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I learned this after he died, twenty four years ago. And in my own personal mythology, that alertness is manifested in my “spirituality.”

And so here I sit in a heated car, on a hill just beneath his grave, on a fairly normal, heartlessly gray late afternoon in Milwaukee. I have come here to accuse him, pre-Shabbos, of the sin of anger and dying young, two things I sometimes fear will take control of me as they took control of him. That’s why, as a strategy for survival, I became a rabbi.

I’m just being honest.

Yes: those fears propelled me, practically against my will, into the rabbinate, after his anger and heart shot him from life on a heartlessly gray day in Milwaukee twenty four years ago. That’s 2 x 12 Tribes years ago for you crazy mystics out there.

And so I stand with freezing feet in the snow, heart broken in accusation. I try to heal it by singing him the Kabbalat Shabbat, a rest and comfort against loss. I see his name, etched in stone:

Monas S. Bachman Father, Brother, Son

I sing to him of Shabbat and my favorite Psalms. It closes the loop from the only Hebrew he taught me—well, not quite Hebrew but the vague shapes of the letters I watched him trace for me when I huddled up against him and a borrowed tallis in synagogue on the rare occasions that he took me with his own father to say Kaddish for the dead ancestors I never knew.

“Thank you father for teaching me that there is a form to our language. A linguistic structure I filled in at the Universities I attended in Madison and Jerusalem. It was in those cities that the replacement fathers were found After you collapsed on your bedroom floor.”

In the Mishnah these new fathers, Avot, are rabbis, and those were the fathers (and one mother) I sought and found over the course of the last twenty-four years.

And slowly, one by one, they all died too.

First there was George Mosse. And then Irv Saposnik. And then Arthur Hertzberg. And now Lisa Goldberg.

Each a teacher. Each a conveyer of wisdom. Each an exemplar of some aspect of the kind of life I wanted for myself, for Rachel, for the kids.

This is the first time that I stood above my father’s grave, with the stark reality of my own mortality staring me in the face. No image on the grave, no Russian icons looking back in my direction. Just a name—BACHMAN—an accusation in its own right saying, “Sentenced to death, eventually.” I say, “You’re gone, Dad. George is gone. Irv is gone. Arthur’s gone. Lisa’s gone. It’s all down to me. It finally happened. It had to, eventually.”

That’s right.

We will all die one day.

And the measure of each of us is how honest we are, how good we are, how generous we are, in the every moment of the every step we take.

And in this prayer, in the cold, with hot tears of anger and sadness overwhelming me in the Milwaukee snow and the background hum of East-West commuters moving down the freeway that abuts the cemetery, I understand another level of my own anger:

That we live and die is so obvious as to dictate, for those who can grasp it, why certain pretensions of power and authority are ultimately absurd. So that’s why you want to change the world! It’s absurd NOT to!

When you’re younger, you’re supposed to buck against the bridle of authority. That’s part of the natural growth process. But what happens to those who keep staring death in the face, whose lives are made up of visiting the sick, of burying the dead, of listening to questions about God and the meaning of life? Are we supposed to put on suits and act the part of Men Who Are Together?

Or do we stare into the grave and discover a greater freedom from it all?

What happens when your teachers die and you’re left standing at the grave, singing songs?

Who teaches me what to do next? Who says, “Keep on fighting, son?”

Is there a book for this?

A leadership training seminar I can take?

Psalm 92, A Song for Shabbat: It is good to give thanks to the Eternal. To sing praises to Your Name Most High. To speak of Your Lovingkindness in the morning. And Your faithfulness at night.

If I had a harp or a lute I’d go on; but I’m freezing my ass off, so I head back to the car.

To my wife and kids and Shabbat.

[Note: This post originally appeared on Rabbi Andy Bachman's blog Brooklyn Jews.]

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I have thought of this alot in the weeks leading up to the “apostasy” of the Golden Calf, the challenges this harsh object lesson poses to the reader. Listening to Bar and Bat Mitzvah students wrestle aloud with this text, one develops a certain kind of sympathy for their youthful impatience. They want, as teenagers are genetically disposed, what they want NOW. Patience, afterall, is a virtue, which, like most virtues, are developed by, not inherent to, individuals.

I don’t think I’m telling you something you don’t already know.

Patience takes practice, tolerance, generosity of spirit.

Interestingly, when Moses learns God’s name up on the Mountain, he learns that God’s name has many attributes: Eternal, Eternal, God of Compassion and Gracious, Slow to Anger, Abounding in Kindness and Faithfulness, Extending Kindness to the thousandth generation, Forgiving Iniquity, Transgression and Sins.

Big name.

“Slow to Anger” is literally translatable as Long Nosed (Jewish, obviously) meaning Patient. A short, fiery nose in the Biblical poetry is a sign of impatience. So, beneath the humor there is the idea that patience is a key to understanding the apostasy of the people’s desire to make a God they could see.

How do we know? When do we find this information?

After the sin of the Golden Calf – when Moses comes down from his second trip up the Mountain after having destroyed the first set of tablets in a fit of anger. He goes to the second set and is so enamored of the experience of speaking to God face to face that he himself desires to “see” God. Here is the famous passage, at the end of Exodus 33 where God says, “You cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live.”

Even Moses expresses that very human desire to “see” the Divine.

And he’s answered in Exodus 34 with a “vision” that is a name, a complex name, with many diverse attributes, one of which is long-nosed patience.

Final thought: a person gives honor to a place. Translating “honor” literally, one may offer “a person gives ‘weight’ to a place.”

Gives weight.

What’s heavier than a statue of gold?

The virtue of patience.

Moses gets it himself, finally, and his reward, at the end of Exodus 34, is that God renews the Covenant.

And from then on, after Moses goes to speak with God, he veils himself before the people, modifying and mediating the direct contact with the Divine. With the veil, we learn that more can be seen when less is seen. That the idol is the need for the immediate, the instant gratification.

And that patience wins in the end.

[Note: This post originally appeared on Rabbi Andy Bachman's blog Brooklyn Jews.]

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Members of my community are asking about the Iraq War and whether or not our congregation should be encouraging discussion on what is, arguably, the most important moral issue of our day.

It turns out the Reform Movement, of which we are a part, is asking us to do just that.

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has posted the most recent Resolution on the War in Iraq and the Social Action Commission of the Union for Reform Judaism asks Congregations to read them, discuss them, and consider supporting them.

In essence, the latest resolution opposes the President’s “troop surge” and calls upon the President to announce a real timeline for withdrawal.

I encourage you to read the resolution and weigh in.

Though a undoubtedly a terribly difficult dilemma, it does not mean we shouldn’t talk about and seek, if possible, to reach a consensus on what we think as a community about this war.

[Note: This post originally appeared on Rabbi Andy Bachman's blog Brooklyn Jews.]

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Dear Andy,

Fascism wasn’t godlessness at all—simply people worshipping a different god. Fascism isn’t monotheism, of course, but obedience to a natural order, and expressed through allegiance to the Führer, the One True Race, or the Party. Not so different from the One True God cult of Deuteronomy-era Israel. It’s the exclusivity and one-pointedness of primitive monotheism and totalitarianism (as well as that of Pharaoh-worship) that make these belief systems so ripe for exploitation by warlords, like those in power again today.

That’s why I can’t help but feel that true godlessness—even atheism—is a more accurate and ethical way of living than belief. Even if there is a God, we are utterly incapable of conceiving of him. Merely to try is to ask for a delusion. When I’m in my most tribally identified and belief-stricken state of Jewishness (as sometimes happens at a great circumcision or whatever), I find I suffer from an air of superiority and exclusivity. And I don’t like that.

Abstract monotheism is great for its ability to get us off our concretized notions of God and into caring for one another, instead. We smash idols—and this includes mental ones—in order to focus more on action. Doing God, if you will.

So, when I’m in what I consider to be my highest state of consciousness and ethical readiness, God isn’t an issue. The focus is outside myself, beyond whether what I’m doing is an official mitzvah, past any association with Jewishness, and towards a more universal acknowledgment of the good in all things.

When I’m stuck, sure, I like to have a point of focus, and I like to believe there’s something aware of me. But when I’m at my healthiest, boundary states like this don’t even exist. There’s no perspective from which some God would watch or be worshipped.

It was healthy for us, the Jews, to move from child sacrifice to ritual blood sacrifice and then finally to prayer. Are we ready to take the next step? What if we spent three hours of every Saturday morning building homes for the sick instead of sitting in our air-conditioned synagogues? Wouldn’t that be a more ethical use of the time and energy?

What I’m saying is that at either end of the spectrum—from my most intensely secular-humanist endeavors to my most spiritual state, I find I don’t really think so much about God.

—Douglas

From: Andy Bachman To: Douglas Rushloff Subject: God is Present at the Root of Our Highest Ideals

Dear Douglas,

Fascism is not “obedience to a natural order.” It is obedience to a materially constructed order that uses the perception of natural order to declare who is in and who is out. Theories of fascism tend toward the uses of myths and cults, reconstructed, to make a new order. My teacher George Mosse used to love pointing that out.

Having said that, Judaism, or religion, is not God-centered fascism, though it is fashionable among today’s (and yesterday’s) skeptics to declare it so.

Let’s cut to the chase.

I believe in God. Not as a punisher (though it helps sometimes to imagine that, especially when evil abounds in this world), nor even as a rewarder (I’m a nice guy and that don’t pay the bills). I agree that certain perceptions our ancestors had of God are reflections of an ancient culture mediating its perception of the Divine through a contemporary lens. Maimonides really laid it on the line, didn’t he? In rooting the encounter of God in the intellect, he broke new ground in our understanding of who or what God is.

But in the day to day, I rely upon the Rabbis in Pirkei Avot and phrases like the one I mentioned: “Where two or more sit and study words of Torah, the Divine Presence dwells.” Do I believe that God is a happy Grandpappy, kvelling that his children are studying Torah? No. But is there more than the readily discernible in our strivings after full human potential, rooted in ethics—in the innate desire for justice, love, and peace?

God is present as the root of our highest ideals. That doesn’t mean God is only ideals, because I also believe that our human capacity for empathy, for an ability to understand one another through the subtle language of emotion, is also a mark of God’s presence in the world.

Go back to the Garden of Eden. In the story, God gives Adam and Eve the ability to know Good and Evil; they just can’t live forever. It’s amazing to think that so early in the Torah, our tradition articulated an idea that we’ve yet to really improve upon.

Humans will never achieve immortality; our great challenge, rather, is to navigate between our impulses to do Good and Evil. That's what Hillel meant when he said, “What is hateful to you, don’t do to your neighbor; all the rest is commentary."

So let’s learn, because where two or more sit and study words of Torah….

It may seem circular, but it works for me.

Andy

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