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April 2009

I’ve had so much positive feedback on my last column – which offered wise counsel from Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, that I’m presenting here one more of Sacks’ ideas, this one on spirituality vs. religion, a topic which may be worth some thought as we approach Passover and prepare to join our ancestors in that quintessential journey.

We often hear it said, “I’m not very religious, but I’m a spiritual person.” When we say this, we’re expressing our preference for the wonder associated with holiness and mystery over what we sometimes think of as the legalisms and institutionalism of religion

Jim Levinson, Sh'liach Tzibur
 

Sacks challenges us a bit on this. In another of his provocative essays he writes:

Spirituality is the poetry of the soul. Religion is the prose. Spirituality is the direct encounter with God. Religion is our identification with a group that has encountered the Divine throughout its history…It is almost like the distinction between love and marriage. Love is an emotion. Marriage is an institution…One of the great shortcomings of our time is that we have come to value emotions at the expense of institutions. We place a higher value on love than marriage.

Sacks goes on to say that, through the course of human history, people have created and protected institutions in part “to give permanence to what is fleeting, stability to the mercurial.” He makes reference to John Bayley’s moving account of life with Iris Murdoch after she had contracted Alzheimer’s, and the ways in which the most mundane acts within their marriage shone with their own moral beauty.  Sachs suggests that we need both the ecstasy and the ongoing rituals. We need not only the joy of seeing the family gathered around the Seder table and connecting with the traditions of our parents and grandparents, but also the rituals of the blessings, the four cups of wine, the four questions, the ten plagues. We need the long stretches of loyalty called for as our ancestors traversed the wilderness as well as the moments of high passion. Even those of us who love poetry can rarely live on it exclusively.

Sacks’ words continue to resonate with me as I reflect on the events surrounding the tragic death of baby Talia. Yes, there was ecstasy – when she seemed to recover from her previous setback, and there was our passionate response to lend a hand to Talia’s family in recent months, but it also was so comforting to know that when this little angel died  there would be the prayers and rituals of our religious tradition, that our Chevra Kadisha would be there lovingly to wash and pray over her body, and that we would come together to offer the ancient prayers as we laid her gently to rest.

B’Shalom,
Jim