Are you ready? Here is your question: What form of religion is seen, often by its own adherents, as tepid, boring, largely a collection of popular pieties recited without much conviction, mainly secular and largely humanistic? Is it a) Zoroastrianism, b) Sufi mysticism, c) the Circle of True Believers in the Divinity of Hubcaps, or d) modern liberal religion of all kinds? You answered: d) Modern liberal religion of all kinds? Is that your final answer? It is. And unfortunately, you're correct.

The Pentecostals are expanding exponentially, as are the Mormons, and the Hassidim. We liberals are being left [pun intended] in the dust. Not that we have to conquer the world, this one or the next, but how is religious liberalism, in our case, of course, Reform Judaism, going to stay in business in the 21st century?

We don't have to, you know. We could become part of one of the more exciting, fast-growing varieties of religion. Except they are all on the far right. They preach absolute obedience to an omniscient creator God who has revealed His will (it's always His, not Hers) through a Scripture in which every single word is true and unchanging and to be taken completely literally. This God rewards and punishes, sending the righteous to heaven to await bodily resurrection at the coming (or second coming, depending on your denomination) of the Messiah, and who either obliterates or tortures the wicked for all eternity. I doubt if many of us would really want to become part of such a system.

So what can be done? I have a strange and somewhat shocking proposal. We Reform Jews have often been criticized for being largely secular. What I propose is that we accept our own secularism. Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles reminds us that, "The word secular [means] the things of our time." [Robert Coles, The Secular Mind, (Princeton University Press, 1999), pg. 11.] That's exactly what I suggest we embrace, the "things," the important, central ideas of this day and age, in order to put some of the "teeth" back into our liberal Judaism.

But are they worth embracing? There is a great deal of cynicism about the culture and spirit of our times. As one author has written:

We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers;
wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints;
we spend more, but have less;
we buy more, but enjoy it less.

We have bigger houses and smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
we have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicine, but less wellness.

We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.

These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare;
more leisure and less fun;
more kinds of food, but less nutrition.

These are days of two incomes, but more divorce;
of fancier houses, but broken homes.

It is a time when there is much in the show window and nothing in the stockroom. [Sheryl A. Madden, Torah Fax, Sept. 1998.]

Yes, there is much we can be cynical about. There is also much in our world to marvel about, and much that is worth embracing. I suggest that we can speak of these things in the traditional Jewish categories of God, Torah, and Israel. Let us take as our guide Baruch Spinoza, whose name many of you have heard, but of whose accomplishments most of us are rather ignorant:

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632. His father had fled Portugal some years earlier, fleeing that land of the Inquisition to seek the more liberal climate of Holland.

As a youth, Spinoza was lauded as one of the community's most brilliant students, but in his 20s his studies in Latin and philosophy and science led him to publicly speak out against the traditional beliefs of the synagogue... Actually, many historians consider Spinoza the first modern Jew, or the first secular Jew, in that he left the Orthodox Jewish tradition without converting to Christianity. Up to this time in the mediaeval world, the only way to leave Judaism was to become a Christian.

[What were his teachings?] …he was a pantheist, rather than a classical theist. That is, for Spinoza, the terms "God" and "nature" are precisely equivalent. God and nature are treated as different names for the same thing. God does not transcend nature; He is not apart from it at all. Indeed, in Spinoza's thought, God did not create nature, but is nature…

…He rejects any notion of divine revelation, be it the Torah or Gospels or Koran, and instead tries to posit a system of ethics based solely on unaided human reason.

…Spinoza not only didn't keep the traditional laws; he proposed a theory that directly challenged the very basis of traditional, Orthodox authority… he argued that the Torah could not have been written by one person, and not all of it could be dated to Moses' time. He treated the Torah not as the perfect, revealed word of God, but as a purely human document. And, in line with his naturalistic philosophy, he wrote that the miracles of scripture were all imaginative fictions; impossibilities that ran counter to natural law. [Gary Huber, The American Rabbi, Spring/Summer, pp. 244-5.]

Quite a modern collection of ideas for someone living in the 17th century. It is just those ideas that I suggest we accept, his ideas on God, Torah, and Israel.

In trying to understand God, should we be pantheists, as Spinoza suggests? Or theists, as the more traditional religions currently teach? Or perhaps Deists, the theology espoused by Thomas Jefferson that God created the universe, wound it up like a vastly intricate watch, and then pulled back, neither rewarding nor punishing, but leaving us mortals to our own devices.

Not necessarily. But perhaps what we should accept is Spinoza's suggestion that there are many ways of conceiving of the Divine. What our secular age would add is that they, and many more including doubt, are all valid expressions of what we think about God. We would also remind ourselves again and again that these are only human ideas, reflecting the successes and failures of our minds, and not necessarily the reality of God.

Plus, almost 350 years ago Spinoza had the incredible courage to come out and say publicly what others had only whispered over the ages: the Torah was written by human beings, not by God. Amazing to me is that even today I still run into liberal Jews who are amazed by this idea. "Why Rabbi," they often say, "if the Bible isn't the word of God, why should we obey it? Why do we have to be Jewish?" as if the essence of liberal religion were coercion rather than choice. "And Rabbi," they often continue, if human beings wrote the Torah, why do we bow down and worship it in the Ark?" In fact we don't. Traditional Judaism worships God, not the Torah, and our bowing is a physical expression of bearing on our own shoulders the weight of the commandments the Torah calls upon us to observe.

I think it is long past time that we embrace the well-documented understanding that our Scriptures are a wonderful record of our search for God and God's will, written by unknown numbers of our people over literally thousands of years with brilliance, creativity, and a tremendous sense of the holy. By entering into constant dialogue with this Torah we shape our Jewish lives based on what our ancestors taught and what we have discovered in our own age. And by doing this, each generation adds its own particular chapters to what will, we hope, forever be a work in progress.

Lastly, by challenging the required ritual observances that were buttressed by traditional, Orthodox authority, Spinoza pointed towards a modern understanding of Klal Yisrael, the people of Israel. The people of Israel, in such a concept, is a truly chosen people, a self-chosen people, a group made up of those who choose to be a part of it. In a modern world in which anyone can drop out of their religion without societal sanction of any kind, this applies to all of us. If we are Jewish, we are truly Jews By Choice.

This opens the door to include not only those born of a Jewish mother, but those born of a Jewish father as well. It opens the door to families in which not every member is a Jew. It opens the door to people who find that they are more physically attracted to those of their own sex than to those of the other. We do not ignore these distinctions, but our liberal Jewish interpretation teaches a tolerance and respect for diversity that more traditional Jewish communities rather angrily reject.

It really is a new world, Golda, as our children well know, often without knowing they know it. A group of students in Clarksville, Mississippi was asked to complete a number of traditional proverbs. Here are some of their answers:

"A penny saved...buys one piece of gum." (Heather Franklin)

"Where there's a will...there's a greedy son." (Amanda Daho)

"If you can't stand the heat...hop in the pool." (Tucker Dearman)

"People who live in glass houses...don't take baths." (Charles Flower) [King Duncan, King's Computer Treasury of Dynamic Humor, Seven Worlds Pub. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990) "Children".]

We liberal Jews do live in modern, glass houses perhaps designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, wired with fiber optic cable to service our home networks and connect us to the outside world by internet and satellite, glass houses in which we sometimes do take baths in Jacuzzi whirlpool tubs and may someday soon be taking sonic showers.

The Judaism of our great-grandfathers is not for us, or we would embrace it. Then let's stop this absurd nonsense of looking at our more traditional neighbors as if they are authentically Jewish and we are some sort of hypocritical fraud. We are the real thing. We are inauthentic only if we choose to be so, and I suspect the percentage of inauthentic people is fairly constant, whether in the liberal or the traditional camp. Let's not be afraid, then, to embrace our own form of Reform Judaism and our secular age, proudly, and without guilt. Let us follow a Judaism that teaches choice in theology, creativity in the ongoing formulation of Torah wisdom, and tolerance and respect so that anyone who chooses to throw in their lot with us, can do so. If we want to stay in business, that should indeed be our final answer.