[MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you. Thank you. Very nice to be here. We've been neighbors
for a long time, and I occasionally
come to things here, so it's nice to have an
opportunity to speak, and I'm grateful to
you for arranging it. Creation has been a neglected
topic in Jewish theology across the 20th century. Now, the 20th century was
a time, you might say, when Jews didn't have an awful
lot of time for theology. They were busy
doing other things. It was the most dramatically
transforming century in the history of
the Jewish people, probably since
the first century, since the century the
origin of Christianity and the great split and
all the other things that happened in that period. It is century, of
course, in which a third of the Jewish
people were murdered. And much of that later
part of the century was built on the recovery
from that traumatic event and, therefore,
thinking an awful lot about national
identity, peoplehood, the move to statehood,
and all those things that happened that I
don't have to talk about at any great
length, especially not on Israel Independence Day. So it's very obvious. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Happy holiday. But there are other reasons why
it was a neglected question. If there was time for any
theology in the 20th century, there were two
theological questions that stood out and almost pushed
everything else out of the way. One was the question
of providence. How could God have let it
happen, this terrible thing? And if it did happen, what
does that say to us about God? If there was a
theological question the Jews asked in the
20th century, that was the overwhelming question. The other question
that went alongside it was, do you still believe in
the literal, verbal revelation of the Torah, that
God spoke every word? And if God didn't
speak every word, then is there any
authority left to it? Is there any reason
to live by it? Those two questions were the
great theological questions. The question of
creation, you see, well, first I would say it
did not distinguish Jews from everybody else. It was everybody's problem. And Jews as a minority groups
are interested in saying, in what way are we different? What's unique about
our tradition? How are we distinguishable
from the majority culture? And it was also an
embarrassing question. It was an embarrassing
question because we came to understand,
with the passage of time after Darwin and the general
acceptance of evolution, we came to understand we didn't
believe in this story that's in our Torah. And yet it's still our story. We have an intimate
relationship to it. I recite every Friday
night, as I pick up my cup, I recite, "Heaven and Earth
were finished, they and all their hosts on the sixth day." And I have a love
for that story. I have a relationship
to that story. I have a commitment
to that story. But that cannot be
characterized as belief. I don't believe in that
story as the explanation of how it happened. It's a relationship
other than belief. But that dissonance between
commitment and belief, between you might say, personal
or existential engagement with that story, with that
narrative and belief as that's how it happened, that was
an embarrassing dissonance. We didn't quite know
what to do with it. Jews, you see, are not
the kinds of people to have stood up at the
Scopes trial and said, we are opposed to evolution. Jews, after all, see
themselves as part of the educated community. We expect our children to go
to medical school, after all. And so the idea that we
stand up and oppose evolution is something that was not
quite a role, a social role, a social or intellectual
role that we wanted. And since the 1960s, a
famous ultra orthodox rabbi, Lubavitcher Rebbe, the leader
of the Chabad movement, got up and said,
no, no, the world was created 5,762 years
ago, whatever it was. And God put the fossils
there to test our faith. And God gave us the
invention of carbon dating to test our faith. And we all rather
smiled and said, all right, he's the
Lubavitcher Rebbe, That's what he's
supposed to say. But nobody else to
his left, let's say, in the broad spectrum of
Judaism took seriously that point of view. But then what do you say? [INAUDIBLE] Well, that's right,
because he, after all, had a Western education himself. And so he was sort of
playing a role in some ways. That's what I have to
say in my official role as Lubavitcher
Rebbe, but come on. It was sort of like that. But then where are we? So it was a question
best left aside. And so what happens was
existential religion, which was really the main
thrust of theology, I would say, in the post-war years-- Heschel, [INAUDIBLE],, the
followers of Rosenzweig and the interpreters
of Rosenzweig, they could somehow bracket
the creation question. Because it's all about
your personal engagement and your personal
relationship with God and the tradition as a vehicle
for your personal devotional life. And exactly what that has to do
with the creation of the world was somehow something that
seemingly could be left aside. Of course, that was not true
for classical Jewish theology. Let me make that very clear. The great classical Jewish
theologies, revelation is the central question. You look at the two great
theological edifices of medieval Judaism, Maimonides
and the Zohar, both of them are fully centered on
the question of creation. Maimonides goes to great
lengths to try to insist that the Aristotelians have not quite
proven that matter cannot be created or destroyed. Because once you say there is
no creation, matter is eternal, then both the
possibility of miracle and the possibility of prophecy
will fall by the wayside. He did say should the best
Aristotelians ever prove it, we would, in fact, have to
reinterpret the Torah in order to go along with that proof. And that was one of Maimonides'
most controversial statements. But for now, he insists
it has not been proven, and, therefore,
we can still claim God is the author of
creation and, therefore, since He could do the greater
miracle of creating the world, He can do the lesser miracles
of splitting the Red Sea or whatever the other-- plagues Israel or
the other miracles are, and prophecy also
some have depended on the details of creation. The great mystical theology
of medieval Judaism was that of the Zohar. And that is a work that's
constantly about creation. On every page of the Zohar,
the process of creation is being repeated. The divine energy flows
from the endless mystery, from [INAUDIBLE] down
through the [INAUDIBLE],, down through the various
manifestations of the divine, unites couples, and
then the lower worlds are born out of it. And everything in the Torah,
everything in the teaching is about somehow a
repetition of that process. So there is no classical Jewish
theology without creation. I would say when you
go back to the rabbis, when you go back
before the Middle Ages to the theology of
the sages, it is very much about the
one who created, the one who spoke and
created the world. The prayer book, which
we have, is still the traditional
Jewish prayer book, which was edited in probably
the eighth or ninth century but the text of which
goes back to Talmudic times to fifth or
fourth or fifth century, you began your evening
service every evening with thanking God, who
makes evening happen. Every morning we
say, blessed is God who spoke the world into being. The verbal creation,
the idea that God speaks the world into
being, is something that happens every day. Every day God speaks day
and says evening and evening happens, the sense that the
word underlies creation. That extreme nominalism that
says that the real creation is the creation of the word
and through the word really remains very much at
the center of rabbinic Judaism. Of course, it remains for the-- the Christians will know
that's the beginning of the Gospel of John as
well, "In the beginning was the Word." For us, of course, the
word doesn't become flesh. It remains word. That word is manifest as
Torah rather than as Christ. But it is the same. That's the same
ancient tradition of the word standing at the
very center of creation. If you take one of the great-- since I mentioned the
Lubavitcher Rebbe, if you take the
work of Habad, which is one of the most interesting
mystical theologies in Judaism-- it's a late 18th
century theology-- the second part of it begins by
saying that what God actually created was only words. God created the word. When God said "Let
there be light," the word "light" appeared. And the word "light: stands
at the center of the cosmos, and the light itself
is only a garment that covers the word "light." But if we could really
see through the garments and through the coverings into
the outer layers of being, we would see there
exists nothing but the word of God, which
is constantly reverberating through the universe
and continues to underlie all of creation. So in the 20th
century, as I say, that theology was more
or less set aside. We didn't know what to do
with it in the face of Darwin. And when I say
Darwin, of course, I don't only mean the
evolutionary biology, but I mean also the geology and
the astrophysics and everything that goes with it, the age
of the Earth, the sense that the world is 13
billion years old and not 5,000 years old and everything
that goes with that story. In the 21st century, I think
this will change radically. That is to say, creation
will come back and stand at the very center of theology. And it will stand at
the center of theology because of the great task of
religion in the 21st century. And this must have
to do with your work. The most important
thing religion will have to do, I believe, as
this century proceeds is help us change the way we
live in relationship to the natural environment
or we will not survive. It's as simple as that. The world cannot go on with the
kind of relationship we have to that which has produced
us and amid which we live. We have watched in
our age, I think in the course of our
lifetimes, the shift from the terrible fear
of nuclear destruction to the greater fear of
simply resource destruction, that there will not be
enough air and water and soil and nutrients in this
planet for us to go on. We are going to very radically
have to change the way we live, and it will be a more
radical change because of the gross irresponsibility
of political leadership in the early part
of the 21st century. We know what has
to happen, and we don't seem to have the
will to be able to do it. You on this campus are
in the midst, of course, of more than a conversation
about fossil fuels. And then when we see the
influence of business interests and so on and the incapacitation
of political leadership, it's very clear that
things are going to have to work in some way
that goes beyond legislation. Because legislation from
above is not going to do it. I think what will
have to happen is a change in attitude, a
change in the human heart, if you will. And only religion
has the ability to affect the mythic structure
of the way we understand what we are doing here and
how we live in the world. So all the religions are
going to be called upon to help make this shift. And that really will be at
the center of what religion has to do in this century. So I think that we
will have to go back to the question of
creation and ask what do we mean by talking about
the world as a created world. But there's more than that. The question is, once we
accept some version or other of the post-Darwinian narrative,
the same way you can say once we accept
biblical criticism, the question is,
what's left for us? What do we have to offer? I do not see the
role of religion anymore as fighting a rear-guard
action against Darwin. Oh, they haven't proven
this particular link, or this particular thing
is still up in the air, and, therefore, the whole
thing is only a theory and we don't have to
take it seriously. It seems to me that we
are in the 21st century beyond those two great battles. Traditional religion
fought both against Darwin and against biblical
criticism fiercely across the 20th century, and
traditional religion decisively lost both of those battles. And they are over. And the question is, how
do we go on from here? And what do religious
people still have to say? If God has nothing to do with
the evolutionary process, with the way we got here, then
God is essentially an idea, then God essentially
begins in the human mind, and we're talking
about notions of God. So you can have a
kind of neo-Kantian, God is important as a
source of morals, the source of heteronomous authority. Or you can have
what in Judaism is Mordechai Kaplan
and other places, you would say it's
process theology, God is good in human beings
that makes us act certain ways. But all of those are
human notions of God. So I think you have to
go back to evolution and say that we have to
uncover its sacred dimension. We have to uncover
it as a sacred story. And here I want to
ask you to forgive me. I'm going to read a little
bit from the way I formulated this in my book Radical Judaism
that came out a few years ago. This came out in 2010. Yale put it out. It was a series of
lectures at Yale. I guess you can read
Yale lectures at Harvard. I guess that's all right. [LAUGHTER] And I'm now working, by
the way, [INAUDIBLE],, I'm just completing the
Hebrew translation of, and I'm working
with a translator, but I've really rewritten
the book totally for an Israeli audience. And it will be
coming out next year. So yours is out in English. Mine will be out in Hebrew. We'll be able to
talk to each other. [LAUGHTER] In the beginning of
the first chapter, I want to read a couple
of passages together, and then I'll talk about it. "I open with a
theological assertion. As a religious person. I believe that the
evolution of species is the greatest sacred
drama of all time. It is a tale, perhaps
even the tale, in which the divine
waits to be discovered. It dwarfs all the other
narratives, memories, and images that so
preoccupied the minds of religious traditions,
including our own. "There is a bigger
story, infinitely bigger than all of our individual
stories and one we all share. How did we get here, we humans? And where are we going? For more than a
century and a half, educated Westerners have
understood that this is the tale of evolution. But we religious folk,
the great tale-tellers of our respective
traditions, have been guarded and cool toward this story
and have hesitated to make it our own. The time has come to
embrace it and to uncover its sacred dimensions. "I insist on the
centrality of creation, but I do so from
the position of one who is not quite a
theist as understood in the classical Western sense. I do not affirm of being or
a mind that exists separately from the universe and acts upon
it intelligently and willfully. This puts me quite far from
contemporary creationists or from what is
usually understood as intelligent design." My theological
position, in fact, is that of what I call
a mystical panentheist. A panentheist is
one who understands that God is throughout
all of being and all of being
contains the divine self. But panentheism is
distinct from pantheism, meaning that there is something
mysterious in the totality of being that goes
beyond individual beings, and the oneness of being somehow
becomes a transcendent oneness. Just one more passage-- "We would thus understand the
entire course of evolution, from the simplest life
forms millions of years ago to the great complexity
of the human brain, still now only barely understood,
and proceeding outward into the unknown future
to be a meaningful process. There is a One that is
ever revealing itself to us within and beyond the
great diversity of life. "That One is Being itself,
the constant and the endlessly changing evolutionary parade. Viewed from our
end of the process, viewed from the
human end, the search that leads to the
discovery of that one is the human quest for meaning." We seek meaning in
the evolution of life. We seek meaning in this
process of development. "But turned around, seen
from the perspective of the constantly
evolving life energy, evolution can be seen as an
ongoing process of revelation or self-manifestation. We discover, it reveals. It reveals, we discover. "As the human mind
advances from our point of view, understanding more
of the structure, process, and history of the
ever-evolving One, we are being given,
from its point of view, ever-greater insight into who
we are and how we got here. This ongoing
self-disclosure of the One is the result of a deep
and mysterious inner drive, the force of Being
directed from within, however imperfectly
and stumblingly, to manifest itself ever more
fully in more diverse, complex, and interesting ways. This has caused
it to bring about in the long and slow
course of its evolution the emergence of a mind that
can reflect upon that process, articulate it, and strive
for a life of awareness that can fulfill its purpose." If you read this, you will
see that the words "One" and "Being" are
usually capitalized in those paragraphs,
which is to say, that's the One that I
understand God to be. I don't like the English
word "God" very much. In Hebrew, I use the proper
name of God, [NON-ENGLISH],, the four-letter name of God,
the [NON-ENGLISH],, which, of course, is an impossible
conflation of the verb "to be." [NON-ENGLISH] is [NON-ENGLISH],,
that which was and is and will be, all put together in a form
that doesn't quite make sense. You should better translate
it Was-Is-Will-Be than God. But that's a little
awkward to say, though. But that's the
sense that it has. And that means that I understand
Being itself as the divine, or the divine is the totality of
Being, the mysterious totality of Being that somehow remains
One and is the One that was before whatever
we call the Big Bang, the origin of
this universe we're in. And it is the One that is
maintained through and present in every fragment of
rock that flew off and every gas that blew and
every chemical and element that made up the origins of life. That One was there in all
of its manifestations. It is present in all, and it
is that which unites them all. It is the One that undergoes
the process of evolution. It is there throughout
the process. If it's there
throughout the process, it must somehow allow that
process to happen to it. It must somehow
take on the forms the Kabbalists will-- the
Kabbalist Jewish mystics will speak about the
process of creation really as a process
of emanation. It's the flow of the One
into the multiple forms of Being that we're
really talking about. The terms that we'll
use are [NON-ENGLISH] and [NON-ENGLISH],, the one
garbing itself in the infinite number of garments, the infinite
number of forms that creation takes on. Everything is a [NON-ENGLISH]. Everything is a
garbing of the One. I think all those garment
metaphors worked so well because most of the Jews were
tailors, as my family were. And so somehow the
metaphor of garment, everything as a garment, was
somehow very familiar to us. But it's also the [NON-ENGLISH],,
the flowing presence, the flow of the One
into multiplicity. Remember, of course,
that for mystics, the question of the
one and the many is a very central question. Mystics are always confronted
with if there is only one-- and that's the teaching
they mystics insist upon. There is only one, not
there is only one God, but there was only One. There is no "one and." There is only one. If there is only one, why
does the universe I experience seem to be multifarious? Why are you you and I me and
this separate from me and floor and ceiling are separate? Why is there a multiplicity
if there is only one? And in some ways, you may say
much of mystical doctrines throughout the
world is an attempt to answer that question. The Kabbalists have their
series of answers to it. Their series of
answers to it have to do with a graduation
of the process. The mysterious one,
the [INAUDIBLE],, the endless that which
can't be named at all begins to manifest itself
through a oneness that becomes 10. Through a oneness, if
you use Arabic numerals, you could say to the
one you only add a zero. And nothing changes
when you add a zero, but yes, everything changes
because the one becomes 10. Sometimes the Kabbalists
talk about what they call [NON-ENGLISH],, which means to
say the one manifests itself as 10, the 10 manifests
itself as 100, the 100 manifests
itself as 1,000. And in fact, there's
nothing there. There's no number
there but the one. In fact, the one is
constant through all the ongoing multiplicity. So I have come to understand
the evolutionary process in that kind of mystical notion
of creation as emanation. The one flows into the
multiplicity of being. Now, if the one flows into
the multiplicity of being, it must somehow want. Can we use the word "want,"
or is that too personifying? Is that too anthropomorphic? It must allow. There must be some kind
of energy force within it that seeks out that
multiplicity, that seeks out the variety,
that somehow delights in the garments it
puts on, if you will, since we're going to see
spring in another week, sooner, soon, soon,
soon, with God's help. It's coming, even in Boston. I was just in Baltimore
for a few days, and everything is
in blossom there. So I come back here
and I see we are still being typical New
Englanders, very cheap without allowing the
blossoms to come out. But some great miracle is going
to happen here, I promise you, in the next week or two. And that one somehow has to
somehow delight in the process, allow for the process, move
that process forward, and remain present throughout it. What do we religious
people, then, have to offer in a
post-Darwinian age? What we have to
offer essentially is the sense of wonder. It is the understanding that
that scientific narrative, which we are not
about disputing, has to be seen through
the eyes of wonder, through understanding that
all of it is somehow-- some has to be called more
miracle than nature, even though we are not saying
anything different happens between those two words. You understand? The natural is the miraculous. The natural is the supernatural. Because that's a
different set of glasses. That's how you see. When you come to understand
all of it or see all of it through the eyes
of wonder, then you come to understand
that the natural itself is the supernatural. We have a tradition
in Judaism that talks about hidden miracles. Two kinds of miracles-- revealed
miracles, obvious miracles, God splitting the Red Sea
and so on, grand miracles, but then there was something
called [NON-ENGLISH],, the hidden miracle. And the hidden miracle comes
to be, of course, the sense that the ordinary
is the miraculous. [INAUDIBLE] talks about miracles
that are with us every day, evening, morning, and
afternoon, and that there is a sense that this world is
a world filled with wonder. And therefore, the
process of evolution is the great object of wonder. You look at how we go
from simple forms of life to the complex mysteries
of the human mind. How did we get here? How did one-celled
animals eventually have the nerve to come
out of water and step onto dry land and some of
them learning to take root in that soil of dry land and
become plants and some others descended from that
same one-celled animal source, developed the ability
to walk around on that land and then take nourishment
by eating those plants? There is something
completely wondrous about it. How do we get to the
relationship between bees and blossoms that live
with each other, that need one another to live? In each climate, the
relationship between climate and flora and fauna and how
they live with one another and how they engage
with one another-- there is just endless,
endless wonder in all of this. And there is a way
of seeing all of this as filled with, as brimming
with divine presence, not because it was all planned. Again, this is not quite,
quite intelligent design. Oh, yes, that proves,
therefore, that somebody must have planned it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that
all of it attests to the presence of magnificence
or the presence of wonder and therefore what I
call the presence of God or the presence of
divinity within it. In a sense, what we have to
offer, we religious people, is that sense of
wonder, but we also have a language for wonder. That's what religion
has to offer. When you want to express
that sense of magnificence or wonder, you find yourself
going back to the religion, to the language of religion,
because that's a language that knows how to speak about it. You go back to the Psalms. Certainly you go
back to Psalm 104, to God stretches out the
heavens like a garment. You go back to Psalm
148, that symphony of divine presence in heaven
and earth and everything singing God's praises, not
as a literal believer but as a person who understands it. That that's how you
talk about this world, as filled with divine energy,
as filled with divine presence. So we in some ways
have a language that allows for that
kind of consciousness. Is that a truth claim? Yes, but it's a
truth claim not that stands on the same
level of human reality or the same level of mental
activity as scientific truth. It doesn't compete
with scientific truth. It rather wants to take
the whole conversation to a different level of
human mind, different level of human consciousness. And I think that's why
the language of religion in 21st century is so
much the language of myth, because myth, as
we know, takes us to a place in
human consciousness not unlike the place where
great art or great music take us to a
different resonance, to a different level of
human mental activity where we know a different truth. And so the old Jewish
and also Christian and also Islamic medieval
sense of multi-level truth, different things can be
true at the same time. A text can be read on
more than one level, and all of those levels
are true and legitimate. And therefore, a sense of
approaching the universe with an openness to
profundity but not with a fundamentalist,
single truth, not with a fundamentalist,
single sense of there is true or false. A few years ago, the
new Commentary magazine, which is now, probably you
know, a Jewish magazine, which has very much turned
to the right politically in the last 20 years or so. They tried to run a
symposium repeating a symposium they had
run in the 1950s called "The Condition of
Jewish Belief." In the 1950s, they had very
interesting people speaking. About 10 years ago,
they tried to rerun it. So they asked me if I would
contribute to their symposium on the condition
of Jewish belief. And the first question was, do
you believe in God, yes or no? And I said my answer began
with the word "phooey." That is the wrong question. The question is, do you
still use the word God in your vocabulary? What you mean by it? How are you using it? That question yes or no is
a little bit like, are you or have you ever been a
member of the Communist Party, you know, that kind
of simplistic answer. The other tale I tell-- if
you've just read the 10 Ideas, I told this story there, that
one day I was about to go teach a group of rabbinical
students a few years ago. And I walked out of my house,
and right in front of my house somebody parked a pickup truck. It had a bumper sticker on it. And the bumper sticker said,
"God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." And I walked into
my class and said, this is not a Jewish
bumper sticker. A Jewish bumper sticker
would always say, God said it, I believe it, now
let's talk about what it means. Now let's talk
about what it means, which is to say there are
multiple levels of truth. So there is a level
of truth in which we accept the
scientific narrative and we're no longer
disputing it. But we are insisting that there
is another level of reality in which that same
scientific narrative opens to the wonder of divine
presence that animates it. That's a level
that takes religion to being an art, not a science. And we should openly admit that
we are an art, not a science. And therefore, what
we have to offer is only testimony, not proof. The Jesuits, after
all, gave up trying to prove the existence of
God a few generations ago. The Chabad Hasidim
are behind them, but they're slowly
getting to the point where they, too, are
getting beyond that and no longer trying to prove
the truth of their claims but rather inspiring
people to live on a different level
of mental activity. What I'm suggesting
here, of course, is a reframing of the
story, is a reframing of the tale of evolution. You see, we've been engaged
in that once before. If you look at the opening
chapter of the book of Genesis, you may say the
beginning of Genesis is a reframing of an
older creation story. There Was a creation narrative
that was very well known throughout the Near East. It's the story that you can
find in Mesopotamian texts and in Canaanite texts and
Ugaritic texts, the story that was an older generation of gods
who dwelt beneath the sea, Yam and Tiamat and so on. They were the older gods. And there was a
younger generation of gods who dwelt in the sky,
and they were more powerful. They were asserting their
power, Baal and Marduk and El. And the sea gods rebelled
against the sky gods because they didn't
like this new generation of younger gods taking over. And the sky gods
slew the sea gods, and the world is created
on the corpses of the sea creatures of the sea gods. That well-known theology
of the ancient Near East underlies various bits
of biblical poetry. We see it peering its
head through various bits of biblical poetry. Psalm 93, the waters
lift up their voices, the water is lifting
up their voices, but God is above the
sound of the many waters in the sea, [INAUDIBLE]
echoes that old battle of the gods of the sea
against the god of the sky. But you can see images of that. That mythology is still
there in later Jewish texts. In eighth, ninth
century texts, we have, as Israelites cross the Red
Sea, Rahab, the god of the sea, suddenly lifted his
head up, and God had to slay that sea
monster, and Israel walked across the sea on its body. So that's the kind of
later Jewish version of that same ancient myth
of the sea gods will rise up and the sea gods
have to be slain. In the Zohar, you
have the great serpent who lives in seven
chambers within the Nile. And he will lift up his head
and have to be destroyed again. What happens in Genesis 1? The story disappears. That story is buried. One God creates everything,
and he loves it and says, it's good, it's good, it's
good, it's good, it's good. Everything He made
is very good, which is to say there's a
harmonistic view of creation. Everything is
created in harmony. Everything has its place. This world is the creation
of a good god who affirms it. That's a reframing of
the creation narrative. I'm suggesting that we
need to do it again. Because a new creation
narrative has emerged. And with it come,
of course, all kinds of very difficult questions,
the struggle for survival. How did we get here? Because we were smart enough and
powerful enough to eat our prey and outsmart our predators? This great heap of corpses, yes,
the great evolutionary mound of corpses, all the
species that weren't smart enough or quick enough
to outrun their predators and therefore were destroyed? It's a very vicious story,
the story of evolution. I'm not suggesting it
didn't happen that way, but I'm suggesting a
new set of glasses. I'm suggesting understanding it
all somehow through this sense of eyes of wonder,
through the sense of there is some divine energy
that animates this process and that rejoices
in this process and that has to be in
the death of the process as well as in the
life of the process. It has to be present in it. Yes, we understand that it all
happens by natural selection. We understand the only
tool that this one has to evolve into the
multiplicity of life is the tool of natural selection
and evolution and mutation. Those tools are
defined by science. But your Harvard colleague
Stephen Jay Gould insisted that all of that
must be without teleology. There must be no
teleology, and it must be totally
accidental, totally random. And there, I think, he is going
from a scientific assertion into a philosophical
or theological claim. I don't think you could
say it has no teleology. I think it's unknown to
us what all this is about. And I'm willing to say it's
a mystery that yet remains beyond us, the mystery
of how we got here, the mystery of what
this process is. And to be able to
name it as mystery and to see it with that sense of
wonder is somehow to redeem it, is somehow to say, this
is a process of which we stand in awe and of which we
recognize that we're a part. Because I think that once we
have life in this process, once we have life, each
living creature somehow is addressed by a wordless
voice within it that tells it what it needs to do. Each living creature
is told somehow, eat, thrive, survive, reproduce,
thrive, survive, reproduce, find a mate, find the most
fertile mate you can if you're an animal, and
reproduce through that, and then you're dismissed. Then you're dismissed. But you are being told
somehow, the voice that we call instinct says
to each of these creatures, thrive, survive, reproduce,
thrive, survive, reproduce. That's what you have to do. Once a creature
emerges that has what we call the human mind,
this infinitely more complex feature, then that
same message-- thrive, survive, reproduce-- also says to us,
make meaning, find out why, understand, understand
me, understand me, the one that somehow is going
through this process, who is present in you, of whom
you are a manifestation. Understand this process. That's also an imperative. That's also an
imperative that emerges. I believe the quest for
meaning, in other words, comes from a very
deep place within us and addresses us
no more in words than "thrive,
survive, reproduce" are words for animals. We, too, are addressed from
within in some wordless process that says, make meaning. Or if you want to, seek me. Or if you want to, the words
with which Adam and Eve are addressed in the Garden of Eden,
[NON-ENGLISH],, where are you, that divine voice that
says, where are you? Figure out where you
are, how you got here, and where you're going,
what this journey is about. I think that's all part
of the divine voice that speaks within us
and that calls out to us and to which all of
religion is our response-- to which all of religion
is our response. Because if the One calls to us
from within creation and says, find me, know me, be aware-- we human beings are
very busy creatures. We're very busy surviving,
catching our prey and outsmarting our
predators and doing all the things we have to do in
order to survive in this world. And so we're too
busy to become aware, and so we create
systems of awareness. We create systems of reminders
toward that awareness. That's what religions are. Religions are
systems of awareness that human beings create. But we create them. We evolve. We create and evolve
our religions. But we do so in response,
I believe, to that voice, which I understand as the voice
of God, the voice of God that does call out to us that
says, know me, be aware. And of course, with
"know me" and "be aware," help other human
beings to be aware. Share that awareness. Share that awareness with
others, because it's not just you who are needed by
these evolutionary force. This evolutionary process
is still going on. We are not the end of evolution. We human beings are not the goal
of evolution-- of course not. We're just another stage
in this ongoing process. If we do not
destroy this planet, I imagine a creature existing
some hundreds of thousands of years from now who will look
back upon us about as proudly of us as ancestors as we
are of the great apes. And we'll say, those
ridiculous, stupid creatures of the 21st century, who nearly
destroyed the planet, who thought they had some awareness
and were just rapaciously destroy the earth. Of course they are embarrassing
ancestors for us to have. So I think we are just
another stage along the way. But we are called
upon to be aware. We are called upon
to be aware of that. And that means, of course,
to push the project forward, this project of evolution, which
is the project, I understand-- you may call it the
works of the Lord, or you may call it the
project of evolution, or you may call it the
ongoing process of our planet. We are called upon
to take part in it. This One that contains all mind
that ever was and ever will be is now manifest in this
thing we call the human mind. And the human mind
has given us somehow to understand what
this project is and to push this
project forward. But we don't do
that as individuals. We do that in societies. And so, therefore, along with
"know me" or "be aware of me," there's also a second part
to that single, divine commandment. I understand there's only
one divine commandment, and that is, make
others aware, too. Well, make others
aware is very good, but they cannot be aware of
finding the meaning of life as long as they are hungry. So you better feed them first. And they can't be aware of
finding the meaning of life as long as they don't
have a place to live. So you better house that
first, et cetera, et cetera. In Judaism, we talk about two
forms of divine commandments, the commandments
between man and God and the commandments
between person and person. The commandments
between man and God are all of religion,
all of ritual form. The commandments between
in person and person are all of the moral
and ethical sphere. So I understand both
of those commandments as essentially divine
commandment, the One that calls "know
me," and we respond by creating the forms of
religion, the One that calls out "share that
knowledge of me" calls upon us to treat other human
beings in the divine image, to treat other human
beings in such a humane way that we can begin to help them
achieve that understanding and share that understanding. So that is in some ways
a theology of creation, if you will. It's a theology of an ongoing,
creative project, the theology of an ongoing view
of the evolving world as an ongoing emanation of the
divine self into ever-new forms of life, into ever-more advanced
and complicated forms of being. And evolution I think that we
understand rather little of, because we don't understand
where it's going. We can't, by nature
of the process being in the middle of it. We do not have a perspective
on where it's going. But I think our
obligation toward it is only to open our minds and
ourselves to it as fully as we can and to become active,
creative participants in that evolutionary process. So as we hand down
cultural traditions, as we hand knowledge from
generation to generation, as we pass our legacy of
wisdom from our grandparents to our grandchildren-- I'm very much involved in
that process right now-- you in some ways
are participating in the act of evolution. You are participating in
the evolutionary process. You are somehow
participating in the opening of the human mind to
divinity or the broadening of the divine mind as it's
manifest in human beings. And that is the work we
are called upon to do. So it is a theology
of creation that's also a theology of obligation. You know, it's never Judaism
until you ask, what does this obligate me to do? We are very serious about
the question of obligation and responsibility. And this is a theology
of obligation. It is an obligation to
know, to become more aware, to open ourselves to awareness,
to share that awareness with others. But I think in the
21st century, it also becomes an obligation,
an awareness that calls upon us to act in a way
that preserves this enterprise, because this entire
enterprise insofar as it's manifest on this
particular planet is very deeply threatened. It's very deeply
threatened because we have acted with a lack of awareness. So if this increasing awareness,
if this ongoing process of becoming aware doesn't lead
us toward responsible action, then we have somehow
missed the message. So the divine call, I think, is
a divine call to human beings. It speaks in something
other than language, and therefore it
is not particular to any specific religious
group or civilization or culture or people. But the responses
we have, of course, are particularistic responses. We respond in the language
of the particular tradition and the particular symbol system
that we have created in order to do that work. But all of those, as
I said, all of those are now called upon in
this particular century to be used, to
open the human mind to that new and increased
sense of responsibility. Thank you. I hope that gives us some-- [APPLAUSE] I hope that gives us
some food for thought, a topic for conversation,
because the more interesting part of this I hope will be the
conversation that will ensue. Thank you very much,
Rabbi [INAUDIBLE],, much food for thought. I'm sure many
questions [INAUDIBLE].. I'll start my question. If this [INAUDIBLE] way of
seeing creation and what religion has to offer,
we see that with regard to the natural world, religion
can no longer offer reasons for [INAUDIBLE] but
really can offer a sense of wonder, when
non-religious peoples and institutions offer
a sense of wonder, like from Hollywood
to [INAUDIBLE],, what's left for religion then? What is unique to religion? Yes, well, let's talk
about what religion is. I must have been
15 years old or so when I understood that the
most religious people one encountered were not
necessarily those who raised their voices
and hands loudest and said, I believe in God. Sometimes those
seemingly secular people were, in fact, deeply religious. And some of those people
who were signed up for all the details of
religious observance were not such religious
people after all if religion is about a
certain consciousness and awareness of a deeper
truth the deeper presence. So I don't know that
I want to divide the world between the religious
people and the secular people. I don't think it's
quite so simple. There is a psychologist,
a psychiatrist in Amherst who wrote a book recently
called The Sense of Wonder, Paul Fleischman. I had an interesting
dialogue with him. He thinks of himself
as a secular person, but he then discovered yoga
and became a yoga teacher. And worth reading,
Paul Fleischman, by name obviously
Jewish in origin, but coming out of Indian
religion and a great sense of wonder but really a
scientist and really talking from a scientific point
of view about wonder. You read some of
Einstein's essays and you see also there is
a deeply religious sense about what science brings
one to, the sense of wonder that science brings one to. Do you need the
forms of religion in order to have
this sense of wonder? No. Can you have it
without religion? I think you can. Is religion a great
vehicle for deepening, for an echo chamber,
an ancient echo chamber for making the
responses more profound and for sharing it with
people across a wide culture? I think it is. I think religion is the
great human invention for teaching this awareness
and for preserving this awareness among people
if it's used properly. Religion, of course,
also often gets involved in self-preservation
and concerned with the details and concerned with
the proper performance and concerned with surviving
against other religions, mine is true and yours is
false, and competition. Then religion becomes
perverted, as we have seen in recent times. I don't have to refer you to
the New York Times of yesterday, today, or tomorrow to find
that perversion of religion in all kinds of places,
religion being used it in horrifying ways. All religions have that. But I think that
religion remains a great tool, a great
tool chest, if you will, for the cultivation of this
kind of spiritual awareness in human societies
and human beings. And we forward with it. If I read Walt Whitman,
I say, yes, this is a great religious human
being, a great religious soul. If I read Tagore, who
is somehow disconnected from many of his Indian
roots, although also has the influence of
them, I see that's a great religious spirit. Religion is present,
in other words, that awareness is present in
great poets across cultures. And it nevertheless
is cultivated by the daily
practice of religion when it's understood as a
tool for that cultivation. Please. Do you remember your first
experience of wonder, whether it was something in
the natural world or not? I come from Newark, New Jersey. [LAUGHTER] See, they laugh. [LAUGHS] No, Newark, New
Jersey, when I was a kid was a very interesting
and diverse place. We were a Jewish
community of some 60,000. I don't think there's
any of it left at all. What I mean to say when
I say I came from Newark, I came from a very
urban environment. I must have been six
or seven years old going for walks around the
neighborhood, four or five blocks from us up
Clinton Avenue, which was a sort of dirty
urban street-- up Clinton Avenue there
was a funeral home. And that funeral
home had in front of it a little rock garden. And in the middle
of that rock garden, there was a little pond. And in that pond, there
were goldfish swimming. It was my first
encounter with nature. I used to go, whenever
I could, walk up Clinton Avenue to Grove Street
and go to that funeral parlor and watch the fish
swimming in that pond, trying to understand,
how did they get there? Was there some underground
channel from the ocean that-- and I put my head down
and see the channel where the fish swim in from. And where did they go at night? And all those kinds of-- I think that was
probably the beginning. [LAUGHS] I think that
was about as far back as I go with nature. Just to comment
on what you say, I remember that whenever
I teach, let's say Maimonides,
something like that-- so Maimonides has this approach
of the wonder of nature. And when you speak to
religious people or some sort of religious people-- Yes, so-called religious
people or some sort of, yeah. This is always a puzzle for me. Whenever you speak to some
sort of [INAUDIBLE],, at least within the I would say
Jewish population in Israel, also here, for them, nature
is a profane, mundane thing. In order to have wonder, you
need something miraculous. They haven't read the Psalms. If not miraculous-- --let alone Maimonides, they
haven't read the Psalms. --you can't really
have the wonder. And I tell them, look, you
know, look at the reality. Yeah. It's so wonderful. You know, miracles are
really boring compared to-- Absolutely, yes. [LAUGHTER] --to reality. Yes. And I find it so hard, you know. It's a kind of such
a process that they have to go through in
order to understand that reality is something
that you wonder about. Morality is something that
you wonder about and not something which is beyond, which
is really not wonderful at all. As I say, it's not only they
haven't read Maimonides, they haven't read the Psalms,
which they mumble every day. Yeah, so the point is
that sometimes people would come to you and
tell you, you know, the whole point of religion
from a certain point of view is exposing you to
just the something which is beyond nature. And only this could create
this kind of wonder. But just to go to
the other way around, to convince them that the
real wonder is what is really in front of you, which has
to do with basic morality and basic nature. This is something which
goes against, I would say, most of the education
that people go through in, I would say,
regular religions. And I think this is true, both
in Judaism and in Christianity. And I think that's true
also about Islam today. I think that's true. And this specific point
that you are making, this is a real revolution in
terms of how to educate people on the, I would say, religious
level, just to convince them that the miraculous is here. It's nothing beyond. But they have it in
their texts if they would open their eyes to see them. Yes, but you know-- I understand. --it's so weird. It seems to me-- you used an important word,
and that is the word "beyond." And I want to say that
people always say, yes, but is there nothing
transcendent? If you're such a
pantheist, then is there-- I like to say the idea
that God is other is not an ontological idea for me. I don't know a God who
is outside the universe. I don't know what
outside the universe means in modern science. There is no other side. There is no beyond the universe. Transcendence rather it is
to be found inside immanence. Transcendence is to
be found right here. God is present or the One
is present in this place, in this moment in
such a deep way that I could never fathom it. And that's transcendence. It's not that
transcendence means God is over there, outside,
beyond the universe making it happen from beyond. I don't know a beyond. I know a beyond
epistemologically but ontologically. So the otherness of God is
an otherness of perception. It's not that God is other than
the world as a separate entity than the world. God isn't an entity. It seems to me that
precisely that's what's being said in
Exodus chapter 3 when Moses asks God, what are you? He says [NON-ENGLISH] and give
him his name, Is, Was, Will Be. And then he says, if you
try to capture me in a box, if you think I'm a noun, I'm
going to conjugate myself and become a verb
again, [NON-ENGLISH].. [LAUGHTER] I will be as elusive
as I will be. I am the elusiveness. It's not as though
God is an entity over there outside the world. But that's sort of hard for
the religious mind to conceive. So I think, yes. You know, Nostra aetate began
with this wonderfully generous wanting to say, "the Jews,
having such a refined notion of transcendence." That's the introductory
[INAUDIBLE] almost to Nostra aetate, "the
Jews, having such a great sense of transcendence,"
which means to say, of course, because
they don't know Christ, they really can't
know immanence fully. I think that's the
subtext of that. But there are Jews
also who agree with that, who have
a certain sense that, yes, it's all about
a transcendent other. And I don't think
that's the point. I think that will
be a battle to win. [INAUDIBLE] Hi, So two things,
first of all, your talk was breathtaking and
beautiful, what you had to say. I want to come from the
perspective of someone who is a die-hard Orthodox Jew. My father was a [INAUDIBLE]. I'm reminded of what
he would say to me when I was 16 years old
or 15 and would come home really frustrated by
things that people were saying, even in [INAUDIBLE] or in
my ultra Orthodox girls school that he sent me
to because he thought they had the warm
and fuzzy Judaism, and he'd give me the
intellectual approach at home, didn't work so well. But I remember coming home and
saying, but Daddy, you and I learned in the Talmud
together that x. But there, they're saying
y, and when I raise my hand and say x like we discovered,
they throw me out of class and tell me that I'm wrong. And I'm upset. I'm upset about God. I'm upset about religion. So my father would say to me
again and again, he'd say, [INAUDIBLE],, who else
is frustrated right now? God. You think it's God's
fault that people are running around saying things
in his name that are wrong? So you're going to blame him? So I'm not saying
I want to criticize or say that I agree with
you, disagree with you. I agree with nearly
everything you're saying except that I would like
to reserve the place for the-- look, orthodox is a silly word. When I was at Hebrew
University, we used to say, are you a [NON-ENGLISH]. Orthodox became a
dirty word because it was an attribution of-- it was a little bit-- among
our intellectual friends, it was as if you were not
being open to other things. I guess what I'm trying
to say is, and I speak-- I'll give an example
as an anecdote and then maybe
you'll understand. Tell me you mean-- when you
say orthodox or preserve room for the [NON-ENGLISH],,
I have lots of room for the [NON-ENGLISH]
in terms of practices. Oh, OK. The practice I say is very
helpful as a reminder system. But I'm saying it
doesn't negate-- I grew up surrounded by
[NON-ENGLISH] or people who were orthodox who I couldn't
find their sense of God that you speak of. That's the problem. The beauty was missing. Nature was missing. All that was missing. But it wasn't just
my father and myself. There were plenty others and
there still are who find God in science and who find God
in the rituals, in the system, and in the systems of
other religions but from a [NON-ENGLISH] framework. It doesn't have to negate t. And I just wanted to
point out this one example, this ultra
Orthodox girls high school that I went to. It's interesting that
you mention Maimonides, and you're talking
about science. I grew up that the Rambam-- that Maimonides represented--
one of the highest levels of attaining union
and closeness with God was knowing God's
world, knowing nature, and that that's what
the Rambam spoke about, that to know God's world was
to come close to knowing God. I said that in school. I made the mistake of saying
that in this ultra Orthodox girls school in the gymnasium
of hundreds of girls and the principals and
all the rabbis when they were talking about Hellenism. And they wanted the
kids to raise their hand and talk about, what are
terrible signs of Hellenism in our age? you know,
to be a Hellenist is to be anti-religious, right? It's the Darwinism of then. You were accused of Hellenism. I understand. So the other girls get up. They say all-- oh, that
girls dress fashionably. That's Hellenism. And then they said,
there are people who know more
names of scientists than names of rabbis. That's Hellenism. That's a sign of Hellenism. So I jump up, and I
say, wait a minute. But Maimonides says,
I said, the Rambam says that the knowledge of
science, that's the best way to become close to
God, to know his world. So of course people should
know names of scientists and learn science so that
they can become close to God. So the principal says, oh,
we hear what you're thinking. Sit down. No one wants to hear
what you have to say. Nobody believes this nonsense/. The first step in
the primrose path. I understand. [LAUGHS] So I walk down. So I said to everybody-- that was when I left school. I said, you forgot that
because of idol hatred, the temple was destroyed. And I walked out. And that's when I quit school. And I did it on my own. The reason I'm bringing this
up is that since then and until today, I find many Orthodox
Jews, [NON-ENGLISH],, who are committed to a rigorous
religious practice that's very much in line with speaking
a common language with other religions and with communion
in nature and with-- I feel like let's
not give up yet on the system that
can still work. I have no interest in
giving up on anybody. OK, good, good. [LAUGHS] I am a none-of-the-above Jew. I'm a pretty traditionally
observant Jew, but I'm a none-of-the-above
when it comes to Orthodox, Conservative, Reform,
what are you-- Yeah, labels are not-- right. I have a none-of-the-above. If anything, I am
a Neo-Hasidic Jew. And Neo-Hasidic
because Hasidism tried to maintain the kind of
religious consciousness I'm talking about. And the Neo-Hasidic teachers of
the early 20th century I think were very much in that spirit. So my real masters
are [INAUDIBLE],, who died in the Warsaw ghetto,
famous Neo-Hasidic poet, and my teacher Heschel, who
I had the great privilege of teaching. These are people who come
out of the Hasidic tradition. And that Hasidic tradition
was Orthodox, quote unquote, in its-- Whatever that means. --in its attitude
toward observance. But it understood
that observance was a means to a greater end. When observance becomes
an end in itself, then it becomes choking. [NON-ENGLISH]. [LAUGHS] Yes. My question will be a very
simple one after this one, but-- so, if I understood
you correctly, you mentioned that the word
is the one that only remains and everything else covers it. Can you say a little
bit more about that? Yes. That's the kind of theology
that you find in Judaism-- in all the Western religions. But it probably
began in Judaism. There was much debate about
whether it was influenced by the Greeks or not. And generally now
they would say, no, it probably comes out of
ancient, Near-Eastern wisdom traditions. The first thing God
creates is wisdom. And then that wisdom comes to
be identified with language, with the word. And so the word that God
speaks is always there. The word never disappears. The word takes a kind of
ontological status of its own. Remember that in the Torah,
in the beginning of Genesis, God creates the
world by speaking. God said "Let there be
light," and there was light. God speaks. The later Jewish semi-legendary,
semi-magical tradition sees God as sort of the cosmic
Kabbalist jumbling the letters. He takes the letters,
and out of the letters he forms the words of speech. When the Israelites created the
tabernacle in the wilderness, which was the first
temple, it was said they knew how to do
it because the person who built it knew the permutations
of letters by which God created the world. So it was the
permutations of letters. Now, what are letters? Letters are graphic
representations of sounds. So this may mean sound, the
sounds by which God spoke. The sounds have a power. There is an interesting book
I've been dipping into recently by Barbara Holdredge
called Torah and Veda about Indian religion
and ancient Jewish religion. And both of them have that
sense of the divine word. It's in Indian religion,
too, but in Indian religion, it sort of became
focused on the sound, and then sounds become
mantras, of course. And the sounds themselves
are very important. In the Hebrew tradition,
it was much more the meaning of the words and
the interrelationship of words and the possibility of
playing on words and so on that took so much form. But somehow there is something
about a word or sound. Now, you go back,
of course, and you say that mystics are
looking or seekers are looking for
something ultimately primal, the primal experience
in which God is to be found. And I would say the two basic
senses, sight and sound, are both very much there. So that God is light and God
is word, God is language, are really about
as primal as you can get in terms of what is--
when people talk about what is a deep human experience,
the deep human experience of hearing sound, the deep human
experience of seeing light, and that God is present in
those as a kind of primal edge of what religious experience
is going to build on, religious experience building
on the most basic experiences of human perception. So I think in some ways
it goes back to that. In the revelation
at Sinai, which, of course, is the paradigm
experience for Judaism, Exodus 19:19 says,
"Moses spoke and God responded to him in sound." God responded to
him in-- some people translate it "in a voice." But the voice there is
actually the voice of thunder. God is thundering. The sound of the thunder
is the divine voice. And Moses translates that he
is able to translate thunder into language, translate
thunder into words. And that's how the word emerges. Yes. Parallel to what you just
said and what an MIT scientist did with his baby-- With his? With his own human baby. The baby. He recorded all the sounds
of all the baby's babble and was able to speed
it up so that you could cover a long period of
time and hear it in a short-- so these odd sounds
that the baby makes, simulated by the sounds
the parents are making, eventually become a word. We all know-- those
of us who are parents have all seen that happen. Right. But we forget it in
our own experience. It's beyond our
conscious memory. But we're drawn to it
unconsciously, which leads me to this question. I think personally that the
trouble most modern people have today is the dogmas of
religion, if you have to believe that there is a creator. And they've read Darwin, and
they find that very difficult to take. So can we say to people,
fine, create your own God in conformity to a tradition
that you've grown up with, in the tradition of the sounds
you heard from your parents, and God doesn't care
whether you think you're creating Him
yourself or whether you think that He started it all. That's not an essential dogma. What is essential
is the experience of inspiration leading to
ethics, leading to community. Yes, but when you do
that creative work, you then eventually
discover that you are only repeating that which has
been done by every generation before you, and you somehow
make peace with that fact. Right. And you can read Torah
or the New Testament or whatever, other
people's creations that have become objectified,
perhaps unnecessarily. Yes. No, I think much
of what happens is that the experiences
of one generation is frozen into the dogma for
the succeeding generations. And then generations
after that come back, and that dogma becomes an
obstacle to their getting to that core experience,
which in fact was what the dogma had originally been. But de-freezing, de-freezing
it from that dogmatic state and sort of putting it back
into its original experiential context, and revivalist
religion I think is an attempt to do that. Hasidism it a kind of revival
movement within Judaism. And I think that's
precisely what they were trying to do, to take
things out of that frozen state and to reinsert the original
life core that had been there in them. Please, sir. Thank you very much
for your lecture. And for your lecture, I think
that God created all things, but God is still
creating all things. So that's evolution, which
can be seen in the research and discovered by scientists. It's a manifestation
of the creation now. The ongoing process of creation. Yeah, ongoing. So the creation of God
is an eternal process from the beginning to
an uncertain future. So the law of God, the power
of God, are in all things and the creative power
of God are in all things. So that's why and
we can find a bridge between God's will, God's
natural law, and evolution. Yes, I think we're
not very far apart. [LAUGHTER] The language is a
little bit different. We would have to unpack exactly
what we mean by God's will. What is the nature of will? But I think for further
conversation we could do that. Yes. Thank you so much for your talk. I have a question. Please correct me if I
understood you incorrectly. You said that you do
not adhere to the idea of an intelligent design. Is that correct? The way intelligent
design is usually used. Yes, yet you talked
about the [? Tellus ?] for the world and creation. And I wonder how the
two could be compatible. Because [? Tellus ?] implies
a design, to my knowledge at least. Interesting. Yes. By intelligent design
as it's usually used, I mean to say that this is-- the wonder of nature
points to the fact that there must be a
mind who creates it and who has a particular
purpose in mind. I don't know what
that purpose is. I stand in awe before the
magnificence of the world, but I don't know exactly
where it's going. I know that we are
part of something that reaches infinitely beyond us. I do not say there is a
particular purpose to it that I can define or
that my tradition has a unique handle on. That's what I mean. That's the distinction
I would make. Oh, the questions are brewing. Please. It's following up
on a prior question, where opposition was
made between the secular and this inspired vision. So I want to keep
that distinction, but I want to just
shift it over. Instead of secular, I want
to call it mass, the masses. Because the reason for
the calamity we're facing is our mass culture
and the way we all are as consumers,
this way of life that's spread over the Earth
now as a mass phenomenon. So that as a secular mass
phenomenon, I want to ask, if I say with you that there
is this panentheism that is this inspiration,
isn't it the case that that's always
been considered, as least traditionally, as
an elite phenomenon, opposed to the masses? So then I wonder if that's
a framework, that kind opposition works. I wonder-- I don't want to
call it then an impossibility to reconcile it. I don't want to call it a
paradox to reconcile it. I want to consider
it a puzzle, and I want to ask, how does one
transform a mass secular world into this
panentheistic experience? Yeah, a lot of educational
work to be done there. I would say, and I'm
not quite comfortable with the distinction you
are making between elites and masses, because I'm
a person who believes that religious experience
is accessible to every human being, that there is a kind
of possibility of openness. There is a of possibility-- In all of us, in all of us. Yes. And so the sense
that only elites have it and not
masses, the language may be an elite
language, I think-- I mean it in a sense
that it's always been understood that it's
a process of training and only very few
flip through the gate. Everyone else stays
behind, more or less. I mean, that's in that sense. Well, I think we-- We're now facing a
world where the mass is the cause of the calamity. How does that work? What's our chance-- The mass is manipulated. The mass is manipulated by
various kinds of elites, by various kinds
of elites that are out there for their own profit
and for their own power. And so who has control
of those levers I think is somehow variable. We now have means-- I'm thinking of film and
new forms of communication and so on-- to appeal to very large
numbers of people. You look at how the
masses have been affected by science fiction creations
in the past several decades, what 2001 and various kinds
of-- what Star Wars did to the masses and
what could be done in mass education for a
certain kind of values and certain kind of
awareness if the right sorts of educational tools were used. Yes, but you have to have
people who are wealthy enough and interested in investing
enough to do that. But I would like to see
environmental educators really getting hold of means
of communication to the masses that could
affect major change or large-scale change. I don't think there's
an impossibility there. But who manipulates,
who controls, I think, is very major question. And that's why these
debates like this one here around fossil fuels
are so interesting, because it so much reveals
what the vested interests are that control what the
opinions of the masses are. But as I say, I think as they
do it, the tools of religion will be a very
important part of that. Because only religion has
the access to the human mind. I know it's a tough fight. [LAUGHS] And if there were
an easier alternative, I wouldn't propose it. [LAUGHTER] Yes, please. Thank you, Rabbi,
for your presentation and more for your presence. It is a blessing-- Thank you. --to be with such vast and
deeply humane erudition. Thank you for that. My question was anticipated
by this gentleman with respect to babies and babbling. And my question is studded with
presupposition and projection. As one grandparent
to another, what have you learned about
mysticism and creation from your grandchildren? [LAUGHS] I'm thinking of a
close disciple of mine who just had a
baby two weeks ago and named him in honor of
one of the Hasidic masters that he and I studied together. So there is still some
continuity going on there. I think I have learned
so much from my child. I have one daughter. She has two children. So much from my
child and then again from her children
about this year of the development of language,
watching language happen was-- yes, it was, of course,
this series of babble, series of sounds, as you say. But it's also [NON-ENGLISH],,
so where did it come from? Where did he get
that phrase from? Where did she-- how could
she possibly have said that? And you just you
just watch the wonder of how things that
weren't there the day before are suddenly there. And then they are
a permanent part of that person's vocabulary
and the way of understanding and the way of
speaking somehow-- which came first? Was that a channel of the
mind, or was that something-- was that an imitative act of
speaking that then somehow is going to push the
child of the mind to follow the pattern of speech? So I'm watching it again. The younger grandchild is
four and has most of language, but it's still happening. And so I watch
that all the time. And of course, of
course, watching and hoping to cultivate
the sense of wonder. Right now it's happening
in coloring books, but that's a good place for it. Please. To pick up on that, what
will you tell your grandchild when that grandchild
goes to Sunday school and comes back with the
traditional creation stories? Well, that's very interesting. You know, when the older
grandchild was about four, I said, all right, it's time
to begin religious education. And I tried to get her some
very advanced, very progressive Jewish books about God. So it's time to
introduce God language. And I didn't like any of them. They were all sort of-- as I
stood in the bookstore reading them-- and books that are
well known that have won prizes for being
progressive Jewish education-- I was horrified and I
just couldn't buy them. I just couldn't quite feed
those to my grandchild. And so it's happening. It's happening slowly. She's in Sunday school
now, and she is learning it and picking things up. But I think at this
point, I wanted her to learn behavior
and watch behavior and what goes on at
her grandparents' house and on the Friday night table. And I want her to
see those things more than I want her to develop
the religious vocabulary. I would rather cultivate the
sense of wonder and joy in her and let her later find
the religious vocabulary. You know, Shoshanna, your
story reminds me of-- I'll have to maybe
wind things up by telling a story of my own. And it's good for
the season, actually. I was about 30 years
old or 29 years old, two or three years out
of rabbinical school. Fordham University
in New York, which is of course a
Catholic institution, offered a day of teaching about
the great mystical traditions and what the mystical
traditions have to say about the seasons of the year. And they invited four
speakers, a wonderful monk. I hope some of
you have read him, Brother David Steindl-Rast,
a wonderful sort of poetic Benedictine monk. And they invented
Swami Satchidananda. This is back in the '70s now. They invited Swami
Satchidananda, who was the head of integral yoga. And they invited the head
of the New York Zen Center, whose name I don't remember. And your humble
servant was there to represent the
Jews, because I was, though very young
and inexperienced, I was a rabbi who spoke out
of the mystical tradition. Well, brother David
gave a beautiful talk about the seasons of
the year, the journey from birth to death
and resurrection. You could imagine a
Christian calendar. And I talked about the two
sacred seasons of our year, also the season
of the individual in the fall and the
people in the spring, but then how that, too,
can be made individually. I talked about leading-- it must have been
this time of year, because I talked about
leading up to Sinai, going to the
mountain and standing there and the inner hearing
of God's voice and so on. And the swami got up, of course,
and we all sang, om shanti om. And at the zen center guy got
up and said, I have 15 minutes. We will sit. [LAUGHTER] And sat. Most of the people there
were the swami's disciples. You could tell because they
were wearing white pajamas all of them. They looked like the
swami's disciples. And after the lecture, a
young man raises his hand. Oh, maybe a guy in his mid-20s. But I was not much
older, remember. He raised his hand
and says, Rabbi, that's very nice what you say
about standing before Sinai and being there and hearing
the inner voice and so on, but is that really Judaism? Isn't Judaism about how
God's up there in the sky, and he's got a book,
and he's writing down all the good things you
do and all the bad things you do and He's going to
reward you or punish you? Isn't that really Judaism? And I looked at this kid,
and I said to myself, another kid ruined by the
Long Island Hebrew schools. [LAUGHTER] And I in my most pastoral
young rabbi voice said, well, most of us end
our religious education when we're 13 years old. And most of the people
who taught us probably don't understand it in
a very profound way, either, so we have to go back
and relearn it as adults. And he smiled and sat down. And then he came up to
me afterwards, said, I just want you to
know I quit-- he mentioned the name of one of
the leading ultra Orthodox yeshivas. I quit such-and-such
Academy the year before I was to be
ordained as a rabbi. And that's still the
theology he was being given. That was higher education,
religious higher education. He was still being given
that theology of God's writing it down and going
to decide whether to reward or punish you. So I have carried him around
with me for the last close to 50 years. I think of that guy often. And-- I hope you changed him. Well, I have no idea what
happened to him afterwards, but I meet people who say,
yes, don't you remember me? I attended a lecture
of yours 50 years ago. [LAUGHTER] So occasionally there--
maybe he'll show up. Maybe he'll show
up one day, too. But we've got a lot
of uphill work to do. Rabbi, thank you very much. Thank you all very much. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]
