When his book “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life” was published, Rabbi Irwin Kula told The Chronicle that he “would never again teach Torah” to groups comprised solely of Jews (Nov. 10, 2006, issue).
However, Kula, who then was featured at Milwaukee’s Jewish Book and Culture Fair, never imagined that he would one day be teaching Torah to non-Jewish members of the United States Army.
In an interview Aug. 6 at Brynwood Country Club, just before the Jewish Community Foundation’s Celebrate the Legacy event at which he was the featured speaker, Kula described how the officer in charge of the Army’s religious educators called him.
“I’m an upper west side liberal Jew, and when the U.S. Army called I immediately got, like, hives,” said Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL).
These educators are generally Catholic or Evangelical Christian, yet “there’s a lot of people they have to deal with on [army] bases from a lot of different religions, everything from Wiccan to pagan; and nobody’s going to get good enough at someone else’s religion to use that religion to help them,” said Kula.
But this officer had read Kula’s book, and he thought, as Kula described it, “this guy is using Jewish wisdom and practice not to help me become Jewish, but to help me deal with how to be more loving and how to be happier and how to know what’s right and wrong; but he’s using the wisdom and practice independent of dogma and creed.”
That is exactly what the Army’s religious educators need to be doing, the officer said, so he asked Kula to “help us do that.”
A ‘mezuzah rebbe’
As a result, this past February, Kula went to Florida for two days, during which he spoke to and taught about 125 people, mostly Army religious educators, but also some chaplains. For Kula, the experience “was life-transforming in a lot of ways.”
First, the people he met “did not in any way confirm my stereotype” of military people. “They were reflective and thoughtful and understood patriotism in such a more nuanced and, I would say, profound way than the people who oppose reflexively the Army,” he said.
“And, of course, this is my Torah anyhow,” he continued. “There’s a partial truth on the other side always. And any time you have a reflexive action and response against something, you’d better learn to take a deep breath and say, ‘What’s the partial truth there I’ve got to learn?’”
“Plus,” he said, “it was just a fascinating thing to help people use their own traditions in a way that I’m trying to learn how to use my own tradition. And I think that’s one of the great tasks, at least in America, because … we’re at the cutting edge of freedom [and] of blurring of boundaries.”
Kula delivered a related message during his speech at the JCF event.
“The fundamental challenge” to Judaism today is that “this game of being a tribe is over,” he said in a talk titled “Re-imagining Judaism for the 21st Century.”
In this era, “all boundaries will be crossed,” and “the only way any religion and spiritual tradition will survive [and] deserves to survive is because it can add value to human lives.”
“Being Jewish is a particular wisdom and practice about learning how to be human,” and much of its “toolkit” is applicable to lives of non-Jews and non-religious Jews, Kula said.
As an example, Kula told a story about a builder he met, a Jewish man who was ignorant of most of Judaism’s basics. Nevertheless, whenever he sold a house, to Jews or non-Jews, this builder gave the customers a mezuzah and helped them hang it.
Why? Because, said the builder, a mezuzah reminds the house’s occupants that “a home needs to be a place of peace.”
Moreover, because for most Americans a home is the single largest purchase they will ever make, buying one is a time fraught with anxiety and ambivalence. When the builder and the customers go through a little ritual of hanging the mezuzah, the customers are often so moved they begin to cry, the builder said.
When Kula heard this, he said, “I wanted to call my rabbinical school and say, ‘I have a rebbe who specializes in mezuzah [who] understands it better than I do.’”
In the elections
In the interview, Kula also said that one can perceive the blurring of religious boundaries in how religion will figure in the coming U.S. presidential elections.
Of the two putative presidential candidates, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barak Obama (D-Ill.), “neither … has the absolutist view regarding religion that is traditionally associated with their party,” Kula said.
Liberals “have a reflexive ‘dissing’ of all religion,” Kula said. “It’s almost like the second anything religious appears, they become apoplectic.”
But Obama, unlike most recent Democratic nominees, “does have a religious life… He speaks the language [and] it’s not fake,” said Kula.
On the other hand, “we have a right wing … that did want to make the country Christian,” said Kula. And McCain “is interesting the other way. You don’t get the feeling that if there really is a problem in the world that he’s going to ask his Father in Heaven for some direct advice.”
And that “makes for a very, very hopeful moment in the country in its conversation about religion,” Kula said. “Because we do need a very serious discussion about how we are each going to be able to bring who we are into the public square.
“And the reason that’s so important is every major issue facing America … is first and foremost a moral values issue. Since the primary moral value language is a religion or spiritually-laced language, to not allow that at all to be in the public square is to impoverish the … difficult conversations that we need to have, and will make for very poor decision-making.”
At present, apart from speaking engagements that have him traveling some 125,000 miles every year, Kula is working on two projects.
He said he wants to “transform” the 34-year-old CLAL, based in New York City, “into an organization that can actually take Jewish wisdom public.”
One way the organization is doing that is through a “Rabbis Without Borders” program that “works with rabbinical students across all denominations to help them teach Torah in accessible and usable ways.”
Second, Kula is working on another book, “this one about love and the Jewish wisdom and practice that can help anybody love more deeply and courageously,” he said.
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