I was a new mother and a young rabbi in
the spring of 2004 and the world was in
shambles maybe you remember every day we
heard devastating reports from the war
in Iraq there were waves of terror
rolling across the globe it seemed like
humanity was spinning out of control I
remember the night that I read about the
series of coordinated bombings in the
subway system in Madrid and I got up and
I walked over to the crib where my
six-month-old baby girl
lay sleeping sweetly and I heard the
rhythm of her breath and I felt this
sense of urgency coursing through my
body
we were living through a time of
tectonic shifts in ideologies in
politics in religion in populations
everything felt so precarious and I
remember thinking my gun what kind of
world did we bring this child into and
what was I as a mother and a religious
leader willing to do about it of course
I knew it was clear that religion would
be a principle battlefield in this
rapidly changing landscape and it was
already clear that religion was a
significant part of the problem the
question for me was could religion also
be part of the solution
now throughout history people have
committed horrible crimes and atrocities
in the name of religion and as we
entered the 21st century it was very
clear that religious extremism was once
again on the rise our studies now show
that over the course of the past 15 20
years hostilities and religion related
violence have been on the increase all
over the world but we don't even need
the studies to prove it because I ask
you how many of us are surprised today
when we hear the stories of a bombing or
a shooting when we later find out that
the last word that was uttered before
the trigger is pulled or the bomb is
detonated is the name of God
it barely raises an eyebrow today when
we learned that yet another person has
decided to show his love of God by
taking the lives of God's children in
America religious extremism looks like a
white anti-abortion Christian extremist
walking into Planned Parenthood in
Colorado Springs and murdering three
people it also looks like a couple
inspired by the Islamic state walking
into an office party in San Bernardino
and killing 14 and even when religion
related extremism does not lead to
violence it is still used as a political
wedge issue cynically leading people to
justify the subordination of women the
stigmatization of LGBT people
racism Islamophobia and anti-semitism
this ought to concern deeply those of us
who care about the future of religion
and the future of faith we need to call
this what it is a great failure of
religion but the thing is this isn't
even the only challenge that religion
faces today at the very same time that
we need religion to be a strong force
against extremism it is suffering from a
second pernicious trend what I call
religious routine ISM this is when our
institutions and our leaders are stuck
in a paradigm that is rote and perfectly
devoid of life devoid of vision and
devoid of soul let me explain what I
mean like this one of the great
blessings of being a rabbi is standing
under the chuppah under the wedding
canopy with a couple and helping them
proclaim publicly and make holy the love
that they found for one another I want
to ask you now though to think maybe
from your own experience or maybe just
imagine it about the difference between
the intensity of the experience under
the wedding canopy and maybe the
experience of the sixth or seventh
anniversary
and if you're lucky enough to make it 16
or 17 years if you're like most people
you probably wake up in the morning
realizing that you forgot to make a
reservation at your favorite restaurant
and you forgot so much as a card and
then you just hope and pray that your
partner also forgot well
religious ritual and rites were
essentially designed to serve the
function of the anniversary to be a
container in which we would hold on to
the remnants of that sacred revelatory
encounter that birthed the religion in
the first place the problem is that
after a few centuries the date remains
on the calendar but the love affair is
long dead that's when we find ourselves
in endless mindless repetitions of words
that don't mean anything to us rising
and being seated because someone has
asked us to holding onto jealously
guarded doctrine that's completely and
wildly out of step with our contemporary
reality engaging in perfunctory practice
simply because that's the way things
have always been done religion is waning
in the United States across the board
churches and synagogues and mosques are
all complaining about how hard it is to
maintain relevance for a generation of
young people who seem completely
uninterested not only in the
institutions that stand at the heart of
our traditions but even in religion
itself and what they need to understand
is that there is today a generation of
people who are as disgusted by the
violence of religious extremism as they
are turned off by the lifelessness of
religious routine ISM of course there is
a bright spot to this story given the
crisis of these two concurrent trends in
religious life about 12 or 13 years ago
I set out to try to determine if there
was any way that I could reclaim the
heart of my own
Jewish tradition to help make it
meaningful and purposeful again in a
world on fire I started to wonder what
if we could harness some of the great
minds of our
generation and thank in a bold and
robust an imaginative way again about
what the next iteration of religious
life would look like now we had no money
no space no game plan but we did have
email so my friend Melissa and I sat
down and we wrote in email which we sent
out to a fruit few friends and
colleagues it basically said this before
you bail on religion
why don't we come together this Friday
night and see what we might make of our
own Jewish inheritance we hoped maybe 20
people would show up it turned out a
hundred and thirty-five people came they
were cynics and seekers atheists and
rabbis many people said that night that
it was the first time that they had a
meaningful religious experience in their
entire lives
and so I set out to do the only rational
thing that someone would do in such a
circumstance I quit my job and tried to
build this audacious dream a reinvented
rethought religious life which we called
a car which means the essence or the
heart of the matter now a car is not
alone out there in the religious
landscape today there are Jewish and
Christian and Muslim and Catholic
religious leaders many of them women by
the way who have set out to reclaim the
heart of our traditions who firmly
believe that now is the time for
religion to be part of the solution we
are going back into our sacred
traditions and recognizing that all of
our traditions contain the raw material
to justify violence and extremism and
also contain the raw material to justify
compassion coexistence and kindness that
when others choose to read our text as
directives for hate and vengeance we can
choose to read those same text as
directives for love and for forgiveness
I have found now in communities as
varied as Jewish indie startups on the
coasts to a woman's mosque to black
churches in New York and in North
Carolina to a holy bus loaded with nuns
that reverses this country with a
message of justice and peace
that there is a shared religious ethos
that is now emerging in the form of a
revitalized religion in this country and
while the theology and the practice is
very very much between these independent
communities what we can see are some
common consistent threads between them
I'm going to share with you four of
those commitments now
the first is wakefulness we live in a
time today in which we have
unprecedented access to information
about every global tragedy that happens
on every corner of this earth within 12
hours 20 million people saw that image
of a line Cordys little body washed up
on the Turkish shore we all saw this
picture we saw this picture of a
five-year-old child pulled out of the
rubble of his building in Aleppo and
once we see these images we are called
to a certain kind of action my tradition
tells a story of a traveler who's
walking down a road when he sees a
beautiful house on fire and he says how
can it be that something so beautiful
would burn and nobody seems to even care
so - we learn that our world is on fire
and it is our job to keep our hearts and
our eyes open and to recognize that it's
our responsibility to help put out the
flames this is extremely difficult to do
psychologists tell us that the more we
learn about what's broken in our world
the less likely we are to do anything
it's called psychic numbing we just shut
down at a certain point well somewhere
along the way our religious leaders
forgot that it's our job to make people
uncomfortable it's our job to wake
people up to pull them out of their
apathy and into the anguish and to
insist that we do what we don't want to
do and see what we do not want to see
because we know that social change only
happens when we are awake enough to see
that the house is on fire the second
principle is hope and I want to say this
about hope hope is not naive and hope is
not in opiate
maybe the single greatest act of
defiance against a politics of pessimism
and against a culture of despair because
what hope does for us is it lifts us out
of the container that holds us and
constrains us from the outside and says
you can dream and think expansively
again that they cannot control in you I
saw hope made manifest in an
african-american church in the southside
of Chicago this summer where I brought
my little girl who's now 13 and a few
inches taller than me to here my friend
Reverend Otis Moss preached that summer
there had already been 3,000 people shot
between January and July in Chicago we
went into that church and heard Reverend
Moss preach and after he did this choir
of gorgeous women 100 women strong stood
up and began to sing I need you you need
me I love you I need you to survive and
I realized in that moment that this is
what religion is supposed to be about
it's supposed to be about giving people
back a sense of purpose a sense of hope
a sense that they and their dreams
fundamentally matter in this world that
tells them that they don't matter at all
the third principle is the principle of
mightiness there's a rabbinic tradition
that we are to walk around with two
slips of paper in our pockets one says I
am but dust and ashes it's not all about
me I can't control everything and I
cannot do this on my own the other slip
of paper says for my sake the world was
created which is to say it's true that I
can't do everything but I can surely do
something I can forgive I can love I can
show up I can protest I can be a part of
this conversation we even now have a
religious ritual a posture that holds
the paradox between powerlessness and
power in the Jewish community the only
time of
year that we prostrate fully to the
ground is during the High Holy Days it's
a sign of total submission now in our
community when we get up off the ground
we stand with our hands raised to the
heavens and we say I am strong I am
mighty and I am worthy I can't do
everything but I can do something in a
world that conspires to make us believe
that we are invisible and that we are
impotent religious communities and
religious ritual can remind us that for
whatever amount of time we have here on
this earth whatever gifts and blessings
we were given whatever resources we have
we can and we must use them to try to
make the world a little bit more just
and a little bit more loving the fourth
and final is interconnectedness a few
years ago there was a man walking on the
beach in Alaska when he came across a
soccer ball
that had some Japanese letters written
on it he took a picture of it and posted
it up on social media and a Japanese
teenager contacted him he had lost
everything in the tsunami that
devastated his country but he was able
to retrieve that soccer ball after it
had floated all the way across the
Pacific how small our world has become
it's so hard for us to remember how
interconnected we all are as human
beings and yet we know that it is
systems of oppression that benefit the
most from the lie of radical
individualism let me tell you how this
works I'm not supposed to care when
black youth are harassed by police
because my white-looking Jewish kids
probably won't ever get pulled over for
the crime of driving while black well
not so because this is also my problem
and guess what transphobia and
Islamophobia and racism of all forms
those are also all of our problems and
so too is anti-semitism all of our
problems because Emma Lazarus was right
Emma Lazarus was right when she said
until all of us are free we are none of
us free we are all in this together and
now somewhere at the intersection of
these four trends of wakefulness and
hope and mightiness and
interconnectedness there is a burgeoning
multi-phase justice movement in this
country that is staking a claim on a
counter trend saying that religion can
and must be a force for good in the
world our hearts hurt from the failed
religion of extremism and we deserve
more than the failed religion of routine
ISM it is time for religious leaders and
religious communities to take the lead
in the spiritual and cultural shift that
this country and the world so
desperately needs a shift toward love
toward justice toward equality and
toward dignity for all I believe that
our children deserve no less than that
thank you
[Applause]