Theology in Practice

Yitro, 5784

When I was a freshman in High School, I started wearing a kippah every day. It happened like this: I went to a secular high school, rather than the Hebrew Day School I went to through eighth grade, and so no longer needed to wear a kippah every day at school. So I stopped. I only wore one went I went to synagogue. It happened that the day before Passover was a school day. I got up early, went to synagogue to hear a siyyum so that I could eat and not have to do the fast of the firstborn, and then went to school. I shoved my kippah in my pocket and thought nothing of it. By complete coincidence, that day, my secular school had its Holocaust Memorial assembly. At the end of the assembly, a Jewish faculty member said Mourner’s Kaddish. Realizing that I had my kippah in my pocket, I thought it appropriate to put it on my head for the prayer, then subsequentially forgot to take it off. Later that day, after biology, the teacher pulled me aside after class to ask me what I was wearing and why. When I explained the kippah to her, and told her I forgot to take it off, she professed ignorance, then asked me why I chose not to wear it every day. I realized at that moment that I didn’t have a good reason-I just simply didn’t feel like it. From that day on I wore a kippah every day.

As it turns out, I could have actually picked a good theological or philosophical reason why I didn’t wear a kippah all the time. I could have pointed out that in according to Jewish law, wearing a kippah all the time is not required—that the custom had been to only cover one’s head for prayers and eating for many years, and that as late as the 1800s the founder of Modern Orthodoxy Samson Raphael Hirsch did not keep his head covered all the time. But I didn’t know any of that—that was not the reason I didn’t wear a kippah. It was simply that I didn’t feel like it. But that conversation with my teacher made me realize that simply saying “I didn’t want to” was not a good reason for not following a Jewish law or custom. I had to have reasons for what I did, or did not do. I wanted to have a practical theology.

We just heard the Ten Commandments. Who knows commandment number one? Believe it or not, it is not an easy question. Go on Wikipedia and look up the Ten Commandments, and you’ll find 8 different traditions on how to number them. Most of them start with the first obvious commandment of the Ten Commandments: לֹא־יִהְיֶ͏ה־לְךָ אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים עַל־פָּנָ͏ַי. You shall have no other gods before me. But the Rabbinic tradition has a different first commandment: אָנֹכִי ה אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִ͏ים. I am Hashem, your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. Even the Roman Catholic tradition, which also identifies this as the first commandment, continues on by claiming that the next line, You shall have no other gods, is a continuation of this commandment. But not the Jewish tradition. The entire commandment is simply “I am Hashem your God.”

What is the commandment here? How is this statement a commandment? The classic rabbinic understanding is that this first line constitutes a commandment to believe that both Hashem exists and that Hashem is God. But I think there is another way to understand this first commandment. Ibn Ezra notes that the commandment reads not “I am Hashem who created the world,” but rather “I am Hashem who took you out of Egypt.” He explains this as a theological statement: the whole world was created by God, but only the Israelites were taken out of Egypt, and thus are obligated to follow God’s commandments. Before we can get to the commandments, the mitzvot, which are theology in practice, we must have the theology.

I am not the first rabbi to point out that we modern Jews can be a bit lax in our theology. And this is not limited to Conservative Jews. There have been papers written about how Orthodoxy has focused so much on following chumrot, or strict interpretations of the law, that it has lost sight of the theology behind it. Similar papers from the opposite end of the spectrum have been written by Reform rabbis lamenting that despite the Reform watchword of “informed choice,” most of their congregants are not informed enough to make a choice. And yet we are a Conservative congregation, so I will focus on the problems of our movement.

The Conservative movement is ostensibly a movement founded on theological arguments about God and Halacha, Jewish law. The main seminary of the movement is even called “The Jewish Theological Seminary.” But there is a running joke that they don’t teach theology at JTS, and certainly it is pretty widely assumed that most Conservative congregants don’t practice what JTS preaches. I’ve got in my hands a copy of The Observant Life, written not too long ago, which is supposedly the Conservative Jewish answer to a law book like the Shulchan Aruch that contains detailed instructions about how to live a life by Conservative Jewish principles. But let’s be honest. How many average Conservative Jews are even aware enough of all those principles to be able to say they disagree with them? Such as my grandmother, who when I was younger and told her I was going to start keeping Shabbat, told me “Conservative Jews don’t keep Shabbat though.” In fact, since moving here I’ve had a fair number of people tell me they think of me as Orthodox, even though I’m following pretty closely to what is written in this book.

I’m going to pick on Stavie for a second, so Stavie bear with me. But it was something you said recently that inspired this dvar Torah. We were in our skeptics class, talking about what it means to be Jewish. The question was raised about whether or not it was enough to say one was Jewish, or if being a quote “good Jew” also entailed certain actions. After some members of class seemed to be indicating that yes, there is more to being a Jew then self-identification, Stavie said “then why don’t any of you do it? Keep kosher, shabbat, and all of that? You don’t because its not convenient!” And no one challenged Stavie. Everyone just nodded.

Now, as a rabbi, I’m a biased party. One of my jobs is to get people to do more mitzvot. But it’s also to get people to think and develop their own personal theology. I’ll admit-I have respect for those Reform rabbis and thinkers who argue that Kashrut is primarily a moral value, and thus the laws of the Torah and Talmud about forbidden foods don’t matter as long as we think ethically about where our food is coming from, that in fact ethically sourced food is more Jewishly important than refraining from mixing milchics and fleishics.. I disagree, but I respect it. It’s a theological argument. But what I don’t respect as a theological argument is “It is a pain,” or “It’s inconvenient,” or even “it’s expensive.” Those aren’t theological arguments. Those are arguments from laziness. And trust me, I know it’s inconvenient. I know it’s expensive. Naima and I are keeping Kosher in here in Savannah on one income! Do you know how much money we could save if we didn’t? But that wouldn’t be a theological reason to not keep kosher.

That is not to say that, should you look in down deep and come to an understanding of your own personal theology, you will end up perfectly aligned with either the Conservative movement’s philosophy or my own. It would be nice, but let’s be realistic here. I don’t expect everyone to believe the same things that I do, nor would I desire that. But what I do hope, as a rabbi, is that you will be able to answer, theologically, why you practice what you do. It may result in a change in how you do Jewish. You may end up doing more mitzvot. It may make no change in your Jewish life. It may, and I hope not but it may, cause you to do less mitzvot. I take that risk on. But if you are able to sit down and have a serious thought about the theology around your Jewish practice, and let that actively inform your Jewish practice, then I will consider that a success.

So that is my challenge. No big deal, right? Just sit down and seriously consider why you keep mitzvot, what the mitzvot mean to you, what Jewish ritual means to you. I recognize that it is no small task. But it is a vital one. And I am happy to sit down with you, and do some studying together, or some deep thinking, to help you come to your own conclusions. That’s what I’m here for. The first commandment informs all the others. It gives every other commandment meaning. So too, as we do our mitzvot, as we put our theology into practice, we must think seriously for ourselves what our theology really is.