Home Digital Content Library “Dialogue Rather Than Dogma — Finding Light in a Dark World ” Rabbi Suzie Jacobson’s Shabbat sermon
Videos

“Dialogue Rather Than Dogma — Finding Light in a Dark World ” Rabbi Suzie Jacobson’s Shabbat sermon

Rabbi Suzie Jacobson
Qabbalat Shabbat, January 31, 2025
Temple Israel of Boston

“Dialogue Rather Than Dogma Finding Light in a Dark World”
Rabbi Suzie Jacobson
Transcript

How do you know what you know? 

I’m not asking about your sophisticated understanding of epistemology or neuroscience. 

How do we, as Jews, as human beings know anything? How do we trust what we know? Who do we trust? What do we follow? God? Intuition? Common sense? A set of rules? Morality? Rationality? 

This isn’t going to be a specifically political sermon to manage your expectations. You are free to have a side conversation in your own mind. 

It certainly could be I feel like much of my adult life has been a series of public debates on the topic – Colbert’s 2005 “truthiness,” followed by,  in no particular order: “fake news,” “my truth,” “alternative facts,” “post-truth” etc. All of these phenomena have real world implications. 

Now here we are 400 plus years after the Enlightenment. The postmodernist, liberal fascination with the subjective and the conservative fascination with the individual has led to this very interesting, and perhaps troubling moment in history. 

If everything from our news media to our history books to our sermons has an agenda, who and what do we believe? 

If every individual is an intellectual free agent which is perhaps the definition of having a conscious mind how do we not fall into dangerous moral relativism with each deciding on their own what is true and what is just? 

The epistemological crisis of our time was a long time in the making. In some spheres there’s a total breakdown in the concept of a shared reality. Adding to the problem, the proliferation of conspiracy theories and mainstream hoaxes has created chaos on a global scale. And it is dangerous for many, including Jews As Dara Horn teaches, anti-semitism is an old and well established conspiracy theory. This intellectual chaos is a breeding ground for the worst human instincts hatred, racism, sexism, antisemitism, and more. 

The problem of our times is not the realization that individuals and sources have an agenda – articles, books, music, sermons all have a perspective. If you read a piece of text from any era, you are reading someone’s polemic, someone’s ideology, someone’s opinion, someone’s rationally explained findings. Every translation is an interpretation even the seemingly straightforward process of translating a word is an act of decision making. Every peer reviewed scientific discovery is capable of being overturned by the next good idea. Everything made with human hands has the mark of the human brain who created it. 

Our problem is when humans allow their free range, ungrounded, highly ideological ideas to runamuck, when we lose our sense of a shared reality. Amplified by instantaneous and ubiquitous consumption of media we have a real problem on our hands. 

I’m not standing up here today to make you feel anxious though I own if that is a by-product I’m speaking about this because I believe that Judaism has an old and wonderful solution to this modern crisis and we only need to dig deeply into our shared tradition to find solace and direction during these turbulent times. 

One of the primary purposes of religion is to create and maintain a shared understanding of reality. The way religions usually create this shared truth is through the proliferation of dogma. A dogma is a fixed set of principles, ideas and beliefs that are authoritative and unquestionably true. 

Christianity, a religion rooted and centralized around beliefs, is anchored in dogma. Christian sects differ from one another sometimes around seemingly minor differences in dogma or theology. And of course, dogma is incontrovertible because it comes from God. 

Christianity is not the only religion or belief system that is rooted in dogma – you will find dogma or dogmatic thinking at the center of Islam, Marxism, fascism, democracy or even ancient Greek schools of thought like Stoicism. 

Dogmatic belief systems rely on a common factor though the religion or thought system might employ ration and might evolve with time – there is something always fixed and certain at the core. 

Judaism is a bit different The Torah, the mishnah, the Talmud all are nondogmatic texts. Although there is a definite common monotheism that evolves in ancient Jewish thought, you will find conversation and even disagreement about very central ideas. God is described in contradicting metaphoric language. If you ask me what Jews believe about the afterlife I can give you dozens of competing ideas that each get their own authoritative airtime. 

Rather than being fixed on a foundation of certainty, Judaism was created by the rabbis to be centered on conversation. And from this conversation, comes practices, behaviors, actions and ideas. And these all move and shift through time. 

But Judaism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. “The non-Jews have dogma, we need dogma too!” The first widely accepted Jewish dogma was written by Moses Maimonides in his introduction to his commentary on tractate Sanhedrin. This is commonly called the 13 Principles of Faith. Maimonides was deeply influenced by the Islamic Aristotelian thinkers of his time and he believed that a religion should have an organized doctrine. 

Now here’s where things get complicated If you go into an Orthodox synagogue tomorrow morning, they might sing Maimonides’ 13 principles – either as Yigdal or Ani M’amim, two popular liturgical hymns. By and large, many traditional Jews today would give two thumbs up to Maimonides’ list of core Jewish beliefs. 

I’m not sure we would agree with his list Turn to page 325. 

The “Yigdal” poem, poetically frames Maimonides’ words. I’m going to read his list, and you can compare as you skim the song – 

  1. God exists
  2. God is a perfect unity
  3. God has no physical body
  4. God preceded all being
  5. God alone is to be the object of worship
  6. God speaks to humans through prophets
  7. Moses will never be surpassed as a prophet
  8. The Torah is from heaven
  9. The Torah is eternal
  10. God is all-knowing
  11. God rewards good and punishes transgression
  12. The Messiah will redeem Israel
  13. The dead will be resurrected

Reform Judaism formally rejected the last two points on the messiah and resurrection. Modern biblical scholarship has put a wrench in the Torah being directly from heaven – spoiler alert, if you come to Torah study you are likely to hear about the Torah’s human authorship. Also, many of you likely struggle with this traditional understanding of God. And, I bet there are several other points that you might disagree with, struggle with, be unsure of or not understand. 

If we were an actually dogmatic religion we would give this list or something like it to our conversion students. We might include it in our membership materials. We might teach it in the religious school – we do not. 

In many ways modern Judaism, including the Judaism we practice here, is deeply nondogmatic. We recognize a range of beliefs, emphasize the development of morality and personal behaviors and invite pluralism as the rule not the exception. 

We follow the many Jewish scholars and theologians–including Moses Mendelsohn (1729-1786) and Leo Baeck (1873-1956) who rejected the idea that Judaism has dogmas. These scholars admitted that there are certain ideas implicit in Jewish texts and traditions, but they believed that formal doctrinal articulation was a medieval corruption of biblical and rabbinic Judaism.

As reform Jews, we quite literally, go back to the sources. If the rabbis of the Talmud could debate each other fiercely while raising up the holiness of their conflicted conversations. We are capable of the same. 

This, I believe, is an answer to the crisis of our time. What we need is conversation not dogma and ideology. When the world has lost its sense of a shared narrative, we can encourage conversation across division. We don’t need to dig in deeper to ideology, we need to open ourselves to intellectual challenge. How do we know what we know? We use our ration, our empathy, our intuition, our kindness, the voices of our ancestors and our ability to listen to the other, the neighbor, the stranger sitting across from us, including those we disagree with. 

We don’t need to silence ideas that are contrary to our own – we also do not have to agree. If we do not want to be silenced, we need to be careful not to silence others. 

To declare to the country that there are only two genders is an ideological assertion. It is forcing a dogma on a pluralistic community. Ask a group of human beings their gender, you will likely get more than two answers. Ask your clergy their gender, you will get more than two answers. Truth doesn’t come from top down declaration, it’s the observance of reality across multiple data points – even when you don’t like the answer. 

Oops I got political. 

In our portion this week, God brings the final three plagues to the Egyptians. The 9th plague is the plague of darkness. The darkness was so deep a person was not able to see their fellow sitting next to them. The rabbi Seforno said that even a candle’s light couldn’t dent the darkness. Nachmanides taught that this wasn’t an ordinary darkness, it was impenetrable, as if God had brought a cloud from heaven that was tangible, touchable and blocked any possibility of light. 

And yet, the Israelites were in the light – they could see one another, they could move, they could live – in a sense, it was a taste of freedom before their final redemption. 

Tomorrow morning at Torah study we will go deeper into the many texts and midrashim on this verse – but tonight I will leave us with this thought. 

We do not not have to sit in darkness. The darkness of our world is human made. We can follow our ancestors’ wise example – we can be curious, we can be aware of our fellow human beings, we can be thoughtful, we can be kind. Our Judaism does not hand us the answer to life’s questions on a single piece of paper – instead we are gifted a model for how to ask and find answers together. 

May we merit to sit in the light together as we find the many truths of the universe together.