680: The Weight Of Words (2019)
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Last weekend, I gave a talk at Chautauqua in upstate New York, which, if you don't know what that is, starting in the 1870s, it was this high-minded lecture circuit, like TED talks before the internet, or public radio before the invention of radio, with a big religious component, which is how I fell into this long conversation about the literal word of the Bible. And having the staffer who drove me to the airport was a retired Methodist preacher, an associate pastor at one of the churches in Chautauqua named John Jackson. And we had this hour and a half long drive, and somehow we got on to how he doesn't believe that every word of the Bible is literally true, which, if you're a Methodist, that's no big deal. And John said that as he gets older, the literal words of the Bible seem less important to him than the big picture. "Love your neighbor as yourself, and love God above all." And I told John, like, I totally get the "love your neighbor as yourself" part of that. I can see how that can reshape just everything about how you treat others, and really everything you do in your life in the world. But I told him, like, I never really understood, like, why is it important to love God above all? You know what I mean? Like, if you do what God wants, you know, and you try to be good, you try to treat others right, what difference does it make if you love God? Like, what does God care? And I got to ask John about kind of a variation on this question that I've wondered about for a couple years, ever since the last time I was in synagogue, this is, I don't know, this was two or three years ago, I hadn't been to synagogue in forever. And it was the anniversary of my mom's death, and we're Jews. So you're supposed to go say "Kaddish," this old prayer, that's one of the central prayers in Judaism at the anniversary of somebody's death. And so my dad and my stepmom and I were one of the daily services that observant Jews go to every day in Baltimore, where I grew up. And I always liked going to synagogue as a kid. We went a lot. And so it was nice going back. I know the Hebrew prayers by heart, and I don't know if this is good or bad, but not having sat in a synagogue in over a decade, it really hit me how every day is a rerun. Do you know what I mean? Like, they never do a new episode, every day. The same words, same songs in the same order, stretching back hundreds of years. They read a new part of the Bible, part of the Torah some days, so there's that, but all the rest, basically, exactly the same, every day. And everybody is singing and chanting. And I started, you know, looking in the prayer book on the side of the page with the English translation of the prayers, which I hadn't done in years, and I really was struck at how many of them, the Amida, the Ashre, are about praising God. Like at length. Like, that's what the words mean. Even the kaddish, which you say over and over during services. And the words basically are, "May his great name be exalted and sanctified, blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded, be the name of the Holy One."
Transcription truncated.