"Saying Yes and Saying No"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 16^th of December, 2001

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
after another mild week of rain and sun
to worship, to be refreshed and rekindled,
to struggle and be comforted.
We come with ourselves as we are,
with hopes and desires, losses and love.
We come ready to learn and unlearn.

And may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to shared visions of what we can together become…

Prayer Before the Silence [Next] [back to top]

Candles. Stars.
Light sparkling in a friend's eye.
Light glistening off tears.
Not one menorah, but thousands.
Not one light, but millions.
It's recited at Hanukkah

A Great Miracle Happened There.

But I say a great miracle is happening here.
We are all here, alive, breathing, aware,
electrons spinning, the space between
our atoms tense with the promise of aliveness.
The marvel and wonder of existing at all,
even for this brief moment
kindles a thousand menorahs of thanksgiving
brightening in my heart.

It's said at Hanukkah

Haneirot hallalu kodesh haym
veyn lamu r'shut
l'hishtameish ba hem
Elah lirotam bivad
K'dei l'hodot u-le-layl.

"These lights are blest,
and may we never use them for anything
except as a summons to praise and be glad."

To these words I add my words…

let the lights of these candles, (menorah is kindled)
the glow of the stars,
the glistening of a tear,
the brightness in a friend's eye
never serve to hurt or harm
but only serve as a summons to be glad
to be alive, here, now, together, in silence.

Amen.

silence

We call to mind now all who suffer on this earth, all who are sick, all who are oppressed by force of arms, structure of economy, or hurtful ideas and images, all who stew in vengeance and are frustrated, all who mourn and would be comforted. In knowing they are our brothers and sisters, we learn something of the humility of our own humanity. And we know afresh the number of lights that are still to be kindled, the number of miracles of reconciliation still to be wrought. We join in solidarity with all who suffer, who struggle to love, who find love and nurture in a hurting world.

We name those we know best, aloud or in the quiet of our hearts.

naming

Blest is every light, every challenge and every joy that is for our growth and deepening.

First Reading [Next] [back to top]
is a thoughtful poem by Jane Hirshfield. It's called IDENTITY

Decades after a man leaves the Church,
Still he is called the priest.

Many years since she set down her bow,
a woman remains the cellist.

The one who seduced so many is content
now to sip her tea, and still she is looked at with envy and hatred.

The one who held life and death
in his mouth no longer speaks at all, yet still he is feared.

The unmoving dancer rehearses her steps.
Again, perfection eludes her.

Fate loosens its grip. The bruises stay.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from Terror in the Mind of God a post 9-11 update of a book by the best professor I ever had while at seminary, Mark Juergensmeyer. He was my Gandhi teacher, but he also taught me that how you teach teaches a great deal too. There are two parts to this longer reading.

1) When the United States has been branded as an enemy in a cosmic war, it has been endowed with superhuman - or perhaps subhuman - qualities, ones that have had little to do with the people who actually live in America. It is the image of the country that has been despised -not its people. Individual Americans have often been warmly accepted by those who hate the collective image that they hold as cosmic enemy. This was brought home to me in Gaza when I talked with Dr. Abdul Aziz Rantisi about the Hamas movement's attitude toward America and its pro-Israeli stance. As Dr. Rantisi offered me coffee in the comfortable living room of his home, he acknowledged that the United States was a secondary enemy because of its complicity in Israel's oppression of Palestinian Arabs. From his point of view, it deserved to be treated as an enemy. What about individual Americans, I cautiously asked him, raising the example of America professors. Would such people be targeted? "You?" Rantisi responded, somewhat surprised. "You don't count. You're our guest."

2) Activists such as McVeigh and Abouhalima - and for that matter, Abdul Rahman, Rantisi, Bhindranwale, Asahara, Kahane, Lerner, Bray, and Hill - have imagined themselves as defenders of ancient faiths. But in fact they have created new religious forms: like many present-day spiritual leaders, they have used the language of traditional religion to build bulwarks around aspects of modernity that have threatened them and to suggest ways out of the mindless humiliation of modern life. It was vital to their image of religion, however, that it be perceived as ancient.

The need for religion - a "hard" religion as Abouhalima called it, an "ancient" one as Pierce imagined it - was a response to the soft treachery they observed in the new societies around them. The modern secular world that Abouhalima, Pierce, and the others inhabited was a dangerous, chaotic, and violent sea for which religion was an anchor in a harbor of calm. At some deep and almost transcendent level of consciousness, they sensed their lives slipping out of control, and they felt both responsible for the disarray and a victim of it. To be abandoned by religion in such a world would mean a loss of their own individual identities. In fashioning a "traditional religion" of their own, they exposed their concerns not so much with their religious, ethnic, or national communities as with their own personal, imperiled selves.

Sermon: Saying Yes and Saying No [Next][back to top]

For the record, Hanukkah is not a major Jewish holiday. Like Purim, its February cousin, it's sort of a semi-holiday, no comparison at all for Pesach (Passover) or the Days of Awe. A hundred years ago, Hanukkah was no big thing, just a few quiet candles burning in the window at night in certain neighborhoods of the city, melting the frost on the window panes. And yes, there were Aunt Judith's famous potato pancakes…latkes…for supper.

However, as the decades moved forward, everything changed. Christmas (once a forbidden holiday in this country, and for many years a minor one) slowly but surely took on the identity of the major market holiday of the year, the prime economic center of the calendar. Suddenly the Jews with their quaint housebound menorahs were facing a new social reality …for a month and a half or so each year. Christmas had turned into a juggernaut, a steam-roller that flattened everything in its path. You have your plastic candy canes and Bethlehem stars decorating our supposedly secular street lights and department store windows, you have festively decorated trees in the stores a month before Thanksgiving; you have Christmas music 24-7 on half the radio stations; TV commercials galore with Santas and bells, Grinches, manger scenes in public buildings and on public squares, lights on half the houses in the city. Christmas suddenly was a powerful mega-event demanding a universal social conformity.

Thus, it makes perfect sense to me that the Jews, in the face of this overwhelming force, might beef up Hanukkah a bit. It seems sensible that they would write a few more songs, stress the gift giving aspects of the holiday, write hundreds of delightful children's books, and craft elegant menorahs and dredls (seasonal tops) in every artistic style and of every precious substance. It's tough to be a non-Christmas minority in a Christmas wild country…you have to work hard to keep some semblance of your identity. You have to try harder to maintain a tie to your family and your beloved grandparents who loved you and who did not assimilate. You might start wearing your yarmulke (kipah) all the time so that people wouldn't automatically wish you Merry Christmas as if everyone alive is Christian. You might start wearing a silver Mogen David, a Star of David on a beautiful chain around your neck. You might find twenty new ways to identify yourself as a Jew, so as not to be flattened by the mighty, disinterested Christmas steamroller.

Oh, you know there are other options, of course. Many Jews in the past took such options. You could assimilate, for example, even though your grandparents didn't. Sigmund Freud did it. So did Karl Marx' family, although they nominally converted to the Protestant faith. Still, Marx would eventually write an essay saying that it would be better for the world if Jews just stopped being Jews, although his picture of what a Jew is remains a stereotype still lifted up by all the right wing paranoid preachers holing up in Idaho. In any case, he thought it better for the world if the Jewish people just melted into the European people and ceased to have any identity of their own other than simply "European."

In the United States, some have also held up the image of "the melting pot." Ethnic identities slowly disappear into the hot blended stew of American culture. Quaint ethnic restaurants survive, but soon

even these have become not really ethnic anymore, but Italian-hyphen-American. Even the word "ethnic" itself applies only to the later immigrant European populations…no one speaks of a restaurant that serves meat and potatoes and beer as an "ethnic" restaurant, even though such menus were found first in this country among the Dutch and English settlers in New York, immigrants all.

Now while I do think that all identities…cultural, religious, personal…are indeed in constant flux, melting into each other little by little, reshaping each other moment by moment, I also think that those who are unsure of their identity---or just a bit too sure about it-- can fear this process. I think that when any group with an uncertain (or too certain) identity faces self-loss by the threat of their inevitable melting into the large, unconscious morass of modern society, a sense of panic justifiably tightens in their throats. And this panic often demands an even clearer, sharper identity as a protection against assimilation, a sheer density of self-identity that resists that awful melting into the common stew.

Thus, a minor feast like Hanukkah becomes an almost full-blown match for Christmas in less than a hundred years just so the Jewish people would not lose themselves utterly in these Christmas loving United States. And, interestingly enough, with this mid-century increase in solid identity, many young secularized Jews who had once rejected their heritage are turning back to their ancestral religion. Many of the old rituals are being brought back with great acclaim, even though they have been modernized so that women, gay people and non-traditional ethnicities are welcomed in many synagogues fully.

Of course, as you may have already figured out, the historic story of Hanukkah is pretty much a meditation on this identity business, but one set twenty-one hundred years ago in time.

The Greek king Antiochus pretended he was a nice liberal guy but, ultimately, his liberalism was of the unconscious, self-serving variety. "Your god and my god" he said to the Jewish leaders "are basically the same universal spirit. This one ineffable Spirit is known by many names. You call god YHWH, and I call god Zeus. But surely you see how these labels are just small cultural things. Still, since I am the power around here, and since all religions are basically the same, we'll do things my way. Cut your hair to my style, wear the clothes I wear, eat the foods I eat, sing my music, dance my dances, worship in my style, and we'll all get along just fine, OK?"

Of course, the story says that at least some people did not think this was OK. They agreed with the Greek king that "G-d is one," but they did not agree that the dominant majority culture gets to decide all matters great and small for every one else. So they fought a violent war against the Greeks. The Greeks fought back, but eventually the worshippers of YHWH won, and drove the Greeks out of their land. They reestablished all sorts of religious practices that had lost favor as a way of reclaiming the identity that the Greeks tried to melt into their own. These were largely economic and liturgical practices, but they served to really establish the Hebraic cultural identity of the people. They learned to say Yes to themselves in a way they had never done before. They also said No to the King's theory that everything is completely relative and therefore, might makes right.

Now the story of Hanukkah clearly asserts the polar opposite of what the poem by Jane Hirshfield says. Hirshfield says that once your identity is established for a while, you can't change it if you try. No one will let you. If you were once a priest, you are always thought of as a priest. If you were once a dancer in your youth, you are still known as a dancer even when you can't walk. And if you were once known for your sexual charms, even when you can no longer get out of bed you are still resented. I think there is a lot of truth in Hirshfield's poem.

You see, some times I worry that if people change a lot, grow a lot, become more self-possessed, then we might begin to lose our own identity if we think we are losing influence over them. If we insist that the priest is still the priest, that the flirt is still the flirt, the dancer is still the dancer when they have moved on, maybe it's our own identity we are trying to preserve, not theirs. Some people certainly change more than others, but any change can be troubling; and sometimes we may relate to each other in a way that tries to shore up against any chance we might get pulled into a vortex of change in our own life. If you stay the same as you are, then I will be able to guard my own self too. But if you grow, maybe you will expect me to grow, and I might not be ready for that yet, so I dig in my heels, and become a tad more of who I am than I usually am.

But, as is usual for me, I think the truth of Hannukah and the truth of Jane Hirshfield's poem are both true at the same time. They form the north and south pole, if you will, around the axis of which our whole modern world spins.

Some of you may have seen the Bin Laden tapes that were released this week. I know the commen-tary on television and in the papers has been swift and fierce…this man is a cold-blooded killer with absolutely no respect for human life. He hates the United States with a passion, and says that no innocent lives were lost on 9-11. Surely, my own blood ran chill when I watched the tapes, despite the fact that I do not myself speak Arabic, and despite the fact that I long ago grew cynical about whatever the national government simply asserts is a plain fact. This man appears to be an exemplar of cruelty and unconsciousness, and no more a spokesperson for Islamic religion than a White Supremicist preacher in Idaho is a spokesperson for Protestant Christianity.

Bin Laden's creepiness should not be surprising. After all, Bin Laden, like all of the men he mentioned in the second reading…the Israeli murderous fanatic Kahane, Mahmud Abouhalima, the Muslim fanatic convicted of the first Trade Tower bombing, Bhindranwale, the Sikh religious preacher of violence, Asahara, the Japanese religious fanatic who killed all those people in the subway…is fighting "a cosmic war," in Mark Jurgenmeyer's terms. In a cosmic war, there is good and evil and that's it. You count yourself on the good side, your enemy is barely human and always utterly wrong. Your enemies are guilty by simply breathing. They are a threat to your identity. You can only thrive if you kill them. Yes to yourself means saying an absolute No to them.

The whole of American culture, for Bin Laden and his cronies, is a threat to their identity. The music and culture and film we aggressively export around the world are seen as solvents powerful enough to dissolve Muslim culture. Our secular culture is considered by them a form of Christian missionary work, an unconscious crusade that will ultimately destroy the identity of the Muslim world because it's so seductively flashy, glossy, rich to the taste. Washington's pro-Israeli stance condemns us too, certainly, in their eyes, but, really, it's the whole of our culture which is found wanting…and threatening. I think this assertion is worthy of meditating on in the light of Hanukkah.

Is there any way that we in this nation are a little like the Greek king in the Hanukkah story? Do we too really think that "everything is really all the same," but that since we are powerful, why not make sure the whole world is like us by exporting our rather unconscious cultural expressions everywhere? Dress like us (wear GAP), drink like us (Coca Cola), worship like us (accept Christ), dance like us (disco), sing like us (rock songs). Jurgenmeyer calls this the "mindless humiliation of modern life." Like the Greek king, I suppose we mean well. But we may be too unconscious for our own good.

Furthermore, I wonder, what might happen in Israel if the present government there saw all of the present crisis in the light of Hanukkah? After all listen to what Uri Savir, the chief Israeli negotiator for the Oslo Accords, wrote 4 years ago.

"Our self-image as a humane society and history's eternal victim blinded us to what was going on. What I discovered in the talks was that a West Bank Palestinian could not build, work, study, purchase land, grow produce, start a business, take a walk at night, go abroad, or visit his family in Gaza with a permit from us. The whole of the population had, at some time, been grossly humiliated by us." (The Process NY Random House, 1998, p.207)

He's saying, as I see it, that saying Yes to their own identity as a long persecuted people (which no sane person denies) and a humane society goes hand in hand with saying No to a whole other people and humiliating them.

Thus you might begin to see why I think the issue of identity is crucial in these times, even though extremely difficult to sort out neatly. Identity. Personal identity. Cultural identity. National identity. Religious identity. There are no easy answers.

But personally, I conclude with great certainty that any issue of identity that is solved by saying Yes to oneself and No to someone else is ultimately faulty and wrong. It's too close to the cosmic war theory of Bin Laden, and other puritans of the spirit.

Better to say Yes and No to myself, and Yes and No to you as well. I am neither all right nor all wrong. Neither are you. With both Yes and No together inside me and inside you, there is room for me to be hospitable to you, and room for you to welcome me, even though we may seriously differ on many issues. Jurgensmeyer says that the head of Hamas, Rantisi, could even gladly and warmly welcome him as a guest, though all the time he was a dreaded citizen of the United States. It's certainly a beginning, these small one-on-ones where we place hospitality before foolish lump condemnations.

But, alas, if I am all Yes and you are all No, there can be no welcoming, no hospitality that I can offer or you can receive. If the present crisis in the world, or in Israel, is either all Yes on one side and all No on the other, then there is no hope. In "a cosmic war," one side has to perish utterly. There is no other choice. But in a conflict where each of us recognizes that we do not have to say a total No to each other in order to say Yes to ourselves, there is some hope after all, and frankly, I'm all for hope and not too hot on despair.

Maybe one day the insights around identity that Hanukkah celebrates might prove that it is indeed a major holiday, not a minor one, and always has been one. May you and I live to see the day when all around the world there is a Yes to peaceful coexistence, Yes to hospitality and increased understanding, and No to violent solutions and all cosmic war theories.

Personally, I can hardly wait for that day to come.

Prayer [back to top]

For all the world's people, those awake,
those asleep, those afraid and those confident,
those of one culture and those of the another,
those who are hungry and those who are full,
those who love and those who are curdled by hate,
those who run and those who won't let go,
those who grieve and those don't know what they feel, this my prayer for one and all, that we each pledge ourselves to that high cause of greater understanding of who we are, and what in us is true. O Love, let us be at peace with each other, and with ourselves endeavoring to let both our Yes and our No to be plain and clear, for the sake of truth. Amen

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