by David Trimble

Today, adopting Abraham and Sarah as my spiritual ancestors, I acknowledge my birth ancestors - my father, his parents’ fathers, and their fathers, and their fathers, who all were ministers in the Methodist Church.  My father was indifferent to religion and spirituality - his passion was the social gospel.  Years ago, he easily accepted my goal of conversion to Judaism but, if he were living today, his heart would be unlikely to resonate with my feelings of religious love.  My grandfather ancestors, some of whom were missionaries, would understand my feelings.  I like to think that, from their perspective in the world to come, they find in my conversion the love for turning toward God that informed their work when they were in this world.  My mother always loved Judaism, and would share in my feelings today, as does my daughter, with whom I share deep conversations about spiritual practice.  Jessica, Jacob, and I have been the passionate spiritual seekers in our family.  This year marked a round of metaphysical musical chairs, as Jacob returned to his birth family’s Christianity, Jessica became a Buddhist, and I became a Jew. As Jodie begins to reconstruct her life, shattered by Jacob’s death, she finds herself every day believing more in Jacob’s soul, and therefore  her own.

My ancestors were with me as I wrote to Jacob where he wrestled at Heartland Christian ministries to find sobriety, life direction, and a meaningful relationship with God.  I taught him what I knew  about how to become a Christian, offering more loving lessons than the harsh fundamentalism at Heartland.  Jacob’s relationship with Jesus helped him to turn his life around.  He was at first afraid that his mother and I, as Jews, would go to hell.  He let go of that, but was sad about my conversion, telling me that I had the power of the Word, and that I was disrespecting my ancestors by leaving Christianity.  It is interesting to note that this week’s portion, Tsav, describes the inauguration of Aaron and his sons, the progenitors of a hereditary priesthood.  Returning home, Jacob recovered the generosity of spirit that shone through the words of his Dvar Torah at his Bar Mitzvah here at Temple Sinai.  He promised to come here to celebrate my conversion.  The original date set was March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day, and Jacob pledged that he would appear all dressed in green.  Now, I have read esoteric texts describing the prophet Elijah manifesting in this world as a green-robed figure.  If any of you tonight catch a flash of green light out of the corner of your eye, please welcome Yaakov Eliahu to tonight’s celebration.
 

Years ago, I would not have predicted that I would practice any religion.  As a child, I wrestled with frightening feelings of abandonment by God, perhaps resonating to my father’s childhood experience of losing his father to tuberculosis, and blaming the Methodist Church for working his father to death.  I learned to meditate when I was an adolescent, and expected to remain content with nontheistic spirituality for the rest of my life.  When I was thirty, life took a powerful and unexpected turn. I met a Dominican espiritista, Ramón Jiménez, whose relationship with the spirit world made him a respected source of guidance and healing in his community.  Ramón became my instructor and guide, leading me into a  brief, life-transforming moment of participation in Divine universal consciousness,  which became the point of reference for my spiritual journey.  I studied texts and found teachers in a wide variety of practical spiritual traditions, ranging from mainstream to esoteric ideas in Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Wica, traditional shamanism, and Native American spiritual practice.  I came to recognize underlying commonalities embodied in the beliefs and practices of many cultures.  I did not feel any need to participate in formal religion.  Indeed, I was persuaded by Sufi lore that any form created by human beings as a vessel for experience of the Divine could only work for a particular person at a particular time in a particular place in particular circumstances.  This made any religious form by its nature ineffective for cultivating spirituality.  As I came to understand the cultivation of spirituality, I learned that I had a dual responsibility as a seeker: In addition to my responsibility for persisting on the Path of self-development, I was responsible for facilitating and supporting the development of others around me.  I could not advance without being responsible for the advancement of others.

As Jodie and I began to form a family, we agreed to raise our children as Jews, and began attending services, first with a Reconstructionist havurah, then at Ohabei Shalom, finally finding our home at Temple Sinai.  To my surprise, I did not, as I always had in Christian services, struggle in intense, silent disagreement with the words and meanings of the service.  I could hold my experience of the Divine in the language of the service.  I was moved by the collective experience of familiar ritual prayer.   I became fascinated with the idea of a covenant people having a special relationship with God.  In some ways, it resonated with my understanding of spiritual responsibility.  God’s purpose with the covenant is to redeem all the nations of the world through the Jews, whom God has chosen for this purpose.  In the parasha Lech Lecha, Genesis 12:3, Adonai says to Abram, “...all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.”  Here was the responsibility to support the spiritual development of people around me, yet a collective as well as individual responsibility.  It was different from my responsibility as an individual seeker, which is shaped by my own spiritual development.  The Jewish people do not necessarily have to be unified in their spiritual development in order to affect human history.  Their collective history affords a mirror and lens for the other nations of the world to examine themselves.

As years passed, the Jewish community and Jewish worship and study came to feel more and more like home.  I found that I did not have to choose between spiritual development and religious practice.   I learned about the care with which Jews have sustained their fidelity to ancient truths while adapting religious practice to their current times and situations.  The age of the forms in the liturgy did not render them useless for spiritual practice.  I was surprised at the intensity of my emotion as I sensed the presence of generations before us, going back to our encounter with God at Sinai,  joining with the synagogue congregation in our most sacred prayers.  The more Torah and Tanach I read, the more powerful for me became the metaphor of Divine breath.  Breath is an organizing idea and practice in many traditions.  As I followed the narrative of the people Israel, I was struck by the grand repetition of connection with God followed by alienation from God, followed by redemption and reunion with God, followed by alienation, followed by redemption, etc.  Estrangement was the metaphorical exhalation, redemption the inhalation.  Neither inhalation nor exhalation is ultimately “better;” both are essential to breathing.  It was easy to integrate this with one of the core truths of many traditions, which I first encountered in Meher Baba’s Discourses and was later to find in the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov: The One gazes into Nothing and imagines Creation.  The most sentient of the beings in Creation (on this planet, human beings) yearn to find, know, and reunite with the One.  This process of yearning and seeking is in fact the mechanism of Divine self-awareness.  God knows God’s self through the yearning and seeking of God’s creatures.  For the process to operate, human beings must be capable of turning away from, ignoring, and not knowing of God (what some religions construct as “sin”).  Human ignorance of God is as critical to Divine self-awareness as human realization of God; exhalation is as necessary for breath as is inhalation.  I found the metaphor of breath to fit with what I had learned about travel on the spiritual path, with its progress and reversal, connection and disconnection, moments of ecstasy and of despair.

Studying Bible and Rabbinics in Me’ah has helped me to learn how it was that a people and their religion survived in a region of the world where a succession of wars and empires destroyed the identities of scores of their contemporary peoples.  To be a Jew is to remember, and to remember is to hold all the voices from our past.  Contemporary biblical scholarship reveals that Torah is a skillful collection of many different texts, written by many different groups, whose competing interests were embodied in competing truths in their sacred texts.  Those who compiled the final version of Torah lovingly and carefully incorporated all these voices, with all their mutual contradictions, into  a single text.  The Rabbis extended and expanded the value of multiple-voiced discourse, with teaching stories such as found in Berachot in Gemara about Gamaliel and Joshua, and in Baba Metsia in Gemara about Yochanan and Reish Lakish. 

To be a Jew is to remember, and to remember is to hold as many voices as possible from our collective past.  Jodie and I have been sustained by the ritual practices of Jewish grieving, with its profound emphasis on remembering.  We are sustained by our Jewish community supporting us as we remember our beloved Jacob in all the complexity of his brief, beautiful, and painful life.

Becoming a Jew has helped me to hold two very different ideas of my spiritual responsibilities, ideas shaped before I became a Jew.  Being a Jew makes it easier to hold  the ideas and the intrinsic tension between them - On the one hand, to accept the world as it is, as God’s creation, and, on the other, to take responsibility for transforming and redeeming the world,  tikkun olam.  The first, the idea of positive and negative, good and evil, darkness and light as interdependent and inseparable constituents of the manifest universe, an idea most clearly developed in Taoism, is embodied in the metaphor of the Divine breath that animates the narrative of Tanach.  The second is the idea that the world is somehow perfectible, that humanity has the capacity for universal spiritual cultivation that will bring forth the light of Divine intention in the manifest universe.  There is an essential tension between these perspectives.  Logically, they are contradictory.  Yet, before I began to become a Jew, I held both ideas: On one hand,  the nature of the universe embodies both good and evil - Divinity comprises both and is beyond them both.  On the other hand, it is possible and imaginable that the most sentient beings on a planet could evolve spiritually to bring about an age of redemptive unification with the Divine.  It is in the words of the Aleinu, Vehaya Adonai lemelech al kol haarets; bayom hahu yiheyeh Adonai echad ushemo echad, that I find assurance that I will as a Jew continue my life’s spiritual journey in a religious community.

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