Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Rosh Hashana reminds us that God is God and we are not

By RAY WADDLE • September 27, 2008

As a non-Jewish churchgoing admirer of the Jewish new year, I'm reassured to see it coming around again (sundown Monday). It's a reality check in nervous times.

Rosh Hashana interrupts our regularly scheduled religious assumptions. It intervenes with a market correction against spiritual boasting and its twin sibling, spiritual
panic.

For 10 days it re-establishes an old, unpopular truth: God is God, giver of life and death — and we are not. God presides over an ethical universe, a Golden Rule precinct where everybody's job is to do the right thing, or else the whole thing collapses in self-pity and violence. The work of human beings should be helpfulness and humility, not excuses and delusions.

During these "Days of Awe," Jews are directed to make amends with each other and with God. They must reconcile.

A Golden Rule theme of reconciliation is a hallmark of all biblical religion. It exposes the great flaw of our stagy public dramas of religion and politics: Reconciliation is impossible when religion becomes a political weapon. Introduced as a solution in any political debate today, the Golden Rule sounds like weakness, appeasement, diplomacy. It sounds "European." On the stage of power, it is always disgraced.

That might explain why a new poll by the Pew Forum says more Americans — now 52 percent — believe churches should stay out of politics. The number has climbed in recent years, and it includes more and more evangelicals. Reasons are many, notably a national disgust with churchgoer loyalty to President Bush, backlash against pious governmental incompetence, and the disappointed discovery by religious conservatives that religion has no effect on policymakers. There's another reason: embarrassment that biblical religion is getting smeared in a permanent climate of fear.

Religious teaching is about getting right with your neighbor. But that's hard work (forget the terrorists; I'm talking about the annoying guy across the street, or in the next room). But such religion doesn't serve the culture of bullying greed and domination. So religion is distorted. God is reconfigured as a tribal warlord who despises weakness. Jesus is recast as a man's man action hero, burly not girly.

This contradiction — faith's message of reconciliation versus the weaponizing of faith — is too painful to admit publicly. One senses that both presidential candidates understand this, but by now it is impossible for either to tell the truth. It would look like weakness.

The Jewish new year lifts the veil on human schemes, declaring God isn't fooled. The holiday makes short work of those stubborn noisy deities who would rival the Creator of the world — gods of ambition, security, cowardice, denial. The Days of Awe belong to God.

Columnist Ray Waddle, former Tennessean religion editor now living in Connecticut, can be reached at [e-mail].

Copyright © 2008 The Tennessean

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080927/NEWS06/809270361/1023/NEWS01

---

and see http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=32473065