Scholars' Corner
The Institute for
Christian & Jewish Studies
presentsIslam and the Jewish-Christian Encounter Response by
Rabbi Nina Beth CardinI'm going to follow Rosann's template. I'm going to try to respond to a couple points Dr. Nyang made, and then try to provide a very concise answer to the question from the Jewish perspective, "What is it that God requires of us?"
First, I was taken with one of what in the Jewish tradi-tion we would call midrashim, one of the rabbinic tales that Dr. Nyang told us from the Muslim tradition. He said, "When Allah summoned the angelic court before Him and told the angelic court that He, Allah, planned to create a human being, the assembly of divine courtiers warned Him about the danger of creating a being that would shed blood. And Allah, according to the Quran, replied, 'I know what you do not know.'" The fact is that the rabbinic midrash offers a very similar story about God calling the angels of the heavenly court together and saying, "Shall we in fact create humanity?" And there are pros and cons on both sides, and when it looked like the side might be against the creation of humanity, because humanity will be liars, and they will be violent, and they will be ugly and will be making idols, God took that side and said, "Nonetheless, I will create humanity."
What are both of these stories responding to? They're responding to two questions: (1) Why are we here, why did God choose to create humanity?; and (2) given the ugliness that humanity can create and foster on the other in this world, why does God continue to have human beings? How do we respond? So in part, what all religion comes to do, it seems to me, is to respond to that question: If we have tendencies toward ugliness, tendencies toward darkness, tendencies toward vio-lence, how can religion bless life and guide us away from those evil tendencies?
Our purpose here, yes, in part, is to worship God, but like Rosann I want to say that Judaism is about more than telling us how to worship God and how to live a sacred life here on earth. Rosann, I thought for a moment the words tikkun olam -- the perfection of the world -- were going to come out of your mouth, because that is a part also of what we think. The purpose of worship is to guide us toward our covenanted relation-ship with God and pursuing God's task. But why would God create the human being, which needed to be perfected? Because God wanted to teach us that re-sponse is important. God knows the world isn't perfect, we know the world isn't perfect. We have it in our hands to make it better, and that is what religion is here to teach us: to recognize the imperfections in the world and to make it better. That's one.
The second point that I want to raise about Dr. Nyang's comments, and here I differ from Rosann, is that Judaism believes that we cannot fathom God's nature. It is always stunning to me to read in the Torah that after the revelations on Sinai, after Moses had been up on the mountain with God, as it were, for forty days, after the Ten Commandments had been given, after the making of the golden calf, after all that when Moses went back up the mountain the second time, it is at that point that Moses says to God, "Would you truly reveal yourself to me now because I do not yet know you." After the revelation, Moses up there with God on Mount Sinai says, "I still don't know you." I think it's saying that from our tradition, we can't know God.
So how does Judaism help us understand God, because if we're going to pursue a religious life, we have to know a little bit about God and a little bit about what God wants. Judaism says that knowledge of God is filtered through the wisdom of our people, filtered through the wisdom of our Torah, of our understanding of the Torah, of the laws, of the interpretation of our tradition by our community. Our relationship with God is in some measure based on the interpretation of Torah, but it is filtered through the wisdom of our community. It is a private affair embedded in and embraced by community.
Three, somewhere, Dr. Nyang, you said that Islam focuses on the world to come. Judaism focuses on this world. How we live here and now is what is so important. When you look through all the books of the Bible, and you look at the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, you will hardly find references to life after death. We focus so much on here, we do what is good here and now because the good we do here and now is not solely because we'll be rewarded in life hereafter. The mes-sianic period for which we strive as Jews, this historic moment . . . God lives and works in history. We do what we do as sacred acts because it benefits us here and now: if you benefit me, I have to benefit you. We per-form sacred acts to benefit ourselves, and by benefitting you, I'm benefitting me in this world here and now.
Point number four. I was struck, Dr. Nyang, with the phrase, "the final prophecy of Muhammad." Now in some measure, Judaism also believes that our canon is closed, Torah is closed, the Bible is closed; we can't add to the words of the Torah. But if you look at the classic printed version of the Torah, you will have in the center of the page, on the top of the page, a classic tradition, a classic text of Torah, and then underneath it or all around it, you will have lots of voices from lots of commentators through lots years talking about it. The conversation builds from the center of the page to the edges of the page, and then spills out from the edges ultimately to today. While in some sense prophecy ended, it also continues in the conversations about our sacred texts, in the conversations that we have in places like this, in the conversations that we have in our imaginations. The prophecy does continue, but we have to be careful that this prophecy of today does not carry the authority of the prophecy of the canon, and that we not confuse the prophecy of today with the prophecy of the canon.
Last point: the third pillar of Islam, obligatory charity, is not at all something that we do not know. That is, ob-ligatory charity encompasses all of our tradition. It is, in fact, I would say -- I going to move from this now to my answer to what God requires of us from the Jewish perspective -- obligatory charity is probably the core of what Judaism tells us God wants of us. Usually, to ask a question, what does Judaism say about something or other, is one of the hardest questions to answer. What does Judaism believe about the afterlife? Do we sit or stand when we recite the prayer Sh'ma? Why is the challah, the Friday night bread, braided? All these ques-tions are often difficult to answer, but surprisingly, this one -- What does God require of us, or of me? -- is not as difficult to answer at first blush as you might imagine.
Here's what I would want to say: God requires that we love God, which leads us to the learning and teaching of God's laws and God's ways and God's will, which leads us to doing commandments, and which leads us to living a sacred life -- a life of Torah, a life of goodness, a sacred life. How do you get there? All of this is in our classic central prayer, the Sh'ma: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." That's where it all starts, with God. But in the three paragraphs under that is where the core formula for what God demands of us can be found. After "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one," it says, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." God, and the love of God, is self-justifying. It was what Rosann was saying, too: in some sense to answer the question, "What does God require of us," we need a foundation upon which everything else is built, a foundation that will hold up everything else. What is the foundation that will hold up everything else? God and the love of God. That is self-justifying. We know intuitively that is right. Nothing else can justify; in fact it justifies itself. God exists and God demands of us, commands of us, begs of us, that we enter into the loving arms of God.
Given that, we move on to, "O.K., now what?" Now that we love God, we must learn about God. How do we learn about God? Again the Sh'ma tells us to take to heart these instructions and the laws that are written in Torah around the paragraph of the Sh'ma. "Take to heart these instructions and impress them upon your children." Learn of God's ways, ways to learn God's word, to learn God's will, and teach them to your children. Tell them. They are precious to you and you pass them on. That is the legacy that you give to your children and no one can ever take away. So you learn, you teach, and then what do you do? You do. For the Sh'ma continues, "Earnestly heed these commandments that I command you this day that you do them." Do them and it will go well with you. Ah, but where do I begin to do them? Do what? Do which ones? All of them? And the Sh'ma continues, and it continues in a most peculiar way. It starts with this grand rule -- love God and teach the laws to your children -- without specifying which laws. Do the laws, and everything will go well with you. O.K., God, but I'm trying to get something specific. Would you give me something to start with, something specific? And you know what it is? You shall wear tsitsit on your garment, on the corners of your garment. The little fringes on the corners of your garment. Now, if you were God, or if you were the Torah, or if you were the rabbis trying to figure out the emblematic mitzvah, the em-blematic commandment to begin with, would you say, "Put little fringes on the corners of your garment. That's where you start"?
There are two reasons maybe to begin with that. One is, O.K., I can do that. I can do that, but now give me another one a little harder. So you start with something you can do, but I think it's obviously much more pro-found than that. Because at the edges of our clothes, that's where we meet the world. And if we can remem-ber at that intersection between ourselves and the world that we have to behave in a certain way, then every action that takes place between us and the other -- my neighbor, my enemy, my friends, my loved ones -- will be treated with the wisdom that I have of the world through my eyes.
So God, love God, learn God's ways, do God's command-ments. Why? Because that leads to a life of justice and mercy. We know that reading from Micah (6:8): "God has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk modestly with your God. Then will your name achieve wisdom."
And if you think that's good enough, we have Isaiah. We read this on Yom Kippur morning, we read this on the holiest day of our calendar, when in fact, in the Temple, when the Temple stood, we had sacrifices and we had the scapegoat, and we were surrounded by the cult of the Temple, which was sacrificial by and large. And we have Isaiah commenting: "Is this the fast I have chosen, a day of self-affliction?" That is, we now are fasting, and is that what God really wants of us? "Bowing your head like a reed and covering yourself with sackcloth and ashes. Is this what you call a fast, a day accept-able to the Eternal?" Isaiah is saying, "Do you think that God is saying God wants the sacrifice and God wants the ritual, for the sake of the sacrifice and the sake of the ritual?" If you lead a wonderfully religious life in the sense of fulfilling all the ritual obligations of the Torah, but you defame God by violating interpersonal relation-ships, do you think that's really what God wants? "I don't eat anything that's not kosher, and I don't do anything I shouldn't do on Shabbos, but I lie and steal." Is that what God wants, Isaiah is saying. If you think that's what it's all about, if you think what it means to worship is what it's all about, you've got it wrong. Worship is pressed into the service of leading the sacred life you were meant to lead with the other. If you turn ritual into idolatry, you have defamed the sacred. God wants relationships that are sacred, that are moral, that are loving. You should never forget that ritual is in service to the bottom line, to leading a sacred life.
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