Good God: Faith for the Rest of Us

Radbam March 26th, 2009

The Catholic Northwest Progress had an excellent article about the upcoming Interfaith Holocaust Commemoration being held at St. James Cathedral in Seattle on Thursday, April 16th at 7:00 pm. The Interfaith Yom HaShoah Holocaust remembrance service is an event that I and Temple De Hirsch Sinai have been involved with for many years. It is wonderful partnering with other faith communities in the greater Seattle area, including St. James and the Seattle Archdiocese, Seattle University School of  Theology and Ministry, St. Marks Episcopal Cathedral, and The Alfred and Tillie Shemanski Institute for Christian and Jewish Understanding, to remember the victims of the Holocaust.  It is always a powerful interfaith event that brings our disparate communities together for a common purpose. Please come if you can.

Here is the article (click here for the link to the article on The Catholic Northwest Progress):

AROUND THE ARCHDIOCESE	THE CATHOLIC NORTHWEST PROGRESS
	MARCH 19, 2009

Cathedral to host interfaith Holocaust commemoration

Six survivors will take part in ceremony, which will call people of all faiths to vigilance against current genocides

SEATTLE

BY KEVIN BIRNBAUM

Rabbi Daniel Weiner (right) of Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle takes part in the 2007 interfaith Holocaust commemoration at St. James Cathedral in Seattle. This year’s event will take place Thursday, April 16 at 7 p.m. File Photo: PhotoByMike.com

On Thursday, April 16, St. James Cathedral will host an interfaith event in remembrance of the Holocaust. The event, called Yom HaShoah, or Remembering the Holocaust, will commemorate the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust and call people
of all faiths to be vigilant in opposing present and future genocides.

The event is sponsored by the Shemanski Foundation, Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle, Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry and St. James Cathedral.

It will begin with a reading of Psalm 23 in English and Hebrew and readings of testimonies from Holocaust survivors and liberators. Six Holocaust survivors will light candles representing the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, while those
gathered pledge, “We will not forget. We will not forget!”

The event was last held at St. James Cathedral in 2007. Last year St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle hosted the event.

“When it’s here at St. James, we have a Christian confession as part of it, based on what (Pope) John Paul II did in 2000, where he just expressed the sorrow of the church for either the inaction or the complicity in various aspects of anti-Semitism
through the years,” said Corinna Laughlin, pastoral associate for liturgy at the cathedral.

Then Rabbi Daniel Weiner of Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle will lead the Mourner’s Kaddish in Hebrew. Youth choirs of both Jews and Catholics will provide music for the event.

‘Not just a Jewish issue’

Observing Yom HaShoah is common in Jewish communities, said Rabbi Weiner, but “having this event in a church, with a focus more on the non-Jewish community as opposed to the Jewish community, I think is a very powerful experience and a very powerful sign that
this is not just a Jewish issue, that this is a human issue.”

The archbishop’s delegate for ecumenism, Sister Joyce Cox of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, said the event has a dual purpose.

“The commemoration is primarily to keep alive what happened to the Jewish people,” she said, “but it’s also to awaken reverence and respect for human life,” especially in light of recent genocides in Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda.

“The commemoration is meant to touch the lives of Christians,” she said. “It’s meant to touch us with the reality of what happened, and what shouldn’t happen again.”

Rabbi Weiner said the 2007 event at the cathedral was “pretty incredible,” and that the highlight was to have the six survivors present to light the candles.

“And to have that happen within a symbol of institutional Catholicism, especially in light of some less pleasant parts of our Jewish-Catholic history, I think is just an incredible gesture and incredible sign of the evolution of our world
and of our faith communities and of the relationship between Jews and Catholics,” he said.

It is important for Jews and non-Jews alike to remember the Holocaust, said Rabbi Weiner, and not to forget the lessons it teaches us about ourselves.

“One is just the capacity for human beings to engage in that kind of evil,” he said. “We see that again and again, and we’re seeing that currently in Darfur, among other places.”

We also “need to be vigilant about our potential for apathy,” he said.

YOM HASHOAH  What: An interfaith event commemorating the Holocaust When: Thursday, April 16 at 7 p.m. Where: St. James Cathedral, 804 Ninth Ave., Seattle

TOTAL DEATHS FROM NAZI GENOCIDAL POLICIES  European Jews: 5.6 to 6.25 million Soviet prisoners of war: 3 million Polish Catholics: 3 million Serbians: 700,000 Roma, Sinti and Lalleri: 220,000 to 250,000 Germans (political, religious and resistance): 80,000 Germans (handicapped): 70,000 Homosexuals: 12,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses: 2,500 (Source: The Holocaust Chronicle; courtesy of Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, www.wsherc.org)

• Judaism , Uncategorized , interfaith , media
• Comments(0)

Radbam March 3rd, 2009

We’ve just posted the video of my talk at Seattle University’s Pacific Northwest Spiritual Book Festival. Check out the new videos on the Good God: YouTube channel and see video clips about the book and speaking to a talk I gave about the themes presented in the book.

Get more clips like this on the Good God: YouTube channel.

• Events/Apperances , Judaism , Video
• Comments(0)

Radbam February 23rd, 2009

Prague 2/23/09

Rabbi Loew and the Golem by: Mikolas Ales

It’s one thing to learn about the Golem legend through its modern incarnations in the hip, urban revisionings of the new generation of Jewish authors. The Clay Giant’s saga impressed American popular culture early in the 20th century, as it did the young lives of so many as Superman, the hyper-anglicized, ethnically deracinated Man of Steel.

It’s another thing entirely to walk the stone lanes where the legend lived, and where the Golem’s creator, Rabbi Judah Loew, reigned as Rav Supreme. The tale is a local variant of mass messianic movements, but with an admonishing twist. The Jews of Prague needed a hero (without the disco back track) to defend them against the forever simmering and often devastating anti-Semitism that lay beyond the quarter’s walls. But we are a cerebral, pious people, little schooled in the Charles Bronson vein of vigilantism. So the Jews did the next best thing: the faithful, scholarly leader Loew created a monster/robot (Czech word)/redeemer called the Golem to save the day, protecting the Jews while introducing the concept of deterrence and mutually-assured destruction to the Prague community centuries before the Cold War.

End of story? Hardly, for no Jewish narrative can conscientiously close without a strident moral message and tip of the kippah to rabbinic authority.  Loew brought the being of Vltava river mud to life by inscribing 3 Hebrew letters on its forehead: aleph-mem-tav–Emet/Truth. When the Golem went off script and off the reservation, ransacking homes and lives as the embodiment of pure, unqualified violence, Loew, its only master, scratched off the Hebrew letter aleph, leaving the word met/death, thus ending the Golem’s sacred spree.

On one level, it’s a reaffirmation of the scriptural dictum-turned-cultural imperative: Not by might, nor by power, but by (My) spirit alone…But perhaps a less obvious lesson involves the essence of Truth. While it can set you free, any absolute taken out of context or employed without measure can be counterproductive at best, destructive at worst.

My minyan (+1) of fellow travelers have reached the boundary of the Promised Land of adult freedoms and responsibilities.  Perhaps their most trying challenge will be to grow beyond the sureties of absolutes (a capacity lost to fundamentalists of all makes and models) to confront, even to embrace, the power and purpose of living life in the gray zone. Gray, the color of the Golem’s muddy form, the tenor of evolved ethical struggle, and the foggy but freeing pathway to moral resolution as our true, ultimate redemption.

• Judaism , Popular Culutre , Travel
• Comments(0)

Radbam February 21st, 2009

Vienna 2/20/09

I never quite got Westminster Abbey. Why take a perfectly good (actually, fairly remarkable) House of Worship and surround it with an indoor cemetery.  Pews sidle right up to graves in a scene only Stephen King could love.  Sure, it might enhance the prayers of some to be surrounded by the likes of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and David Livingstone (I presume). But for weekly, communal worship, the creepiness factor probably keeps away all but the most star struck and eccentric.

We met the inverse, but no less creepy, in Bratislava, Slovakia en route to Vienna. There, a small remaining plot of the 17th century cemetery containing the remains of the eminent Orthodox sage, the Chatam Sofer, has grown a visiting center and synagogue around it. While on many levels this is patently un-Jewish, as averse as we are to cults of the dead, especially when impressed into bondage to construct their stagecraft (I’m looking at you, Pharoah!), the ultra-pietistic and unapologetically anachronistic take great license in venerating the relics of the righteous.

Moses Shreiber, aka The Chatam Sofer, made his mark by drawing a line in the sand—resisting the modernizing pressures on tradition and the community for a Judaism relevant to the evolving cultural sensibilities of the emancipated Jew. Though more generous and well-intentioned in his approach, he is part of a long, gray line of reactionaries, some benign, some bellicose, futilely seeking value in recreating an imagined past at the expense of a more meaningful present and secure future.

The Chatam Sofer’s sarcophagus is the physical center of the small patch of earth at the nexus of this spontaneous shrine. But just behind his large slab is a more modest, almost obscured marker belonging to a man named Herzl. The proximity of stones reflects an irony only the fickle finger of fate or Hollywood could conceive, for it was this Herzl’s great grandson who would forge a nationalistic Judaism exclusive of faith, and sow the seeds of a modern nation-state that would provide refuge for the remnants of European Jewry’s annihilation. Herzl’s, seminal, visionary work, Altneuland, the Old-New Land, saw fate writ large upon the continental politics of his day. This vision acknowledged the past, but invested heavily in the urgency of the moment and an unrealized future. The Chatam Sofer would be a scarcely remembered figure of a vanquished, absorbed people had not Herzl and those he inspired embraced the demands and possibilities of what lay ahead. His great-grandpa’s stone should get better placement in the complex’s next remodel.  (photo and internet access:  Kyle Stratiner

• Judaism , Travel
• Comments(1)