Broadway’s hottest new musical is the Book of Mormon, and in the wake of its triumph at the Tony Awards, the temperature continues to rise – as it should.  There are many reasons to like the play, but the most interesting is that it figures how to laugh with religion, not at it.

Faith needs to be able to laugh at itself, and so do the faithful.  That happens far too rarely, and when it does, the net effect is largely positive for both the faith and the faithful who can do so.  The Book of Mormon’s Tony Awards could be a triumph not only for a particular play, but for faith in general, if believers actually have enough faith in the faiths they follow to laugh at what they love even as they continue to love it.

This play pokes fun at elements of LDS practice and satirizes the experiences of some of its members, but it does so without hostility.  To be sure, the play is foul-mouthed, occasionally inaccurate in terms of doctrine, and all the other things you would expect from a play brought to the stage through the combined efforts of the guys who brought us South Park and Avenue Q.  But like South Park has done for years, the play also takes religion seriously, appreciating how it shapes many people’s lives and provides a sense of purpose and community.  And as Avenue Q did with Sesame Street, it pokes fun at some of the motifs and practices of a particular cultural phenomenon, but it does so in a way that also reminds us of how compelling and convincing those motifs and practices can be.

Nobody should confuse seeing The Book of Mormon, the musical, with serious instruction in the actual Book of Mormon.  But who does that?  One is a musical and the other is a sacred text for 15 million people.  If that’s a distinction one cannot make, then both the play and the book are beyond their intellectual capacity.

The show takes seriously the compelling nature of faith, and takes just as seriously the challenges associated with totalizing faith which makes little room for questions, doubt and the seeking new forms of religious connection.  If that’s uncomfortable for some, so be it, but creating that discomfort is not the same as mocking faith, especially when it’s done in the context of a cheery musical which leaves most of the audience, including as reported by many Mormons who have seen the show, feeling pretty good as they depart the theater.  Now if they could just put some tickets on sale, I could to take my kids to see the show!

As celebratory crowds continue to gather around the country, especially near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, and in front of the White House, Americans are sending a message about who we are.  Is it the one we want to send?  Is it the one we should be sending?

Religious leaders, like many others, are weighing in on the issue of the propriety of celebrating Osama Bin Laden’s death.  Not surprisingly, they tend to cherry pick those portions of their respective traditions for the passages which “prove” what they already believe.  But is it really as simple as all that?

What does it mean to cheer another person’s death, even if they are a genuine enemy?  Is it appropriate?  Is it inevitable?  Is it necessary?

The answers to these questions are not resolved with a few well-chosen quotes from whatever scripture one happens to hold dear.  From a Jewish perspective, there is plenty of material which supports both those who choose to celebrate Bin Laden’s demise, and plenty of other material which suggests that such celebration is inappropriate.

Suggesting otherwise – that the tradition supports only one of these reactions, misreads the tradition and makes it small.  The greatness of the Jewish canon, at least, is that it holds out a range of responses as wide as the range of human emotions which arise at such moments as the demise of a hated and/or feared enemy.

Examples abound, but one need look no further than the Exodus accounts of the parting of the Red Sea.  Pharaoh and his armies drown in the sea.  Moses and Miriam lead the people in song, celebrating God as a “man of war”.  Later rabbis however teach that as angels in heaven joined the earthly song, God demanded that they cease their singing, rebuking them with the words, “how dare you angels sing as My creations are drowning!”

Interestingly, God rebukes the angels, not the people, for singing.  In that seeming contradiction, along with the tradition’s refusal to settle on a single acceptable response to such events, we find a stirring message about the appropriateness of both celebration and sobriety in the phase of recent events.

The measure of one’s response to such events seems to lie in one’s proximity to the suffering caused by the one who is now beaten or dead.  The Israelites, who suffered the agony of hundreds of years of slavery, celebrate the death of their oppressors.  The angels, whose delight is purely theoretical – the joy of seeing good win out over evil, have no such right to celebrate.

People directly touched by the events of 9/11 or other acts of terror have a right to respond differently than those whose lives were not similarly shattered.  For many, especially those who have suffered directly as a result of Bin Laden’s terror, the catharsis of celebration may not only be appropriate, but actually necessary.

Those who lost loved ones in the war against terror, or those who support loved ones wounded in that war, will and should respond differently than those of us who have not.  How could it be otherwise?

The question is not which is the right response to Osama Bin Laden’s death; the question is who each of us is in relation to Osama Bin Laden.   The task at hand is not to figure out how God would want us to respond; the task at hand is to figure out how, whatever our chosen response may be, we will move forward in life and empower ourselves to build a world which in which all people are safer and more secure.

Reprinted from Brad Hirshfield blog on beliefnet.com

Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins, continues to stir controversy and provoke debate in many religious circles. Whether Bell is correct or not about who gets into heaven and who will go to Hell is not something which anyone can know.
Both Bell’s theories and those of the people who dispute him about what a loving God would do are simply mirrors of both his and their pre-existing definitions about love, God, and the afterlife. More importantly, those beliefs are great predictors of how people behave in this life and since that is the one we all share, it’s the one upon which we ought to focus.
Tell me a person’s beliefs about the afterlife, including the absence of such belief, and I’ll tell you how they function in this life, for better or for worse. Notions of the afterlife reflect our most deeply held values about this life, which because they are not always realized here, are deferred to the next life. Like all ideals, they represent that to which we aspire, and if we are serious about our aspirations, those conceptions of the hereafter impact how we live in the here and now.
Debates about what will “really” occur in the future are best left to the future. But the implications of the beliefs that people hold, have enormous impact not only on their own lives, but on the lives of all the people around them – especially those who don’t share their beliefs.
Whether there is an afterlife, how important its existence is to any individual or group, their belief about who gets in, who doesn’t, and why – all of these shape how they live and how they relate to others, especially to those who do not share their beliefs. Ultimately, it is this last issue which is the most important.
At the end of the day, it is far easier to hurt and even to destroy another human being whom one already believes is cursed by God. After all, the hurt done to them in this life is nothing compared to the suffering they will endure in the next life and, so the argument goes, reflects God’s ultimate will and may even cause them to repent of whatever sins they are supposedly guilty.
Over the centuries, millions of people have been subjected to everything from regular degradation to the most horrendous suffering, including mass murder, all because they were outside of some other group’s salvation scheme. That tragic behavior continues to this very day in more places and ways than we can name.
Unfortunately, even those who are well-intentioned, including Rob Bell, may be guilty of perpetuating this problem. While not necessarily as toxic as consigning people with whom he disagrees to Hell, Bell’s description of them as “truly humbled, broken, and desperate for reconciliation” is not much better. Am I in that category because I am a non-Christian? Are atheists in that category because they don’t believe in the existence of God?
While Bell argues for love, he does so in a way which embraces a belief in the still real spiritual failings of what I am sure equals billions of people. While his approach is a big deal within Christian theological circles, and is certainly an upgrade on those beliefs which regard many of us not only as damaged but as eternally cursed, it’s far from where I think such beliefs need to be.
Personally, it strikes me as arrogant to imagine that when we are done in this life, there is nothing that comes after. But it strikes me as both arrogant t and dangerous to believe that whatever is coming will be measured by any one set of beliefs that obtain in this word, and certainly not that people will be measured by the rules of those communities to which they did not belong when they were here.

Reprinted from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s blog Windows and Doors: Where politics and pop culture meet 3000 years of Jewish Wisdom on Beliefnet

Despite all the over-blown claims about the “clearly” positive meaning of Egypt’s so-called January 25th Revolution by some, and the outright fear-mongering about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood by others, the only thing that’s clear, is that the situation in Egypt and throughout the Middle East’s Muslims nations, is anything but clear. Whether or not the unfolding situation will bring positive change vis a vis the United States’ relations with those countries depends on the level of openness which the parties can maintain.

Egypt, Tunisia and any other countries which join them in overthrowing non-democratic regimes will have to channel their passion for change, not only into democratic government, but into democracies which value openness and some form of rights-driven government which puts individual citizens ahead of any particular religious system. Neither Egypt, Tunisia, nor any other Muslim country is the US, nor should they be.
They will however have to embrace unprecedented, for them at least, levels of cultural and legal openness if they hope to see a new era in relations with the United States.

United States policy-makers will have to figure out what it means to see hope where they have often trained themselves to see only hopelessness. They need to get past overly simplistic dichotomies which force us to choose between individual dictators and the dictatorship of a particular faith. We need to embrace the notion that there are many ways to create the kind of political and legal cultures which we treasure, including the possibility of doing so within an Islamic context. To be sure, no nation in the Muslim world has really done that, but places like Turkey are trying and we dare not declare impossible that which is simply unprecedented.

The future of US relations with Muslim countries depends on the willingness of both sides to open their collective minds to new possibilities and the discipline to realize that despite having taken some very interesting steps in the past weeks, the journey is far from over. In a world of over-eager apologists and small-minded cynics, we need clear-eyed optimists – people who know that naiveté can be deadly, but that without hope, we are already dead.

Reprinted from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s blog Windows and Doors: Where politics and pop culture meet 3000 years of Jewish Wisdom on Beliefnet

Reprinted from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s blog Windows and Doors: Where politics and pop culture meet 3000 years of Jewish Wisdom on Beliefnet

Reprinted from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s blog Windows and Doors: Where politics and pop culture meet 3000 years of Jewish Wisdom on Beliefnet

Reprinted from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s blog Windows and Doors: Where politics and pop culture meet 3000 years of Jewish Wisdom on Beliefnet

Reprinted from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s blog Windows and Doors: Where politics and pop culture meet 3000 years of Jewish Wisdom on Beliefnet

Is it appropriate to simply right him off as a kook? Can we afford to stand silently by? The answers to those questions have nothing to do with how one feels about Islam in general, or about the proposed cultural center and mosque to be situated a few blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center.

Whether one opposes the mosque or not, this proposed Koran burning is obscene. Tragically and ironically, this is an expression of Christianity which parallels the parts of Islam which represent a genuine threat to the human race. I guess it’s an irony Pastor Jones misses, but reminds us all that it’s not the faith which kills; it’s the fanatical attachment to it.

Before deciding what you think is the appropriate response, think for a minute about the response you would hope for, if it were bibles that someone proposed to burn? What would be the appropriate response to a religious leader calling for the public burning of a Torah scroll?

We cannot call for a vocal response from Muslims when Muslims engage in hateful acts towards the followers of other faiths unless we, who cherish those other faiths, speak out when our religious leaders behave hatefully. Ultimately, this moment is not a test of Pastor Jones, but for the rest of us. I hope we pass. I guess we’ll see.

Reprinted from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s blog Windows and Doors: Where politics and pop culture meet 3000 years of Jewish Wisdom on Beliefnet