We Are Here — The Roman Empire Is Not

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on June 6th. If you somehow missed the news, Rabbi Lizzi met the pope. The Vatican is not short supply of lavish iconography, and it got her thinking about the different relationships our traditions have with religious imagery. Because while Judaism is on guard against anything that smacks of idolatry, we have sacred symbols of our own. Can our reverence for these symbols as Jewish people or Americans border on idolatry?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

I want to begin at the beginning of this week’s reading, which Esther read to us this morning, 

B’ha’alotkha et haNerot, mul p’nei ha’Menorah, ya’iru shivat ha’Nerot
"Tell the Priest Aharon, mount the torches, so that the seven lamps give off light of the menorah.” 

The parasha goes on to describe how the menorah is made of hammered gold, one solid piece from base to the tip on each of the seven branches, requiring very ornate craftsmanship, and then the text moves on to talk about other things that happen inside the Mishkan, or the holy space made for God’s presence.

There were many objects in the Mishkan, the traveling sanctuary for the Israelites, which was the prototype for what later became the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. There were altars and implements to tend to the sacrifices made on it, cups, ladles, head-dresses breast-plates for the priests, and so much more. But the  menorah has become one of the most well known symbols in the Jewish tradition. 

I was in Rome this past week, part of a delegation, composed of business, government, labor and civic leaders, designed to build the relationship btw Rome and Chicago’s business and government, sharing projects and ideas. The faith leaders got added to the trip when it became clear that part of the Chicago + Rome mashup was going to involve meeting the Pope, who is after all from Chicago — and that became the big story. I was honored to be one of those faith leaders and the only rabbi. If you want to hear more about that part of the trip, after Shabbes search my name and “pope” and you’ll find some lovely articles from the Jewish press and from last week's Sunday Sun-Times. 

https://youtu.be/5w0sA7DSBfs

This morning I wanted to talk about something else that came up for me as a rabbi, and just as a Jewish person, walking around the beating heart center of the Catholic world last week. Symbols. Symbols and the role they play in our imaginations, our culture, and our religious lives. How symbols can uplift, and how they can distract, or God forbid, cause harm. 

To walk around Rome, and in particular to walk around the Vatican, is to encounter an overwhelming abundance of symbols and representations of God, of stories from the Hebrew Bible that we share, and Saints and stories holy to Christian history and lore. There is a culture dating back to pre-Christian Roman times, of depicting the Gods and Goddesses, and making elaborate structures and Temples to venerate them — temples and altars for Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus…. When the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century CE, he not only converted himself, but the entire empire. And so the representations of the Roman Gods in the temples were replaced with representations of Jesus and Mary and the apostles, and the Temples to the Roman Gods became Churches.

The culture of creating visual art, architecture, sculpture and painting so prominent in the Roman Empire, was retrofitted to venerate the Chistian God. And they took this veneration to new levels– think of the iconic churches and cathedrals around the globe but especially in Europe, and especially in Italy, and especially in the Vatican: St. Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, the walls and halls of the Vatican itself. It honestly feels like a wonder of the world. The staggering creativity of the human mind and collaborative effort that it requires to make stuff like this — it is indeed a tribute to God’s greatness. 

And I have to admit- I was a little jealous. We Jews don’t really have anything like that. Sure, we have a few examples of large, grand, ornate synagogues, mostly in Europe, some in the United States here — but the truth is they’re designed to imitate their Christian neighbors. And they are the exception, not the rule. Throughout most of Jewish history over the last 2000 years, Jews have not focused heavily on building magnificent physical structures in which to venerate God, for a number of reasons I’ll get into in a minute. Most of the synagogues you might go into whether in Israel, or here in the states, or anywhere in the world, are pretty modest. Not ugly, by any means– totally passable and lovely spaces to pray, but nowhere close to the level of opulence as their Christian neighbors’ cathedrals. Why is that?

One reason is the Second Commandment.

"Lo ta’aseh l’kha pesel v’kol temuhan: You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any picture of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them." – Exodus 20. 

The prohibition on idolatry. Jews take this commandment quite seriously and don’t make art or sculptures depicting God. So if you have a notion of God as a man in the sky, guess what, blame Michaelangelo. Jews have overwhelmingly not made religious art — rather we have poured our creative energy into, this won’t surprise you, words. There is gorgeous Jewish art: illuminated manuscripts, caligraphy, gorgeous Haggadot, ornate Torahs and Torah mantles, prayer books, and thousands upon thousands of commentaries on Torah; poems and prayers and piyutim (religious poetry) — all in dialogue with the artistic or literary traditions wherever we found ourselves — Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, South and Central American neighbors… but mostly, not visual art. Again, there are a few exceptions to that, but they’re mostly exceptions to the rule.

The truth is the Jews did actually have one of the most ornate and beautiful Temple structures in the ancient world, the Temple in Jerusalem (in which the menorah I mentioned above was featured, among many other ritual objects, textiles, precious gems). But 2,000 years ago that very Roman empire, destroyed it in a bloody and protracted battle for control of the city in the year 70 CE. The destruction of the Temple is considered one of the darkest and most painful days in Jewish history because it marked the final blow to Jewish self-rule in the Land of Israel for the next 1,800 years, leading to centuries of displacement and persecution.  So how strange and unsettling, as I’m wandering around Rome, to see that darkest of moments depicted triumphantly on the Arch of Titus —this monumental marble structure, which has stood in the middle of Rome since it was erected in the first century CE to honor this great conquest.

Standing there, contemplating this celebratory depiction of our pain, I realized something else. I am here — the Jews are still here. The Roman Empire is not! Because one of the unintended consequences of that crisis was that it catalyzed our survival. Had that moment of utter destruction not happened, there would have been no reason for Judaism to be rebooted from the sacrifice-based, place-based, Temple-and-priest-based religion of ancient times to the version of Judaism we now practice. Because of that cataclysmic moment, Rabbinic Judaism — this new version of Judaism that was developing alongside Temple Judaism but that didn’t require a central Temple, didn’t require animal sacrifice and didn't require priests, rather, required prayer, learning, acts of lovingkindness, shabbat observance, keeping kosher, and other things we could do in our homes and communities and put in a suitcase and carry with us if need be — that version went from being on the fringe to the only game in town. And it’s the game we’re still playing, 2,000 years later. It’s a near certainty that if that hadn’t happened, Judaism would have died along with every other place-based, sacrifice-based tribe in ancient Israel. 

And the fact that this version of the religion was so portable was no accident: we had just seen what happens when you put too much emphasis on a place, on a structure. It can be destroyed. And not only can it be destroyed, but if we believe that the place is its essential feature - then we're done. Might as well give up when we lose it. But if we create something bigger than the place, something that can adapt and change, something we can carry in our bodies, hearts, and minds — then we can navigate the rubble and find a path forward. And so we become people of the Book. Or to quote Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, we became a religious civilization — by contrast to other civilizations whose contributions to culture might include art or architecture, the Jewish civilization is one built around learning, worship and religious practice, Shabbat and holiday celebration, and a calendar, and ethics and ideas.

Another unintended consequence of that dispersion was a really fruitful fusion with cultures and ethnicities around the world that have been an immense force of creativity and growth, in all the cultures in which we’ve dwelt over the past 2,000 years, producing mashups of Hebrew and other languages, like Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Roman, Judeo-Arabac… and the influence of all of these fusions on science, philosophy, theater, humor, music, food, and the list goes on —– has blessed us and blessed the world. I love witnessing when an American Jewish child learns that Bagel is a Yiddish word, meaning ring, and is a gift to America from their Jewish great grandparents who came here 100 years ago. You’re welcome. Thank God for the Jewish diaspora and all its colorful richness all over the globe. 

That said, there is immense vulnerability in always being a stranger in a other peoples lands. Being a minority everywhere our people went, and being persistently different, made Jews a target for hatred and oppression virtually everywhere, some centuries and places better than others, and some, so painful and destructive that we’ve still not really recovered emotionally or physically, even if we seem to be doing OK now. Losing a sense of homeland meant always wandering, with a sense that anyplace could spit us out at any moment, or worse. Now that there is Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel again, for the first time in almost 2000 years, it is evident the degree to which this historic sense of vulnerability shapes Jewish consciousness- sometimes in a way that’s genuinely protective, and sometimes in a way that does not fit the situation. As trauma so often shows up.

So it gave me a weird feeling to see that cataclysmic scene of our people’s darkest moment, depicted on the Arch of Titus — which shows the Roman army triumphantly carrying off Jewish slaves and Temple implements from as plunder featuring, iconically, the menorah. The menorah we read about in the Torah this very week.

The Romans took the thing. They stole the menorah. Maybe it's somewhere in the basement of the Vatican — so far they haven’t found it. However, we have the idea. What the menorah means. We have the portable story of Light and hope in darkness, and the ability to overcome impossible odds. Of creating beauty wherever we are, of living on a calendar that connects us more deeply to the rhythms of the earth even as it means that we’re always a little removed from the calendar of whatever society we live in. We have both the relationship with a land and a language, Israel and Hebrew, but also the land and language of wherever we are, making meaning and creating holiness everywhere.  Both and. Symbols can be subverted, carted off — what was a thing of immense holiness for us became a spoil of war for them, a sign of weakness and conquest. But we, with our ideas, our stories, our dreams, our creativity and resilience, have outlasted the empires built on things.

I wanted to close with the notion that Judaism’s forbidding of the making of graven images to represent God, is actually because God already has an image in the world. It’s us. To depict God’s form is considered idolatry because God’s form is all around us, if we would only look. Take a look around at all these images of God. This is what Jews hold most sacred, a directive from the opening chapters of the Torah: not a thing, but human life itself. 

Particularly today, as we fight over the meaning of symbols — whether the American Flag, the Star of David, the rainbow during Pride Month — the important thing is to venerate not the thing but to embody the ideals it stands for. Not to pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America — but to hold sacred the ideals of liberty and justice for all. Our history as Jews has taught us always to remember the ideals behind the image is, whatever it is, centering the human being and our inalienable, God-given right to freedom and happiness — to be who we are and to love who we love. To hold anything else as sacred is to violate the Second Commandment, clinging to something other than the only image of God in the world.

It reminded me of this poem, and with this I’ll close. 

"Tourist" by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai:

Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Citadel,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see
that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head."
I thought: "But he's moving, he's moving!"
Redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Shabbat shalom.