Last night in class

I am a Jewish educator, which makes me a religious educator, a job description which has some baggage that I would like to address. In many Western nations, religion has pushed itself into a dichotomistic relationship with society. There has become a faith/no faith binary which has tarnished the beautiful role religion can have in society.
On an individual basis, I have decided that I need to sit on the fence when it comes to deciding about God. I am agnostic because I see no clear benefit in being a theist or it’s opposite. Even if I declared a belief in God, it would not be a matter of faith. Some would say that you can only believe in God as a function of faith. I am not so sure.
When Abraham was said to have heard God’s call, “Lech Lecha, go forth to the land I will show you,” he didn’t have faith in his encounter. He heard God’s command and went forth. And, yes, I am aware of the problem of using this story to illustrate my point.
I am not such an empiricist as to accept that only those things we can actually experience through our senses exist. If this were the case, Australia would be lost to me and my cell phone would work by magic instead of the radio frequencies that carry our voices over great distances. At the same time, if I thought I heard God commanding me to go to a land that he will show me, I would go for a “check up from the neck up,” as Kinky Friedman likes to call a visit to the psychologist.

In class last night, I explained why I have a problem with William Pinar’s book, Race, Religion, and a Curriculum of Reparation: Teacher Education for a Multicultural Society. I saw Pinar speak about his underlying premise at the American Educational Research Association’s national conference in Chicago and raised my objection. Pinar starts his argument with the story of Noah after the episode of the ark when he is lying in bed drunk and is visited by his son Ham.
If he were just giving his interpretation of the story, I would have no problem. I love midrash, and I appreciated the insight Pinar gave as a possible explanation for why Noah’s sons received such a terrible curse from their father. My problem with Pinar is not his midrashic abilities. My problem is that Pinar tied his interpretation into a defining logic behind the sexual mores and racial iniquities of our time with a very cursory understanding of what religion has done with these texts.
I won’t speak for all religions, not even for my own. Religion is not so monolithic that it can’t be spoken for in one voice. Speaking from within my tradition, I can say that Noah is in many ways an anti-hero in the best literary criticism understanding of a text. The rabbis of the Talmud were not literary critics, but they asked the question, “Why does Torah provide us with this story?”
If I am William Pinar or anyone who sees religion as monolithic and even threatening, my answer is simple. Religions see this as holy text. In other words, this is God’s word. Some in Judaism believe this, other’s say the text is divinely inspired. Some just have reverence for the text for its social, historical, cultural and moral impact on society. My Jewish tradition is clearly not monolithic.
The rabbi’s surely believed that the text was given by God to Moses. In Pirkei Avot, the Sayings of the Fathers, we get the direct line of Torah.

Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; and the prophets handed it down to the men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be deliberate in judgment, raise up many disciples, and make a fence around the Torah. Shimon the Righteous was one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly. He used to say: On three things the world is sustained: on the Torah, on the (Temple) service, and on deeds of loving kindness. (Pirkei Avot 1:1-2)

This text does not say “Moses received the Torah from God.” I don’t know how deliberate that was, but it does tell us how the tradition was passed from generation to generation, or at least how we think it was passed. Pinar does not address this. He reads the text and interprets it. Fine. Though some people, me included, would have a problem with an interpretation that ignores the greater context of the period from which the text was written. But this is not the main problem, and we could rejoice in the fact that Pinar is not a literalist like many who interpret these texts.
My problem with Pinar is that he ignores the fact that some of these stories are not taken at face value as he presents them. Noah, according to the rabbis, is not a hero. The rabbis ask why Noah wasn’t willing to stand up to God when he threatened to destroy all of humanity, while Abraham was willing to challenge God when all He wanted was to destroy Sodom and Gemorah. The rabbis address the literal meaning of the description of Noah, “a righteous man in his time,” and ask what it means to be righteous relative to a certain epoch of history. In short, the rabbis don’t like Noah.
Given this understanding of Noah, how can Pinar say that the sexual mores and racial iniquities of our time are rooted in this anti-hero. Isn’t it clear that the intention of an anti-hero is to be a model of what not to do? If it is, then isn’t tying issues of sex and race to our understanding of this biblical story really an indictment of us, as if to say that we don’t get it, we mistakenly modeled our behavior after a character whose role it is in the Bible to deter us from following his ways.

I can understand why people have a problem with faith. We live in an epoch of scientific understandings. Sometimes we take science so far that we cannot accept any explanation of phenomenon which is not rooted in scientific methodology, quantitative measures and rational understandings. I don’t think we need to be so rigid. In his day, Yochanan ben Zakai, the first leader of the Sanhedrin in Yavne, did the opposite with religion. He said that if you are planting a sapling and they tell you the messiah has arrived, finish planting and then go out and greet the messiah. In other words, the issues of this world are more important than the issues of heaven.

For me, the question is not whether or not to keep religion. It is about what we do with it. As an agnostic person who is committed to social justice and not fully content with humanism, and totally fearful of relativism, I struggle with religion. It has been used to justify so much bad in the world, and it has the potential to create a lot of good. The same can be said for science. The scientific age ushered in cures for disease and many other wonders. It also included eugenics and the creation of weapons of mass destruction.
As my father has taught me, you can never sit back and kick up your feet, and on this issue, I think we will never have the luxury of feeling completely comfortable with where we stand. With this as the case, I think Yochanan ben Zakai gives us a pretty good model with his planting trees, and I think I’m going to follow his lead.