CHAPTER XIII

MIPNE DARCHE SHALOM: TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES IN PURSUIT OF PEACE

RABBI JACK A. LUXEMBURG

Temple Beth AMI

            It is a sorry circumstance, often thrown back in the face of re-ligious persons, that "religion does more to divide people than to unite them." The history of inter and intra religious wars down through the ages; the patterns of social, political and economic discrimination too often legislated in, or buttressed by, the name of God; the demonizing and the disparaging of peoples and their beliefs by other "peoples of faith;" the headlines of our daily payers underscoring the religious difference between battling factions in Bosnia, or Rwanda, or North Ireland, or the Middle East: all lend credence to this painful accusation. It would seem that rather than being the heirs of Abraham (peace be upon him) and sharing a common legacy of covenant, revealed scripture, and sacred mi-ssion, we often have too appeared to be spiritually troubled descendants of Babel,lacking an adequately inspired means of ex-pressing our common religious heritage in terms that can be grasped and appreciated by another.

            It is with purpose that I refer to the Babel story. The Bible depicts the people of Babel gathering on the planes of Shinar, calling to others to gather in a great concentration of humanity. "Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, to make a name for ourselves, else we shall be scattered all over the world" (Gen. 11:4). The rabbinic exegesis and textual explo-ration known as midrash wondered what these human beings wished to do with this tower upon which they intended to enter heaven (as based on the Hebrew idiom which connotes "a tower into the heavens" as opposed to "a tower reaching towards the heavens"). One of three possibilities they conclude: to ascend into the heavens and war against God; to take their man-made deities and set them up in the heavens to be worshiped; or to ascend into the heavens and ruin them with bows and spears. And from this they felt they would gain a name, an identity which would be a bulwark against the frightening notion of a humanity dispersed across the face of the earth.

            I would like to suggest that this image is an apt metaphor for one aspect of our discussion. Each perspective suggested by the midrash results in the denial of the one and only God. Human beings are to displace God or supplant God with deities created by human beings in their own image, or simply destroy the heavenly abode -- and thereby obliterate the possibility of the divine. Each scenario represents the vainglorious notion that human beings, in their finitude, can supplant, replace, or irradiate the infinite tran-scendence which is God, Adonai, Allah. For us the story can stand as a warning: beware of the tendency of human beings to create absolutes. If the builders of Babel were ready to assault the very gates of heaven, how would they have felt about assaulting the gates of the city or shrine over there where people worship a dif-ferent God, in a different way, in a different language. Makers of absolutes cannot tolerate alternatives.

            To stay with this a moment longer, consider the delicious irony of their punishment. Might we not suggest that with the multi-plication of tongues, the variety of languages, comes variation in perceptions of the world about us, variation in frames of re-ference and modes of abstraction. The divine response to the making of absolutes is to confirm the reality of diversity and alternatives in human experience, and to affirm that there is only one source of transcendence through which this human diversity can experience the unity which is divine.

            It is against this backdrop that Abraham (peace be upon him) emerges. The three traditions we represent embrace him and his descendants, each in our own way, and with our own under-stand-ings. This is precisely because it is through Abraham (peace be upon him) that human beings are taught that there is a path to transcendence which does not distort, but dignifies; does not lead to fallacy, but to the fulfillment of our humanity, and that humanity can live in covenant with Divinity. I believe that this can be one way to understand the assertion that "all the peoples of the earth shall bless themselves by you." Every people, every person and every group can enter into the blessing of covenantal living which enables human beings to reflect the image of God through the fulfillment of their humanity, even participating in divine transcendence by linking temporal human effort with infinite divine purpose.

            The problem arises when a group or even a single individual of great charisma makes an absolute of their covenantal relation-ship. While such a relationship is by nature an absolute in the life of the adherents, we must question whether it can justifiably be imposed upon others, or whether that absoluteness may held up as the justification for claims of the superiority -- spiritual, political, or social -- of the particular adherents; or as justification for diminish-ing the status and rights, temporal or theological, of non-adherents. Even if we are of a mind that there is, today, no justification for such tendencies, we must acknowledge that not one of our traditions has been immune in the past.

            In the ancient world, ethnicity and religious identity were more congruent than today. Then, it was not unusual for each people to have its own gods, its own festive days, its own sacred places and devotions. What distinguished the Jew in ancient days was that he or she was part of a folk that worshipped a single, unique, universal deity who entered into covenant with human beings, and thereby was made manifest in history, the realm of human experience on the temporal plane -- the transcendent entering the world of the finite. This is a mystery which each of our (three) faiths explains and celebrates in its own fashion. That ancient Jew was part of an identifiable folk with a land, a language, a mode of daily living based on revealed scripture; he or she was an identifiable ethnic.

            It is instructive for our deliberations to examine briefly the perceptions of what would seem to be an ethnocentric Jewish community. How did it understand the phenomenon of human diversity or the import of its covenant relative to the other peoples? It may be surprising to note that to the rabbinic mind, the first chapters of torah, the creation narrative, contain a teaching which runs strongly counter to any notion of racial, ethnic or social superiority. Noting that God created a single human being rather than humanity in all its diversity (as was done with other living things, all created in their various species), the sages of Judaism deduced that this was to teach the common ancestry of humanity. Such common lineage, insist the rabbis, precludes claims of hereditary superiority, whether racial, moral, or spiritual. It also denies any assertion that one’s actions are beyond question because of a sterling "moral" lineage, or that one can nor be held accountable for misdeeds because of a blemished moral legacy. All humanity shares a common lineage and equal claim to the dignity accorded to human beings.

            That humanity, despite its common ancestry, is obviously greatly diversified in appearance did not trouble the rabbis. Indeed, they viewed this variety as a reflection of God’s own limitlessness. They taught this lesson through a comparison: the earthly king stamps coins from a single mold, and all the coins look alike. The heavenly king, God, creates all human beings in the divine image, yet no two are alike. From this perspective, human ethnic and racial diversity is viewed as a marvelous reflection of a divine attribute.

            Convinced of the truth of a single universal God, the sages of Judaism could only conclude that any revelation emanating from that God must also be universal; that is, have I meaning and ac-cessibility to any and all. Therefore rabbinic lore is full of midrash and commentary that emphasizes not Judaism -- the religious experience of the Jewish people -- as an absolute, but the absolute and eternal relevance of the revelation, the teaching, the torah for all humankind. Consider: the rabbis taught that the torah was given in a wilderness, a no man’s land, and consequently an "everyone’s" land, precisely to underscore universal access to its teaching, so that no one could say: "It was given in the land of the Jews, therefore it is only for the Jews." A parallel teaching is that at Sinai, when God revealed torah to Israel, God spoke in the seventy languages of humanity; that is, in all tongues for all to hear and for all to embrace.

            The implication is clear. If, as suggested above in the dis-cussion of the tower of Babel, differences in languages represent real differences in modes of both perception and expression, than we can go on to find a basis for suggesting that the religious traditions that flow from the individual, Abraham (peace by upon him), through the folk, Israel, and into a formulation of their own, represent the response of those who have heard the voice of Sinai echoing through time and consciousness. Their response, different from that of the Jew, is also genuine. Their covenant is also valid, containing, as it does, the seeds of human redemption.

            Two additional teachings, one early and one late, illustrate the durability of this perspective in Judaism. One is the notion of the Noahide covenant. The earliest torah teachings impress upon the Jew that God entered into a covenant with all of human kind through Noah, establishing standards of human decency and righteousness independent of a particular religious creed. This is reflected in a later teaching found in both the midrash to the Book of Psalms and in talmudic literature: "The righteous of every nation have a place in the world to come".

            This is a validation of God’s readiness to be in covenantal relationship with every and all people -- an equal opportunity deity, if you will. But it requires us to drop our tendency to absolutes in order to realize that equal does not have to mean identical. The God of monotheistic faith is not bound by our desire for spiritual and salvific monopoly. It is precisely when we make God over in our own image, as intolerant and discomforted by diversity, that we give false sanctity to the boundaries that divide people, whether by faith, locution, skin color, facial characteristics, language . . . or whatever. We become convinced that God’s infinite capacity to love the world and all in it is finite -- infinite for us, nonexistent for them -- whoever they are. The tragedy which we all wish to avoid is to make religious life and covenantal relationships zero sum enter-prises, either/or experiences. If I am, then they are not; either me or them. We must move to a theology and shared understanding of self and other that can say, "me and them, too."

            There is in the 16th century code of Jewish teachings, the Shulchan Aruch, a passage that contains a line of thinking that I believe is worthy of our consideration. In speaking about how Jews are to respond to the needs of non-Jews it says: "Help their poor, visit their sick, bury their dead, deliver a funeral oration, comfort their mourners . . . Mipne lathe shalom. All this and more, says the Shulchan Aruch, in order to pursue the paths of peace, maintaining peaceable relations.