Shabbat Shuvah
This week's commentary was written by Rabbi David
Hoffman, Assistant Professor, Department of Talmud and Rabbinics and
Scholar-in-Residence, Development Department, JTS.
Ultimate Questions
"Live the questions now."
—Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1903
There are some who expect religion to provide
answers. The religious experience is thought to be a refuge from the messiness
of life; a peaceful, ordered worldview that may help explain life's daunting
moments. In this way, faith offers the believer comfort that life is as it was
meant to be, and that one's spiritual work centers on acceptance and "finding"
one's path.
Judaism turns these ideas on their head.
From Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Isaiah to Rabbi Akivah and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in the 20th century, Judaism has never been about acceptance. The greatest teaching that Judaism offers the world is that the way things are is not the way things have to be. The course of our lives and the condition of the world are not inevitable realities. God, through the Torah's commandments and the protest of the prophets, created a vision of the world as it was meant to be, but is not yet. This is true on the micro level and on the macro level. That is to say, there is a version of ourselves who we are not yet, but our families and communities need us to be. The Rabbis of the Talmud continued this work of envisioning more just and compassionate versions of the world and gave this dream a name—redemption. However, the Rabbis never intended that we ignore the world in front of us in favor of this dream. We are asked to be present for the world in all of its brokenness, while simultaneously holding the vision of the world as it should be.
This, perhaps, is the core religious commitment of a Jew: to live with an awareness of this sacred tension between the reality of our world and lives and the dream of what they should be.
Judaism turns these ideas on their head.
From Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Isaiah to Rabbi Akivah and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in the 20th century, Judaism has never been about acceptance. The greatest teaching that Judaism offers the world is that the way things are is not the way things have to be. The course of our lives and the condition of the world are not inevitable realities. God, through the Torah's commandments and the protest of the prophets, created a vision of the world as it was meant to be, but is not yet. This is true on the micro level and on the macro level. That is to say, there is a version of ourselves who we are not yet, but our families and communities need us to be. The Rabbis of the Talmud continued this work of envisioning more just and compassionate versions of the world and gave this dream a name—redemption. However, the Rabbis never intended that we ignore the world in front of us in favor of this dream. We are asked to be present for the world in all of its brokenness, while simultaneously holding the vision of the world as it should be.
This, perhaps, is the core religious commitment of a Jew: to live with an awareness of this sacred tension between the reality of our world and lives and the dream of what they should be.
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