God is Love
After meditation this morning at Midcity Zen Center, we continued with the study of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. We read a section on bowing and how through bowing you are stripping away any sense of self-centeredness you possess. I said that I had been a little distracted by all the bowing when I had gone to the one and only service there. Having been brought up Jewish and having so many rituals that accompanied that religion, entering into another set of rituals turns me off because I don’t want to add onto what I already have, but rather shed more.
I said and I feel that it’s hard to be Jewish in the modern world. Here I am a woman who left my religion behind when a minyan did not include me as the tenth person (as if I am not a person because I am not a man) [a minyan is ten men which is needed to recite the Kaddish, prayer for the dead, aloud]. I walked out on Judaism and only came back to it to fast and meditate on Yom Kippur, to clean my house and eat matzo on Passover and contemplate what it means to be a slave, to light the menorah for Hanukkah and to put my mezuzahs up on my doorways. That’s what my modern Jewry consists of.
What else could it consist of – when I hear someone say “God the Father” I cringe because the divine is greater than the image of a hoary bearded man on a throne of stone. God is, someone said today, everything that is all wrapped up together.
If Rudolph Steiner spoke about our education system stuck in the Greco-Roman time warp, then what of Judaism that has dietary laws that don’t form the basis of modern thinking except for humanistic practice, and the baloney of your mother having to be Jewish, which is nonsense, as Judaism is a religion people – not an ethnicity – for god’s sake.
So I can’t grasp what being a modern Jew would be like because having been raised Orthodox and having seen the Conservative movement and then the Reform movement offer so little in terms of change, only a shedding of practices and thinking such as, “Well at the Reform synagogue we don’t define whether there is heaven or not” – where is the shape shifting needed for Judaism to seamlessly exist in the modern world? – I don’t know how it should or could evolve, I just feel I have evolved passed it.
And in looking at my own spirituality, I probably have more in common with the Hari Krishna’s down the street who chant God is Love then I do with most other practices.