WEBVTT

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I was a new mother

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and a young rabbi

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in the spring of 2004

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and the world was in shambles.

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Maybe you remember.

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Every day, we heard devastating reports
from the war in Iraq.

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There were waves of terror
rolling across the globe.

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It seemed like humanity
was spinning out of control.

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I remember the night that I read

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about the series of coordinated bombings

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in the subway system in Madrid,

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and I got up and I walked over to the crib

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where my six-month-old baby girl

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lay sleeping sweetly,

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and I heard the rhythm of her breath,

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and I felt this sense of urgency
coursing through my body.

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We were living through a time
of tectonic shifts in ideologies,

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in politics, in religion, in populations.

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Everything felt so precarious.

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And I remember thinking,

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"My God, what kind of world
did we bring this child into?

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And what was I as a mother
and a religious leader

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willing to do about it?

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Of course, I knew it was clear

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that religion would be
a principle battlefield

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in this rapidly changing landscape,

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and it was already clear

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that religion was a significant
part of the problem.

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The question for me was,

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could religion
also be part of the solution?

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Now, throughout history,

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people have committed
horrible crimes and atrocities

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in the name of religion.

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And as we entered the 21st century,

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it was very clear that religious extremism
was once again on the rise.

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Our studies now show

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that over the course
of the past 15, 20 years,

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hostilities and religion-related violence

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have been on the increase
all over the world.

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But we don't even need
the studies to prove it,

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because I ask you,
how many of us are surprised today

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when we hear the stories
of a bombing or a shooting,

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when we later find out
that the last word that was uttered

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before the trigger is pulled
or the bomb is detonated

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is the name of God?

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It barely raises an eyebrow today

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when we learn that yet another person

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has decided to show his love of God

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by taking the lives of God's children.

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In America, religious extremism

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looks like a white,
antiabortion Christian extremist

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walking into Planned Parenthood
in Colorado Springs

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and murdering three people.

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It also looks like a couple

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inspired by the Islamic State

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walking into an office party
in San Bernardino and killing 14.

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And even when religion-related extremism
does not lead to violence,

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it is still used
as a political wedge issue,

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cynically leading people
to justify the subordination of women,

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the stigmatization of LGBT people,

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racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

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This ought to concern deeply

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those of us who care
about the future of religion

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and the future of faith.

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We need to call this what it is:

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a great failure of religion.

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But the thing is, this isn't even the only
challenge that religion faces today.

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At the very same time

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that we need religion
to be a strong force against extremism,

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it is suffering
from a second pernicious trend,

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what I call religious routine-ism.

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This is when our institutions
and our leaders

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are stuck in a paradigm
that is rote and perfunctory,

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devoid of life, devoid of vision

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and devoid of soul.

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Let me explain what I mean like this.

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One of the great blessings
of being a rabbi

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is standing under the chuppah,
under the wedding canopy, with a couple,

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and helping them proclaim publicly

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and make holy the love
that they found for one another.

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I want to ask you now, though,

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to think maybe from your own experience

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or maybe just imagine it

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about the difference
between the intensity of the experience

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under the wedding canopy,

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and maybe the experience
of the sixth or seventh anniversary.

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(Laughter)

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And if you're lucky enough
to make it 16 or 17 years,

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if you're like most people,
you probably wake up in the morning

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realizing that you forgot to make
a reservation at your favorite restaurant

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and you forgot so much as a card,

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and then you just hope and pray
that your partner also forgot.

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Well, religious ritual and rites

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were essentially designed
to serve the function of the anniversary,

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to be a container in which
we would hold on to the remnants

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of that sacred, revelatory encounter

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that birthed the religion
in the first place.

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The problem is that after a few centuries,

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the date remains on the calendar,

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but the love affair is long dead.

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That's when we find ourselves
in endless, mindless repetitions

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of words that don't mean anything to us,

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rising and being seated
because someone has asked us to,

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holding onto jealously guarded doctrine

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that's completely and wildly out of step
with our contemporary reality,

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engaging in perfunctory practice

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simply because that's the way
things have always been done.

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Religion is waning in the United States.

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Across the board,
churches and synagogues and mosques

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are all complaining

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about how hard it is to maintain relevance

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for a generation of young people
who seem completely uninterested,

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not only in the institutions
that stand at the heart of our traditions

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but even in religion itself.

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And what they need to understand

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is that there is today
a generation of people

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who are as disgusted by the violence
of religious extremism

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as they are turned off

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by the lifelessness
of religious routine-ism.

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Of course there is
a bright spot to this story.

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Given the crisis of these two
concurrent trends in religious life,

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about 12 or 13 years ago,
I set out to try to determine

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if there was any way

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that I could reclaim the heart
of my own Jewish tradition,

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to help make it meaningful
and purposeful again

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in a world on fire.

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I started to wonder,

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what if we could harness
some of the great minds of our generation

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and think in a bold and robust
and imaginative way again

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about what the next iteration
of religious life would look like?

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Now, we had no money,
no space, no game plan,

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but we did have email.

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So my friend Melissa and I
sat down and we wrote an email

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which we sent out
to a few friends and colleagues.

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It basically said this:

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"Before you bail on religion,

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why don't we come together
this Friday night

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and see what we might make
of our own Jewish inheritance?"

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We hoped maybe 20 people would show up.

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It turned out 135 people came.

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They were cynics and seekers,

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atheists and rabbis.

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Many people said that night
that it was the first time

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that they had a meaningful religious
experience in their entire lives.

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And so I set out to do the only
rational thing

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that someone would do
in such a circumstance:

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I quit my job and tried to build
this audacious dream,

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a reinvented, rethought religious life

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which we called "IKAR,"

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which means "the essence"
or "the heart of the matter."

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Now, IKAR is not alone

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out there in the religious
landscape today.

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There are Jewish and Christian
and Muslim and Catholic religious leaders,

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many of them women, by the way,

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who have set out to reclaim
the heart of our traditions,

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who firmly believe that now is the time
for religion to be part of the solution.

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We are going back
into our sacred traditions

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and recognizing that all of our traditions

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contain the raw material
to justify violence and extremism,

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and also contain the raw material
to justify compassion,

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coexistence and kindness --

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that when others choose to read our texts
as directives for hate and vengeance,

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we can choose to read those same texts

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as directives for love
and for forgiveness.

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I have found now

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in communities as varied
as Jewish indie start-ups on the coasts

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to a woman's mosque,

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to black churches
in New York and in North Carolina,

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to a holy bus loaded with nuns

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that traverses this country
with a message of justice and peace,

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that there is a shared religious ethos

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that is now emerging in the form
of revitalized religion in this country.

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And while the theologies
and the practices vary very much

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between these independent communities,

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what we can see are some common,
consistent threads between them.

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I'm going to share with you
four of those commitments now.

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The first is wakefulness.

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We live in a time today

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in which we have unprecedented access

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to information about every global tragedy

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that happens on every corner
of this Earth.

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Within 12 hours, 20 million people

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saw that image
of Aylan Kurdi's little body

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washed up on the Turkish shore.

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We all saw this picture.

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We saw this picture
of a five-year-old child

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pulled out of the rubble
of his building in Aleppo.

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And once we see these images,

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we are called to a certain kind of action.

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My tradition tells a story
of a traveler who is walking down a road

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when he sees a beautiful house on fire,

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and he says, "How can it be
that something so beautiful would burn,

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and nobody seems to even care?"

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So too we learn that our world is on fire,

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and it is our job to keep our hearts
and our eyes open,

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and to recognize
that it's our responsibility

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to help put out the flames.

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This is extremely difficult to do.

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Psychologists tell us that the more
we learn about what's broken in our world,

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the less likely we are to do anything.

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It's called psychic numbing.

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We just shut down at a certain point.

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Well, somewhere along the way,
our religious leaders forgot

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that it's our job
to make people uncomfortable.

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It's our job to wake people up,

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to pull them out of their apathy

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and into the anguish,

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and to insist that we do
what we don't want to do

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and see what we do not want to see.

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Because we know
that social change only happens --

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(Applause)

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when we are awake enough
to see that the house is on fire.

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The second principle is hope,

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and I want to say this about hope.

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Hope is not naive,

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and hope is not an opiate.

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Hope may be the single
greatest act of defiance

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against a politics of pessimism

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and against a culture of despair.

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Because what hope does for us

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is it lifts us out of the container

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that holds us and constrains us
from the outside,

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and says, "You can dream
and think expansively again.

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That they cannot control in you."

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I saw hope made manifest
in an African-American church

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in the South Side of Chicago this summer,

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where I brought my little girl,

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who is now 13

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and a few inches taller than me,

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to hear my friend Rev. Otis Moss preach.

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That summer, there had already been
3,000 people shot

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between January and July in Chicago.

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We went into that church
and heard Rev. Moss preach,

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and after he did,

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this choir of gorgeous women,
100 women strong,

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stood up and began to sing.

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"I need you. You need me.

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I love you. I need you to survive."

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And I realized in that moment

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that this is what religion
is supposed to be about.

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It's supposed to be about
giving people back a sense of purpose,

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a sense of hope,

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a sense that they and their dreams
fundamentally matter in this world

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that tells them
that they don't matter at all.

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The third principle
is the principle of mightiness.

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There's a rabbinic tradition
that we are to walk around

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with two slips of paper in our pockets.

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One says, "I am but dust and ashes."

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It's not all about me.

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I can't control everything,
and I cannot do this on my own.

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The other slip of paper says,
"For my sake the world was created."

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Which is to say it's true
that I can't do everything,

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but I can surely do something.

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I can forgive.

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I can love.

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I can show up.

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I can protest.

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I can be a part of this conversation.

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We even now have a religious ritual,

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a posture,

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that holds the paradox
between powerlessness and power.

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In the Jewish community,

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the only time of year
that we prostrate fully to the ground

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is during the high holy days.

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It's a sign of total submission.

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Now in our community,
when we get up off the ground,

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we stand with our hands
raised to the heavens,

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and we say, "I am strong,
I am mighty, and I am worthy.

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I can't do everything,
but I can do something."

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In a world that conspires
to make us believe that we are invisible

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and that we are impotent,

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religious communities and religious ritual

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can remind us that for whatever
amount of time we have here on this Earth,

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whatever gifts and blessings
we were given,

00:13:39.080 --> 00:13:40.816
whatever resources we have,

00:13:40.840 --> 00:13:43.176
we can and we must use them

00:13:43.200 --> 00:13:45.776
to try to make the world
a little bit more just

00:13:45.800 --> 00:13:47.181
and a little bit more loving.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:47.920 --> 00:13:50.856
The fourth and final
is interconnectedness.

00:13:50.880 --> 00:13:54.136
A few years ago, there was a man
walking on the beach in Alaska,

00:13:54.160 --> 00:13:56.096
when he came across a soccer ball

00:13:56.120 --> 00:13:58.616
that had some Japanese
letters written on it.

00:13:58.640 --> 00:14:01.976
He took a picture of it
and posted it up on social media,

00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:04.696
and a Japanese teenager contacted him.

00:14:04.720 --> 00:14:08.496
He had lost everything in the tsunami
that devastated his country,

00:14:08.520 --> 00:14:11.216
but he was able
to retrieve that soccer ball

00:14:11.240 --> 00:14:14.256
after it had floated
all the way across the Pacific.

00:14:14.280 --> 00:14:17.056
How small our world has become.

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It's so hard for us to remember
how interconnected we all are

00:14:21.920 --> 00:14:23.120
as human beings.

00:14:24.720 --> 00:14:26.696
And yet, we know

00:14:26.720 --> 00:14:29.416
that it is systems of oppression

00:14:29.440 --> 00:14:33.536
that benefit the most
from the lie of radical individualism.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:33.560 --> 00:14:35.376
Let me tell you how this works.

00:14:35.400 --> 00:14:37.336
I'm not supposed to care

00:14:37.360 --> 00:14:39.816
when black youth are harassed by police,

00:14:39.840 --> 00:14:42.136
because my white-looking Jewish kids

00:14:42.160 --> 00:14:46.056
probably won't ever get pulled over
for the crime of driving while black.

00:14:46.080 --> 00:14:50.096
Well, not so, because
this is also my problem.

00:14:50.120 --> 00:14:53.296
And guess what?
Transphobia and Islamophobia

00:14:53.320 --> 00:14:56.856
and racism of all forms,
those are also all of our problems.

00:14:56.880 --> 00:15:00.336
And so too is anti-Semitism
all of our problems.

00:15:00.360 --> 00:15:02.056
Because Emma Lazarus was right.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:02.080 --> 00:15:04.400
(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:07.560 --> 00:15:10.896
Emma Lazarus was right
when she said until all of us are free,

00:15:10.920 --> 00:15:12.856
we are none of us free.

00:15:12.880 --> 00:15:14.960
We are all in this together.

00:15:15.800 --> 00:15:19.296
And now somewhere at the intersection
of these four trends,

00:15:19.320 --> 00:15:24.056
of wakefulness and hope
and mightiness and interconnectedness,

00:15:24.080 --> 00:15:28.616
there is a burgeoning, multifaith
justice movement in this country

00:15:28.640 --> 00:15:30.896
that is staking a claim on a countertrend,

00:15:30.920 --> 00:15:36.056
saying that religion can and must be
a force for good in the world.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:36.080 --> 00:15:40.096
Our hearts hurt from
the failed religion of extremism,

00:15:40.120 --> 00:15:44.336
and we deserve more
than the failed religion of routine-ism.

00:15:44.360 --> 00:15:48.136
It is time for religious leaders
and religious communities

00:15:48.160 --> 00:15:51.536
to take the lead in the spiritual
and cultural shift

00:15:51.560 --> 00:15:55.256
that this country and the world
so desperately needs --

00:15:55.280 --> 00:15:57.416
a shift toward love,

00:15:57.440 --> 00:16:01.336
toward justice, toward equality
and toward dignity for all.

00:16:01.360 --> 00:16:04.800
I believe that our children
deserve no less than that.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:05.360 --> 00:16:06.576
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:06.600 --> 00:16:14.124
(Applause)