Column by Mary Lee Talbot
Cantor Olivia Brodsky often gets asked a provocative question. “I am sure you do too,” she told the congregation. “People ask why they should participate in religious life if their beliefs are not certain, if the sacred texts raise more questions than they answer or they can’t affirm all the beliefs the community holds. Why bother?”
Brodsky used her sermon at the 9:15 a.m. Monday morning worship service in the Amphitheater to give answers to those questions. Her sermon title was “Action, not Belief,” and the scripture reading was Deuteronomy 6:1–9. She began her sermon by singing “I Have a Voice” by Elana Arian. She was accompanied by Sonya Subbayya Sutton, interim director of Sacred Music, on the Steinway piano.
“People often think that the primary gateway to religious life is through theological certainty. But this is a misguided notion of why someone should participate in religious life,” Brodsky said. “Too many people deprive themselves of religious community because they think they have to have theological convictions before they join.”
The anthem sung by the Motet Choir, “Kehillah Kedoshah,” means holy community. The anthem described how each person must help, give, pray, heal and live in the community, to do the work of the community.
“People can value the community because of its lifelong learning, praying with their feet, teaching children or simply carrying on family traditions,” Brodsky said. “Religion offers far more than doctrine or commandments. Religion helps us to sanctify time rather than just manage it, teaches us to disagree respectfully and that we are just a small part of the whole story. It has inherent value whether or not you believe in God.”
In Deuteronomy, Moses and the Hebrew people stand at the foot of Mount Sinai and Moses gives a commandment, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
Brodsky said, “The people respond, ‘We will do and we will hear.’ Why ‘do’ before they ‘hear’? Shouldn’t understanding come before commitment? In Hebrew, to hear can also mean to understand, or to internalize or come to appreciate. Therefore, Judaism moves toward an enduring insight about human experience: Understanding, meaning and connection can grow through action itself.”
Philosophers have long distinguished between propositional knowledge, knowing that something is true, and experiential knowledge, the kind of understanding that comes only through live encounter. As an example, Brodsky said to understand the color blue, a scientist can talk about rods and cones and ways light gets into the eyes. But for a person who cannot see, it is hard to understand what blue looks like. “We can’t suspend our intellect, but some understanding only comes through lived experience.”
In Judaism, love is not just an emotional state but is something actional. When we say we love God with all our heart and soul and might, the community rituals and practices cultivate conditions so that feelings can grow.
“Teaching children to do these ritual acts, to bind them on the hand and to the doorpost, means that by love we are nurtured and sustained. We are called to honor our mother and father — not love, only honor — but with acts of devotion over time, our affections deepen, relationships mature. Love itself grows through deeds. Judaism doesn’t simply command love. It teaches us how to love,” Brodsky said.
“The heart follows the deed” is part of a 13th-century Spanish text, Sefer HaChinukh. Brodsky said, “We often speak about the commandments as obligations and restrictions rather than gifts that contain formative value. They can cultivate passion, generosity, responsibility, gratitude, humility and belonging.”
She continued, “Their value is not exhausted by their theological justification. It is also made evident by the lives that they help us to build, the communities they help us to sustain and the people they invite us to become.”
Religion has undeniably been used to justify hatred, violence, exclusion and oppression; any honest account of history must acknowledge that reality, Brodsky told the congregation. But the abuse of religion does not negate its intended purpose any more than the abuse of medicine neutralizes its healing effects or the abuse of law nullifies the quest for justice.
Brodsky said, “At its best, religion has the capacity to anchor a deeply thoughtful, moral and just society. It offers practices that cultivate habits, relationships and rhythms through which meaningful lives are built.”
A meaningful life is not just stumbled upon. “For Judaism or other faiths to flourish, we need to recover the richness of our traditions to appeal to people. A tradition that teaches us to stop one day a week in order to remember that our worth is not only measured by our productivity has something important to teach a society,” she said.
She concluded, “A tradition that insists no one should mourn alone has something to say during an epidemic of loneliness. A tradition that gathers around a dinner table year after year to retell our story has wisdom to impart on a society that struggles to remember where it came from and the people who got us to where we are today. A tradition that preserved centuries of disagreements within its own sacred texts has something invaluable to teach the world increasingly plagued by polarization.”
Many people understand faith as requiring certainty in things that cannot be proven. “This perception causes many thoughtful people to conclude that religion is not for them. But perhaps by engaging in religious ritual, faith will deepen and our understanding of God will evolve. Or perhaps, all of our questions will remain,” Brodsky said.
She concluded, “What matters most is the willingness to enter the conversation, to join the community, to open yourself up to the possibility of discovering something new and to engage in whichever aspect of tradition most resonates within you. The enduring relevance of religion lies not in what it asks us to believe, but in who it asks us to become.”
The Rev. Mary Lee Talbot, Ph.D., a member of The Chautauquan Daily editorial staff, presided. Leslie Adler, president of the Hebrew Congregation of Chautauqua, read the scripture. Sonya Subbayya Sutton, interim director of Sacred Music, played “Melody” by Myroslav Skoryk, arranged by Jonathan Dimmock, for the prelude on the Massey Memorial Organ. The Motet Choir, under the direction and accompanied by organ scholar Owen Reyda, sang ”Kehillah Kedoshah,” music by Dan Nichols, text by Mike Moskowitz. Reyda played Fünf Fest-Präludien: No. 1 by Louis Lewandowski on the Massey Organ. Support for this week’s chaplaincy and preaching is provided by the J. Everett Hall Memorial Chaplaincy and the Randell-Hall Memorial Chaplaincy.
