Teach Your Children Well, or, What I Learned At Sukkot

A. C. Grayling writes that religious instruction is a “serious form of child abuse” and goes on to say that there is no greater cause of evil than religion.  Now let’s ponder that for a moment. Surely one can point to the many factual errors in scriptural texts as evidence that such texts should not be relied upon for biology or history class.  And a review of history will show that many wars have been carried out in the name of God and religious difference, particularly since the Christianization of the West.  But let us not forget that great empires of antiquity were formed via hostile conquests even prior to the Christianization of the West, so religion is hardly the only cause of human warfare. 

In fact, it was the tremendous turmoil and warfare in the Axial Age that resulted in the major world religions as we know them, in an effort to imbue life with sufficient meaning that people would be less willing to risk their own or take another’s as old gods proved themselves inadequate to the task of ordering life and ensuring safety.  Each of these religious responses was a localized response to deep questions of human worth and the meaning of life. 

Could we be at the beginning of, or in the midst of, another Axial Age?  If so, how might we view religion and spirituality in ways that are adequate to our current scientific understanding of the world while being life affirming?

Yesterday I went to a Sukkot celebration.  For those of you who don’t know, as I didn’t until recently, Sukkot is a Jewish harvest festival held in a sukkah, or temporary shelter constructed in such a way that it is very permeable to the environment.  This shelter is a reminder of God’s sheltering the Isrealites as they journeyed through the wilderness.  While the sukkah is open to the environment, it must also be structured because without structure of some type, there is too much vulnerability and no protection to survive the wilderness. 

Rabbi Or Rose shared an interpretation of the sukkah, or tent, in relation to the permanent home that I think may shed some light on the issues at hand.  The permanent home is designed to eliminate contact with the outside world, and can be seen to represent the religious tradition of the parents.  The sukkah is created to be open to the outside world, and can be seen to represent the new religious insights of the child. 

Every generation reinterprets the traditions inherited from the parents in response to the demands of the present.  You should not pass on everything you learned in church, because a great deal of it is irrelevant even to you.  But the parts you feel have guided you and helped you make sense of the mess that life is—pass those along intentionally!  And, going back to yesterday’s blog, if we were to worship as the children do, we would be singing songs that make us happy, forgiving each other’s goof ups, starting over when we goof up, building community, and laughing instead of trying to answer unanswerable questions or worrying about creed, dogma, or damnation.  And anyway, your children will not believe everything they hear whether or not you take them to church, whether or not you say it, or whether or not it’s true; feel free to share and even to make mistakes because they will sort it out for themselves just like you did. 

My main concern is that we are inadvertently making a God of Economics (or more precisely, the free market), and I fear what we may do in the name of that god more than anything else, because that god reduces the worth of our lives to our net worth and by the time we figure out where we went wrong it may be too late.  We deserve better than that.