I’ve brought with me this morning a small paper “fortune” out of a fortune cookie I ate recently. Usually, I don’t take them too seriously, because the “fortune” I receive is not directed to me personally, but is more or less just a random idea that just happened to be in my cookie. This message, however, seemed immediately applicable to what I was going through at the time, and I think the message will be meaningful to all of us this morning.
I’ll read you the message later. Right now, I want to read to you what Swedenborg said about what Jeremiah did with his underwear. I’m reading from Apocalypse Explained, which has much in common with the Arcana Coelestia except that it is a verse by verse treatment of the Book of Revelation instead of Genesis and Exodus. Swedenborg included our reading from Jeremiah in its pages, and I want to warn you all that you may be quite disturbed about part of it:
This represented of what quality the Israelitish and Jewish Church was and what it became; the “linen girdle which the prophet put upon his loins” signifies the conjunction of the church with the Lord by means of the Word; for the “prophet” signifies doctrine from the Word, and the “girdle upon the prophet’s loins” signifies conjunction. Falsifications of the Word by evils of life and falsities of doctrine, and thence reasonings that favor these, are signified by “the girdle was marred in the hole of the rock by the Euphrates”. For by means of the Word there is conjunction of the Lord with the church, and when the Word is perverted by reasonings that the favor evils and falsities there is no longer any conjunction, and this is also what is meant by “the girdle was profitable for nothing”. And here is the part that is likely to be disturbing: That this was done by the Jews is evident from the Word both of the Old and New Testaments. From the word of the New Testament it is evident that they perverted all things written in the Word respecting the Lord, and all the essentials of the church, and that they falsified these by their traditions.
This is not the only place where Swedenborg wrote words that seemed so blatantly antisemitic. Critics of Swedenborg have for years cited passages such as this, and several have concluded that Swedenborg was an antisemite. Being raised as a minister’s son in a part of the world where the Jewish population was quite small, and given that our Jewish brothers and sisters (mostly the brothers) have been blamed in Christianity for Jesus’s death, we should probably expect that Emanuel would have inherited a few cringe-worthy beliefs that might have leaked into his writing. But what are we supposed to do with statements like this? Clearly, and especially in these times when the dysfunctional horrors have reared their ugly heads once again in the Holy Land, we need to have a response to Swedenborg’s apparent attitudes regarding the Jewish tradition.
I remember being quite appalled in seminary when I first encountered these passages, and my teachers, bless them, helped me through it. As we study Swedenborg, it becomes clearer that he wasn’t making any blanket judgments about Judaism. He was talking about an attitude toward the Divine that has appeared in all of the world’s religions, and that is, for lack of a better term, I’m going to call religious materialism. I suppose we could also call it spiritual egotism or ego-centered spiritual practice, but it refers to the belief that all that is required for growth and enlightenment is an external adherence to the rules and practices of tradition, without the inclusion of sincerity. It means going through the motions of our religious practice without involving our deepest thinking and feeling, believing that if we simply do the rituals our heavenly future is assured. If we listen to what Jesus of Nazareth was saying about the Pharisees of his day, we get an image of people who seems to believe that the office alone will bring personal salvation. Jesus was criticizing those to put on the adornment and go through the prescribed rituals, by the book, even, but only superficially, thinking that such things as humility and sincerity weren’t necessary for a positive outcome. The Pharisees of his day, if the Gospels are historically accurate, were more concerned with the external, worldly benefits, the social status, the respect, the authority over others. Jesus was not criticizing Judaism—he was Jewish, after all, and he participated himself in the rituals of his culture. It’s often difficult for Christians to understand that Jesus do not invent Christianity. His disciples did, after he had “escaped the surly bonds of the earth”.
When Swedenborg wrote about “the Jews”, my professors explained, he was talking about the same attitude that we can all slip into, that worldly, external thinking, believing that if we go to church on a regular basis and give to charities and perform regular acts of service to the community—everything that most religions tell us are important—then we’ll be okay, and actually feeling a devotion to the Divine or engaging in regular reflection, actually working on ourselves to become genuinely spiritual people, isn’t a requisite for being a true Christian or Jew or Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu…
All the world’s religions teach that we must be internally invested in our spiritual practices if we are to grow—we must be sincere—and Swedenborg was trying to make the same point, He wasn’t saying that Judaism was bad; he was saying that we don’t grow if we are content with an attitude resembling the Pharisees that the Gospels describe. It is truly unfortunate that the writings just came out that way. In fact, my professors pointed out, Swedenborg was even more critical of the Christianity of his day, suggesting that Christianity had more than its share of Pharisee-minded adherents.
I wish often that Swedenborg would have known personally the few Jewish people living in Sweden in his day. I truly believe that his words would have come out differently. I attended a lecture, years ago when I was living in Boston, by an academic who explained that there is evidence that Swedenborg had encountered the Kabbelah, one expression of Jewish mysticism, but the lecturer concluded that he didn’t understand it for what it was intended to be. I myself have been to a few Sabbath services in synagogues, and a few ecumenical Seder feasts, and they have been beautifully moving. I have been hard pressed to find people who were more welcoming and loving in my life, to people outside of their religion.
The problem, as Swedenborg explains in other places, is that every world religion becomes “vastated” over time. Humans tend to drift toward superficiality in their spiritual practices. We lose sight of the original intent of the rituals, and eventually just go through the motions. The Pharisees were examples of vastation in the Jewish tradition. If you want an example of Christian vastation, let’s talk about the Crusades, or the Spanish Inquisition. My own ancestors left Europe because Catholics had decided that Protestants were evil, and had enacted a rather aggressive and bloody policy against them. Jeremiah’s “loincloth adventure” was to demonstrate that the spiritual practices of Israel and Judah were vastating. The loincloth deteriorated in the same way that spirituality was deteriorating. Given that a loincloth is an external covering for the more interior organs of generation, he was saying that current practices were disconnected with what the Lord wished to inspire in the people, and that needed to be addressed. We can’t go through life with a soggy, disconnected loincloth. Our external practices must be in harmony with our internal heavenly inspirations, and that wasn’t happening.
Swedenborg felt that the reasons why he was being inspired to write was that Christianity on the whole was vastating, and that it needed fresh ideas to rejuvenate it, to get it back on track and in harmony with the love and wisdom that the Divine continuously inspires. He was actually tried for heresy after he wrote that people of other religions could receive God’s favor and find a place in heaven. Christians needed to be reminded that love is not exclusionary, that wisdom is not necessarily a byproduct of age, that the faith and devotion require a unity between thought and feeling, between body, mind, and spirit. And Christians needed to be shown that there was more to the Word of God than what we read off the page, that is is a multi-layered expression of God’s presence in the world, and that it is meaningful beyond our superficial experience of it. People needed to be shown that a New Church was necessary, or they would be in danger of sacrificing their spiritual maturity and losing themselves forever. Swedenborg was not an antisemitic in his heart. He was pro-Human, openly acknowledging that every religion contains the means for spiritual regeneration.
It is such a blessing that we have so many approaches to a truly spiritual life in this world. This weekend marks the holy day of Yom Kippur among our friends in Judaism. It is a time of atonement, when people are encouraged to own their own shortcomings and to make amends for them by asking for forgiveness from God and from each other. It is a time for sincere self-examination and for repentance. As the conclusion of a season that began with Rosh Hashana, it is the beginning of a new year, a fresh start. And I wish for our friends that they celebrate this new year with sincerity.
The challenges that Israel and Palestine faces are begging for self-examination and repentance. We all need to realize that, for a new beginning to commence, we often are called to abandon the some of the norms of the past. We’ve not yet attained the global peace that we all dream about, but we are mature enough to realize that policies based upon retaliation don’t work. We are mature enough to realize that waltzing across borders and taking territory, as is happening in Ukraine, does not move us toward the peace that the Lord inspires. As we continue to pray for a deeply divided legislature in our own country, we are mature enough to realize that prosperity only comes through cooperation, and through abandoning our need to dominate the course of events. We are mature enough to understand that, if we want a bright new beginning among us, there needs to be a bright new ending of the attitudes and practices that the Lord has already shown us do not work, will not get us to that inspired goal of peace, acceptance, and sincere love for all our neighbors. As the poet tells us, we cannot keep decorating our swords for peace, and use them only for war. It just doesn’t work.
Here’s a thought that I’d like to leave you with this morning. For our western, secular culture, the new year begins on January 1. For the Chinese and Koreans, the new year is in February. Many cultures, such as Islam and Ba’hai and our viking ancestors celebrate the new year on the first day of Spring. In parts of India, Ugaadhi is in April. For Muslims, Ra’s as-Sanah al-Hijrīyah is at the beginning of October, while for the Celts, the new year was observed at the end of October—Samhain, or All Hallows Eve—and Hindus also celebrate Diwali at this time of year. My point is that, between all of us on earth, there are multiple opportunities for deep reflection and for making a fresh start in life. Inspiration is constant, and the time for change is always now.
Oh, I need to tell you what was written in my fortune cookie. It says, “What are you waiting for?”
READINGS
Old Testament Reading: Jeremiah 13:1-11
New Testament Reading: Matthew 23:1-15...
Reading from Emanuel Swedenborg: Apocalypse Explained 569.20
Poetry: An Old Song by Marie Syrkin
In the blossom-land Japan
Somewhere thus an old song ran.
Said a warrior to a smith
" Hammer me a sword forthwith.
Make the blade
Light as wind on water laid.
Make it long
As the wheat at harvest song.
Supple, swift
As a snake, without rift,
Full of lightnings, thousand-eyed!
Smooth as silken cloth and thin
As the web that spiders spin.
And merciless as pain, and cold. "
" On the hilt what shall be told? "
" On the sword's hilt, my good man, "
Said the warrior of Japan,
" Trace for me
A running lake, a flock of sheep
And one who sings her child to sleep. "
Marie Syrkin (March 23, 1899 – February 2, 1989) was an American writer, translator, educator, and Zionist activist. Syrkin's first book, Your School, Your Children, published in 1944, was an influential study of the American school system, in which she argued that schools should actively foster democratic values. In her eightieth year, she published a volume of poetry called Gleanings: A Diary in Verse (1979), which brought together the public aspects of her career—her commitment to Israel, her social commentary, and her devotion to literature—with profoundly moving expressions of intimate emotions, private struggles, and personal sorrows.
In 1930, Syrkin married the poet Charles Reznikoff, whom she had first met in 1927. She visited Palestine for the first time in 1933. In this period she also began to publish English translations of Yiddish poetry. In 1934, she was a co-founder and joined the editorial staff of the New York-based Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier.
In 1950, at age fifty-one, Marie Syrkin began a new career. She became the first female professor of an academic subject at the newly established Brandeis University, where she was appointed to the English faculty. Here, she developed the first university course in the literature of the Holocaust and in American Jewish fiction. During her sixteen years at Brandeis, Syrkin wrote a memoir of her father and a biography of her close friend Golda Meir, edited an anthology of the writings of Hayim Greenberg, edited the Jewish Frontier, served on the editorial board of Midstream, and was editor of the Herzl Press.