Aspiration Toward Inspiration

Hillel, a 1st century Rabbi whom Paul of Tarsus studied under, was once approached by a man who told him: “If you can teach me the whole of the Torah while I stand on one foot, you can make me a Jew.”

Hillel responded: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study.”

Think on that… “the rest is commentary. Go and study.”

One of the continuing themes in the Bible is Jesus’ healing on Sabbath days. In all of the gospels, the Pharisees are irritated with Jesus for breaking Sabbath law. If we look in the story of John 9, where Jesus heals the blind man, we see that not only does Jesus give this man the ability to see, he does it in a funny way. Jesus spits, gathers up dirt, rubs it in his hand to make mud, smears it on the man’s eyes, and tells the man to go wash his face.

Why didn’t Jesus just say “abra cadabra” and heal the man?

At this point in the history of Jewish legalism, Sabbath law had become so particular that simple things like molding mud and spitting were considered breaking the law. It had become THAT particular. So why did Jesus spit, gather up dirt, rub it in his hands to make mud, smear it on the man’s eyes, and tell him to go wash his face? Because each of those steps was breaking Sabbath law. Because Jesus was pointing out NOT ONLY how Sabbath law was preventing good works, but also the ridiculousness of how unnecessarily picky Sabbath law had become. He performed the healing in such a way as to rub it in the face of the Pharisees.

Jesus is rubbing his “disobedience” of Sabbath law in the faces of these religious authorities.

If you were standing there that day, wouldn’t you just say, “Oh snap”?

What conclusion do we draw from this story? The easy conclusion to draw from this story is that the law of compassion trumps all other Biblical law. It’s a good conclusion.

I like to think about this in an additional way. I like to see this as a way we should approach religion in general. Stay with me.

“Because God says so” is bad reasoning. I mean, Sabbath law was all about “because God says so.” For a fearful populace that thinks of God like we are ants and God is a human cleaning God’s kitchen, maybe that makes sense. Maybe we should just do what God says so God doesn’t smoosh us. What’s wrong with thinking like that? It’s playing it safe. Jesus was all about playing it safe, right?

…

(the answer is no)

For one thing, within ANY religious tradition, you can say, “it says in scripture that this is the right action,” and there is ALWAYS another passage you can draw from that contradicts that position. ALWAYS. So we can say that the contradictory nature of religious scripture should make clear to us the problem of Biblical literalism.

Well, that’s dispassionate, isn’t it? “Don’t claim God as your reasoning because someone can use your same God to contradict your reasoning.” There’s my dispassionate position.

My passionate reasoning goes more like this: To be compassionate because God says so is cheap. It’s no longer compassion, it’s again adherence to law, and the problem with law is that it imposes boundaries. We should never put boundaries on compassion.

One night, I was driving home… from IHN, actually… with my then-boyfriend. As we were heading down Ellsworth, he exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, I think that guy was hurting that girl.”
“What? Where?” I asked.
“Back there,” he said and motioned. “He had her pinned against that wall.”
I turned the car around.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I said, “I’m going back.”
“Why? What are you going to do?”
At this point, we see that the couple was merely making out. I didn’t have to figure out what I was going to do. What was I going to do? I don’t know. Call the police? At least shine my headlights and get him to take his hands off her? Invite her into my car? What was I going to do? I don’t know. Not the point.

As we drove away, he asked, “Why do you always do that?”

Of course, he wasn’t referring to some tendency I have to interfere in instances of domestic violence. Thankfully, I don’t often encounter domestic violence. He was referring to the times I’d step in between his friends in bar fights. To the times I’d help out a random girl in a club. To the times I stop and try to talk to someone crying on the street. To the earfuls I’d give to large strangers exhibiting sexism. To the conversations I’d have with homeless people. To the times I’d run outside and break up a cat fight (the kind between cats…). To the everyday small things, sometimes stupid things, I would do. To all the things he’d get irritated with after I did them. Why do those things?

What he meant was, “Why do you always get involved in other people’s business?” And perhaps… “especially when it involves some kind of risk.” It really bothered him. He saw my actions as butting into other people’s lives. If his friends were going to get hit in a bar fight, they deserved it for being stupid. I’m a 110-pound female. How am I going to help?

Well, I like to think that because I am a 110-pound female, a man is unlikely to hit me. It’s maybe a risky bet, but it’s one that I’m willing to make.

But my boyfriend’s question goes unanswered. Why? Why do I do that? Do I do it because it’s what God wants? Because it’s what Jesus taught? Because it says somewhere in the Bible? I say I do it because it’s the way my momma raised me. And my mommy didn’t raise me talking about God or Jesus… or Buddha or the Pope or the Dali Lama…

My mother raised me to take other people’s experiences into my own. She told me not to hurt other people in my words or actions. People don’t like to hurt. “Would you like someone to do that to you?” she would always ask. I avoid hurting people for the same reason I try to help people… because we should be acting with a mentality of Human community. Of course, my mother never said this. Before now, I never have, either.

Why do we try to help people? We just do it. It comes from inside, not from outside. If God told me to help people, God did it from the inside. Not through scripture, through Humanity.

God gave us free will and these beautiful minds that are capable of some extremely complex thought. Why would God do that if God just wanted us to simply surrender our own judgment to authority? It doesn’t really make sense, does it? Why give us these beautiful analytic minds and then say, “everything you need to know should be in Leviticus”? It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense because God is still speaking.

God gave us a mind and a heart and a moral compass. God gave us these tools with which to learn from scripture, to learn from Life. I think that God’s main guiding tools for us are internal. After all, scripture only has meaning to us BECAUSE of those tools, because of that Spirit of God in all of us.

If God is in me, God is in you, and if God is in MY motivation, God is in yours as well. I should take EVERYONE’S wellbeing into my decision-making. God probably does.

My willingness to stand in between 2 people on the verge of violence is because my mom taught me not only to anticipate MY possible outcomes, but others’ as well.

One of my professors referred once to a book called, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Philip Hallie. The subtitle of this book says it is “The story of the village of Le Chambon and how goodness happened there.” What a funny way to phrase things. The book is about a small village whose center was a small Protestant church. The pastor, Andre Trocme, started housing Jews during the Holocaust. As time went on, his home and church became full of Jews and his hiding them seriously endangered his own life, the lives of his family members and the lives of everyone in their village… but this whole village came together and helped hide these Jews from the military. They all risked their lives for the well-being of complete strangers.

Compassion does not know the boundaries of law or religion or any other boundaries.

Andre Trocme believed that beyond the moral strengths and weaknesses of human beings, there is something much more valuable. In Trocme’s eyes, God showed how valuable each and every Human Life was when he sent Jesus to help us. Trocme believed that every Human life had a “spiritual diamond” that God cherished.

At the time that Hallie wrote his book, Andre Trocme had passed away, but his wife was alive and available to interview. I’d like to share a passage from the book.

“When I asked her why she found it necessary to let those refugees into her house, dragging after them all those dangers and problems, including the necessity of lying to the authorities, she could never fully understand what I was getting at. Her big, round eyes stopped sparkling in that happy face, and she said, “Look. Look. Who else would have taken care of them if we didn’t? They needed our help, and they needed it then.” For her, and for me under the joyous spell she casts over anybody she smiles upon, the spade was turned by hitting against a deep rock: there are no deeper issues than the issue of people needing help then.”

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”

How could the people of that small French village let the Jews stay in harm’s way? They recognized the community of Humanity and saw that those lives mattered as much as their own. They took on the struggle of strangers… because those strangers needed help then. When a girl is crying on the street in San Francisco, she probably needs help then. When 2 people are about to break into violence, they need help then. Getting an ice pack 20 minutes later is helping a different problem.

The gospel stories are inspirational and illustrate time and again how compassionate service matters. When Jesus heals the man in front of the Pharisees, he doesn’t say “God told me to.” He just does it. He does it by rolling up his sleeves and getting dirty… quite literally. He doesn’t justify himself in any way and in fact does it in direct contradiction of those rules which are supposed to be moral guidelines. Jesus doesn’t refer to some section of the Torah or wisdom literature to substantiate his reasoning for acting this way. He just does it.

Why do you behave the way you do? Why do I behave the way I do? I try to think about my whys and what I want my whys to be. When someone asks us, “Why do you do that?” hopefully we can say: “it needed to be done, and it needed to be done then.”