Thought Of The Week

Books I've Read     

Several times a year, a space opens up in my teaching. I am usually and gratefully guided by our calendar on Shabbat. For my Monday evening and Wednesday noon Spiritual Formation classes, the array of spiritual-psychological concepts and practices keeps us pretty busy.

A couple weeks ago when I mentioned that after Sukkot there would be a space (before Chanukah) in which I take recommendations from those studying with me, one long time student reminded me that I often mention the short list of books that changed my thinking, that, in essence, strongly shaped my intellectual, spiritual and moral life. She asked if we could devote some class time to those books.

The books I have in mind may not necessarily be the greatest books. Perhaps more importantly, I read them at the right time. I know many people who have read, for example, Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith and don't recall shuddering with a sense of the mysterium tremendum when they read it. I read the book when I was 22 years old, out of the Marines just a year before, after a year on a Kibbutz, starting college as a Religion major, with the goal of becoming a rabbi, but no real sense of what that meant. I was primed for a book to change my life, and Dynamics of Faith was on the syllabus. I learned to see beyond a biblical concept of God to a more philosophic-existential-mystical one, God as "the ground of being", as "ultimate reality." Belief in God was secondary to knowing God.

I then asked: how does one then reintegrate religion into knowing God? If the knowledge of God as the ground of being is a philosophic/mystical category, what does Judaism have to do with it? The professor who assigned me Dynamics of Faith recommended that I read Philosophy in a New Key by Suzanne K. Langer. This phenomenal book swept me into the symbolic nature of human consciousness. We are always symbolizing - the only question is whether our consciousness can guide and direct the deepest symbolizing. I understood religion as a spectrum, a constellation, a cosmos of dynamic symbols, and to traverse that world was not only to build a world, but also to journey through the nature of consciousness. The Torah, our calendar, the prayer book - these were arrays of symbols and myths that not only shaped consciousness, but also led to a relationship with the Ground of Being, with Ultimate Reality. Truth can only be symbolized to us. In engaging in that transformative symbolic world, we are brought to life.

I'd like to apply a few of these thoughts to our study of the prayer book for the morning study session. Our Torah study will be led by Jacob Mahoney, who is celebrating his Bar Mitzvah. He will take us into the world of transgression and reconciliation, and then I will comment on his talk in light of the texts mentioned above.

Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Mordecai Finley