The Jewish high holy day Yom Kippur begins at sundown Wednesday.
In many ways what Jews at West Suburban Temple Har Zion and Oak Park Temple B’nai Abraham Zion will be doing this evening is swimming against the current of societal flow.
The societal current these days is flowing toward the secular, away from a theocentric worldview and toward an anthropocentric view, if not an “ego-centered” one. Rabbi Yitzchok Bergstein, the rabbi at the Chabad Jewish Center in Oak Park contends, “In today’s society we need to refocus and reconnect. We must recognize that there is a super-being, an entity that we are answerable to.”
An entity to which we are accountable?!
We in this neck of the Western Suburbs live in a culture influenced increasingly more by the Enlightenment than the Bible.
According to AI, “the Enlightenment was a 17th– and 18th-century European intellectual movement emphasizing reason, individualism, and scientific inquiry to challenge tradition and advance human society.”
Enlightenment views on religion emphasized religious tolerance, challenging religious authority and promoting a more secular public life. Again AI:
“This shift challenged traditional religious authority, fostering religious tolerance and a more humanistic understanding of spirituality, often leading to Deism — a belief in a Supreme Being accessible through reason.”
The God to whom Jews will pray on Yom Kippur is revealed in the Bible, not a product of rational speculation and is not a distant detached being.
The primary element in Yom Kippur is “repentance.”
When is the last time you heard President Trump or any person with power say, “I screwed up” or “I’m sorry”?
The Genesis creation story is not to be read as prehistoric history but as a religious myth describing human nature. In Genesis 1 we humans are portrayed as created in God’s image.
But in the very next chapter, Adam and Eve are warned that they are not God and need to limit the vast freedom they have with obedience to their Creator’s commands.
Turn the page to chapter 3 and we hear the serpent tempting the humans to rebel against their mortal nature and be “like God.”
“The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.”
Back to repentance. Yom Kippur assumes that we humans are both created in God’s image and at the same time have lost paradise because we keep rebelling (aka sinning) against God’s rule.
Rabbi Bergstein: “A big focus of … Yom Kippur, is ‘Teshuvah’ which is usually translated as ‘Repentance.’ The truth, however is, that ‘Teshuvah’ is a lot more than ‘repentance’”
Teshuvah should not be paraphrased in psychological terms. “Repentance,” he explained, “suggests that its objective is to feel regret, guilt and shame. ‘Teshuvah’ is anything but that. ‘Teshuva’ in Hebrew means to return to our essence to who we really are … to finding our way back to the land of our soul.
“Teshuvah, thus, effectively recalibrates our self-image and gives us the strength and confidence to act in alignment with that spiritual essence, which is the cornerstone of our being. While regret is undoubtedly a necessary component of teshuvah, it is only a detail, not its primary focus or goal.”
But recalibrating our self-image is a counter-cultural enterprise.
Francis Collins is a scientist’s scientist. He was head of the National Institutes of Health and did important work on the Human Genome Project. Yet in his recent book, The Road to Wisdom, his goal is “to turn the focus away from hyperpartisan politics and bring it back to the most important sources of wisdom: truth, science, faith and trust, resting upon a foundation of humility, knowledge, morality and good judgment.
“These four essential goods are not opposed to each other. Rather, each builds upon the other.”
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” he wrote, quoting Chesterton. “It has been found difficult, and left untried.”
My experience is that the radical right can be anti-science and the radical left can be anti-religion.
Collins acknowledges that “Christians have done so much to damage the credibility and appeal of their faith,” but adds that “difficult situations can be redeemed.”
He imagines that the principles of the Christian faith (and I’ll add Judaism) if actually implemented would partner with science in producing the wisdom our society so desperately needs. The Scopes Trial in Tennessee 100 years ago pitted science and biblical religion against each other.
Collins and Rabbi Bergstein, I believe, complement each other, each providing a unique window into the nature of reality.