My Beautiful Unbuilt House

Tonight I shared my spiritual journey in five minutes. Really, I'm sure it took longer than that.

If you have a beautiful house, say a straw bale house with lots of window seats and nooks and a beautiful south-facing kitchen with lots of windows and a mason stove with a bench that the children and cats love to curl up on (there, that description told you a lot about me, didn't it?), and you have a friend who also has a beautiful house, perhaps a house with a circular floor plan and beautiful art and a stain-glass skylight that makes rainbows on the floor at noon, it would be very pleasant for you and your friend to visit each other and marvel over each other's houses and all their similarities and differences and just really appreciate how beautiful and unique that house is. It might be very different from one's own, but that does not make it less beautiful or enjoyable. However, if you are homeless, going into that beautiful house your friend has will make you want to cry, will hurt your heart with every beautiful detail, because you know that you have nothing to show in return, no home of your own to be content with. Right now, I am that one who has no house, and when I am surrounded by the beauty of the Christian tradition, as I am at Koinonia, I am painfully aware that my house is not yet built.

Judaism is a communal religion; it is a nation, an ethnic history, a culture, a body type, family type, history, as well as being a religion. Thus, you cannot really have an individual Jew. We exist in the context of a wider group.

I believe in the tradition. I believe that it's good to keep the law to the full extent possible, not because of some external pressure or because of rewards in the life to come or because it is good to fit in with one's fellow Jews, lest they judge you, but simply because in Her infinite mystery G-d told us to do so, and that is good reason enough. Some things you just do. It's important to have faith for faith's sake, and to find meaning in the mitzvahs from the rich tradition and stories and the reasons that are given, but also in one's own heart, for one's own reasons and for the sake of a personal devotion and love. I believe in unconditional love, both G-d's for us, and ours for G-d. If we only love G-d as long as G-d provides us with X, Y and Z, that's conditional love, and it will not get us far enough. When you love someone and that someone tells you "it's really, really important for me that we do things this certain way, and that you don't eat those kinds of food, and no, I can't give you a rational explanation as to why," it is possible to respond to this request from a place of such deep love and joy that you feel it is the least you can give to your beloved that you honor these wishes. With the trust that if it were not possible for you to do it, the one you love would not ask that from you, because they love you.

Today I went to a Baptist church, and heard the former president Jimmy Carter teach Sunday school. He talked about the sabbath, and how Jesus made a point of breaking it to heal people. About how restrictive those priests saw the sabbath as being, all those things one could and could not do and how silly that was... And I sat there and thought—Christianity was so clearly formed in opposition to Judaism. If there were no Jews, if all memory of Judaism was lost even as a historical context for the New Testament, Christianity wouldn't make any sense. We are the Other that Christians can point to rhetorically and say "we're not THEM, we're different." So, yes, I am one of those people who thinks about the sabbath (at least to some extent) as all the things one must not do so as to keep it holy, as well as all the blessed things one is able to do which also makes the day holy. Yeah, those silly restricted holy people—that's me, Mr. Carter. I keep the seventh day in a particular way, because G-d was very explicit as far as G-d's expectations in that regard. Although it is very explicitly taught that to save a life (ie, to heal), the sabbath may and should be broken...

This is only part of the story, though. The whole story–it's much more complicated, more complex. There are more sides, more voices who would chime in and say, well, yes, but...