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Rediscovering ourselves through our stories
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There is a realm that Scripture refers to that we as humans have largely forgotten about. This realm is the creative act, the act of imagining, and the receiver’s process of interpretation. The Bible is often related to as a news reel, listing off the facts as they happened, recording for us the events of the past. Such a view has forgotten the nature of creativity and the human spirit.
Humans need to create. It is a primal need of ours right along with food, shelter, sleep, and procreation. The human is a combination of mysterious and huge forces, and the act of creating - telling a story, painting a picture, playing a song – brings the actions of those gigantic internal forces to a plane that we can understand. Our ancestors understood this. Stories, myths, religious teaching, and ritual dealt in this crucial middle realm between our inscrutable insides and the perceivable world around us. They depict what is going on inside an individual and a people and show it to us in a way our egos can understand. Movies are an excellent example. Why are we afraid of horror movies when we know it’s all makeup and nobody dies? Why are our heartstrings pulled while watching a love story even though the emotions are fictitious and the characters never existed? Something uniquely human is going on. We identify with what has been created.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the apocalypse obsession in American culture and Jewish religious culture. Stories of the prophets and rabbis are taken out of their context, which addresses the human heart, and projected onto the screen of history. As a result, people wait with baited breath for huge natural disasters, earthquakes, meteor showers, and colossal world wars. The rabbis of recent generations stated unambiguously that we are living in the final generations before what was referred to as the “end of days” in the prophets, but who is looking at our internal upheavals - earthshattering events of the mind, total upheavals of worldview, meteors cracking the rock casing of the heart, gigantic wars being waged between the various parts of our split personalities, our schismed Self, our good pious self and our uncomprehendable shadow?
It’s going on right now if we’re willing to see that in those stories of good guys and bad guys, legions of angels and armies of demons, we are both. The power of stories, the power of scripture is that it embodies the forces inside of us right now. It is not a story of the past whose events we can relate through generalization to various instances of our lives. Such a view removes us from our scriptures, takes away our power to be moved and changed by stories, takes away their power of revelation, of revealing ourselves to us, not the workings of some remote heavens.
One’s power is taken away from them, one’s true connection to a religion is taken away when scriptures are interpreted in a historical way. Now, our rabbis are interpreting reality for us, our history, our own hearts, our own minds. Instead of our stories showing us our inner workings, they’re revealing a distant reality that we can’t comprehend. It is too far distant from our experience to understand, and yet, we are bound by the commandments at that time, given at a distant point in history, which must be interpreted for us by those who “know the truth” of those past events, the select few who have received the “true tradition.” Thus, Judaism has become a dogmatic religion, a tradition of a people has become the law of a few rabbis because the stories have been taken away from us.
But if the stories speak to us, reveal our inner lives to us, we don’t need an interpreter. If they show me what’s going on inside when I have a fight with my wife, when I lose my temper with my child, when I speak insensitively to a friend, when I act dishonestly in business, I have stood at Mount Sinai. I have been commanded by God right now. It’s not as grand and lofty as it sounds. It’s a feeling, a subtle swelling of the heart, a glow of love that lasts for a few moments, a couple hairs raising on the back of one’s neck. We think to be a religious experience there must be a chorus of angels singing and deafening us, but it is not removed from our everyday lives.
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