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Jewish Public Forum Seminar:
“What Is Religion For?”
November 19, 2001
“What Is Religion For?”
Jewish
Public Forum Seminar
November
19, 2001
FRAMING THE
SEMINAR
Religious leaders and others who function as the spiritual and
ethical leaders in our society face real challenges – both in the immediate and the
long term. Even before September 11, we were
in a significant transitional period in religious life in America. We were already facing real change in the ways in
which Americans were making meaning in their lives – how they were finding a sense of
belonging, a sense of connections to institutions and purposes beyond themselves, and how
they were addressing the spiritual and ethical concerns in their lives.
After
all, unfettered access to information, the decline of traditional forms of authority and
the willingness to build identities from a multiplicity of traditions has allowed
individuals to take control of their spiritual lives as never before. The very boundaries between work and family,
private and public, sacred and secular are being redefined.
At the same time new challenges – from the implications of advances in
bio-technology and neuroscience to global instabilities and the gulf between the wealthy
and the poor – demand new types of response from religious communities and leaders.
The
crisis triggered by the events of September 11, and religion’s central role in it,
only further accentuates these trends and the need to look closely at religion’s
future, and how it does or could function to help address the important human challenges
of the next period of time.
Obviously,
a single meeting can only begin to address some of the pressing questions. We have designed the framing questions below to
move beyond the common polarized manner in which religion has been discussed after
September 11, and to address issues that have been left out of the public debate.
One
common polarization in public debate is between secularists who argue that religion is at
the root of most of history’s violence and religious thinkers who argue that the life
of the spirit has been ignored in the hubris about human economic and technological
progress. A related polarization is between
fundamentalist thinking on the one hand, and relativism on the other.
We
hope to move beyond these polarizations, casting the questions differently. At the same time we hope to stay focused on the
practical dimensions of these questions and how they play out in the lives and work of the
participants in the room. The following two
sets of questions will therefore frame and animate the meeting:
1) What are
the ethical, social, spiritual and political challenges of this moment? What role can religious traditions, communities,
institutions or leaders play in addressing them? The power of religion and religious impulses
is evident in the actions of the terrorists and in their mass support, as well as in the
outpouring of religious responses to the crisis – both within and outside of
traditional religious contexts. This forces
us to reexamine how we define the boundaries between the religious and the secular. Might
religious wisdom, insights and awareness provoke new ways of addressing important societal
concerns?
2) Fundamentalism has received a great deal of
attention since September 11. But as we are
horrified by, and fight against, fundamentalism in others, we need simultaneously to
attend to the fundamentalisms inherent in our own communities and ideologies. Are extremism and fundamentalism innate
possibilities in all religions? What factors
aid and hinder the development of fundamentalist forms of religion (and here we mean both
traditional and secular religions such as nationalism or capitalism)? How do we develop a commitment to
pluralism, avoiding fundamentalism on the one hand, and moral relativism on the other? What shifts, in the way our institutions are set
up, in our leadership, in the questions we ask, would be necessary to do this?
“What Is Religion For?”
Philosophy and
Goals of Jewish Public Forum seminars
All Jewish Public Forum meetings
aim to move beyond the usual framings of important issues in order to generate new ideas. Our meetings are most often about developing
better questions rather than about finding answers or policy conclusions. We do this by mixing people from a broad range of
communities, professions and disciplines. It
is our conviction that new perspectives most often come from interdisciplinary
conversation, which implicitly forces people to stretch beyond the ordinary ways they
understand their work.
We also utilize a range of methods
for open, yet structured conversation to transcend the limitations of discussions that
take place in other settings. Open
conversation helps to overcome the sometimes overly formal nature of presentations-based
meetings, while the way we structure the conversation allows the meeting to stay focused
enough to avoid generalities. Our meetings
are designed to engage and to stretch participants both personally and analytically. And they are based on the underlying claim that we
do not make sufficient space in our lives for the kinds of longer-term and broader
conversations that need to take place if we are to address the human, ethical, spiritual
questions of the next period in American life. Such
conversations are often too product oriented (as in business or politics) or too driven by
theoretical or disciplinary concerns (as in academia).
Thus we aim on November 19 to begin
an important conversation, which we hope will continue both at CLAL and among participants
who meet in this setting.
We will have succeeded if
participants: a) generate for themselves better questions with which to analyze the issues
under discussion; and, b) come away with new insights about the way their institutions and
the networks to which they are connected can address those questions.
The insights generated at this
meeting will be disseminated by CLAL in several ways: they will feed into upcoming Jewish
Public Forum seminars on related topics; they will be discussed at broader meetings we
will be holding with rabbis and other religious leaders; and, they will be incorporated
into CLAL’s publications which reach a broad audience of philanthropists, community
leaders, religious leaders, and opinion makers in academia, politics and beyond.
Jewish
Public Forum Seminar
November
19, 2001
“What Is Religion For?”
Text excerpts to
begin the conversation
The
texts that we have included are meant to get you thinking in advance of the meeting.
I.
Reading the world in new ways:
There are three fundamentally distinct ways to think about the future. The easiest
is extrapolation—to conceive of a future that is an extension of the present and
recent past. The second is to imagine what might be, independent of what is, or as free of
influence from the present as one can become. The third is to cultivate awareness and
reflectiveness—to become open to what is arising in the world and in us and
continually ponder what matters most deeply to us.
The first is the easiest and by far the most common. It is also the most dangerous
in a time of deep change. If indeed there are many aspects of our present ways of living
that are not sustainable, such as the destruction of living systems upon which social
systems depend, then there are few things more certain about the future than that it will not arise as a mere extrapolation of the past.
The second way of thinking about the future is the ostensible aim of this
collection of essays. But I believe that it, too, holds hidden dangers. It is easy to
engage in “reactive imagination,” focusing on some facet of the present
situation that we dislike and imagining a world that is very different from this. However,
this “negative image” actually offers only a disguised version of the present.
It can appear imaginative when in fact it is not. It can be an unintended projection of
ego, rather than a true expression of the course of nature.
“All great things are created for their own sake,” wrote Robert Frost. In
these simple words, Frost expressed the timeless sensibility of the artist, who looks
deeply within and without, who takes responsibility for her or his creation while
simultaneously experiencing an overwhelming sense of humility as a mere agent for what is
seeking to emerge. This is the fundamental distinction between machine-age planning and
the creative process. The former seeks to manifest human intentions. The latter seeks to
align human intentions and actions with the course of nature.
Paradoxically, in this aligning lies real freedom and choice. “The free man
[mensch] is the one who wills without arbitrary self-will,” wrote Martin Buber.
“He must sacrifice his puny, unfree will that is controlled by things and instincts
for his grand will, which quits defined for destined being. Then . . . He listens to what
is emerging from himself, to the course of being in the world . . . in order to bring it
to reality as it desires.”
This third way of thinking about the future is also a way of thinking about the
present. In fact, the two are inseparable. We become agents of creating a future that is
seeking to emerge, by becoming more aware of the present. This third way requires deep
thinking about not only what exists today but also how it came to be this way. This third
way replaces blind trust in human ingenuity with trust in life. Imagination, rather than
becoming more limited, is actually freed and becomes the servant of awareness, which in
turn requires a life’s work to cultivate.
In this third way, human and nature become integrated spontaneously. We become
nature’s agent. There is no nature outside ourselves, nor ourselves outside of
nature. In fact, the very word nature, pointing
to something outside ourselves, becomes unnecessary, as it is for many indigenous people.
Several writers in this volume cite modern quantum physics as evidence of a deep
change in understanding the universe that holds promise for creating a more sane way of
living. We would do well to heed the admonishment of noted quantum theorist David Bohm:
“What folly to think that we can correct the fragmentation of the world via processes
that re-create that fragmentation.” This fragmentation starts when we see a world of
corporations, institutions, and systems outside of and separate from ourselves.
Ironically, only by recognizing that these are continually created by our daily acts of
living will we start to see that they are also expressions of our own choices.
None of this should be taken to imply that an isolated individual can reshape a
living human system or can rehabilitate our collective capacity to choose. But it does
imply a guiding principle: We produce what we do not intend because we enact systems that
we do not see. And, learning to see is a life’s work. Rudolf Steiner, echoing a
sentiment of Goethe’s, beautifully articulated the twofold nature of this work:
“In searching for your self, look for it in the world; in searching for the world,
look for it in your self.”
Peter Senge, “Three Ways of Thinking About The
Future,” Imagine What America Could be in the
21st Century, Marianne Williamson, ed., pp. 175-177
II.
A broadening notion of the religious?
The meaning of any specific activity in everyday life (say,
cooking dinner) is given by the broader sphere of relevance in which it occurs (e.g.,
being a parent). Without this broader
context, it will seem arbitrary, something that has no significance. But these spheres of relevance, in turn, have
meaning only in relation to some broader context, and these contexts to broader contexts
still. In other words, any set of activities
must be related to something larger than itself in order to have meaning: cooking to
parenting, parenting to having warm human relationships, warm relationships to a sense of
living in community, or whatever. The
solution to the problem of meaning, then, is to posit a hierarchical series of symbolic
frameworks that give meaning and integration to ever-widening segments of life. Within this logic, questions about “the
meaning of life” itself represent the most encompassing form of symbolic integration.
Robert Wuthnow, “Sacredness and Everyday Life,” Rediscovering The Sacred, (Eerdmans, 1992)
Religion is not a discrete category within human experience; it is rather a quality
that pervades all of experience. Accustomed
as we are to distinguishing between “the sacred” and “the profane,” we
fail to remember that such a dividing up of reality is itself a religious idea. It is often an awkward idea, rather like someone
trying to carry himself over a stream in his own arms-a confusion of part and whole, form
and function. There are no inherently
religious objects, thoughts, or events; in contemporary culture so much of our world has
been “contaminated” with the mundane we hardly recognize a quality of the sacred. This has been called the process of secularization
or of modernization, but it may be something else, it may be a nearly inevitable
consequence of a dualistic paradigm, a religious point of view that divides reality into
two. Indeed, the words mundane-of the world, profane—outside the temple, and secular—of the temporal, indicate that
whatever is “before the temple” is made of space and time (mundane and secular)
and whatever is not of the world and temporality is that which is contained within the
category of the sacred. However, that
arrangement of reality means not only that material
events and knowledge are devalued, but that events and knowledge altogether are devalued and deprived of
the quality of the sacred.
Lynda Sexson,
“Boxes,” Ordinarily Sacred, p. 7
III.
Religion as provocateur?
Just as social
critics are often social thinkers (often historians, political scientists, and economists)
who become public thinkers, and culture critics are often cultural thinkers (often
scholars of literature or art) who become public thinkers, religious critics are often
religious thinkers (often religious studies scholars or theologians) who become public
thinkers. It is likely, however, that the best public intellectuals, particularly the best
religious critics, rise not from these expected disciplines but from other disciplines or
from no academic discipline at all.
I do not argue that
America has no religious critics but that the ranks of the religious critics are thinned
from two sides. From the religious side, openly religious thinkers tend not to function
either as intellectuals or as public thinkers. Not only are fundamentalist, charismatic,
and new age religious thinkers drifting away from intellectual worlds but so are their
counterparts in mainline denominations. That is, while religious thinkers may be
thoughtful, many ignore dominant intellectual institutions in America, like universities,
university presses, and journals, as well as their fashions, such as their
poststructuralist/ postmodernist attacks on theory. Nor do religious thinkers in America
tend to function as public thinkers. That is, religious thinkers even in academic worlds
seldom attempt to establish the public roots and branches of their thought. If American
religious thinkers—or any American thinkers, for that matter—have a theory of
America, it is usually only implicit.
From the other side,
duplicating this self-imposed truncation, the few surviving public intellectuals tend not
to think religiously. Of course, many public intellectuals reject religious thought
because, as Garry Wills and Steven L. Carter have noted, they are suspicious of
conservative religious attitudes (just as they are suspicious of popular patriotic
attitudes). Those suspicions are often legitimate, and those suspicious intellectuals are
often important critics of religious critics. But public intellectuals seldom criticize
their own suspicions. Further, they make them normative and impose them on all religious
theory, refusing to take seriously even the critical definitions of religion generated by
their colleagues in the university. “The prevailing orthodoxy among intellectuals in
the West,” says Bzrezinski, “is that religion is a waning, irrational, and
dysfunctional aberration.”
William Dean,
“Introduction,” The Religious Critic in
American Culture, p. xv-xvi
Jewish
Public Forum Seminar
November
19, 2001
“What Is Religion For?”
Pre-Seminar
Question
Please write a paragraph or two in
answer to the following question:
We have all been personally
affected by the events of September 11, in our work and in our lives more generally, and
have great personal stakes in the questions that event raised. What issues have you been personally grappling
with – either in response to the question “What is religion for?” or more
generally? Please try to frame this as a
question or challenge for discussion by this group or for groups like this one?
Please e-mail your response to Robert
Rabinowitz (rrabinowitz@clal.org) by November 14th
so as to provide sufficient time to circulate answers among participants prior to the
meeting:
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