, all well and good. But: “If you want to make a materialist reductionist uneasy, ask one what he or she makes of music, and insist on a response that corresponds to the actual way one lives and not to an ideologically glossed version of it. ‘Neurological responses to vibrations in the air’, seems totally inadequate as an account of listening to a performance of the Mass in B Minor.” (ibid., p. 14)

From inside or from outside, the question of Who, if anyone, is on the other side of the relationship remains mysterious. For those of us in the relationship, there seem strong hints that on the other side there is an Other. I see evidence that the Other is not just me in a mask. But it’s not irrefutable evidence. It would not stand up in court. It is simply suggestive. That is all I may ever get. As Polkinghorne suggests, Divine Reality, if indeed there is such, is not likely to conform to our scientific modes of evidence, nor likely to be entirely explicable and understandable and graspable by human beings. It cannot be picked apart and studied and observed and experimented upon, because it is not that kind of thing. It can only be experienced, and because of that, its reality will always be questionable.

But the fruits of this practice are irrefutable. Whatever you think of my so-called relationship with God, it brings forth blessing and not curse, although sometimes its blessings look at first like curses and vice versa. An outsider can see these fruits, as my husband does, as the product of a magnificent mind hack. That’s one theory, and it may even be true. I keep faith with the Person on the other side of this relationship, however much I cannot prove the existence of such a Person, because for me the fruits come from the Person and not from the mind hack.

Yes, this is really coming back around to actual verses from the actual parsha! Here they are:

Deuteronomy 11.26 - 11.28
“See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you upon this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.”

And 13.11 If a relative or someone close to you “entices you in secret, saying ‘Come let us worship other gods’ -- whom neither you nor your fathers have experienced -- [...] do not assent or give heed to him. Show him no pity or compassion, and do not shield him; but take his life.”

And 13.13-15 “If you hear it said ... that some scoundrels from among you have gone and subverted the inhabitants of their town, saying, ‘Come let us worship other gods’ -- whom you have not experienced -- you shall investigate and inquire and interrogate thoroughly.” If the charges are true, the text goes on, kill everyone in the town, “and burn the town and all its spoil as a holocaust to the Lord your God,” says my JPS translation, chillingly.

Three times in this text the Israelites are told not to turn to other gods ‘whom you have not experienced’. The punishment for doing so is death.

This all would be reasonably straightforward, if harsh, except for the clause about experience.

Given this clause, that you are guilty if you turn away to a God you have not experienced, then how can anyone be proven to be guilty? Who can know what face the One True God wears to others? What if the other Gods we turn to are not other gods at all, but the One True God? What if instead the other gods are true also, but we cannot know that without experiencing them? Do we open ourselves up to investigating other Gods, to experiencing them, to know if they are true or not? Risking that we will lose our souls to false gods, to idols, to mirages?

These are urgent questions in a pluralistic world, as they were for the Israelites, surrounded by a plethora of gods, and for the early Christians, living amongst the proliferating gods of the Roman empire, east and west. If we are commanded to burn a town as a holocaust to the Lord your God, we had better understand how to tell if someone follows other gods and not simply the same God wrapped in different packaging. And how can we know this without entering into the investigation, inquiry, and interrogation of that god and the religion and spiritual practices inspired by that god?

So here we are:

1. Don’t turn to other gods you have not experienced.
2. Kill Israelites who turn to other gods they have not experienced.
3. How can we possibly know whether someone has experienced another god or not, and whether their experience is in truth from the ‘One True God’, or from some other source?
4. What does it mean to experience God, anyway?
5. Is experience a reliable indicator of the Reality of God, or is it illusory?

It is often stated rather simplistically that Judaism is a religion of acts, not of faith. For Jews , the story goes, there is no such thing as ‘sinning in your heart’. There are only mitzvot and the breaking of mitzvot. Judaism does not care about interiority, is not interested in faith, but is a kind of religious behaviorism.

But here we are, cautioned not to turn to gods we have not experienced. The people of Israel are again and again reminded of the miracles they themselves experienced, of the pillar of fire, the parting of the sea, the manna, the water bursting forth from dry rock, the voice out of the cloud. And if there is no experience of God, then why follow the laws at all? Many of them are inexplicable and absurd. One of the oldest mitzvot is painful, at least for men. Who would circumcise their baby boys to follow a God they had not experienced themselves? (We did, though. We didn’t understand why, and it made us rather sick to our stomachs, but we did it.) How could a person find the energy to fulfill such laws if they had no direct experience of the God who commanded them? On the other hand, how is one to experience God unless one takes up the spiritual practices recommended to enable the experience? It is a chicken-and-egg problem, and the theological solution to it is that God is seeking us, whether or not we are seeking God.

If we seek God, we take up a practice, we taste and see, and then, as we taste and see, and practice, in community, we may more and more find that God is also seeking us. And we may find that the more we practice, the more our lives are transformed, and that it is self-evident that they are transformed for the better. To experience God is to be transformed; to become more humane. Anything that looks like a god that we do not experience in this way, upon investigation, interrogation, inquiry --- that is not God, but an idol. Relationships with God are never static, they are not particularly self-affirming, they are full of doubt and angst and confusion and crying out in the wilderness and wondering if we have been forsaken and fear of new things and trying to discern and attempting and failing to do what is right in our own eyes and the eyes of God, and turning again and again toward God, deepening the relationship, seeking more and more of the life-giving experience that is God.

So practice may begin in doubt and remain always in doubt, or grow to faith, or a mix of faith and doubt together. But an adult does not newly turn to spiritual practice (practices they have not been brought up in, or done consistently, such that to do it is natural and not to do it is not natural) in the certainty that there is no God. We must be open to experiencing God if we are to do so. And that openness is indeed a faculty of the heart. It must be cultivated, and usually with pain. Faith matters, even in Judaism, because it is far easier not to practice than it is to practice without faith. To practice without faith or the possibility of faith or openness to faith is indeed to be under the burden of the law, as the Christians would say, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans. Without an openness to direct experience of God practice is worse than no practice, as it leads to self-righteousness and to spiritual pride and those are not the fruits of drawing close to God. But Christians who believe the Jewish laws are death, that to live under the law is to live under death, have not experienced God as God is experienced in the practice of mitzvot. To do a mitzvah is to open a connection to God, provided you do it with an open heart. It’s not the only connection, but it certainly is one, and anyone who claims otherwise has never kept the Sabbath or worn a prayer shawl or sat around a seder table or blessed and shared the wine and challah at a Sabbath morning service.

So those who have not had experience of God cannot report on it, and those who have find their reports tainted by the fact that their experience is personal, subjective, interior, and can be reduced to various neurological and social phenomena. This is an impasse for materialism, but not for theology, which trusts that God wants to be known and that we are able to know God, but not in the ways we are able to know the laws of physics, because God is not a law but God, and though we can’t understand what God is, we seem to have powerful access to God when we interact with God as a Person with whom we can have a relationship.

So who should we stone, and who should we burn, and should we investigate them with the rack and the waterboard, or with hot pokers or by pulling out their fingernails? How shall we ascertain if someone has experienced a true god or not? What towns will we bomb into oblivion, women and children howling, covered in napalm and burning alive?

However we pull someone to pieces, whatever George Orwell said, we cannot get into a person’s heart and read the experiences written on it like a scroll. We do not know what someone has taken to heart. We can guess, by watching the fruits they bear. But it is only a guess. On the evidence of a guess, there can be no throwing of stones, no burnings or drownings or draw-and-quarterings. If we must inquire about the authenticity of someone’s God, we must do so by taking up their practices. If we do not want to taste and see, we cannot judge their God; we can judge only the fruits of their practice.

What does this mean for interfaith dialogue? Polkinghorne writes:

In contrast to the unanimity of the scientists on such fundamental issues as the existence of quarks and gluons or the molecular basis of genetics, there is no unanimity in the theological world about even so fundamental an issue as the existence of one true God -- Theravada Buddhism seems at best agnostic on the question.

[...]

I can do little more than acknowledge the problem and say that I regard it as one of the most urgent and critical items on the contemporary theological agenda.

[...]

Let me content myself by saying two things. The first is that religious understanding must start within a tradition, taking with great serious the experience and insight that tradition preserves. Once again there is no accessible view from nowhere, only a perspective from somewhere. [...] The second point is the complement to the first, namely, that if theology is to be true to its essential nature as a search for truthful understanding, then tehse issues will not be pursued by means of each tradition stridently reasserting the total correctness and adequacy of its own exclusive point of view, but by a truth-seeking dialogue between the traditions, long and painful and difficult as that will surely be. The quest for motivated belief will take on a further dimension when it is pursued in the setting of this truly ecumenical meetingplace. There is a vital necessity that we should be willing to continue on this shared long search for the deepest truth about reality. (ibid, 50-51)

I talk about Christians a lot on this blog, and about Jesus. I have these Christian blog friends, as I’ve mentioned before. I’m also really into the Dalai Lama. For a while I used to go to sitting meditation at the Shambhala center near where I live. It’s not because I’m a crypto-Christian or a Crypto-Buddhist and, I hope, it’s not because I’m a new-agey navel-gazing grazer collector of religious practices. It’s because I’m seeking Reality, and because I know there are many things my tradition has gotten right and some things it may not have gotten right. And because when I see people who follow what look like other gods whom I have not experienced, I want to know what their experience is like, and I want to see for myself what fruits it brings, and whether we’ve experienced the same Reality or quite different ones.

I do not want to throw stones and I do not want to burn anything to the ground in a holocaust to God. I want to sit at the table, all night long, asking questions, making connections, joining with others to experience God.