The New Criterion

Jul 05, 2007 11:47 AM

The Meaning of Suffering: Part IV

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Roundtable Index: Introduction | Part I: Roth | Part II: Palazzi | Part III: Pearl | Part IV: Yellin | Part V: Guimond | Part VI: Glazov | Part VII: Evanier | Part VIII: Kimball | Part IX: Roth | Part X: Palazzi | Part XI: Pearl | Part XII: Yellin | Part XIII: Guimond | Part XIV: Glazov | Part XV: Evanier | Part XVI: Kimball (Conclusion) |

Rabbi Richard Yellin is a pulpit rabbi of 38 years who continues to serve a major 2,000 member congregation in Florida going on 9 years. Born in Philadelphia, and having served for 2 years in Korea as a Chaplain, 5 years in Washington, and 16 years in Boston, Rabbi Yellin became an Israeli citizen and served as Advisor to the mayors of both Netanya and Beer-Sheva for seven years. He served as the Jewish Chaplain of the Newton, Massachusetts Police Department, and presently is the Jewish Chaplain of the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office. Rabbi Yellin was the Chairman of the International Rabbinic Cabinet of Israel Bonds, of several major committees of the Synagogue Council of America and is the President of the Scholarship Fund for Ethiopian Jews in Israel. He has lectured in eight countries around the world, and his 125 articles have appeared in major newspapers. Rabbi Yellin has taken 2 groups for private meetings with Pope John Paul II, and he has met privately with the Pope on two other occasions. He has led 20 missions to Israel, and with his wife, Ora, each year leads a group of his own congregants to Israel. In addition to 7 married children and 15 grandchildren, he cares for his elderly mother in Florida, which is why he has returned from Israel.

Glazov:Well, in my own limited understanding of this world and of its creator, I have a slight hunch that God might have a bit of a higher understanding of the way His creation works than we do. If we knew God completely and understood everything about Him, then He wouldn’t be God and we wouldn’t have freedom. And we also wouldn’t be just human beings -- which we are. I am slightly nervous and uncomfortable, to say the least, with the suggestion that, as humans, we somehow make God into His image, rather than vice-versa. And I am not sure about the wisdom of making ourselves Gods, or equal to God, in the suggestion that His creation beocmes what we think of it, rather than recognizing that our understanding is limited, and less than a speck of dust, in the face of His infinite greatness. I also have a feeling that if an individual believes that God doesn’t love him, and doesn’t operate in his life, that this does not necessarily change the reality that God does both.

Rabbi Yellin, your turn my friend.

Yellin: The key word for me as a Jewish person on the question of suffering is "Charoset!" It is used at the Passover Seder as a sweet condiment of apples, nuts, wine and other like mixtures, to symbolize the bricks of clay used by the Hebrew slaves to build the store cities of an evil Pharaoh.

But the real message of the "Charoset" is the reversal of the Biblical command to "eat the paschal lamb with bitter herbs (Exodus 12:8)." The clear message is that religious practice must not cause any discomfort, and any ritualistic suffering; or, vicarious suffering must be sweetened. Even our children are educated to dip the bitter herbs into the Charoset to offset the sting.

All of Jewish ritual emphasizes this major emphatic trend of our philosophy of life. All our belief systems about things past or future, which are not related to present day experience, are all of secondary importance compared to the reality of today. Jewishness does not ask if we believe in God - it asks "Do we observe the Passover or the Shabbat or Kosher laws?" (Judaism is characterized by the "indeterminacy of belief and creed" as compared to the determinacy of present behavior and practice, which is primary.[Read the Rabbinic Mind by Max Kadushin]) Example - if the doctor prescribes a medicine that has any forbidden ingredients that cannot be used on Passover or any other day for that matter, the doctor’s prescription takes precedence. Reality always trumps belief.

On the holiday of Tabernacles (Sukkot-Booths), if it rains outside, the law of the Bible is countermanded by the Rabbinic law which eliminates staying in the Sukkah with the roof that must allow the stars to shine through. Hope transforms suffering.

The most misunderstood of all of Jewish philosophy is the concept of "The sufferings of Love - yissurim shel ahava." [What is written of Abraham? And I will bless thee, and make thy name great (Genesis 12: 2). Yet as soon as he set out, famine assailed him, and still he neither rebelled nor murmured against God. So too, if suffering afflicts you, neither cavil nor be resentful. R. Alexandri said: There is no man without suffering: happy is he whose sufferings come through his laboring in studying and practicing Torah --Midrash Rabbah 92:1] In other words all affliction and suffering must be seen as God’s love of us for finding creative solutions and hopeful patterns of response.

In my congregation we have more than 120 holocaust survivors, many of whom have written books and have lectured on their experiences. Every one of them has a horrible tale of suffering to tell, but each of them has rebuilt his or her life, remarried, produced second sets of children, or succeeded materially in a new world, a world where God created new opportunities for the survivors’ victories over the dead Hitler and his unrealized final solution.

When Jews raise their glasses offering toasts, the word used is "L’Chaim-to life" [even made into a song in Fiddler On The Roof]; but the full expression, found in the Talmud and the Prayerbook, is "L’Chaim v’Lo Lamavet-to life and not for death." The National Anthem of the Jewish People sings proudly with "Our HOPE [Hatikvah] has never been lost for the past thousands of years." Victor Frankl in his Logotherapy, and I paraphrase, as long as one retains his memories of his loved ones, and embraces hope, all is not lost, and suffering is transubstantiated into a humanity worthy of cosmic proportions.

The Jewish people pragmatically are still alive and to the degree that one is part of that community one retains the best possibility for transforming suffering into light, slavery into freedom, and exile into redemption. Even Holocaust Memorial Day has been thoroughly transformed in Israel and the Diaspora into "Holocaust and Resistance (Valor) Day."

Let me make this a political statement, for religion and politics are the mystique and politique which are simply different sides of the very same coin. Israel, the Jewish people for 3200 years, and the State for the past 59 years, have desired only one thing in deed and creed: peace for itself and its neighbors. The Messiah according to Maimonides, at a minimum, means that Israel will live in peace in a thoroughly hospitable environment where man-made imposed sufferings upon all peoples will be eradicated by the Charoset of pluralism, diversity training and Menschlichkeit, where the Menschlichkeit [human kindness] trumps religion and its extremes, or ritual and its obfuscations of reality.

There is a wonderful Hebrew expression which summarizes Jewish tradition and the issue of human suffering: "Gam Zo L’Tovah" - this too, we shall make the best of it. Alternative reading: This too, make something good out of it!

Glazov: Thank you Rabbi Yellin. Can you also give your view of some of the comments made by the other panelists so far?

Yellin: After having stated my overall weltanschauung - I must say that I want to become the student of Judea Pearl - He understands in his being and psyche what Judaism teaches. Here is the Sermon excerpt I delivered on the High Holidays to 2500 people following Daniel Pearl’s brutal murder. Judea Pearl, wrote in The Times, "Daniel Pearl was not a military hero or political leader, yet millions of people worldwide have identified with his life and legacy... Danny’s spirit has not been defeated. In the last days of his captivity, he remained proud of his heritage, a man who lived by truth and compassion. Our children will be inspired by Danny’s life, not his death."

Dr. Pearl understands the concept that the death of any human being can bring atonement for our own life. Our tradition teaches that the death of a child, of a teacher, of a parent, or in fact of any human being, can be atonement for our own lives - if we use the death as a way of self introspection that allows us to better the world in which we live and to reevaluate our role in such a world. In effect this is the meaning of Prayer. I hate to engage in polemics, but the English word prayer does not convey the Hebrew meaning of the word. Tefila translated erroneously as "prayer" actually comes from the word self introspection - like the word Tefillin - wrongly translated "phylacteries" - which means physical reminders on the mind and the emotions which direct one to right behavior as revealed in God’s felt interactions with the whole Jewish people. "To know God" means to engage in the best paradigms of HUMAN behavior that our people felt were mandated to our collective entity by a Cosmic force that is a rubber stamp for the creative survival of mankind and for the creative survival of the Jewish people; the Jews are supposed to serve as a microcosm or litmus paper test for civilization, culture and menschlich continuity.

Describe how Jews are treated in any country and you will have an idea of the moral quotient in that country. The Psalmist says "how great are God’s deeds, and therefore how can man possibly comprehend them." Every time an individual Jew wants to speak about God, the tradition forces him to say HASHEM which means the "ineffable name" which no one can pronounce-- or -- simply put -How can I really know!? All the banter and speculation about God or belief is of necessity fuzzy, and anyone who speaks about God with certainty, is engaging in deception. What remains in the conversation is how we act and how we grow beyond the trials and tribulations of our lives. Imagine living in a world where some human mind or power judges us on what we believe rather than on how we act. With all due emotional angst I cry for any death because of the image of the Cosmic Power planted within that life, and all death no matter how gruesome or accompanied by the worst of torture, is a challenge for us - an atonement- an opportunity for reevaluation of how we lead our own personal lives in the contexts of our pragmatically indestructible Jewish people.

The Noahides teach that the natural law of civilized societies comes from the Hebrew Bible. The Noahides are non-Jews whose religion is Menschlichkeit. Google them. We will all see they use Jewish tradition to refine their basic "humanity religion." They use rabbinic advisers to guide them through this maze. What I as a Jew look for in a human being is their diversity training, their pluralism quotients, and their willingness to generalize from the best of other people and religions. There is a real fraternity among such people, and they are united not because of their religions but by a basic set of emphatic trends that place a civilized and kindly humanity on a higher plane then certainly their own ethnicity, their own race, and even more-so, their own religion.

As to Frimet Roth’s observation of sadness and despair - Judaism would rather have you grateful for what you had than despairing for what you lost. I have asked 100’s of parents who have lost children: If you knew that this was going to happen to your child would you have preferred not to have had the child at all!? God forbid: "Better to have loved and lost than...." I would say it rabinically: A half full cup does not begin to compete with "Yea tho I walk thru the valley of death....my cup runneth over." "The day of death is better than the day of birth", because a good name acquired and sealed on death is better than precious oil at a birth whose eventual end is shrouded, because you never know how it will turn out. Paradoxes and ironies and contradictions explain the meaning of life, suffering, and death. In a religious sense, the death of a young person is the same philosophically as the death of an older person. One moment of life is infinitely indivisible and equally precious at any moment. The only purpose of Cosmic force or the Almighty in trying moments, is to gain a perspective that flows from the vantage point of the collective creativity of mankind or from a vantage point that does not place the individual as the center of his own universe.

As to Frimet’s observations of forgiveness- forgiveness is not related to Justice which is in the hands of the community to keep us from personal acts of revenge. Forgiveness is letting go and continuing life. A Holocaust survivor on a late night Israeli talk radio show when asked if she forgave Hitler, said "yes" because she did not want to (in the words of Emil Fackenheim) "give Hitler a posthumous victory" over her - she wanted to move on with her life and let the Courts of Civilization deal with the crimes against humanity. In truth, religiously, every crime against one person, is a crime against all of humanity.

With regard to Islam, why is someone telling us what to believe - which leads me to say to the Sheik, if you speak so assuredly about who or what God is, that makes me afraid of you because our tradition teaches us more about who God is NOT than about who God is. The test of our religions is how many people of other faiths are our equals and brothers in the face of the Law of enlightened societies. I would never try you according to a Jewish God, but only before the God of all the universe; and please believe me when I tell you that we Jews were always dhimmis [second class people] in Muslim societies. If Allah wants me to be a Muslim, or if Allah wants me to anything other than a good person, I want nothing to do with that form of god. If Muhammad’s or Moses’s judgment of my life is more important than humanity’s judgments of my life, I want nothing to do with that messenger. According to Jewish law, someone of another faith has diplomatic immunity in our tradition; in fact the only people that have an Avenue of the Righteous of all humanity is the Jewish people. Do you have a list of the righteous Jews in Islamic tradition? Our Bible names the portion of the Decalogue after Jethro the Midianite. The Ancestor of King David is Ruth The Moabitess, etc. When any religion promotes the suffering of the non-believers, it is anathema to civilization. I would rather my own life be taken than for me to knowingly cause suffering to another human being of any persuasion.

A Lebanese Christian girl who is living in Israel because she fled from the Hezbollah war, when asked if she is planning to go back to Lebanon some day, because Israel is only a temporary asylum from Muslim hatreds, she said: "I will one day return to my home in Lebanon when my Israeli and Jewish friends will one day be able to go to Lebanon in peace." Humanity trumps Islam-Christianity-Judaism-et al. The 16-year-old Christian Lebanese Arab said it all about suffering.

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