I'm not a Hasidic Jew. I don't know any Hasidic Jews, nor to I pretend to know much about their religion, community, or specific customs. But, kind of like my curious admiration for the counter-cultural example of the Amish, I have always had a respect from afar for their traditional belief and practice as our spiritual ancestors; their unique, stand-alone witness in a culture that has forgotten Who has created them, which has gone mad as a result.
My only thing that really put it on my radar was discovering a Hasidic reggae singer/song-writer convert named Matisyahu, who was blowing up the charts around 2005 wearing the yarmulke with swinging payes on stage, the works. He had a unique sound, a spiritual message, and a one-of-a-kind M.O. He had a great song called "King Without a Crown" around that time that gave glory to God, which I thought was pretty cool:
You're all that I have and you're all that I need
Each and every day I pray to get to know you please
I want to be close to you, yes I'm so hungry
You're like water for my soul when it gets thirsty
Without you there's no me
You're the air that I breathe
Sometimes the world is dark and I just can't see
With these, demons surround all around to bring me down to negativity
But I believe, yes I believe, I said I believe
"This morning I posted a photo of myself on Twitter. No more Chassidic reggae superstar. Sorry folks, all you get is me… no alias. When I started becoming religious 10 years ago it was a very natural and organic process. It was my choice. My journey to discover my roots and explore Jewish spirituality — not through books but through real life. At a certain point I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity… to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person I needed rules — lots of them — or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission. Get ready for an amazing year filled with music of rebirth. And for those concerned with my naked face, don’t worry… you haven’t seen the last of my facial hair."
He continued to make music, a kind of generic pseudo-spiritual mash of Judaism and self-actualization. I guess he still performs; I lost interest, though, so I'm not really sure. I was never a fan-boy...I just thought it was cool he amassed a huge following rapping about God, and his music was catchy.
But something about his "journey" haunted me. He was kind of like a brother from another mother: we were the same age, were born in the same part of Pennsylvania, we were both enthusiastic converts to our respective religions, big on individualistic self-expression laced with narcissism, and we seemed to share a common seeker's heart. The one difference is he immersed himself in a strict, tight-knit religious community in Brooklyn, whereas I spent years going to Mass, but essentially practicing my religion outside any such kind of tight support-system.
I have no interest in judging Matisyahu's motives or what led him to abandon his orthodox religious practice, as there is probably more to it than what an outsider can see. But I hold him up as a sober, real-world reminder to myself of what has the potential to take me off track.
Submission is a hard thing. It can be hard for wives today, who have been brought up on the self-empowerment rhetoric of radical feminism, when they read:
"Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything" (Eph 5:22-24).
It can be hard for radicals to submit themselves to the civil law, who read:
"Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God." (Rom 13:1)
It can be hard for believers to submit to the religious authorities when they live hypocritically, though Jesus made clear to his followers that,
“The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them." (Mt 23:2)
It can be hard to simply follow the Lord, when the going gets tough, and the tough gets crazy, as when Jesus exhorts his followers on the necessity of eating his flesh to gain eternal life, who "As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore." (Jn 6:66).
Why people leave the One True Faith--ie, apostasy--is something that keeps me up some nights. Will I be one of them who choose, somewhere down the road, "not to walk with Him anymore?" What keeps one on the path? If I find out--as someone I was close with posited in anger--that one of my children was gay...would I continue to believe it was a sin? If my beliefs "evolve" and it becomes clear that the shackles of religion are oppressive chains of conformity, will I find some new practice to offer incense to the Divine, on my own terms? If the Lord takes my wife, my children, my livelihood...will I rebel, blaspheme, blame, and rage agains Him by turning by back? When I am public in my profession of belief, and my typed words get held up before me as in an affidavit, will I deny I ever wrote them? Will my fickle nature succumb to the whims of fancy? Will I take up the idol-carving business and look with embarrassment on my former beliefs in the One True God?
Lukewarm faith is no faith at all, as far as I am concerned. We need to either walk away, or double down and dig a deep well. And yet, to walk away is to slouch through the wilderness in the shadow of Peter's admission: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life!" (Jn 6:68). Really, in the end, what option do we have but to believe?
Thanks be to God, we are not "making our own way" by our own efforts, but are saved by grace through faith. "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Eph 2:8-9). No Catholic should doubt this, and yet not faith alone, for we know don't we
"that faith without works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up Isaac his son on the altar? You see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected; and the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone." (James 2:20-24)
Christianity is seen as a "creed over deed" religion, versus Judaism which regards "deed over creed" as the proper expression of faith. But really, can we not have creed and deed work together for the fullest expression of religion, the embodiment of all that make us human--body, mind, and soul?
The life of the Catholic Christian is the recognition that it is a ridiculous modern fallacy to "love Jesus and hate religion"; that Christ entrusted the keys to to the Kingdom to Peter, "The Rock;" and that the Lord desires all to be saved, that none may be lost but might come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). True religion is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, one that requires faith, submission, and confidence in the Lord's promises. Does a person go through life with no skeleton to hold their organs intact, to provide structure to the body, to keep the skin stretched and taunt, and to give us form and definition?
A man without religion, following his own spiritual whims, is like a body without a skeleton, a subjective slump of flesh and organs with no form and no way to move or hold itself up when the swords and clubs of persecution come. For those agents of destruction that seek to beat the spirit out of us will find that in breaking our bones and fracturing our skulls at the pillars, we grip our holy religion and the Lord's precepts all the tighter, giving glory to the One whose body was broken before us. Should we walk away seeking our own individualized spiritual actualization, apostatizing from the faith prior to the persecution, we should never have the honor of losing our heads for the Lord.
Hold tight, brothers and sisters. When faith gets hard and belief feels like a farce, when the world laughs at you and you can almost taste the illusory sweetness of acquiescence to its way, when the ark feels claustrophobic and full of corruption....double down and pray. Pray for grace. Pray for wisdom. Pray, and hold the line.
No comments:
Post a Comment