Egos and Altars

Lawrence Kushner uses his vast experience as a pulpit rabbi to tackle a narcissistic society.

By LIAT COLLINS
kushner 521 (photo credit: Bloomberg)
kushner 521
(photo credit: Bloomberg)
There were two points very early on when I nearly gave up reading Lawrence Kushner’s I’m God, You’re Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego. The first time was when he mentions congregrants driving to the concluding service of Yom Kippur. As an Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem, I immediately doubted that this collection of essays, talks and sermons was relevant to me. The second time was when my friend Betsy Cohen-Kallus, who saw me reading it, exclaimed: “Lawrence Kushner! He was my rabbi in Sudbury. He’s the reason I live a religious Jewish life.”
Whatever I wrote about the book would never surpass that spontaneous moment of honest praise.
I’m glad I kept reading. Every time I pulled the book out in public, someone else asked to borrow it. The list has now grown to include Orthodox Jews and a Conservative rabbi, and I have a Reconstructionist rabbi friend for whom it is close to a must-read.
Most readers, at least those in or from the US, will need no introduction to Lawrence Kushner. Non-orthodox (in both senses of the word), he is considered one of the most creative modern Jewish thinkers. Apart from his pulpit work – close to three decades as the rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and currently the scholar at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco – he is also an adjunct faculty member at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Fortunately, his own ego is humble enough to accept that people often confuse him with “the other Rabbi Kushner” – Harold (Why Bad Things Happen to Good People). Lawrence Kushner, also well known as the author of God Was in This Place and Honey from the Rock, has a different style when he uses his vast experience from more than 30 years as a spiritual leader to offer a new perspective on faith, Jewish identity and “life stuff.” The book classifies the material into six categories: rabbi, Judaism, family, world, mysticism and holiness.
His former congregant, before I asked, offered her view on what made Kushner so special as a pulpit rabbi. “He was really against bingo evenings and fund-raising and all that sort of thing,” she noted. This is borne out several times in the book (which suffers from the hazard of all such collections, repetition).
He is absolutely – some would say amazingly – against donor plaques, for example. “No matter how much you give, your name can’t be anywhere,” he tells Bill Novak in an interview that appears here. Not only are plaques vulgar, they ruin the chance of having a classless society, he notes. “If you acknowledge publicly how much money people give, you can’t avoid creating a hierarchical social structure. If nobody knows you gave the money, you and the next person are equal... All the money comes from people taking on their fair share of the expenses.”
If you hadn’t guessed it from the title, his point is that “the goal of all spiritual life is to get your ego out of the way – outwit the sucker; dissolve it; shoot it; kill it...
“Silence the incessant planning, organizing, running, manipulating, possessing and processing that are the ineluctable redoubts of the ego... because they preclude awareness of the divine. To paraphrase the Talmud, God says, ‘There ain’t room enough in this here world for your ego and Me. You pick.’”
He relies on a broad base of sources, including his own mentor (“my other father”) Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf and the Ba’al Shem Tov.
In the complaints department, Kushner’s work is very “American,” and he has that annoying trait of assuming all Jews, and even God, speak Yiddish – and extraordinarily colloquial Yiddish, at that: “God, in effect says to Moses, ‘(Schmuck!) your asking, ‘Who am I?’ is the sign that I’ve sent you!”
HIS GUIDELINES to “surviving and healing congregational life,” set out in a chapter entitled “The Human Pyramid,” is inspired and contains insights into human nature and congregational truths such as, “Heated arguments about the correct way to be religious are almost always driven by something personal and secret.”
One of his driving principles is “not to collect more Jewish scalps but to make better Jews out of the ones we already have... What we are selling is a three-millennia- old tradition for how to make sacred sense out of life. You don’t have to advertise that or offer it at bargain-basement prices to check it out. All you need to be is welcoming, give them the real thing and expect the highest of which they are capable in return. In other words: no schlock.”
Kushner thinks every Jew should learn Hebrew, find a way of “remembering” Shabbat and keep at least a certain level of kashrut: “Look, I don’t know if God cares about what I eat, but I know that I feel closer to God when I care about what I eat.”
He doesn’t have all the answers, and certainly not those that Orthodox Jews would be comfortable with, but the book is nonetheless full of good advice. In his section on family, for instance, Kushner advises: “Tell the truth.” “The next time a child asks you a real, spiritual question, try saying, ‘I don’t know the answer. I’ve been wondering about it ever since I was your age. It’s a holy question.’”
Incidentally, to answer that nagging question addressed by Harold Kushner, this Rabbi Kushner answers: “The real question is: Why do human beings do terrible things?... God didn’t die in the Holocaust, only the Deuteronomic idea of an intervening God who rewards and punishes people.”