The Dance of God in Our Theology & Action
This week, we tuned in to an on-line forum on religion and politics being sponsored by the Rockridge Institute. (If you’re interested, click here).
One of the first items open for discussion: What is your theology, and how does it shape your politics? Here is what we wrote:
We ground our theology and action in the two Names that the Torah ascribes to God, speaking at the Burning Bush to Moses when commissioning him to become a liberator:
1. “YHWH,” understood as what happens when one tries to pronounce it with no vowels: “Yyyyyhhhhwwwwhhhh,” simply a breath. This breath-of-life unites all cultures, languages, and life-forms: What we breathe in is what trees and grasses breathe out; what they breathe in is what we breathe out.
2. “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” “I Will Be Who I Will be,” God as continuous Becoming. This name invites us to reimagine God as the beckoning of the Universe toward justice, freedom, peace, and wholeness, and toward the reconception of these goals in every generation. (As the Passover Haggadah teaches, “In every generation, a new Pharaoh arises; in every generation, we must free ourselves anew.”)
Our theology is thus rooted in a (not “the”) Jewish understanding of God—an understanding that God is indeed One and Universal, and that all peoples are called by this urgency of the universe to consciously connect the shattered, scattered pieces of reality and truth into a more and more harmonious whole.
I believe that God becomes manifest in physical, biological, and human history through a Dance of Control and Community—an effort, whether at the level of unsentient chemicals or biological species or human civilizations, to control their environs to win more nourishment and power, and an effort at all these levels to create relationships/ ecosystems/ communities. The amoeba that totally controls its environs will first flourish and then, having eaten all available sustenance, die; it must restrain itself and encourage the emergence of other life-forms in a biosystem that nourishes its future while limiting its power.
In human history, this dance took form in -
o the great surge of Egyptian and Sumerian irrigation agriculture, a great leap forward in dominating the earth—to which the Western Semitic peoples responded with the creation of new communal forms, embodied in the Bible;
o again, in the great triumph of control over the earth and humanity embodied in Roman-Hellenistic culture, followed by the creation of Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam as new forms of community;
o and today, by the off-the-charts triumph of Modernity, which in its control over the web of life on Planet Earth threatens the destruction of that web and of the human race.
In response, many of us are struggling to create new forms of community—renewing Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc. to see each other and all life-forms as part of our community. The project of renewal means digesting some transformative aspects of Modernity (the equality of women and men, democracy, full respect for other life-giving cultures and traditions) and integrating them into the older traditions. The result will be, is already becoming, something new—yet bearing deep identity with each of the older traditions.
AND—alongside this effort of renewal, there emerges a rejection of Modernity and an attempt to restore the certainties of pre-Modern religion. This effort is what some of us call fundamentalism, and its power at this moment has called many of us into reaffirming the transformative and prophetic aspect of religion.
For me, “prophetic” describes us better than “progressive”—because it is a word rooted in religious rather than Modern thought; because it draws on the past as well as constantly transcending it; and because it rejects the dichotomy between social responsibility and individual responsibility. Typically, religious restorationists focus on individual responsibility; secular progressives focus on social responsibility; the prophetic mind-set addresses both, and sees domination of society as closely akin to intrapersonal addiction and idolatry.
In its previous work, The Shalom Center has applied this “theology” to issues of the nuclear arms race through the framework of the Biblical Flood (and midrash on a coming “Flood of Fire”) and its threat to all life on earth, with the response of the Ark and Rainbow; to broad issues of ecological healing through the framework of Shabbat, the sabbatical year, and the Jubilee as requiring that the human community allow the earth a rhythmic rest; and to the present danger of Imperial America/ Corporate Globalization through the framework of Pharaoh, the translation of political/ economic/social oppression into rebellion of the earth through eco-disasters (the Ten Plagues), and ultimately a journey toward liberation and a new form of community—the Exodus and Sinai.
The Shalom Center applies this theology to assessment of the world crisis. Our hypothesis is that the two greatest dangers facing us are a long destructive war between the US and Islam, and the climate crisis we call “global scorching.” We are therefore working on two major projects: Observance of the confluence of Muslim, Christian, & Jewish sacred dates in Oct 2005, to strengthen connections among the renewal energies in these communities and their joint action for peace and justice; and a campaign to move “Beyond Oil” for the sake of preventing both endless war and planetary disaster.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow directs The Shalom Center
voicing a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life.
See also
www.tentofabraham.org
for information on the October plans.
See www.shalomctr.org and www.tentofabraham.org