By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — “Take off your shoes,” God admonished Moses at the site of the Burning Bush. “You are standing on holy ground.” What was God actually saying? Moses was not at the Vatican. He was not at the Mosque of Omar. He was not even in Jerusalem. He was in the wilderness—in the middle of nowhere. In other words, wherever you feel God, that is holy ground and what you feel and what you experience is real and it is what you believe.
A wise pastor of the Gospel once told me that “religion works best as a salad. It has to have a variety of ingredients mixed together to come out good. Each one of us is an ingredient.”
These days, too many people are inbred from childhood to follow extremist chief rabbis and self-righteous evangelicals and imams who have lost touch with the inclusive message of Mohammed. What are you to believe? One thing worth knowing is that the religions have somewhat fossilized into archaic, even dangerous organisms, spewing out hate and division, enslaving minds, and that you just have to go back to the beginnings to rediscover that each one of us is God’s equal child and all we have to believe in is pastoral kindness.
The Bible is a library of ideas and people and oracles and phonies and miracles and romances and murders and music and, like the human experience itself, it is loaded with contradictions.
The Jews say, “If you only have Torah, then you don’t even have Torah.” In other words, there’s more, a lot more, to living life and believing in something, than just arbitrarily quoting from one segment of, or even a single passage, from a book. It’s not holy because God wrote it. It’s holy because men and women inspired by God wrote it. With each successive writer came a new layer of insight, of pain, of yearning, and breakthrough. If we surrender the authorship to God, then we human beings are just vessels and poetry dissolves from the earth.
We know that George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree. Does that make what he had to say and how he fathered the United States any less sacred? So does it really matter if Moses actually climbed up Mt. Sinai and came down forty days later with two stones inscribed “with God’s finger” called “The Ten Commandments?” Doesn’t it matter more that we have the legacy of law and decency and the notion of honoring our parents and the prohibition against stealing from others?
The text is not our homeland; life is. God is not to be determined; God is to be discovered—like dawn is a personal experience and the moon is seen in as many ways as there are eyes that can look up.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. You may contact him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com