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By Edward Boraz
January 20, 2005
Last Sunday evening, I collapsed in the front of the television and began watching “Boston Legal (okay I did watch the Patriots game),” a farcical drama about a law firm in Boston. In a modern day remake of the Scopes trial, a group of science teachers sue the superintendent of a public for wrongful discharge. They were ordered to teach creationism alongside evolution, for one could not explain everything and that a Higher Force could be at work was possible. When they protested that they were science teachers and not theologians, he promptly dismissed them. They sued and lost. Faith triumphs over skepticism in the courtroom. Though fiction, it is also a statement about where we have ventured as a society since the Scopes trial where science clearly triumphed over faith. Now, 80 or 90 years later, our society might receive a different outcome.
I would like to address this morning the following ideas based on my own study of my tradition and its history. The difficulty is not so much that of faith and skepticism; as it is one of faith and reason; that is to say which truth is greater the “raised eyebrow” of the skeptic who uses that energy to discover a “real” truth. Or is it the one who holds onto a “higher truth” despite the evidence that his or her senses and logic suggest otherwise. Those of us in this House of Worship have a sense that is difficult to explain. It is more of a feeling that a Force guides our destiny and that “the beauty that surrounds us” is from something beyond ourselves and our ability to comprehend it. It is this recognition of the “beyond” that stimulates a sense of wonder and asks us to relinquish our devotion to understanding.
The dilemma arises when we begin to ask, “But can we prove it?” The answer is, of course, no we cannot prove our faith based on reason. We can make analogies. We can assert that chance could not possibly have played a part in our falling in love with another human being or that the newborn child we hold in our arms is beyond anything that we can describe and thus we can only attribute it to the hand of God. But to prove in fact, through our intellect and reason, in the same way as a mathematical formula that God does have a hand in all of this – this we cannot do. Neither song nor prayer can prove anything, even the latter’s efficaciousness.
The human mind has the capacity to establish a limited certainty in the world. It can establish an order, structure, and through reason, either make the world a better place (for example the vaccine that cured polio) or destroy it through war and other forms of wasteful conduct.
Faith does not enter into the realm of science, mathematics. In far too many instances, it has been used to divide and to conquer others, rather than to bring the vision of the prophets of all religious faiths and traditions, a firm reality.
The Scopes Trial and the Boston Legal vignette are attempts to keep apart, and for good reason in most instances, these two phenomena of faith and reason. Usually, it is faith serving reason to advance some cause or some project that we find ourselves engaged in.
I would like to posit a different paradigm for the problem of reason and faith. It is to suggest that in the Jewish tradition, as it has grown and changed over time, reason serves to temper and to keep in control faith. Faith can be powerful and can be terribly divisive within and without one’s own religious tradition. The Jewish rabbinic tradition, which emerged with the return of Ezra to the land of Israel in 425 b.c.e, attempted to use our cognitive ability to reason to indeed place a barrier on faith. Perhaps, in part, their response was to the growing trends of Jewish cults, represented by the ascetic lifestyle of the qumranic communities, and the rise of Messianism as witnessed by the rise of Christianity,
We have a description in the Talmud Megillah of a liturgy referred to as the Shemoneh Esreh” – the eighteen benedictions. The prayer, as a whole, is referred to as “The T’philah” – loosely translated as the prayer par excellence in Judaism. Each day the prayer is first recited silently and then repeated by the Cantor. The first four are actually introductory. The core of the series begins with blessings five and six. They are as follows:
Blessed Are You, O Lord Our God, Ruler of the Universe, who bestows knowledge
Blessed Are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who desires repentance.
The human attribute of knowledge acquired through thought and reason is considered by the religious person to be a gift from God. My ability to communicate in words, to write this sermon, to form thought, is considered an act of grace from God. It is not a priori, a given of the human condition for the religious individual. It is not the DeCartes formulation of “I think. Therefore, I am.” Rather, each and every day, a human being arises and acknowledges that thought is a gift bestowed by God upon a human being.
How is this gift to be utilized? For the religious individual, it is to be used to motivate one towards “t’shuvah,” loosely translated as repentance. The actual root is “shuv” which means to turn. It has the real effect that what God desires is for the individual to turn towards God in the encounter, to not turn away and become lost in the daily, though necessary, pursuits of life.
“T’shuvah” does carry with it the true notion of repentance and here is where one aspect of the use of knowledge becomes critical. Thinking means the ability, in the absence of mental or emotional impairment, to distinguish between right and wrong. It carries with it the possibility of conducting oneself morally in one’s life. For the religious person, it means the obligation to assess the quality of one’s ethical, moral, and spiritual life and to know what one needs to better oneself morally.
Knowledge (daat) has a specific function the religious realm. To be clear, Judaism does not place any restriction on the use or purpose of knowledge. Maimonides, the great theologian of the 12th century, believed that philosophic inquiry (the science of his age) would lead to a greater knowledge and understanding of God. But the use of knowledge is to serve a particular religious function. It is to humble oneself before God and before oneself by acknowledging one’s own imperfection in leading the religious life and to give thanks for the ability to do so.
Knowledge – the gift of thought- helps to further one’s understanding of one’s self in relation to God. It creates the possibility of religious morality as something complex. It is less certain than many imagine. In the Jewish paradigm, knowledge is the gift that makes religious life possible. Knowledge is what allows us to understand those around us and our world. It is not to be used as a tool to fight one against the other as in the Scopes trial or on is to place in the courtroom in the highest courts of our country, whether real or fictional.
May it be your will, O God, that we recognize and reflect upon this most wonderful gift that permeates the human condition. May we be granted to use it with a wisdom that reflects the imagery of Scripture wherein God stated, “Come let us Make a Human-Being in our image and in our likeness." Amen.
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