CLAL Special Features

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Jewish Public Forum Seminar: “What Is Religion For?”
November 19, 2001 

Pre-Seminar Response to the Question:

“What Is Religion For?”

 

By Richard Lipton 

What is religion for? Religion is for helping with that most challenging of tasks, being a human being.  It is for helping us develop meaningful relationships on multiple levels: with ourselves, with our families and communities, with the broader world, with G-d. Using relationships as a framework the following questions come to mind: 

Self to self: What is my place in the world? What tradition of wisdom can I use to comprehend the incomprehensible? What do I believe (or what stories do I tell myself) about who I am, where I came from and what is expected of me? Are there ways to make my ordinary, sometimes incomprehensible life more meaningful? Can I ever feel that the world was made for me, that I was made in G-d’s image and simultaneously know and feel okay about being dust and ashes? I have known gratitude and joy but gratitude and sorrow elude me.  Can I find permanence in the impermanent cold? What will sustain me in my trials and in my joys?  

Self to Family and Immediate Community: What are the core values, beliefs, history, traditions and practices (rituals) that we share? How can we come together to create meaning, to make sacred time and sacred space? How do we retain our individual identities in the context of communities that share some but not all of the same values? How can we take the tradition of our faith(s) and own it, use it, transform it, imbue it with meanings that are sometimes highly personal and sometimes shared and sometimes, when we are very lucky, both at the same time? How can we be the grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren and friends that we would want to be? How can we define those aspirations in a changing and uncertain world? What do I tell my children about their safety, about the threats to their safety? How do I help my children become themselves while simultaneously giving the opportunity to benefit from what I know and believe? How can we build ethical, pluralistic communities that embrace diversity without fear? How do we define “them” and “us”? 

Self to Broader Community: Who is the “other” and how can I understand them? What if there are no “thems” in G-d’s eyes? What if it is just us and we are all G-d’s children following different paths to a common homeland? What does it mean to be bound together by the human experience? How can I understand and deal with someone (or a group) who hates me and wants to destroy me, sometimes for several reasons? ( I am an American; I am a Jew, etc.). How can we protect our families and ourselves when they need protecting without becoming xenophobic and closing ourselves of to the width and breadth of human experience? 

Self to G-d: What does G-d want from me as an individual, from my community and from my people (across the generations)? In what way are we created in G-d’s image? Do I pray for G-d or for myself? Why did G-d create the universe? “Can you answer? Yes, I can. What would be the answer then?” Should I pray using someone else’s words or my own? How can we reconcile the High Holiday story with free will and moral responsibility (even if the Book of Life is just a metaphor)? 

Community to Community: How do we create a world where differences are not threats and diversity is celebrated? How do we understand and prevent the harm done in the name of religion? What are the boundaries between faith and fanaticism?

 


    

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