I’m not partial to faith healing and miracle stories. I like to keep my feet on the ground when talking about God. And so does my good friend Anne Hodges-Copple, who serves as rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Durham, North Carolina.

So I was a little surprised when she sent me a recent sermon that centers on what looks ostensibly like a simple story of faith and healing. It happened recently when Anne went on a church mission to Belize, in central America.

Late one night, only about ten days ago, twenty-year-old Rachel woke up in her one room house on the outermost edge of San Mateo, Belize. Her husband and two young sons were still asleep. She looked over the swamp outside the window of the tiny box of a house she and her husband had built from discarded wood planks and scrap metal. Like other rather ramshackle dwellings nearby, her house was built on piles that rose above the soft ground created by filling in the lagoon with a dubious combination of sand and trash. San Mateo was created away from any land that could be valuable to developers and to keep poor workers and their families out of the sight of the thriving tourist industry of San Pedro. Despite the beautiful multi-hued turquoise waters of the Caribbean that surrounds Ambergris Cay, Rachel and her neighbors were surrounded by brackish water, and a ground so lacking in nutrients that the hardiest shrub had a difficult go of it.

Rachel awoke because she sensed something was wrong. As she told the social worker at Holy Cross Anglican School later that day, she felt something invisible move across the swamp and into her home. She felt something dark and sinister blow into the house. She closed the board door across the window. Shortly thereafter her youngest child, three year old Ronan, woke up crying. He called out in a terrified voice that crabs were eating him. Candles were lit and the child examined by worried parents. They could find no evidence of any bites. They could find no physical source of the child’s continued cries. They tried to soothe him, but he remained listless and distressed. Rachel feared that evil spirits had come into her house perhaps, upon her child.

As usually happens in these stories, the doctors were of no use, and the family turned to the church—to Anne—for help. Her reply:

I’m Episcopalian. We might discuss demons in a Bible study, but that’s as close as I’ve gotten.” I paused, thinking to myself: what am I going to say if she asks me to perform an exorcism. “I could go and do a house blessing and a healing service for the child.”

But off she went, canoeing across a swamp to reach the afflicted family.

The family wanted Anne to bless their house with Holy Water—but Anne, for all her religious training, had no idea how to make water holy, or what procedure to follow. But she blessed some water with a baptism blessing,

I then took the sprig, dipped it in the water and began flinging water everywhere: over the door posts, inside and out. Over the windows, inside and out. I just made it up as I went along, inviting the Holy Spirit to visit the place, to drive away all sickness of mind, body and spirit. I invited the Holy Spirit to dwell in this home and abide with this family, keeping them safe from all harm. We crowed into the tiny house and blessed the stove and the kitchen table. Ronan was delighted with this shower of water being cast all over the place. He and his mother laughed as I shook the branch with the holy water over their beds and over their heads.

I then knelt down and placed my hands on Ronan and prayed for God’s healing. I then prayed over Rachel. By his time she is crying and I thought I was about to cry. But Ronan….., but Ronan was all smiles. Earlier when we first arrived his mother had asked him to sing but he shyly refused. Now, he tugged on her shirt. “I want to sing.” And as the three adult women stood there dumbstruck he proudly, carefully sang for us. “Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. All the people of God, praise the Lord.”

Anne presumes that the boy’s condition, and his cure, can be explained medically. But she also thinks she saw a miracle:

I do think I witnessed a miracle: a two part miracle. First, I saw a young poor woman with out any kind of social standing, without any kind of economical or political pull put all her trust in the Lord. She did what the Bible told her to do.… I saw a woman whose love for her child went hand in hand with her love of God.

Part two of the miracle? I saw a bond of fellowship and love that stretches across oceans and across time, across cultures and across class. I saw a miracle that has built a sanctuary of safety for the children of San Mateo. And I saw a bond of fellowship and love where a scared little boy and a priest out of her depth can sit down together and both feel the healing, cleansing power of the Holy Spirit. Those are miracles enough for me.

For me, too.

Let me add my own two cents: I have no doubt that Ronan’s condition was dire Anne would have seen that he got to the nearest hospital rather than just trust in God. But the cure that occurred here, as Anne points out, was much more than medicine could achieve. Not just bodies were healed.

As I’ve previously written, in the age of science the only way God can act in the world is if human beings make a deliberate choice to invite him in. That choice can’t be one that ignores the physical facts of the world. A true miracle does not change the world—it changes people. As George Bernard Shaw has his archbishop say in St. Joan,

A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. They may seem very wonderful to the people who witness them, and very simple to those who perform them. That does not matter: if they confirm or create faith they are true miracles.… Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

We can live without God. My friend Anne’s story shows that there are some good reasons to choose to live with him.

You can download a pdf version of Anne’s entire sermon on the St. Luke’s sermon page–click on the sermon for Feb. 15.

South Jerusalem lost another of its pillars this week. Aryeh Geiger, a religious educator for whom the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin signaled the need for a complete revision of religious education in Jerusalem, passed away this week after a four-year battle with cancer. I, and my daughter Misgav, were among the many hundreds who attended his funeral yesterday.

After the assassination, Geiger and a group of teachers and students founded Re’ut, a pluralistic religious school. The flexibility and freedom that Geiger sought were impossible within the strictures of Israel’s state-religious school system, so Geiger founded a religious school within the secular state system.

Shabbat is about to come in so I don’t have time to write at length about Aryeh, but I’ll paraphrase, from memory, the eulogy delivered by Geiger’s close associate, the chairman of the Knesset’s education committee. Rabbi Michael Melchior. Melchior compared Geiger to Isaac the patriarch. In last week’s Torah portion, Melchior recalled, we read about how Isaac continued to dig wells even as the Philistines kept filling them up. Even when the task seemed hopeless, Isaac continued to dig wells, until, finally, he dug one that flowed unimpeded.

Aryeh Geiger was a man who did not give up, and who was not deterred when others said that his vision was impossible. South Jerusalem, Israel, and the Jewish people will sorely miss him.

Readers interested in the science (specifically evolution) and religion debate might be interested in the exchange I’ve been participating in with the Grand Mufti and others over on Jewlicious. The GM defines the problem well, and I’ve tried to help him dispel some misconceptions. The gist is that it’s an error to say that belief in God is compatible with scientific explanations of the world–if what you mean by that is that God can somehow be inserted into science as some sort of meta-explanation for physical phenomena. However, in my view (though not the GM’s, as best I understand him), we can bring God into the world in other ways. I hope to expand on these thoughts here in the near future.

In response to my post The Torah-Who Needs It, “Haskalah” asks:

Can a Jew “think hard about every action, about what it means and what its consequences will be, without the Torah?” Did no one do so before the first Sha’vuot? In short, is it possible for a Jew to be moral and ethical and responsible without being observant?

It’s possible for anyone, not just a Jew, to be moral, ethical, and responsible without being religious or observant. And, as I noted in that post, observing the Torah’s commandments does not automatically make the observer a moral person.

Ultimately, I know of no rational argument that can convince anyone to be religious or observant. In the end, being religious requires an instinct that tells you that there is something beyond the empircal world. You need a sense of the sacred, and some people don’t have it.

But I can make this process-oriented case for the observance of precepts and ritual. When a ritual system is interwoven with your life, the study of your religion’s texts and laws directly affects your behavior. For example, if you are an observant Jew in Israel this year-a Sabbatical year-you have no choice but to grapple with the question of how you will observe the special laws pertaining to the produce grown in the Land of Israel during this year. The answers you reach in that study directly affect what and how you eat for an entire year.

So when you address larger moral issues in the same framework-to name some pressing and not specifically Jewish ones that Gershom and I have written about in this blog: homosexuality, organ transplant, health care, and the treatment of minorities and refugees-you already live a life in which study and abstract argument directly affect your everyday actions. I think that such a discipline encourages deep theoretical analysis and thought while keeping one’s feet on the ground and in the world of action.

That said, I certainly respect the many non-observant people I know who think deeply about moral issues and act to correct the injustices they see around them. They do God’s work.

I recall a gathering of journalists once many years ago at which a well-meaning but clueless intern told me that she worked in “Jerusalem, Israel” and then quickly corrected herself: “I meant just Jerusalem. I believe it should be an international city.”

In response to my Jerusalem Day post earlier this week, DanH asks a related question:

It has always seemed to me that, given the claims of both sides, the only long-term solution for Jerusalem is joint or autonomous administration, not just of the holy places, but of the whole city.

To idealists, and to some overwhelmed by the intractability of the Jerusalem problem, internationalization and joint Israeli-Palestinian rule over the Holy City sound like wonderful solutions. But, quite aside from the practical problems (recall Danzig, recall Trieste), they are wrong in principle.

Why? Because they give neither the Jews nor the Arabs what they want and need-ownership and sovereignty in the city they see as their capital.

Those two words, “ownership” and “sovereignty,” sound primitive and selfish to idealistic peaceniks. But that’s only because such people think the whole concept of national and religious identity is primitive and selfish. Enlightened humans, such people believe, don’t need such divisive things as religious belief and national affiliation. They don’t need blood and soil.

True, religious fundamentalism and hypernationalism can be a cause of conflict. But so can disregard of the natural human trait of identifying with and taking pride in one’s native culture, faith, and land. One reason (not the only one, of course) that sub-Saharan Africa is such a mess today is that the colonial powers disregarded ethnic affiliations and territories in drawing their boundaries. And self-styled trans-national states (Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union) always end up imposing a dominant culture on their minorities, leading to resentment and rebellion.

But the diversity of human culture, language, historical narrative, and paths to God is a gift and an asset. Who wants to live in a world where everyone thinks, talks, remembers, and worships the same? Instead of ignoring or dismissing particularistic identities, we need to strengthen them. It’s when people feel that their national and religious identities are under threat that they take up arms to defend them–and justly so.

A nation strong and secure in its identity can afford to give up some of its native territory and accept and acknowledge that other nations have other beliefs and narratives. When a people feels secure–not just militarily, but culturally as well–they can compromise.

Making both Palestinians and Israelis feel secure in their identities is thus essential for any peace plan. Given the centrality of Jerusalem in both Palestinian/Arab and Israeli/Jewish history, belief, and myth, it’s important that each nation have its own stake in the city. It’s not enough to hand it over to some vague international administration, or to share ownership. Each nation needs and deserves to have a part of it for its own. With firm and unchallenged sovereignty for both nations, Jerusalem can indeed become a city of peace.

But the association of the Most High with the most right-wing doesn’t stand up to philosophical scrutiny. Conservatives, after all, love order. They want today to be like yesterday, and tomorrow to be like the day before yesterday.

But then they’ve also got this all-powerful God who, they believe, intervenes in their lives, in politics, and in everything else on a daily, ongoing basis. But wait a minute–if God is constantly intervening in the world, that means the world operates according to God’s will, not according to any established laws. A world ruled by an omnipotent, interventionist God would, on the face of it, be totally unpredictable. Tomorrow would most certainly not be like today.

That’s not a very conservative proposition.

As Philip Ball points out in an excellent essay in the April 17 issue of Nature, “Triumph of the Medieval Mind,” European thinking about the world was revolutionized at the beginning of the twelfth century when lost and ignored classical works of science were reintroduced into Christendom via translations from the Arabic. Islamic scholars such as Averroes, Al-Khwarizmi, and Avicenna had studied and expanded on the work of Aristotle, Pythagoras, and other Greek and Roman philosophers during the second half of the first millennium. During this time, European geopolitics made the life insecure and unpredictable for the continent’s inhabitants, so they found little of interest in the works of ancients who claimed that the world was ruled by natural law.

But the twelfth century’s new generation of Christian thinkers–who came to be called the Scholastics–lived in a more stable climate. Like their Jewish contemporary Maimonides, they conceived that God’s glory was revealed not in his power to arbitrarily do as he wished with the world, but rather in the wisdom through which he created a world that was ruled by natural law. This law could be understood by mortals and used to predict how the events of tomorrow would result from those of today.

Like today’s rationalists, they were also vilified by critics who charged that science explicitly denied God a role in the world. But–and this is to often disregarded by modern-day defenders of science–their concept of natural law emerged from an explicitly theocentric view of the universe.

So is God a Republican? If we accept the view of the Scholastics and Maimonides, God favors order and consistency. But he also in his divine wisdom created a world that we can investigate and understand without reference to revealed truth. Perhaps that means he’s a Democrat.

I guess we’ll have to wait for November and see which way his precinct goes.

I’m delighted that you found my previous post worth a response. If a little summary judgment (isn’t that what blogging is all about?) can promote a lively exchange of ideas, then I think it’s for the best. If we weren’t doing this at our keyboards, when would we have found time for this conversation?

I’ll look forward to reading your book and having my misconceptions corrected—although I’m not convinced by your response that I have misunderstood where you stand.

I’m posting this on Erev Pesach; I’ve burned my hametz and will soon be setting out with my family to celebrate the Seder with close friends in Zikhron Ya’akov. So let me here focus briefly on your view of religion. I’ll address the nature of national identity in a future post.

Tellingly, you adduce William James and Emerson on man’s relationship to the divine. Both these American philosophers, as you note, viewed religion principally as an inner experience. Such a view of religion is peculiarly suited to the liberal American tradition, which holds that belief should be a private matter. A person’s relationship with God is his or her own business, and not the state’s.

I’m not arguing against this view as a political strategy, but most religious people would, I think, find it inadequate as an account of their experience and their needs. For them, religion not only comes from within but also from without, as a matter of revelation, tradition, myth, and sacred texts. The religion of James and Emerson has no room for ritual, for the performance of precepts (other than general moral ones), and relatively little for collective experience. Their religion did not need a church, mosque, or synagogue; it did not need stories of creation, redemption, and liberation; it did not need the performance of precepts. In a large measure, they viewed such elements, which bring individual believers together for prayer, disputation, and collective memory, as impediments to the inner spiritual state they viewed as the essence of man’s relationship to the divine.

The American relegation of religion to the private sphere grew out of specific historical circumstances. It produces an assimilating society that can absorb nearly anyone who accepts this principle.

My grandparents accepted it, were accepted into American society, and managed to work their way up into moderate prosperity, safety, and happiness. For them it was a great bargain, compared to what they had experienced under the czars and the commissars. But they gave up a lot, too; assimilating into America meant gradually sloughing off their Jewish heritage. They remained committed, identifying, and partially practicing Jews, as did their children and grandchildren. But their Jewish culture, the connection to Jewish history, tradition, practice, language, and texts, grew more and more attenuated in each generation. It wasn’t until I began relearning these things, first in high school and then after settling in Israel, that I realized how much we had given up in order to become American.

It’s wonderful that the world has a United States of America and a liberal American tradition, but not every place need be the United States and not every fair-minded, moral person need be an American-style liberal. In fact, if the whole world accepts the American solution, the world will lose a great deal. One of the things it will lose is the heritage of faiths that stress collective experience.

The Exodus, which we will both sit down to commemorate tomorrow night through the reading of an ancient text and the performance of ancient rituals, was a public, not an inner spiritual event—as the Seder makes its yearly rehearsal to this day.

This, let me assert once more, does not give religions a right to force others to believe or worship. I’m a fierce critic of the Orthodox Jewish establishment in Israel and of hyper-nationalist, xenophobic interpretations of our heritage (and of others). I believe that a seriously religious person in any faith ought to question, doubt, and struggle and that such engagement is a necessary condition for creating the humility and creativity that ethical life in the modern world requires.

But the proper answer to that is to seek to create a Judaism (and a Christianity, and Islam, and all the rest) that is open, accepting, and humanistic, but also faithful to and conversant in its heritage. If I understand you correctly, this is very different from your vision of Judaism and for your vision of how Jewish history and tradition would  operate in your Hebrew state.

I wish you and your family a joyful and thoughtful Seder and look forward to continuing this discussion.

Haim