Since my wife Keleigh
recently had a total knee replacement, and our Westie, Zeke, is disabled,
several times a day I have had to carry him up and down the stairs.
Last week I was writing a message on
my smartphone, which uses predictive text to suggest how to complete the word
you are typing. I went to write “schlepping the dog” but the predictive text
completed the phrase as “schlepping the dogma.”
At first I was offended. I consider
myself to be pretty open-minded and not at all dogmatic. Why would my phone
make such a suggestion? What dogma would I be schlepping? Many books have been
written on the question of whether or not there even are dogmas in Judaism and one of my rabbinical school professors,
Jakob Petuchowski, famously said that the only dogma in Judaism is that there
are no dogmas in Judaism.
A dogma is defined as “a principle
or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true” and is
mostly associated with Catholic beliefs such as papal infallibility or the
Virgin birth. Depending on who you ask,
Moses bringing the Torah down from Mt. Sinai in the precise form we have it
today might be a dogma in Orthodox
Judaism. But in Conservative Judaism, we don’t exclude someone from the
community because they don’t believe a particular teaching. We definitely do
not have dogmas. So what was this predictive text really telling me?
Schlepping the dog was made easier
by knowing that in doing so I was performing a religious act. In Jewish
teaching there is a mitzvah known as tza’ar ba’ale hayyim, usually translated as
“avoiding animal cruelty” but more accurately, “the obligation to avoid causing
animals pain.” And Judaism going back to the Bible recognizes that animals can
feel not only physical pain but emotional pain. If I wanted to avoid schlepping
Zeke up and down the stairs, we could have kept him on the lower level of the
house or even penned him up in the kitchen which has a tile floor rather than
the wood that’s in the rest of the house. But this would have caused him
distress as he is very attached to us but particularly Keleigh, and if she is
in the house but he can’t be with her it bothers him a great deal -- and he
lets us know it. By carrying him up and down the stairs so that he can be with
Keleigh, I am helping to avoid inflicting emotional pain on an animal and thus
fulfilling a mitzvah.
So schlepping the dog is not dogma
but it is a religious act. And the autocorrect reminded me that Judaism gives
us a framework to make meaning out of the little things. Judaism gives us a
broader context to consider the things which we do every day.
In the play “Fiddler on the Roof”,
Tevya says that the Jews of Anatevka have traditions for everything -- “how to
eat, how to sleep, even how to wear clothes.” Tevya of course was pious but not
particularly well-educated Jewishly -- although learning Torah was his highest
desire -- and he might not have recognized what was tradition, minhag, as opposed
to halacha, law. But his overall point is nevertheless pretty valid. Judaism
provides guidance, wisdom, and meaning in every area of life. True, I didn’t
particularly enjoy carrying a 22 lb. dog up and down the stairs several times a
day, and I didn’t enjoy having to occasionally go back home -- even though it’s
only a 2 minute drive -- to take the dog downstairs and let him out. But
reframing what I was doing from a “chore” to a fulfillment of the mitzvah of tza’ar ba’alei hayyim made a difference.
Not merely the fact that by doing what I did I was acting in accordance with
Jewish tradition or even Jewish law. But it wasn’t just that, it was something
deeper. It’s not just that we are supposed to do it because it’s a mitzvah; we
are supposed to do it because animals feel pain, even psychological pain. As
the ones who are responsible for the wellbeing of animals entrusted to us, we
are obligated to do everything within reason to avoid causing them pain.
There is a statement in Midrash
Rabba 44:1 that “the Torah was only given in order to refine human beings.” I
once saw a publication from the Hillel Foundations in the 1950s that said one
of the purposes of Hillel was to help Jewish college students become
“spiritually finer” people.
Certainly Jews are not the only people looking to be “spiritually
finer” people. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden that “the mass of men lead
lives of quiet desperation.” Thoreau decided to see if he could get out of his
“quiet desperation” by moving to a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond in
Concord, Massachusetts. He advocated solitude, self-reliance, contemplation, proximity to nature, and
renouncing luxuries as means of overcoming human emotional and cultural
difficulties. But Thoreau didn’t maintain his experiment -- he returned
to Concord after two years. His Walden experience enriched his life and through
his writings has enriched millions of others, but most of us will not find
meaning in our lives by moving to a cabin in the woods.
I too sought solitude in my quest to find meaning. From October 1996 to
July 1997 I spent ten months living in a Trappist monastery in Northern
California -- as many of you know. I had spent a year as an administrator at a
rabbinical seminary and the less said about that, the better. I needed some
time to regroup and figure out what I wanted to do next. Thomas Merton, the
writer and Trappist monk, had been an important influence on my own spiritual
development and the Trappists were willing to let me come, so I went.
The first question asked in the Torah is also the shortest, when God
asks Adam, “ayeka,” where are you? This
is not a question about geography. God knows
where Adam is, God wants Adam to look inside himself. A monk or a cloistered nun -- the female
equivalent of a monk -- spends so much time in solitude, and even when working
with others is silent. He or she is constantly asking himself or herself
“ayeka,” where are you? The routine of the monastery is designed to give the
monk the maximum potential to develop his soul and his relationship with God.
I went to the monastery a Jew and a rabbi and I left the monastery a
Jew and a rabbi. Indeed, while living at the monastery I spent every other
weekend serving as the interim rabbi of the Conservative synagogue in Reno,
Nevada, where I lodged at a casino owned by a congregant -- another place where
there is constant, fervent, prayer. But my year at the monastery was
beneficial. Before my monastery period I was known for having a short fuse and
being sarcastic. Those character traits still percolate up on occasion, but
much less frequently than they used to.
Thoreau could not spend his life at Walden. Only a very small
percentage of men who enter monasteries as postulants stay through until final
vows. Withdrawing to the woods or joining a monastery can provide a meaningful
life for some people but they’re not choices that most people will make. And
frankly, if most people did make them, that would be the end of human
existence. Thoreau never married and monks and nuns, of course, are celibate.
We all seek meaning in different ways but the search is important.
Rabbi Harold Kushner is known for writing the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. But he has written many
other books, including When All You’ve
Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough. In that book, Rabbi Kushner writes: “Our souls are not hungry for fame,
comfort, wealth or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that
we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter.”
So what type of meaning do people
seek out? The author and columnist David Brooks is an active Conservative Jew
who belongs to Adas Israel congregation in DC. A little over three years ago he
wrote a book, The Road to Character, where
he distinguished between what he calls “Resume Virtues” and “Eulogy Virtues.”
He’s
certainly not the first person or even the first active Conservative Jew to
make this type of distinction; Rabbi Kushner said many years ago that “no one
ever said to me on his deathbed, gee, Rabbi, I really wish I had spent more
time at the office.” But Brooks captures the distinction nicely. “The résumé virtues are the skills
you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked
about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were
you capable of deep love?”
At its
best, Judaism provides us with guideposts to developing our eulogy virtues.
This is one of the reasons why our religious school curriculum is now organized
around Jewish values rather than distinct subjects like history, Bible, life
cycle events and so on. Virtually any Jewish ritual we observe has a
moral-ethical component but sometimes we have to dig a little deeper to find
it.
For
example, most of us know that when we are observing a Shabbat or holiday meal
where we say Kiddush over wine and ha-motzi over challah, we say the Kiddush
first while the challah remains covered. The conventional explanation as to why
the challah remains covered is that if the challah knew we were saying the
blessing over wine first, its feelings would be hurt. I’ve been a rabbi or
rabbinical student for 36 years, and this is the way I have always explained
it.
A couple
of years ago one of the children in our congregation raised an objection. Bread
is an inanimate object. It doesn’t have feelings.
I was
momentarily taken aback. She was right. Then it hit me.
“True,” I
said. “Bread does not have feelings. But people do. If Judaism teaches us to
take into consideration the feelings of a loaf of bread, which is an inanimate
object, how much more should we take into consideration the feelings of our
fellow human being?” While we sometimes think of our practices as mere rituals,
the act of covering the bread before saying the blessing for wine can carry a
deep ethical message, but sometimes it takes the innocent question of a child
to help us understand what that message is.
Almost
the entire book of Deuteronomy is Moses’ farewell speech to the people of
Israel as they prepare to enter the Land of Israel and begin their new life as
a nation without Moses to guide them. In Chapter 13, Moses says to them “אַחֲרֵ֨י יְהוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֛ם
תֵּלֵ֖כוּ”, “you shall walk after
the Lord your God, ” but a more literal translation would be “you shall walk behind the Lord your God.” Hundreds of
years later, the Talmud in Tractate Sotah raised an objection. “How is it
possible to walk behind God? After all elsewhere in Deuteronomy (4:24) it says
that God is a consuming fire!” If we walk behind
God and God is a consuming fire, we’ll get burned up!
The Talmud goes on to say that while
we can’t physically walk behind God, that isn’t what Moses meant. We are to
imitate the attributes of God and act in Godly ways -- clothe the naked, visit
the sick, feed the hungry, comfort those in mourning.
Judaism teaches us that we find God,
not just in a cabin in the woods or smoke, fire, and thunder at Mt. Sinai. We
encounter God through learning and then applying our practices and sacred
texts. Through feeding the hungry, through worrying about hurting the feelings
of a loaf of bread, and through schlepping the dogma -- I mean, schlepping the
dog.
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