The Bible is, at once, the most widely published and completely unknown volume in the history of this planet. It sits unopened, like a perfunctory slab, in most every hotel room drawer on the globe. People open and shut the drawer, notice the book, but rarely pick it up. It seems to us like it belongs there—we expect it there, like some ominous reminder of forced, past devotionals or hand wringing on the part of a parent or a priest. But we rarely open or refer to it. It remains a bound mystery that we never really understood and we go on with our business.
The Jews say, “If you only have Torah, then you don’t even have Torah.” In other words, there’s more—a lot more—to living life and believing in something than just arbitrarily quoting from one segment, or even a single passage, from a book. It’s not holy because God wrote it. It’s holy because men and women inspired by God wrote it. With each successive writer came a new layer of insight, of pain, of yearning, and breakthrough. If we surrender the authorship to God, then we human beings are just vessels and poetry dissolves into the earth.
We upgrade or discard our cellular phones within months of each edition. Our cars become outdated within minutes of leaving the dealership, but we still believe in the automobile. Does all this make a cell phone or a vehicle any less essential to us in the twenty-first century? Can’t we be just as nimble with the data and the information we cherish and still pray while acknowledging that that book was canonized when people rode on camels and the only upgrade available back then was their imagination?
We know George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree. Does that make what he had to say and how he fathered the United States any less sacred? So does it really matter if Moses actually climbed up Mt. Sinai and came down forty days later with two stones inscribed, “with God’s finger,” and called them “the Ten Commandments?” Doesn’t it matter more that we have the legacy of law and decency and the notion of honoring our parents and the prohibition against stealing from others?
As I mentioned previously, the text is not our homeland; life is. God is not to be determined; God is to be discovered—like dawn is a personal experience and the moon is seen in as many ways as there are eyes that can look up.
I remember gazing into the wedding canopy where my younger daughter exchanged marriage vows with her betrothed just a few years ago. The evening ceremony took place outdoors in an orchard-filled community complex not far inland in central Israel.
The open field, the fragrant citrus, the celestial ceiling, the bittersweet sentiments of life and generations all converted the setting into a natural sanctuary. There was a palpable holiness in the air, none of it organized, legislated, or tethered to any one creed. Muslims, Jews, and Christians, agnostics, atheists, doubters, and zealots became one in the liturgy of love and the religion of romance.
I was there, simply as the father of the bride. Ironically, even though I am a veteran rabbi, I could not perform her ceremony. Israel forbids non-Orthodox rabbis from officiating at milestone events because the fundamentalist rabbis control all such things. And they actively prevent all other inclusive denominations from functioning. The ordination of Reform and Conservative rabbis is not recognized by the government, presenting yet another travesty of organized religion and its duplicity with cynical political operatives.
But it didn’t matter that night. God knew what was in my heart and my daughter knows how much I love her—therein is the sanctity. She was happy; she was no longer a child and the twigs bent under her feet toward eternity. I wasn’t concerned about religious ordinances and church hypocrisies. I looked up at the glittering sky and felt the moon knew everything that had to be known.
These are the moments when you just know there is a God and the best part is you don’t have to struggle with what that even means. You float in those rare interludes of tender human milestones and you cross, with some of the mystics, over the “bridge of judgment” into paradise.
You dance with the Hopi Indians, cotton strands in your hands, making flowers to symbolize the heavens. Your eyes sting with the Buddhist wisdom that those who live in these moments may yet bless this realm again with angelic insight.
You are at one with everything and your pockets—like the white burial shrouds of the Jews—are empty. Your soul is full and you are not afraid of the future. The happiness of a child is the bridge that binds this side to the other, and there you are and you comprehend for a fleeting, delicious moment why it is good to be born and it is okay to die.
I don’t need anybody to tell me who or what God is and I’m not in terror over death anymore. Experience and birth and sacred promises and exceptional pain have all filled me with quiet compliance. Who can be free near a child’s rapture and not know there is a God?
First plant the tree; it’s more of sure thing. And it’s what the true God wants us to do.
MAKING SENSE OF SCRIPTURE, SAINTS, AND SAVIORS
PEOPLE ASK: “Do I have to believe the Bible was written by God to be considered a ‘good’ person?” That’s like saying you have to borrow every book out of a library to prove that you love the library. Or asserting that scientists, who have done a great job over the centuries explaining what goes on in the universe, are all sinners and doomed to the netherworld.
The Bible was not written by God, but by men and women inspired by God. If you start with this rational view of the Bible, it will give you, here and there, a lot of meaningful insights and moral direction. And you won’t get stuck on some of its significant inconsistencies in terms of narratives, ideas, and chronology.
I have been touched by the compassionate examples of many people—nurses, musicians, fire fighters, schoolteachers, hospice workers—who didn’t know a lot of Bible yet exhibited a kind of goodness and dedication that was as biblical as it was unpretentious. I have also visited clergymen and temple presidents serving time in prison for corruption, embezzlement, and sexual criminality.
The Bible is an archive of disparate books, written at different times and by different authors living in different times and circumstances. When we let other people determine what we should take out of it, then we have made the librarians into priests and we have ceased to be learners. We have choked the creativity of this literature, muffled its poetry, and stifled its many daring stories of dissent, controversy, and even spiritual ambivalence.
We have taken ourselves out of the discussion and handed it over to a few ecclesiastics, many of whom don’t feel safe with it unless they are pounding you with the miracles and cataclysms that are colorful and safe and give these clerics dangerous power. What about the love stories, the sexual sonnets, the political cunnings, the family dysfunctions, the deep deceits, and pounding griefs? They are much more in tune with you and me and our little lives. You and I are less likely to witness a sea being parted than we are to win the lottery. The big marvels in some parts of scripture are diverting but they don’t deliver when it comes to managing our marriages, our kids, our employers, our money problems, or our health.
The Bible is only as alive as your take on it and you are invited to grapple with it, just as you are included in its complicated tapestry of life and death, triumph and trouble. Finding this section of it repugnant and that section of it rhapsodic is actually its purpose. Believing that it is an indisputable testimony is like asserting that life is completely predictable. You’ve been around long enough to know that’s not the case. It reduces the spiritual power of this long literature into a lunch menu and it trivializes our need to think, react, and argue with fate.
A lot of GIs carried bibles into World War II but, in the