Text for today
abiuro gave me back a Jewish prayer book I loaned her years ago and I opened it randomly and read various bits.
Given that it’s Friday night and just gone sunset (Shabbat, according to the Jewish faith I grew up with), and also happens to be the cross-quarter between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice (Samhain, according to one reckoning of the pagan calendar I now follow), I thought I’d post a meditation for the Sabbath from it. I no longer believe in the ‘God’ bit, not the way this is written, but I still find this a fascinating text. I think I have a lot to learn from it still.
God of the beginning, God of the end, God of all creatures, God of all generations: with love You guide the world, with love You walk hand in hand with all the living.You created us in Your image, capable of love and justice, that in creation’s long unfolding we might be Your partners. You endowed people with freedom; we must not enslave them. You gave them judgement; we must not dictate their course.
You set before us many paths to tread, that we might search and find the way that is true for us. We thank You for Your gift of choice. Without it, where would our greatness lie? Where our triumphs and where our failures? We will then consider our lives as persons and as a people who are called upon to choose.
Let our reflections help us to bring into our lives the harmony we seek and the love we would share.
May 5th, 2006 at 11:21 am
religious text
Yes, it’s all very lovely – but the god thing is definitely off. Today in Sydney a little five year old who was terribly badly burned in an horrific car accident caused by a runaway car bursting into her preschool, was hit by a car while being pushed in her stroller on a crossing and she is in hospital on life support with worse injuries. Her parents have asked people to pray…
I ask “Pray to whom?” Who took his/her eye off the people of the world when she was targeted for these two terrible incidents? I pray that the doctors can save her without brain damage or else that she dies and so does not suffer further. She does not deserve such a terrible fate from people let alone from a ‘caring’ god.
May 5th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
or me the interesting thing is the choice section. The Christian dogma seems to be about your lack of choice, much more based on a realist (in the philosophy/theory sense), and this seems so much more different. I still have a love hate relationship with Judaism, but I have to say there is some very beautiful writing in it. Thanks for posting this.
May 5th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Re: religious text
Couldn’t agree more. That’s awful and I can’t imagine any sentient being wanting that let alone a caring one. That’s why I simply cannot believe in that God any more.
What interests me about this text is the stuff about people having inherent freedom and therefore no human should enslave them and people having inherent judgement therefore no human should dictate to them. Problem being, without a God, who says that love and freedom and judgement are inherent in humans?
Who says that ‘these truths are self-evident’ if there is no God? That’s one of the key points that was raised in an essay I posted a link to a while back.
At which point I think we’re back to Sartre and it’s all absurd but choose to be political and positive anyway…
Anyway, really what I find interesting is the idea of human rights and choice within Jewish ethics which I think gave me a certain foundation for my politics…
May 6th, 2006 at 3:09 am
I’m also not a believer in God. I substitute the word Good wherever I come across it (capitalisation intentional) and then reread to see what it makes the text into. Almost invariably it changes the text into something I can agree with (there are of course plenty of old-testament-ish examples that fail this) The idea of Good I’m using is that of an overall accumulation of good in the world; an improvement in the state of things towards… well I guess towards whatever I see as good.
On the other hand, I’m not at all a fan of the philosophy that there can’t be a God because bad things happen to good people. I won’t even claim to know for any action what is good. I try as far as my understanding and interpretation allows to aim for my actions causing the most good, and least harm, but where seeming chance has led to tragedy, I’m certainly not going to say that I know it’s not for the best. If that little girl survives, then she will have an amazing foundation to build strength in the rest of her life, and if she dies then she will finally escape all the pain and trauma of her first injury. Neither of these are circumstances I’d choose to build for her, but I certainly can’t say they are better or worse than what her future otherwise had in store (sorry, I’m all out of omniscience).
(Oh btw, the Devil of popular mythology become d’Evil or the Evil; the collective negativeness side of all things. All things having elements of good an bad to them at all times.
And thankyou for sharing that meditation. I liked it as it stood, and better still when I reinterpreted it.
May 7th, 2006 at 4:00 am
Re: religious text
This is something i’ve often pondered – if there isn’t a benevolent, devine force willing us to be ‘nice’ to each other (to put in the simplest terms), then who is to say what’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in an ethical sense? I’ve even seen it argued that ‘ethics’ or ‘morals’ are wierd human eccentricities, or even deluded perversions against the ‘natural’ order of kill-or-be-killed, looking out for your own and ’survival of the fittest’ (one of my most hated expressions).
The only answer i come up with is a simple personal question of what kind of world it is that i want to live in, and my belief that a world devoid of compassion and kindness is not one worth living in and that moves in that direction should be resisted however possible.
May 7th, 2006 at 5:26 am
I really like that take. I think I will try it out. Thankyou.
May 9th, 2006 at 2:58 am
Thank You
It is beautiful.
May 13th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
I wonder if perhaps some of the views of God in a couple of the comments are a little childish.
By which I mean formed during early life and not updated as people grew up and abandoned a childish view of faith without realising there are adult views of ultimate reality as well.
I have a vested interest I suppose, being Jewish (a convert no less!), but I came to my own, much less anthropomorphic view of God at university, doing a degree of politics and religion after spending 14 mon ths in Israel learning Hebrew.
I had found the all-powerful “Big Daddy in the sky” God unsatisfactory, but then so did almost everyone else I knew.
God is perhaps the natural and eternal source of good, the impulse of the universe towards creating, building and sustaining what is life-enhancing, but action is required in order to achieve this, and that’s where we come in.
Perhaps we are God’s hands, without which God is useless and impotent?
Someone said it much better than me when they suggested that at Auschwitz the question was not “Where was God”, but rather “Where was man?”
In the Reform Movement prayer book is this passage which I have always found meaningful:
“Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city,; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart and rebuild a weakened will.”