Chok and Mishpat - Is Religion of the Heart or Head June 18, 2010

Chok and Mishpat: Is Religion of the Heart or Head?

June 18^th, 2010

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

Richmond, Virginia

 

Today is Ruby and my anniversary. We met in Camp Ramah forty years ago this summer. Despite whatever she tells me from her side of the equation, I "knew" – typed in quotations, immediately that she was very special, different from the others girls I had met. While I couldn't say that I said to myself "she is the girl I'm going to marry," I clearly acted like that until we did get married.

 

I open with these biographical remarks, typing the word "knew" in quotations marks because it is the most obvious way to exemplify that the word "knew" doesn't apply to the head but to the heart. But that is poetry because we know that the heart is a muscle and does not process emotions. The head does. But by saying "heart" instead of "head" we are really saying something else: There is some kind of unconscious, subconscious, unvocalized, non-rational, non-analytic process/formula that occurs. This stands in contradistinction to a rational, analytical, and conscious process where we analyze pros and cons, good and bad, bottom line, likes and dislikes. That didn't happen when I met Ruby. My heart – or was it my head – went thump, thump. My vision tunneled to exclude all others. Still does.

 

Let me transition.

What is the main word, the leitmotif of Judaism? If I asked you, as I do my Basic Judaism class every year, "Give me Judaism in one word" and you can't say God or Torah, what word would you offer?                                              My answer is: Love.

 

As liturgy is the main vehicle to understand core Jewish values and thoughts, we see that even when the prayers don't use that word, that is what it is referring to. God's creating the world, God's sustaining the world, God's choosing Abraham and his descendants – us – to be His messengers, God's revelation of Himself through the giving of Torah, the mitzvot of Torah, are all acts of God loving us, loving humanity, loving the earth. The answer to the question: "Why did God do any of this?" is: "God loves us." I don't why God did any of this. The Torah doesn't say "why." The Rabbis formulate their answers in the Midrash and "put them in God's mouth," but they are human answers and not the Divine.

 

If God foresaw what we would do to His earth, if He knew what we would do to the Gulf, to the air and to the land, and He still made it and gave to us?!? I have many more questions and still no answer from God. I can only make up what I hope that He was thinking.

 

If God foresaw what we would do to each other, the inhumanity of one to another throughout human history, the disparity of the rich and the poor, the degradation of slavery and genocide which is still going on, and He still created us?!? My questions multiply and my answers about God are still non-existent.

The only answer that I can posit is that God's love like our love is unexplainable in rational terms. The Rabbis imagine that when God told the angels that He was going to create the earth and humans they argued with Him not to do it. In the Midrash God did not enter into logical debate about creating the world and humanity. If He did, we would have lost!! It is only because God's love triumphs over any other value, an unfathomable love, an inconceivable, inscrutable, and undecipherable love by which we exist and so, too, the cosmos. There is no explanation that we can formulate other than love.

 

In a sense, when we look at a baby, when we look at the sky, when we look at each other, the operative condition is love. You can't teach it. You can't explain it. You can't rationalize it. You live it. It just is.

 

Once I posit as the foundation of my belief that there is a God, then there is the question: How do we relate to God? The obvious answer is: Love. And that is exactly what we say when we get to the S'hma: "V'ahavta…" "And you shall love…" We are not just singing along, we are not just mumbling a bunch of incoherent syllables. We are saying to God: I/we love You. And we do it every day, several times a day, when we get up in the morning and when we go to bed at night. Again, it is unexplainable emotion to see Menachem put Ariel, Moshe and Raya to sleep singing S'hma and V'ahavta, just as we sang him, Yonina and Tzeira. It is an emotion beyond words to believe that there are metaphoric divine arms that embrace us, as we use our human arms to embrace God. While I need words to express this to you and talk about God, about our existence, about emotions, the feelings, the object of my thoughts is beyond words. I can't teach this. I can't preach this. I can't explain it. It just is.

 

Tomorrow's Torah portion is known as Hukkat. That word refers to a law that is unexplainable. If God did not put it in the Torah, we would never have dreamed it up. The proper noun – Hok – is a law that does not yield its secret to any analysis. There is no good reason for it. There are several Hukkim in the Torah. In their inscrutability Hukkat stands in contradistinction to the only other word used in the Torah as the title of a sedra in this genre, namely Mishpatim, which refers to laws that have obvious explanation and rationale. In these we clearly see their utilitarian purpose and if God hadn't given them to us in the Torah, we could have and would have made them up ourselves. These two words stand in juxtaposition: Hok u'Mishpat.

 

Just like in my love of Ruby, I could, can and did come up with all the reasons I love her. With age the list only gets longer. I can explain and rationalize all those answer. This is akin to Mishpatim. But the "Why" the mystery of love is unanswerable and shouldn't be explained, that is akin Hok. This paradigm of explaining the love between us is the paradigm for explaining the love between God and us and us and God. I feel secure, comforted, uplifted in each love. No words can explain it. And there are no words to explain the love I give. I hope that Ruby and God feel as good as I do. May we all have unending and indescribable love in our lives. That which we receive and that which we give. Between each other. And with God.

 

Shabbat Shalom.