Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Zealotry and Its Cure

I wrote my senior sermon on this parasah, Shemini. The senior sermon in Rabbinical School is a really big deal. All your classmates are there as well as your professors. You have studied sacred text for 6 years and now it was the time to show what you learned in a 20 minutes talk. I prepared for this 20 minutes for months. I gave the sermon and got good reviews from my professors: renowned historians, Biblicists and Talmudists. So now I was supposedly ready to go out into the world of the pulpit and get reviews of my sermons from Jews in the pews. I fondly remember how gentle my professors were in comparison.
So Parashat Shemini. There is drama in this parasha which is rare in the Book of Leviticus which speaks mostly about the list of animal sacrifices made by the priests in the Tabernacle. But in our parasha there is much more; there is malfeasance, there is sin, there is destruction and death.

This is what happened. Two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, themselves priests, as the text says, “took up their fire pan, and they put fire in them and placed incense upon it and they brought before God, an alien fire that He [God] had not commanded them [to bring]. [Then,] a fire came forth from before God and consumed them and they died before God.” This is an incredible story. Here are two priests who bring a strange fire: an extra sacrifice that God had not commanded them to bring, and they died for it. Now, they didn’t kill anybody. They didn’t commit adultery. They were not worshipping idols. They just brought an extra sacrifice that wasn’t on the list of required sacrifices. In a sense, they just did a little more than was asked of them. Why did they have to die, as if a little more incense offered up in the Tabernacle was some kind of religious catastrophe?
There is a lot of rabbinic commentary on this episode as you might imagine. Some say that the essence of their sin was that they offered up this sacrifice in the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle that was reserved only for the Kohen Gadol (they weren’t) and only on Yom Kippur (it wasn’t). Some say that they should have used fire that had come from the alter but instead used fire that came from elsewhere (thus, the phrase, alien fire), so that was their sin. Some say that it was an appropriate sacrifice but it had not yet become a part of the regular sacrificial system; it was premature, in other words; and thus forbidden.

All interesting, I think, but not as interesting as the commentary of the Sifre, the legal commentary on the Book of Leviticus. It says there that Nadav and Avihu brought their additional sacrifice out of an extreme love of God. The sons of Aaron had already witnessed the eight day celebration of the inauguration of the Tabernacle and the elevation of the priestly tribe (the descendents of Aaron). Nadav and Avihu suddenly became two of the most important young men in Israel. They were excited. They were overwhelmed, they were, in fact, ecstatic.

So, implies the Sifre, they got carried away. They did more than they should have. They took it upon themselves to make up their own ritual, their own sacrifice, their own tradition. And God saw this as dangerous for the People so He took their lives with fire (just as they had committed their sin, with fire).

Judaism doesn’t like ecstatic displays of religious fervor. In the Talmud, Masechet Chagigah, there is the story of 4 rabbis who entered “the garden,” perhaps a metaphor for an ecstatic mystical spiritual experience. The four rabbis were, Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher (a derogatory name for Elisha ben Abuya who became an apostate) and R. Akiba. The text then reads: “Ben ‘Azzai cast a look and died.” Perhaps he looked into the face of God. It was too much for him and he perished. “Ben Zoma looked and went insane.” Alisha ben Abuya looked and left Judaism. Only Rabbi Akiva, the greatest legal mind among the four, departed from the garden, unharmed.

What happened in that garden? No one knows but it clearly was overwhelmingly powerful. It was certainly religious fervor; these rabbis went to a spiritual place to which they had no business going. They got carried away, literally. One just dropped dead, one went crazy, one had to leave the faith all together and only Rabbi Akiva made it out of there in one peace.

Why Rabbi Akiva? Rabbi Akiva was religiously and spiritually the most mature. He was steeped in tradition. He had an overwhelming experience yet was able to fall back on Jewish law and tradition to keep him sane and grounded in this world. Few of us are like Rabbi Akiva. There are places in our spiritual lives we should not go. Ecstatic religious fervor should not be part of our religious experience. It causes problems, it hurts us and it harms our community.

Examples? I don’t think too many of us are at risk of flying off into some ecstatic trance from which we will never return. But I do think there is risk today. Perhaps not from a spiritual extremism, but there is risk from religious extremism and zealotry. Religious extremists go beyond what their tradition teaches. These people look at isolated religious texts, mostly out of context, and take them too far. They can easily become zealots for some cause or ideology that they come to believe God requires of them. Religious zealots have caused a lot of suffering in Jewish history. Jewish zealots fought each other in the first century CE, convinced that their understanding of Judaism was correct. Their infighting made the community weak, susceptible to the Roman conquest which ultimately destroyed the Temple and created a Jewish dispersion that lasted two thousand years. In the second century CE, Jewish zealots believing the messiah had come, antagonized the Romans which led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews and the destruction of some 50 Jewish towns and 1000 Jewish villages.
Zealotry. A dangerous problem in Judaism and in all religion, really, in all cultures both religious and secular.

I believe we all have, perhaps what we can call, “zealous tendencies.” How do you know whether that is true for you?

Here is a test for zealotry which I made up. You can make your own test.

First: zealots never think they are zealots; they just think they are passionate in their cause.
Second: zealots think their reasoning is impeccable and can’t believe how ridiculous the other guy’s reasoning is.
Third: zealots look to leaders for guidance and affirmation and those leaders can easily manipulate their zealot followers. Zealots never question or challenge their leaders.
Fourth: zealots believe that they already know everything they need to know. They do not listen to anyone who disagrees with them or are different from them in any significant way. Zealots rarely learn anything new.
Fifth: zealots don’t see the real people who are in front of them; people are only important if they validate the zealot’s worldview. And that worldview is usually distorted.
Sixth: zealots always have enemies who are often imaginary. Zealots believe other people are dangerous.
Seventh: zealots believe that people who don’t agree with them, are … zealots.

We all have some zealotry in us: we all at times enter that same crazy garden of the four rabbis, where we can get over-excited and self- righteous in our religious experience and/or in our ideology. The cure for zealotry and religious extremism? Moderation. There are a lot of ways to understand Jewish tradition and practice today, but I require of my approach to Jewish life –moderation. My Judaism cares less about ideology and more about practice. It encourages calm, caring, compassionate, reasonable behavior. My Judaism accepts and encourages differences of opinion (read any page of Talmud, to see what I mean). My Judaism is tolerant of Jews who practices differently than I do and does not believe that those Jews who do things differently that I do are “doing it wrong.” My Judaism respects Jewish leaders but realizes that Jewish leaders are flawed human beings like anyone else. My Judaism abhors violence and understands all human beings to be made in the image of God. My Judaism is a Judaism of moderation. I believe my Judaism and other religions and ideologies like it, control our natural tendencies to zealotry and extremism.

So I say, let’s stay out of the garden that the four rabbis entered. Instead, let’s keep our feet firmly planted in this world and do what it right for our community and our world.

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