On Ash Wednesday
This evening, in the parking lot of the Lutheran church that hosts my sons' day care center, the pastor was out offering to impose a cross of ashes on the forehead of any passers-by. It's a few-year-old tradition they call Ashes To Go, and my family did it once - back when we were Christian. Last year, in fact, we were so taken as to be drawn in to the sanctuary to attend their Ash Wednesday service proper. It was all about my mortality, my sinfulness, my puniness in the grand scheme of things, my inability to help myself, my need for holy water that nonetheless could never wash off the stain of the ashes.
It was truly a beautiful service, and it genuinely moved me...just not in the direction the pastor had intended. I wondered what the pastor would think if I told him that last year's Ash Wednesday was another first step on my road to Judaism.
What problem could I possibly have with Ash Wednesday, though, and with the bigger Lenten tradition it kicks off, when I am jumping with both feet into a tradition whose two holiest days proclaim our sinfulness and then fast in atonement for it? What issue can I legitimately take with a festival of pensive and plaintive self-deprecation, entering as I am into a religion famous in some quarters for instilling a permanent sense of guilt?
I've been thinking about that a lot today, and I think I have come to an answer: Christians focus their Ash Wednesday on the feeling of insignificance, of helplessness, of being lowly as dust and dead like ashes, I suppose in an effort to feel their need for a Savior, and also to make them all the more joyful when one man's triumph on Easter supposedly lifts them all out of that. Only that, when the rubber hits the road of the real world, Easter doesn't clear out the dust and the ashes: I've heard enough sermons telling me that God's and Christ's victory have already been won on a cross and an empty tomb, only to leave church and see a world in which real life carries no sense of that victory.
Jews, on the other hand, have set up Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur to start us off with a sense of our personal and communal failures, but move us to a sense of renewed possibility. We meditate on our failings in order to remind us that we have the ability to do better by our world. We remember our broken commandments as a way of knowing that there are at least 613 opportunities to improve. We use guilt to spur us to action. In other words, we don't spend a day meditating on our insignificance and helplessness, but on our significance and our ability to help. We don't see ourselves as permanently broken, but as God's tools for fixing the brokenness.
But, the Christian tapes in my head insist, I must be missing something. It's important to remember our own mortality, our own lowliness in the face of God, our essential nature as ashes and dust.
No, replies my inner rabbi, it is you who are missing something: half of the equation, as it were. For the sage Qoheleth said: "the dust returns to the earth as it was, but the spirit returns to God who gave it." and in Genesis it is written "Adonai fashioned the human from the dust of the ground then breathed into his nose the breath of life".
In other words, we are only one part dust and ashes - we are also one part breath of God.
L'chayim, therefore, and Happy Ash Wednesday. Remember, you are God-breath, and to God-breath you shall return!
It was truly a beautiful service, and it genuinely moved me...just not in the direction the pastor had intended. I wondered what the pastor would think if I told him that last year's Ash Wednesday was another first step on my road to Judaism.
What problem could I possibly have with Ash Wednesday, though, and with the bigger Lenten tradition it kicks off, when I am jumping with both feet into a tradition whose two holiest days proclaim our sinfulness and then fast in atonement for it? What issue can I legitimately take with a festival of pensive and plaintive self-deprecation, entering as I am into a religion famous in some quarters for instilling a permanent sense of guilt?
I've been thinking about that a lot today, and I think I have come to an answer: Christians focus their Ash Wednesday on the feeling of insignificance, of helplessness, of being lowly as dust and dead like ashes, I suppose in an effort to feel their need for a Savior, and also to make them all the more joyful when one man's triumph on Easter supposedly lifts them all out of that. Only that, when the rubber hits the road of the real world, Easter doesn't clear out the dust and the ashes: I've heard enough sermons telling me that God's and Christ's victory have already been won on a cross and an empty tomb, only to leave church and see a world in which real life carries no sense of that victory.
Jews, on the other hand, have set up Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur to start us off with a sense of our personal and communal failures, but move us to a sense of renewed possibility. We meditate on our failings in order to remind us that we have the ability to do better by our world. We remember our broken commandments as a way of knowing that there are at least 613 opportunities to improve. We use guilt to spur us to action. In other words, we don't spend a day meditating on our insignificance and helplessness, but on our significance and our ability to help. We don't see ourselves as permanently broken, but as God's tools for fixing the brokenness.
But, the Christian tapes in my head insist, I must be missing something. It's important to remember our own mortality, our own lowliness in the face of God, our essential nature as ashes and dust.
No, replies my inner rabbi, it is you who are missing something: half of the equation, as it were. For the sage Qoheleth said: "the dust returns to the earth as it was, but the spirit returns to God who gave it." and in Genesis it is written "Adonai fashioned the human from the dust of the ground then breathed into his nose the breath of life".
In other words, we are only one part dust and ashes - we are also one part breath of God.
L'chayim, therefore, and Happy Ash Wednesday. Remember, you are God-breath, and to God-breath you shall return!
I had a similar reaction to that service - I wanted to run away from (that branch of) Christianity. It prompted me to start really examining the view of humans from a Christian perspective.
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