Jeremy Rosen
Challenging Conversations: Has Religion Failed Us?
Jeremy Rosen - Challenging Conversations: Has Religion Failed Us?
- Ladies and gentlemen, this is a painful subject for me to deal with. Because as somebody who would be described as a religious person, I have to admit that I am not proud of much of the role that religion has played in our world and in our civilization. After all, we’re over 2,000 years of the great religions of this world declaring that they are going to bring peace and happiness and wellbeing to the universe in which they function. And yet the reality is that it’s very difficult to see the extent to which they have abled, been able to clean their own audience stables. I remember when I first was asked why I wanted to devote myself to the rabbi and to Jewish education, I told my friends that it was as though I had a girlfriend who I was madly in love with, but everybody else thought was a very unpleasant, nasty, incompetent person who they didn’t want to deal with. And I set out idealistically to see how much I could change. And in the words of the famous Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, when I started out I wanted to change the world. And then I saw I couldn’t change the world. And so I tried to change my town. And when I saw I couldn’t change my town, I tried to change my family. And when I saw I couldn’t change my family, I decided the only person I could change was myself. And the biggest challenge throughout my career has been the behaviour of other religious people in all the religions that I’ve had to encounter. So I want to make the case against religion and then I want to make the case for religion and then see whether there is any way we can possibly resolve the conflict.
So let me start first of all with what I think is wrong with religion. And they all share such beautiful ideas of peace, of welfare, of finding solutions to the problems of the world and they have all manifestly failed. Every religion is divided up into warring factions that barely speak to each other. Every religion is as full of violent people who want to impose their will on others as it is made up of good-willed and good caring human beings who want to help others. When we look at what it is about religion that is so problematic, it is this idea that they are the bearers of what we call truth. Of course the term truth in itself is a problematic idea, because if, for example, you look at the Bible, the term truth in the Bible is an empirical one. Did these events happen? And although every group, every people in the ancient world believed that they had the answer, the fact is that they kept on failing in achieving what they wanted to achieve. There is a difference, it’s true between a religion that is a religion that wishes never to get involved in anything physically violent, a pacifist religion, except the fact of the matter is that pacifism hasn’t succeeded in persuading enough people that it is the right path. Lord knows Gandhi tried and others like him and the Quakers have tried. So the question is, does religion in a sense breed automatically violence? And then the question is, why do religions want to impose themselves on other people? Persuade I can understand, but why impose? Why have there been these attempts to force one religion on another people?
One way of thinking, one way of believing, one way of finding the right path. We have come across within religion, what we call fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is you must see it my way. My way is the only way. We’ve come across conservatism. That is to say, my job is to protect the past, to protect what I have and insulate it from anything that might in some way challenge it. Then you have the tradition for thousands of years of what one would call sexism, the ideas that religion have conveyed and reinforced even though maybe these ideas were there beforehand. And then you have all these petty little details, these rules and their laws and the ceremonials that every individual religion has and every individual religion requires its members to adhere to. And then if they don’t adhere to it, they are somehow ostracised or asked to leave or made to feel inadequate or made to feel somehow that they are missing on the right correct way to behave. And then we have the idea of guilt, the idea that somehow we are inadequate because we are not achieving what the religion suggests that we should achieve. But above all these different things, we have the idea originally that religion had all the answers. And now of course we see that religion does not have all the answers. Once upon a time religion incorporated science and philosophy and all the empirical sciences of the world we thought at the time were true. And now we see very clearly that there is a lot that religion cannot answer, that science answers, that psychology answers.
Many of the modern academic subjects and medical subjects have solutions that religion once thought it had but now simply we’ve seen does not. And the one thing that I resent more than anything else is that within every religion there is a power structure. There’s a structure of ambitious people who are prepared to preach one thing and do another, to claim they want peace and humanity amongst mankind, but who will attack those people who think differently to them. And this power structure exists in every single religion, which is why in every single religion we’ve had sexual abuse, we’ve had financial abuse, we’ve had every kind of human abuse existing within the so-called boundaries of religious life. And this sort of mentality is a mentality that is somehow acceptable and that for whatever reason, the religions are unable to see where their failures are. Now then the question is, well fair enough, all human beings have failed. What is the alternative? And it’s true that when you look at the alternatives, the alternatives to religion are just as bad. You can say the same thing about Marxism, that the ideas are lovely but they never worked in practise. You can say that the ideas of libertarianism, of freedom of individuality, these are all value systems that also have failed to make the world a better place, even though each in their small way may be contributing something towards it. So therefore, the question is, can we say there’s anything to be said for what these things called religions stand for and propagate? And I think in general, in general, of course, I really believe that there are certain things to be said in favour.
For example, the principles of trying to make the world a better place, however we want to put it into practise are very good principles. But when you tell me, only my messiah is going to make the world a better place and your messiah is not going to make the world a better place, it’s not the failure of the religious ideal so much as the failure of people who seem unable to accept other points of view. And of course, you know, this is something which in fact permeates every area, every area of human life, whether it is sport or whether it’s literature or whether it is music, has the capacity to raise our human spirits, to give us something, to enlighten our lives and bring us greater degrees of satisfaction. And yet at the same time, all these areas can be corrupted. So we take something aesthetic. Some of the major contributions that religions have given to mankind, wonderful principles, beautiful ideas, music, art, literature, they’ve all helped enrich lives. And yet for all this enrichment that they’ve been able to offer, there still remains the challenge. And the challenge essentially is how do we, as individuals, how do we manage to make ourselves better? Is the answer that we are all sinners, we are born corrupt, we are all self-centered egoists and only discipline and structure can make us better? Or is it possible to think in terms of taking responsibility for our actions? The truth is that originally in a simple tribal society, we were all together in one kind of cocoon.
There was a famous English sociologist of the previous generation called Desmond Morris. And Desmond Morris was interested in the idea of tribes. And in his famous book he wrote about the idea that we will start off with the little tribes where we know the structure, we know where we belong, we know who what our values are. But then these tribes get bigger and bigger. And as they get bigger and bigger, they turn into what are called super tribes. And in a super tribe, people don’t necessarily agree on almost anything and they start arguing, fighting, conflicting within, let alone between a tribe and against another tribe. And so what happens in these super tribes, these big nations, we end up with what he called pseudo tribes. Pseudo tribes are little groups that feel a sense of identity and he focused very much, for example, on supporters of different soccer teams having their tribal colours, their tribal songs together as a group fighting against other groups. And we have them in clubs, in societies, in political parties. Everything within our world is divided into these smaller groups because human beings feel the need to belong to some sort of group. And therefore the question is can religion meet this need or does religion in itself provide these pseudo tribes which end up fighting with each other? Every society has its petty routines. Whether these petty routines are the routines of royalty or government of the diplomatic, or whether they are what is correct dress or incorrect dress, whether it is how to greet somebody and not greet somebody, to look them straight in the face or to look down, to bow, to nod, or to curtsy.
Everybody does. And in that sense, religion is no different to humanity, in general. But then we come to whether one specific religious tradition can be said to be better, superior or more correct than another. And not only that, we come to the question of what is it that we call religion? So we are now coming up to the festival of Purim. And in Purim you have the first attempt to describe religion. The word for religion in Judaism, if you like, is now dat. It’s used in the book of Esther when Haman Says these people have a different dat to the other. And dat literally means a behavioural pattern, not necessarily a system of beliefs. Religion is a system of beliefs, whereas dat is more a way of life. And some religions base themselves on systems of belief. you must believe this in order to be accepted into this religion and others are more interested in how you behave and what you do. The idea of dat is one that incorporates a wider range of people than the idea of religion. And this has been one of the biggest problems of our society. So when people look for example at Jews, they want to know is Judaism a religion? Is Judaism a race? Is Judaism a nation? What is it? Where do we fit in? And the truth is we are all of these things. And each one of these things has a value in itself, a way to think, a way to understand the purpose of life. That’s an important feature, the way to behave. We humans need behaviour, we need structure, we need a considered life to think about our behaviour day-by-day. And routines, whatever these routines are, help us.
Some religions have one religion, have one routine, some others, some have a Friday, some have a Saturday, some have a Sunday, some have others. And yet we need routines. And it is the value of routine that a religion gives. The problem is in all these things, when whichever particular ingredient is used as a power point, as a way of either aggressively attacking individuals or alternatively as a way of trying to restrict the freedom of thought of individuals, that these tools which are perfectly normal, happy tools within themselves all of a sudden become a problem. And in becoming a problem, they cause conflict. There’s conflict of the other where the other is, again, a different race, a different religion, a different background. And look at us now as we look around the world in which people are being attacked for religious reasons, for nationalist reasons, for all different kinds of reasons. To my mind, to my mind, the only justification for violence is self-defense. When somebody is attacked, that is the only justification. Apart from that we have in human sense this dream of making the world a better place. And in my view there are two ways of trying to make the world a better place. Going back to the Bible again, king Solomon thought that he had the solution, that he wanted to find the solution, the secret in the book of Ecclesiastes as to how we should live our lives.
And he thought that the way to find the secret was through wisdom, a very Greek idea of the philosophers. But he went into wisdom and the more he went into wisdom, the more he discovered there were frustrations in wisdom. And these frustrations in wisdom came about as a result both of the need to know more and of the fact that when you have knowledge, you think that this knowledge is all that matters in life. But knowledge is not the only thing that matters in life. Then there’s the question of pleasure. Pleasure is very important. Human body is designed for pleasure. But if you think pleasure is the only answer to life, then that also becomes frustrating because pleasure sometimes can go over the top and can become unsatisfactory instead of being satisfactory, instead of helping you become a better person. And in the end, as he said very clearly, there is no single answer, there is no single answer. The only way is to try to do one’s best, to be positive, to make the best out of life and to adhere to an ethical standard. His ethical standard was the standard of the Bible. But there can be other ethical standards so long as they are objective ethical standards and standards that respect the humanity of other people. So the function of religion as a system of getting people to be more sensitive to each other is a beautiful idea. Indeed, the simple answers the answer that Micah gave, the prophet Micah in chapter 6 of his book, humanity, you’ve been told what to do, you’ve been told that all that is required of you is to be a good person, to love justice and to be a humble person.
He added before God, but in that sense, God can be left out of this equation. And the reason why I say God can be left out of this equation is because God is something so subjective that if you were to ask three people what they think God is, each one would come up with a different answer. And it’s impossible to define because if God is something beyond the physical world, then we can’t use physical words to explain God. And so much damage and hurt is being done by people who want to define God their way as opposed to another way. So in the end, God is something that the individual either finds, experiences, or does not. You cannot appeal to God to justify something to somebody who does not believe in God. And therefore the only thing you can argue about is human behaviour, how humans behave towards each other. And this is something that comes back to each one of us. And therefore, the failure is not the failure of religion so much as the failure of us as people. And the truth is that this is a universal problem. You’ll have heard probably of C. S. Lewis, the great Christian English academic, who in addition to his academic work wrote lots of fables and stories and fictions that are part of the popular world today. He wrote a little book that my father got me to read as a 16-year-old called “The Screwtape Letters.”
And “The Screwtape Letters” consist of letters between a senior devil and a junior devil trying to corrupt the Christian. And it’s good advice. And in one of the letters, junior writes to senior devil and says, look, my Christian is coming into church and he’s kneeling down and he’s getting something from the atmosphere in church and he is turning to religion. What do I do? And screwtape senior says very simple, next time he’s in church and thinks you are, he’s getting something. Just get him to think about, to think about the person to the right and the person to the left, what’s wrong with them, why they annoy him, why she/he feels they haven’t treated him well, what grudges he or she has towards that person. And as soon as you can get people to think about what’s wrong with everybody else and what’s wrong around them, what’s wrong with religion that will destroy any delight you have. There was a famous English playwright called Baron Corvo who wrote a play about a mythical English pope called Hadrian the Seventh who gets to Rome convinced he’s going to change and reform the cure. And he gets to Rome and he’s blocked every reform he wants to make, he can’t get through. And one night facing all the cardinals, he turns round to them in his frustration and he says, you know, I love the faith but I hate the faithful. And I’ve always been impressed by this. Institutions, politics, religions, all of them have failed, the messages have value in them, but they’ve failed not because of the messages as much as because of the people who apply those messages, the people who invade other countries, the Putin of this world, it’s because of their actions, not because of the ideas.
And you can turn around and you can criticise the Russian Orthodox Church for not insisting that he pursue the path of peace. You can look at the Christian religion with a rivalry between Catholics and Protestants and between the Episcopalians and between the Southern Baptists. You can look at Islam and you can look at the Jihadism and you can look at the Shia against the Sunni. You can look at Judaism and look at the Haredi parties that are spit amongst themselves and the Hasidic dynasties that hate each other. And you have the extreme nationalists and the extreme antinationalists and the left and the right and the trotskyites against the Lenin Knights and the Lenin Knights against the Stalin Knights. And everywhere you look, you look at the Democrats, the left and the right and the Republicans of all different kinds, there is no agreement. And is that the fault of the ideas or is it the fault of the people? The psychiatrist would tell us in the end, it’s all the fault of us. Look at the psychiatrist, how they fought amongst each other about who was an Orthodox one and who was not an Orthodox one. And whether a Jungian or a Freudian? Whichever way you look at it, the problem is not the problem of religion, it’s the problem of us.
And if we are inadequate in some way, then we have to heal ourselves. And that is where I conclude my diatribe and start hopefully the discussion amongst us all.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: Michael Bloch asked the question of, please tell me who was the first person who wrote about messiah Ben David coming to save the Judeans.
A: Well, that’s a very good question. The truth of the matter is that in a way you could say Messianism started off with Judaism in one way you could say that. But if you look at the Bible, the term messiah, Mashiaḥ, messiah simply means somebody who was anointed with oil. Aaron was anointed with oil, his sons were anointed with oil. And the vessels that were used in the tabernacle were anointed with oil. There’s no mention about anything supernatural or messianic as we understand it. Later on, Samuel is the first person to use oil to anoint Saul and then he uses oil to anoint King David. And from that moment onwards anointing with oil was only in the south when there was a break in dynasty, the dynasty was challenged. So the last person in the south who anoint be anointed was King Solomon because his elder brother Adonia challenged his right. In the northern kingdom only one man was anointed and that was Jehu when he was given a mission to overthrow the household of Ahab. So then the idea developed that there was a break in the dynasty of the southern kingdom of Judea, the northern tribes of Joseph. And when they were in exile, their dream was they would come back, have their king again and have their independence. And so in exile in Babylon, you get the idea there’s going to be a messiah to the household of David. There’s going to be a messiah to the household of Joseph and they will one day get us back our independence. But nothing about anything supernatural. But that’s in a way where the idea develops. And then during the period particularly of the Hasmoneans where you have this idea of oppression, there is no David dynasty there, but they’re looking forward to getting out of this mess. The idea of Messianism as making the world a better place begins to enter into Jewish ideas.
But in fact, it never became what we understand it to be until after the destruction of the second temple. And after the destruction of the second temple, the Jews believed that one day the temple will be rebuilt. One day King David or his descendants will come back onto the throne and will all live happily ever after in a wonderful world. But already there were other views. The dead seaset had the views that the world needs a teacher of righteousness and he has to battle the forces of evil. And out of some of these ideas came the idea of Christianity, that there would be a messiah who would come to atone for all our sins. In Judaism only you can atone for your sins, nobody can do it for you. And every individual has as much right as any other individual to atone for sins. But then what happened was those two paths diverged, the Christian path diverged towards having a messiah who if he failed the first time would come back a second time but meanwhile coming back the first time, this would give us a new lease of life. And the Jewish idea that no, we’ve got to look to the future and we look to the future in one of two ways. Either God has to intervene this world because it’s such a mess, we can’t cure it. Or alternatively we can try harder to make this world a better place. And so these are the ideas where Messianism came from. It looks to the past but then looks forward to the future. But whether this is something that is defined theologically was another area where Christianity and Judaism diverge. Christianity tended to prefer a theological, philosophical answer, whereas Judaism moved towards a more mystical, non-rational point of view. But in all religions you have a rational approach and a mystical approach ‘cause some people are different. Some people like experience and like mysticism, some people like intellect and rationalism. And so all these concepts, all these ideas are explained by every religion in a different way.
Q: So anonymous asks, can one be religious and not observant? And on the other hand be observant and not religious?
A: Well, look, it depends what you mean by that. For example, let’s take the classical case. If you are religious, technically you should abide by the rules of your religion. The rules of your religion are expected to make you a better person. So you can’t abide by the rules of your religion and be a thief or to be a bully or to be a cheat or to be a liar. Now on the other hand, just belonging to a religion in itself doesn’t make you a good person unless you abide by the rules. So the question sometimes people ask, can you be a good person without being Jewish or Christian or Buddhist? Yes, of course you can. Does every Christian and Jew and Buddhist and Hindu who says they are religious make them a good person? Definitely not. And therefore, the straight answer is you do not have to be religious to be a good person. But in theory it ought to help in the same way that there are many atheists who are good people and many atheists who are bad people. It’s the same everywhere.
Ingrid asks fanatics believe their religion is the right one and they want to impose this on non-believers. But the problem is more fundamental. Where religion believes as an almighty, followers believe in all knowing. And so even if we don’t understand, that’s because it’s beyond our capacity.
Well, that’s true. People do tend to believe that there is a religion that comes from the Almighty. But if you look for example at the Bible, the Almighty is perfectly happy to say Ishmael and Isaac and these other tribes are part of my covenant with Abraham. And my covenant with Abraham was for humanity. Hence we have this idea of the Abrahamic religions and the idea that God is the God of everyone body. And when you look at the prophets of the Old Testament, they all say, we’ve been sent to the nations, to everybody. And Christianity also says, we want to go to everybody. And Islam also says, we ought to go to everybody, but that doesn’t make them by themselves good people. So then you ask me to comment, when a Hitler, Putin or slave owners impose their will, why does the Almighty allow this? Well, your big problem, and it is why I avoid God, and it is this, if you think that God is like a human being, then that’s not God. And if you think as God is not like a human being, how is it possible for a human being to know what God thinks? Now our holy books of all religions try to tell us what humans believe God wants, but that’s humans trying to work out what God wants.
All we can do is take from our holy books and from our holy text, whichever ones they are the ideas of treating human beings well. And that’s the idea again that the prophets keep on emphasising. But the fact is, unless we keep on reminding ourselves, unless we keep on having a lifestyle that is a lifestyle devoted to caring for people and being good for people, the theory gets dissipated. The old joke goes that it’s easy to love the world and much harder to love your next door neighbour. And that’s the problem. The problem is not in the ideology itself. And when you talk about God, you don’t surely expect God to intervene every time for every human being, that every human being has a problem. That would not make sense. It’s true that we turn to God as if God is going to answer our prayers.
But if you think about it rationally, we ought them to be able to pray to God that we’re not going to die, but we all die in the end whether we like it or not. And there are certain things that function in our world 'cause that’s the way we are designed. We are designed to have free choice, to be able to make our own decisions about things. And therefore, if we do, then in a sense we are ourselves to blame for the mistakes that we make. Within the world in which we have, we have, for example, bacteria. We love these bacteria when they bring about alcohol or fermentation in a positive way, then all of a sudden we don’t like these bacteria when they strike our bodies and we become ill in some way or another. So in the physical world in which we live, we can only call on ideas outside of ourselves to improve ourselves. And each person believes that God’s on their side just go to any soccer match and see before the soccer match, some people come on and they cross themselves, other people come on and they bow down to the ground. Other people come on and look up to heaven and lift their finger up to heaven. And what God cares about who wins a soccer match? I don’t think so. So you are talking about human expectation. Human expectation is quite a different issue from talking about God.
Q: Sophie asked, if you come from outer space, and so all these groups on earth each believe have the truth. Which one would you choose to belong to and why?
A: That’s an excellent question. And I’ve always believed and some of the greatest rabbis have believed, it is the obligation of a person to go on looking for the right way and the good way to live throughout their lives. But if you wait until you found the answer before you change the way you live, you may never find an answer. And therefore his suggestion, rabbi Saadia Gaon living in Babylon a thousand years ago, his answer was, if you have come into a tradition, that’s where you begin. But then you have to ask yourself as a thinking person, what do I expect of my tradition? What do I want of my tradition? I want of my tradition that my tradition will give me certain experiences, a certain feeling of identity, a certain sense of belonging, and therefore I also want a way of life. And in pursuing and trying to find a best way of life, I look around and see which one works better for me. If I’m a rationalist, I want a more rational one. If I’m a mystical, I want a more mystical one. I believe that individuals have the right to choose how they’re going to live their lives and therefore they should on one hand adhere to what their family and their tradition have offered them as a basis and then use that as a basis on which they should build.
Fern said, look at divisions close to home and in Judaism, conservative reform, egalitarian don’t recognise the right of women to worship at the wall. And this is precisely my point, that within every religion you have these different, different opinions. Everybody saying they’re right, not respecting another point of view. And it does not make sense to me. I don’t see why we can’t allow people to do other things, but we get so caught up in defending ourselves as human beings. I want to protect my little world that anything from the outside that challenges my little world becomes a problem. And most people are incapable of overcoming this problem. I don’t mind whoever calls themselves a Jew or claims they want to live a Jewish life. It’s up to them. I know what the Jewish constitution, the Jewish way of life is, and it’s up to me if I choose to follow it or not, and to what extent I follow it. But if somebody chooses not to, that’s their freedom. And indeed that’s what the Bible itself says in the last chapters of Deuteronomy. You are free to choose. But I can’t stop people being intolerant in every religion, in every political party, in every sport, in every area of human activity we can’t stop people being who they are. Dr. Colin, now to the point in the current situation, we have an overload of information stemming from the internet, email, social media. We have a position where countries are bending over backwards to house refugees while closing their ears and eyes to the appalling situation in their own country, both from an economic and strategic defensive position, or to put it mildly, forget our own problems, but attempt to solve the problems of other countries.
I agree with you Dr. Collin a hundred percent. This is absolutely true. We are so fixated as individuals and what we believe is right and then we discover what we believe is right, might well be wrong. I mean, you know here we have a perfect example in the United States of America where we have agreed that climate change is an absolute necessity and we have to do something about it. The question is how do we do something about it? Do we cut out atomic power? Do we cut out oil? And here we have a situation where America, for example, is unable to act against Russia because it needs oil and it cut back so much on its oil that it depends on either Russia or even Venezuela if it comes to that and other people for its oil. And so the price of oil goes up and people suffer. Or you take the whole question of social welfare. We all agree in social welfare, but do we agree that you deal with it by giving blanket donations as we did during COVID? Everybody gets extra money instead of just focusing on those people who really need it. And then somehow controlling how they spend it. These are questions that we keep on asking because they’re complex and there’s no easy answer, no political solution, whether it’s capitalism or Marxism, whatever has solved these problems, we’re grappling with them all the time. And the question in the end is, how do we deal with them? The problem with the democracy is where everybody has a charge to say what they want to say, they will say it and they can’t agree. The problem with autocracy, whether it’s China or Russia, is the bosses decide what’s going to happen. Everybody has a fall in line and you can argue for both cases. And in the end you decide where you want to live and how you want to try and influence your society. And if you can’t influence your society, at the very least you can influence yourself and try to be a good caring person and help those people you can.
The first question I struggle with is Martin’s definition of religion. Well, this is a good question.
Q: What is religion?
A: Religion can be described as a profession of faith, your faith, what do you believe? But it can be something that’s got nothing to do with belief. It’s got to do with what is your practise. How do you behave? What is your life? It can also be what is your nation? It can be all kinds of different things. And that’s one of the reasons why you have to define your terms before you can have a sensible conversation.
Q: What do I mean by God?
A: If I mean by God something that intervenes from outer space, then that’s one way of looking at it, but it’s not the only way of looking at it. And similarly, how can you explain the paradox of free will and predestination Harold asks. Well, of course the philosophers have struggled this for a long time. You know, if God knows everything in advance, why can’t he stop it? But of course, we are designed as humans. We are designed physically with a brain in such a way that we in fact have choices. Now, some people, some philosophers or some sociologists, we say, no you don’t, skinner, you are all, we’re all programmed. We have no such thing as free will. And yet we see that people do manage to change for one religion to another, for one society to another. We humans are designed to be the mess we are. The world was created out of chaos. God says we start with chaos, so to speak, if you take the Bible. So we do have chaos built into us in a sense. And therefore if we have a freedom to make the choice as shall we say, mythically, Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden, then you must allow them to make the wrong choices.
Q: Richard asks, why is Christianity grown so large versus Judaism?
A: Well, I think there’s a very simple explanation. And the simple explanation is this, you can treat religion as something to be popular for as many as possible. And you can treat religion to be more concentrated in the same way that in education you can have Ivy League or you can have Oxbridge, you can have state colleges, city colleges, all different kinds. They’re all part of the spectrum of education. And in the same way, some people choose to have a BA, some people choose to have an MA, some people choose to go a PhD and some people choose to go beyond that. So the answer is that there are different alternatives. Some people like the intensity of Judaism, I happen to like the intensity of Judaism, not so much the intense people, but the intensity of it. I like that. That is the way I want my religious life. But I see it’s too hard for everybody. Not everybody can, not everybody can take Shabbat off or festivals off if they’re employed by other people or want to get on in a career. And therefore, people make these different choices. And I have to respect that. We have to respect that. So I believe Judaism is an example of two things. It’s an example of a holistic situation in which ideally you live it in a community. We are a people, we are described as a people, not as a religion. This term religion is something foisted on us from the outside.
So I don’t like the word religion at all. We are a way of life. A way of life that ideally should be lived within a community. That’s why the nation, the land of Israel, the people of Israel matters so much to us. But it can also believed be lived outside if you want to live an intense way of life. Not everybody does. And I wouldn’t want to force it on anybody. And sometimes I feel like giving up and going to live in isolation somewhere. But on the other hand, we need sense of community. If we don’t have sense of community, then we become egoistic, egocentric. And the religion of Judaism is one which combines the sense of community, the intensity with also a way of life that I believe is ethically and morally a very valuable, positive way of life. And until Sunday can show me a better way of life, I’ll be happy to consider it. How can Jewish religious person reconcile his or her religious beliefs with general society when there are conflicts but there are conflicts everywhere. The Bible is full of conflicts right from the beginning in every family and every person, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There are no saints in this world. We don’t believe in saints. We are a people who try our best or should try our best to behave in a good and a possible way.
Michael Gates says, I’ve been a scientist for over 50 years and I served Shabbat another. I find no dichotomy between some of my aesthetic friends, but even though my aesthetic friends are surprised at my attitude. My feeling is that both science and religion are about people. Is that not right?
Absolutely. I agree with you. And also science and duties are basically concerned with rationality. No, I would say there is a very strong rational element within Judaism, but there’s also a mystical element in religion which is not rational. God is not rational. I don’t believe God is rational. Experience is not rational. Falling in love is not rational. And so the whole mystical tradition of Judaism is not rational. That’s not where you go for rationality. You definitely go to science, but science is not enough. Science tells us about things as they are, not as things as how they ought to be or how we ought to be.
Q: David says, you discuss past actions in religion who runs Judaism in the USA and in Canada?
A: Thank God. This is one of the things I like about Judaism in USA and Canada as opposed to Israel or England for that matter, is there is no concept of a chief rabbi of a centralised authority. Every community is independent and it does what it likes. Some are more religious, some are less religious, some are orthodox, some are conservative, some are reformed, some of them are nothing else. And whatever it is, I don’t like authority. Authority is what I dislike everywhere in politics as well as in religion. Unfortunately, we need some authority to run things, but I believe that power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely. And I’ve not seen a religious structure, any religious structure that is not in some way corrupt, even the most ultra-orthodox in some way or other. There’s an element of corruption because in all humans there’s an element of corruption and therefore it’s not surprising if it spreads beyond. Leon says, is there, oh sorry.
Q: Ralph says, is there an evolutionary principle behind development of religions?
A: Well, I’d like to think there is. And some people say it is slowly, slowly getting better. And if you are talking about evolution as I would and as I do, I would say this, humans have been evolving for millions of years, literally for millions of years. And we’re talking about a couple of thousand years, how arrogant. It’s like that compared to human development. So I’m very impatient in saying it’s taken thousands of years and religion has failed. Really, it’s too early to say. And besides, it’s also too early to say how religion will evolve in the future. We’ve evolved from a sacrificial system to a system based on prayer, then we might move to a system based on meditation and who knows in the future we might not evolve to a system of artificial intelligence. It is a process. I agree, but the fundamentals are the same. The fundamentals: love your neighbour as yourself; be a good human being; Be kind, be considerate. That’s what we all agree, in theory.
Q: Barry says, my wife and I have lived on a kibbutz. Kibbutz didn’t believe in religion. We had food on Yom Kippur. We believe in social and democracy and everyone treated equally. Is this a form of religion?
A: Yes, it’s their form of religion and they’re entitled to their form of religion and good luck to them. I’m not saying I’m right and they’re wrong. I’m saying, I am right for me. That’s the only thing I can say with any sense of certainty.
I dunno if there are any more otherwise, if there are no more questions. No, then let’s end this session.
Thank you for paying attention.