Practice What You Preach
Know Before Whom You Stand
I wrote this post after a month during which the deaths of two close relatives brought me to memorial services at one of thousands of synagogues whose Torah ark conveys the message that Moses first heard from the Burning Bush. In Hebrew, the message reads: Da lifnei mi atah omed.
In my mind and heart, this message sparked an unspoken response. My response wasn’t addressed to God, nor even to the community burying the deceased. It was addressed to all preachers who should hear their own sermons, and to all healers who should first heal themselves. To everyone derailed by the sin of hypocrisy, an inner voice responded sublingually: “Practice what you preach.”
Practice What You Preach
I imagined a future in which adherents of all religions dedicate themselves to a living alignment of preaching and practice. In this future, we would dare to know before whom we stand. Then, there would be nothing left to say, and we would rejoice in the resonant silence, and we would have peace.
In the wisdom of my people, Peace is one of the names for the nameless illumination at the core of our being. We lose our connection with this reality when we preach peace and knowledge but practice war and ignorance, or when we exalt life as a supreme value but support ideologies that devalue and destroy life and meaning, or when we claim to follow the words of the living God but worship the golden calf.
When the Preacher and the Practitioner split, it doesn't matter how many times we see or repeat the message displayed on the Torah ark; we remain at war and in ignorance because we dare not know before whom we stand.
In several languages — Turkish, Georgian, Armenian and possibly others — there's a word for this state of inner and interpersonal disconnection: chatlakh. Colloquially, it's used as a vulgar insult with shades of meaning translatable as ‘scoundrel’ or ‘sleaze’ or ‘motherfucker’. But, etymologically, chatlakh means separated from God. In my view, chatlakh is another word for an idol worshipper.
Standing Straight
I feel no need to speculate about the identity of ‘before whom we stand’ and from whom we can be separated. Without any speculation, we know that we stand before each other and ourselves, with our unfolding stories woven into “a single garment of destiny”. We also know how easily this garment rips.
We honor the encounter by standing straight — compassionately conscious of the many meanings of this moment. Tragically, we also routinely desecrate this encounter not only with hypocrisy but also with inattention and our often unnoticed preference for the unreal over the real, the non-human over the human. In an essay by tech entrepreneur, Rabbi and futurist Jason Miller, I found a couple of memorable examples of these avoidable (and often trivial) tragedies.
Notice the Human
One day, tourists approached Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens outside the court. They weren't asking for his autograph. They didn't want to take a photograph with him. They didn't even recognize him. They wanted him to move out of the way so they could take a good photograph of the Supreme Court. According to this NYT article, Justice Stevens cherished the memory of this encounter.
Hear O Israel
Consider also the banality of our inattention to the beauty that fellow humans bring to the world. In a series of ‘Stop and Hear the Music’ social experiments (here is one in DC), busy commuters ignored Bach concertos performed by the superstar violinist Joshua Bell on a violin worth $3.5 million.
Pay Attention
I don’t know who first wrote or said that the idea of God is the clearest obstacle to the experience of God, but the observation seems both elegant and true. In a similar vein — and here I’m paraphrasing the poet Mary Oliver — the idea of prayer can be an obstacle to the experience of paying attention.
Some of the people who attended the memorial services with me pray three times a day. Some pray once a year, perhaps on Yom Kippur. Some never pray. But we all stand before each other, and we would all benefit from paying closer attention to this moment-to-moment unfolding experience.
Tribute to Virtue
Instead, we pay lip service to this reality. Or, in the words of the famed aphorist François de La Rochefoucauld:
Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.
The hypocrite's gambit works because he's learned to divorce abstract acknowledgements from lived reality. He gazes at the Torah ark reminding him to know before whom he stands, and he interprets the sentence as a reference to an abstraction rather than the flame of an encounter with a fellow human.
Related: Religion vs. Idolatry
The description of religions as viruses is not a judgment or an insult. It's an attempt to advance a theory that can account for religion as a natural phenomenon — as natural as a virus.
A point often made in response to such depictions of religion is that there's good religion, which typically means ‘mine’, and bad religion, which typically means ‘yours’. I propose a definition of bad religion that doesn't lapse into such juvenile finger-pointing and primitive shadow projection.
Rather than focus on the ways in which religion distorts reality as measured by science, I propose that the opposite of religion isn’t science but idolatry. From this point of view, we can evaluate the goodness of a religion on the basis of standards that the religion itself embraces. Across the traditions of Abrahamic monotheism, idolatry is bad.
I remember a time when serious students of religion and adherents of specific denominations would describe certain sects as idolatrous or heretical. Regardless of what percentage of the audience reacted with agreement or disagreement, few would argue, as I've been arguing since the turn of the century, that, these days, a better question is whether there are any non-idolatrous denominations.
Sure, I can point to numerous individual practitioners and leaders representing countless denominations who express the very best of their traditions, and I receive their practices and teachings as blessings. But at the institutional level, I apply a presumption of guilt to every denomination. As I see it, institutional religion is a choreographed betrayal of its own founding revelations.