“For Jews, reflection and renewal … are elicited through text study. Our most enduring words do not simply remind us of who we once aspired to be; they press us to ask how well we have lived up to them and how they might yet speak with urgency in our own time.”
– Rabbi Leon A. Morris, Talmud of America
Month: June 2026
A G?d With No Name
IT HAS BEEN said many times, including by me, that Judaism is the most misunderstood religion, and Jews the most misunderstood people, this planet has to offer.
Take this conversation I had with someone the other day. It should first be noted that this someone is one of the most inclusive, bighearted, and real human beings I’ve ever met; I both respect him tremendously, and regard him with a good deal of collegial affection. The context was how to big-tent the Jewish attendees at a local public event where he delivered an address containing various names for the Divine. But we ran aground on this point:
“What is the Jewish name for G?d?” he asked. “Is it ‘Yahweh?'”
“Well, that’s a great question,” I replied enthusiastically. “That particular name is a transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning ‘to cause to be.’ But most Jews don’t use it. Jews have more than one name for G?d, and like anything else Jewish, the answer depends on who you ask. Some would even say that G?d really has no name.”
He regarded me with a very polite and sincere version of a blank stare. And I don’t blame him.
Judaism is complex, in the way that any millennia-old, culturally adaptive, self-reinventing, participatory art project is complex. Not only do we not call G?d* by a single name, we can’t even agree on who should be called “a Jew.” There are a few basic things that most Jews hold in common – monotheism, if they believe in any deity at all, and a self-identity as Jews – but that’s where the similarities end. For me, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (mid-20th Century) said it best: “Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish People.” But not everyone would agree with that definition, either.
At its heart, Judaism requires a certain comfort with ambiguity that’s challenging for many Westerners to grasp. (For various reasons, the Western worldview often tends to think a thing either is or isn’t; there’s not much room for the excluded-and-fuzzy middle of “sometimes.”) Jewish tradition wallows in the ambiguity of contextuality – it doesn’t teach definitive answers so much as how to ask better and better questions.
I yearn for, and dread, the day when someone somewhere can define Jews and Judaism in a soundbite. I yearn, because it would be kind of nice for people to more easily “get” Jews and Judaism – and I dread because it would reduce something transcendentally beautiful to a fossilized factoid. The Talmud, that thousand-year-long record of rabbinical arguments, settles its otherwise unsettle-able questions with the word “teiku” – an anagram of the four-word Aramaic phrase roughly meaning “Elijah the Prophet will answer this when he announces the coming of the Messiah.” May that day swiftly, and never, come.
* I spell it this way to remind myself that the Divine is a Mystery. YMMV.
Industrial Strength Peoplehood
A sermon I delivered this morning. Feel free to skip it if ethnoparticular rallying cries aren’t your thing.
DO GOOD FENCES really make good neighbors – or just a bad impression?
Let’s review the piece of Torah that our rabbi just chanted, specifically the part where the Canaan-bound spies report back to our assembled ancestors: “The people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.”
Sounds hopeless, doesn’t it? Powerful people living in fortified cities. The spies can perhaps be forgiven for freaking out over the prospect of future conquest.
But Rabbi Jonathan Sacks sees the situation differently. He says the spies drew the wrong conclusion: that if the cities are strong; then the people are strong. But that’s not accurate: if the cities are strong, the people must be weak.
It’s like this: If the people were truly strong, their city walls wouldn’t need to be, because they could trust to their own strength to defend themselves against interlopers.
Rabbi Sacks says that this can be an analogy for Jews in the modern age. We couldn’t possibly build enough walls to keep out occasional threats. And anyway, Judaism teaches us to engage with the world, not retreat from it. Even when faced with our most ancient enemy, Jew-hatred.
From Pirkei Avot, that digest of rabbinical wisdom, comes this advice: “Rabbi Elazar teaches: Be diligent in the study of Torah, and know what to answer a heretic.”
In simpler language: Know who you are. Why you are. Where you come from. And how to take care of yourself in a non-ideal situation.
It may not be easy. But Rabbi Sacks assures us that Judaism is strong enough to withstand any challenge. We are, all of us, almost 4,000 years’ worth of strong. It’s a hard-won strength, gained from resisting some very severe attempts to marginalize or vanquish us. And though resistance isn’t always easy, either then or now, we’ve done it – and are still here to prove it.
So my question today is: “How do you strengthen and maintain your sense of Jewish identity?”
[pass mic: some of the dozen-or-so answers included studying our textual tradition, attending services, and cooking (and teaching!) Jewish recipes]
Thank you, everyone. Shabbat shalom.
Double Identity
IN ADDITION TO what else one may find in a wallet (money, DL, &c.), mine contains two cards that license me as a member of the clergy.
They’re neither what you think – I’m not a rabbi, nor will I likely become one in this life – but they do tell a semi-religious story nonetheless.
The first came c. 1999, after a friend who was a member of the Universal Life Church asked me if I too wanted to be ordained. “Sure! What do I need to do?” I asked him. After anointing my head with a frosty cold one (it was a very hot day, in the way that only Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire days can be very hot), he declared, “You’re in.” He then told me where to write and receive my free ordination credentials.
ULC espouses a single creed: “Know your beliefs and be true to them.” And because ULC is legally recognized in California (and other enlightened states) for solemnizing weddings, I have since married a handful of friends – which was, really, why I wanted ordainment in the first place.
The other ordination, also legally recognized in some places, belongs to the Church of the SubGenius. Those behind that inexplicable parody religion/religious parody/living art project published a trade paperback in 1983 which – much like science-fiction conventions and DEVO – assured lonely misfits that they too had a place, and a people, they could call their own. Of course, I took to it in a big, enthusiastic way.
Unlike the ULC, the CotS then charged $20 for an ordination kit. So, justifying it as for a good cause, I mailed a Jackson to their Dallas, Texas headquarters. Within a week I received an ordination card, a poster of Church frontman J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, and various pieces of SubG propaganda (some of which I distributed in the summer of 1985 at 2 a.m. in Times Square – but that story is classified.)
For a long time, my ULC and CotS “ministries” helped me feel as though I belonged somewhere spiritually important. I am grateful to be able to do that now in other ways. But I will always be respectfully grateful to the Revs. Kirby Hensley and Ivan Stang for opening their secretly famous doors and inviting me in.
Secret Signposts
HIDDEN SOCIAL NETS surround us everywhere we go, and those who know – know.
Example? Sure!
I was shopping in one of my favorite grocery stores earlier today when the guy behind the butchers’ counter noticed my black Firefly T-shirt.
“Nice shirt!” he said with a wide grin.
“Thank you,” I said, bowing.
Now, he could have added something like, “I’m a Firefly fan too.” Or “I really like that series.” Or even “How long have you been a fan?”
But instead, he indicated the leather bomber-jacket I was wearing (Sonoma mornings are cold these days) and said with a wider grin, “I see you’re a real Browncoat.”
If none of this makes sense to you, allow me to explain. Instead of stating the obvious, my fellow fan responded with another insider’s reference. You see, the shirt in question doesn’t feature the title of the show or anything like that – the only way to “get it” is if you recognize the image and motto: a burnt-umber image of the titular spaceship above the motto, “STAY SHINY.” If you don’t, then no harm done. His comment told me right away that he got it. And his grin told me that he was enjoying our little secret signpost as much as I was.
Connections. Isn’t that what it’s all about?
Father’s Time
SOME TRADITIONS ARE axiomatic: just as a woman should inherit her mom’s wedding ring, so should a man wear his father’s watch.
My dad, who died at the end of January, didn’t like to faff around much. He was a happily simple man with happily simple tastes, and preferred straightforwardness in all things. That’s reflected in his choice of timepiece – a white-and-gold Timex Indiglo Easy Reader, mounted on a gold stainless-steel expansion band that conforms to the wrist without constant buckling and unbuckling. Simple and tasteful, and accurate without nerding out about it – it’s easier to say “a quarter to three” than “2:47 and 38 seconds.” After more than 40 years of wearing a cheap but rugged Casio Illuminator on a plastic strap that buckles, I actually and seriously feel “grown up.”
Maybe that’s why we inherit these things, or rather, that’s what it means to inherit them. In my dad’s absence, I am now the “man of the family” (for some values of “man of the family,” anyway, since now there’s just my sister and me), and in trying to figure out exactly what that means, it occurs to me that part of it means adopting certain cultural traditions.
Hence the watch.
Might there be the same effect as inheriting his car or house? I don’t think so, as these are not as intimate as, say, what I now wear to bed every night so that I can see what time I wake up. Or to synagogue board meetings. Or to conduct services. Or to the grocery store. Or even to simply look at and think about the man who wore it before I did, and wonder what he thought about when he looked at it.
Thanks, Dad. It’s good to feel like the man who’s your son.
Machine Time
HOW MANY HOURS do we waste waiting for our thinking machines to do their thing?
Browsers to load. Files to open. Printer jobs. Email delays. Forms to register. TFA codes to arrive. And a hundred other petty inconveniences that result in impatience, lost tempers, and general cussedness.
Now, I am a patient man, but I swear – if I had a dollar for every minute spent waiting for my machines to catch up to my schedule, I could retire to my own private Idaho. It’s a ridiculous feature of modern life that these (what used to be called) “labor-saving devices” may be actually causing more helplessness than enabling usefulness.
I have no solutions to this mishegas – what can one person do against a vast cultural tide anyway? – but I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. Perhaps that Butler fellow had it right all along. Who’s with me?