This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Interfaith Conversation with Rabbi Steven Philp
DESCRIPTION
Anger often gets a bad rap — but what if it holds a sacred spark? This week we reclaim anger not as something shameful but as a signal worth following into collective action. How can we transform our anger into compassionate action for collective good?
Join us for a conversation with Rabbi Steven Philp to explore Jewish teachings on our theme of the month, fear and fury, and how they can lead to personal growth and drive compassionate outreach.
SUMMARY
This interfaith service at Cityside, led by Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza and featuring Rabbi Steven Philp of Mishkan Chicago, explores Jewish teachings on fear, anger, and the divine within a shared framework of oneness and co-creation with God. Through the imagery of Khalil Gibran’s “Fear” and the metaphor of the river becoming the ocean, the conversation highlights a mutual theological emphasis on interconnectedness with a larger source—whether named God, the divine, or the unfolding cosmos—and on a covenantal relationship of “mutual obligation” expressed as love in action.
Rabbi Philp outlines a Jewish “sandbox” of God-concepts ranging from immanence to transcendence and from belief in one God to a non-theistic sense of cosmic oneness, emphasizing deep interconnectedness and a creative, generative process in which humans participate. Fear (yira) is presented as both danger and doorway: it can contract us into distrust and hatred, or, when understood as awe, can propel us outward into compassionate presence, exemplified by rabbinic teachings that “walking in God’s ways” means clothing the naked, visiting the sick, comforting mourners, and burying the dead.
Addressing fear and uncertainty, Rabbi Philp draws on Hasidic teachings that liken life to crossing “an extremely narrow bridge,” encouraging courage rooted in memory of past resilience—personal, communal, and ancestral—and insisting that fear must not dictate our actions. Anger is framed as a “life force” that points to injustice and can motivate repair, with biblical and rabbinic narratives showing both destructive anger (Cain and Esau’s violence) and evolving models of channeling divine and human anger into restorative justice, as in Abraham and Moses’ interventions with God. The discussion affirms the legitimacy of “righteous anger” at the gap between the world as it is and as it should be, while warning that unfiltered anger can “throw Torah and prophecy out the window” and must be passed through ethical and prophetic “filters” and supported by community.
Practically, participants are urged not to avoid the world’s pain but to “show up in the way we can,” recognizing that each person has a unique role in the unfinished work of repair, and balancing engagement with necessary rest through practices like Shabbat and communal joy, song, and sanctuary. In closing, Rabbi Philp situates fear and anger within the Jewish High Holy Day season of introspection, distinguishing guilt (“I did something wrong”) from shame (“I am wrong”) and emphasizing teshuva—returning to one’s inherent goodness and divine image rather than internalizing brokenness. The service ends with shared blessings and prayer, affirming a single sustaining source that empowers people to face fear, anger, and all emotions in community, as embodiments of divine light and oneness.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Hello everyone. I’m Reverend Judy Ranniger Meza. My pronouns are she/her. Welcome to everyone here for our interfaith service. I’m happy to say that these have become a regular thing here at Cityside, which I’m happy about. I’m also happy to be here today with Rabbi Steven Philp from the Mishkan Chicago community. And he is here to give us his perspective and insight on Jewish teachings about fear and anger, which is what we’ve been looking at this month. I’ve had the opportunity and the pleasure to hear Rabbi Steven speak, and I know him to be engaging, insightful, and knowledgeable. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation and I know that you are too. So if anyone is from the Mishkan community, I’m not sure anyone is here in the room, but could be online. We say a big hello and welcome to you and to everyone who is showing up here today in the room online, or maybe you’re going to look at this as a recording later on.
So happy to have everyone with us. So a few notes about our service today. I will be facilitating this conversation with Rabbi Steven, and afterwards there’ll be an opportunity for questions and answers. So there are cards and pencils on your chair. So as you fill them out, just raise them up. There’ll be an usher to grab them so that we can get right to the Q&A after our conversation. So there’s a little change in the order of service. After I introduce Steven, I’m going to do a reading and then I’ll do a brief blessing. So no meditation today. So sorry folks. So let’s see. Oh, we also have some food and refreshment, so please stay afterwards for a little fellowship after service. I’d like to introduce you now to Rabbi Steven. He is the associate rabbi at Mishkan Chicago, a spiritual community reclaiming Judaism’s inspiration and transformative essence.
He is also a licensed clinical social worker and serves on the board of the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs and the Chicago community Mikvah. Rabbi Steven received his master’s of divinity and master’s of social work from the University of Chicago and a Master’s of Studies in Jewish studies from the University of Oxford and rabbidic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is currently a doctoral student at the Spurtis Institute. And you also may be interested and noted that Rabbi Steven lives in Boys Town with his cat Miso, which is we save all the interesting stuff for the end of the rep. Okay. So before I ask Steven to join me up front, I would like to offer a reading to begin today’s conversation. It is entitled Fear by Khalil Gabran, and then I’ll open the service with a little invocation. It is said that before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the past she has traveled from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river cannot go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear. Because that’s where the river will know. It’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean. So now if you’ll just turn within and join me as we open our conversation today, knowing our oneness with all that is, knowing that this vast ocean of divine love, divine peace, divine source is the truth of who we are, is the truth of who I am as each person in the seats and online.
All of life is one with this source of love and peace, wholeness, freedom and joy. And so it is in that oneness, in that truth that I speak this blessing upon our time together here, knowing that we are blessed in this love of God, this love of the divine that holds us and guides us and supports us. And so I bless everyone who has made this service possible today and blessing the music team and the tech team and all of the hearts and hands that make it all possible and create this wonderful sanctuary for us. And I bless Rabbi Steven as he joins me in this conversation about dealing with fear and anger and these human emotions that we often struggle with in our lives. So just bless this time together, calling it good. And so it is. So Steven, if you’ll join me up front, we’ll take a seat here.
So Stephen, I love the imagery of this poem, the river trembling with fear as she looks back where she’s been and now she’s looking off into the distance to that big ocean that she’s being inexorably drawn to and she can’t go back. And so it speaks to me of how we travel with fear in our lives at various times. We can’t help but not because it’s part of the human condition. But it’s only when we are able to unite with the divine, in this case represented by the vast ocean, that we can let go of that fear. So this idea of becoming the ocean is really a central theme and central concept in science of mind. So I’m wondering, Steven, for you what the meaning of the poem is for you and if it touches on any Jewish themes of life and God and fear.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Well, first it’s so nice to be here. Oh, hi, there’s more people behind me. It’s so nice to be here with all of you. And also I know folks are joining online as well. I loved the imagery of that poem because it points to a central idea within the Jewish tradition that we are all deeply interconnected, both with each other, with the world around us, and also with, if you want to call it God or the divine or the unfolding of the cosmos across billions of years, whatever that is, that thing larger than ourselves, that we are in intimate relationship with it.
Judaism, we’re not a dogmatic tradition. We don’t have kind of a set of beliefs or a statement of beliefs like many other traditions do. But the closest thing that we probably do have to that is a prayer that we come back to multiple times a day in a traditional Jewish practice, but certainly at any holiday or service, which is called the Shima. Shema Israel, which means listen up you Israel people, you God wrestlers is really actually the literal translation of the word Yisrael. It means to wrestle with the divine. So listen up, pay attention you God wrestlers. This entity, this source is in relationship with us. This is our God. And this entity, this source of creation is singular. The problem is that we often hold this up as a kind of central principle of faith in the Jewish community without actually looking at it in context, which is really important, which is it’s actually followed by several more paragraphs of text.
This is all drawn from the Torah. And those paragraphs I think are actually vitally important to understand our particular relationship with this oneness, with this vastness, which is how do we respond to the recognition that we are all part of a larger whole? And that is mutual obligation. We conceive of ourselves in the Jewish tradition of being in a relationship of mutual obligation with the source of all things. And that commands that we show up in a particular way for each other and for the world. And that particular commandment, what follows directly on the heels of the statement of unity is a command to love, to show up in love. And there’s a really beautiful conception of love that I borrowed from an amazing scholar named Dr. Mara Benjamin who talks about love as obligation, which is an experience any of us have. If you’ve ever loved anybody or any pet, for example, in your life, you know that love doesn’t always feel good.
Love is actually not about feeling good all the time. Love is about how we show up for those people, for those things that we love. And that means sometimes being really frustrated or being really grumpy or being really angry at that person that we love, but we still show up. We still feed our children. We still walk the dog. We still give our partner a hug. We still answer the phone when our friend calls even when we’re not feeling great about it. And so that I think in one way is the response to how do we navigate the vastness that is the ocean of oneness that we find ourselves swimming in, which is to show up in love and a love that obligates us to act in a particular way, which is a supportive, co-creative, life-giving, life-affirming way.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Okay. That co-creation is a central idea within science of mine too, that we are in partnership with the source, with God, with whatever word we want to call it. And that kind of just leads into the question of just if you can explain more about the concept of God within Judaism. I know when Rabbi Max was here, he said you get three rabbis in a room and you get three different definitions of God. So is there kind of a central idea about God within Judaism or are you in Rabbi Max’s camp on this one?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
It’s not even just three rabbis in a room. Get two Jews in a room and they’ll have three, four, five different conceptions of God between them. My students, whenever I teach about anything within the Jewish tradition, the phrase they become very used to hearing me say is, well, it depends because there is a range. But while there is, I think, a plentiful number of conceptions of the divine within the Jewish tradition, there are parameters to it. So I often describe it as a bit of a sandbox that we get to play within, but there are edges to that sandbox. So one spectrum that I like to kind of use as defining two of the walls of our sandbox is the spectrum of imminence to transcendence. So Jewish conceptions of God where God is very imminent, so noble, involved in history, involved in our lives, in direct relationship with us, perhaps in the world, perhaps within us as well, to transcendent on the other end of the spectrum, which is beyond.
Outside of time, the laws of nature, maybe even unknowable, maybe even beyond our ability to conceive as human beings. And you can imagine that on this spectrum, there are thousands of ways of leaning more one way or the other or bringing them together. Some conceptions of God within the Jewish tradition even take the extremes of imminence and transcendence and throw them into one idea. But that’s kind of one of the parameters, to the edges of the sandbox. The other edge is one to zero, which I like to say is that Jews believe in atmost one God. So zero is an option as well. That is an operating theology within the Jewish tradition. Meaning
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
No God. Meaning
Rabbi Steven Philp:
No God, right? And that oneness means something else other than maybe a divinity. Maybe it’s the oneness of the fact that we are all interconnected through creation, which is why I always love that image when I’m kind of speaking God language within a Jewish context. It could be God. It could be an entity or a source or something that we have intimate relationship with. It could also just be the miracle of the universe unfolding, which is also pretty cool if you think about it. And maybe even a little bit more mind-blowing in some ways. If anybody’s been to the planetarium recently, I always find that’s kind of an awe inspiring moment of this is really big, this thing around us. So that’s kind of the other spectrum as well. So polytheism, for example, it’s an easy example, and that falls outside of the Jewish conception of God.
But there’s a lot of space within the kind of imminent to transcendent one to zero range. There’s a lot of space to play around in there.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Okay. Okay. Well, that answers a lot of questions about the idea of oneness that I always like to ask our interfaith guests. But I guess my conception, just because it’s a theistic religion and that maybe God is out there. But you’re really describing God is in here and out there and all around. Is that how Judaism holds that idea of God?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
It depends on who you’re asking, right? I would say most Jewish conceptions of God find their space on that range, that God is somehow involved in the world and in history. It’s how we experience God as a Jewish people. The way we know God, if anybody has read the Torah or seen the Prince of Egypt, which is the greatest animated feature of all time, that’s a statement, not an opinion. But the way God introduces God’s self to the biblical character of Moses is by saying, if anybody knows it, I’m the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. That’s how Jews experience God. That’s how we know who God is, is by looking back on our own history, either as a people, like the collective memory of our people or in our own lives as well. So there is a sense of knowing God divinity, that thing larger than ourselves through our own personal and communal experience as a people.
But there are certainly Jewish theologians who’ve weighed much more on the side of transcendence of even though God has been involved in history, that thing is so much larger than anything our human minds could ever conceive of. Of course, the people who write that usually say, “Except for a few of us, like myself, who can actually encapsulate that.” There’s a little bit of an ego there. But yeah, there’s a sense that God is within. And again, I love to go back to the idea of whether it is kind of a sense of divinity or even a sense that we are all made of the same material as each other and the universe around us. There’s a deep interconnectedness there, that we are part of this unfolding of creation. So if we’re going to move towards what’s my conception of divinity, it is that process of unfolding.
It’s that creative generative energy. And that’s where I see the kind of covenantal, that relationship of mutual obligation play out, which is how are we participating in our actions in that unfolding of creation? How are we bringing that further towards a more kind of abundant and life-giving and peaceful and life-affirming world?
And so that’s where I see us participating in that process of showing up again in that way of love. To have love for each other, ourselves and the world around us by acting in ways that help creation unfold rather than stand in the way of that unfolding or even trying to go in the other direction, which is to be destructive or harmful, which of course is a way that sometimes we act as human beings, that’s in our capacity.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Yeah. Okay. So that co-creative process is something that we embrace a lot here in Science of Mind. And this idea that we’re one with it. We’re utilizing that in our lives. So we’re speaking a lot of the same language and using the God qualities. We often talk about God qualities, that we are one with this same God stuff, that it’s part of who we are.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Which I love too, because there’s a though within Judaism that other people don’t need to be Jewish to be good people or to be connected to God. We’re not an evangelical tradition. Although people are welcome to join the Jewish people if they want to, that is an option. But that’s not the goal. The goal isn’t to make everybody Jewish in the world. The goal is to seek out and connect with other people who are also following traditions that affirm life and lead us towards more ethical, more purposeful lives.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Great. Well, some of the things that get in the way of that can be fear and anger. So as we turn toward our themes that we’ve been looking at this month, how does Judaism distinguish between healthy fear and destructive fear that keeps us from living faithfully or healthily, we might say? And do you have some examples from the Jewish teachings of people who have dealt with fear?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
So like any human emotion, it can be constructive and I think it can be destructive as well. And the destructive examples of fear I think are quite easy to see. It’s the fear. Fear comes from encountering something that’s unknown or outside of our control, which is scary. We like to have a sense that we’re in control of things. And that is largely in some ways an illusion, but it feels really good. It feels really comfortable to be masters of our own fate and of the world around us. And the reality is that just by existing as human beings, and particularly as human beings in relationship with other human beings, there’s a lot we don’t control. And that can be quite frightening and that can be quite scary. And so one response to fear, one way fear drives us is to turn inward, to turn away, to push away that which we don’t understand or don’t know.
And I’m thinking particularly of how we interact with other people. The issue then is that pushing away, that pulling inward. It really deadens our ability to be empathic, to build connections with other people. And that so easily turns to distrust. That so easily turns to hate. And we see, I mean, there’s so many examples. I think we can look in the world around us where we live with the end result of what started as fear. A fear of people who are unlike us, a fear of people who act differently than us, a fear of people who behave or believe different things in us, or even a fear that things are just spinning out of control and we don’t know what to do. And so we act out in a way that sometimes give us that illusion of control. Fear also, I think in kind of deadening our empathic impulse, it limits our imagination.
It pushes us towards simple answers. And often, one of those simple answers it pushes us towards, which is in the end, not actually an answer to the problems of the world, is that we can blame somebody else for the ills of the world. That if only they thought differently, if only they didn’t exist, then everything would be better. I like to say that’s kind of our Tolkien-esque view of the world because it is a fantasy. Like Lord the Rings, right? If we’ll borrow for another sacred text, right? Like Lord of the Rings, wouldn’t it be great if we just lived in a world where they were all good people and all bad people and we just had to destroy one thing to make everything better? There’s a reason that fantasy’s appealing. That sounds really nice. That’s not how the world works, but fear drives us towards that kind of simple solution mindset.
The other way to think about fear, it’s in close relationship with awe. And the word in Hebrew, yira, means both fear, but it also means awe or wonder. It’s that standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. It’s the smallness of floating in the ocean. It’s the going to the planetarium and doing that little zoom out exercise where suddenly you realize that we are a tiny little speck in a really big universe. Which is scary. That’s really frightening, but it can also be deeply grounding in a sense of actually having awe how vast the world is. Now
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Isn’t the Hebrew translation of that fear of God, fear of the Lord?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
So Yuratashem, which is what you’re talking about there, that’s where I love Hebrew. Hebrew, it’s a beautiful language because it’s actually a very sparse language. If we think about English or even modern Hebrew for that matter, we borrow a lot of words from other languages so that we can be very specific. It’s what makes English literature and poetry so beautiful. We can be very, very specific with what exactly we want to say. So if I can say rage or fury or annoyance or anger, for example, that doesn’t exist in biblical Hebrew certainly. So a word like yira means fear or awe or reverence or that sense of overwhelming wonder. It’s all the same word. And so fear of God, yes, that’s one way to translate it. The other way to translate that is awe. To be in awe of our place within that larger oneness, which is so vast and so much bigger than we are, which is scary and also brings us, I think, to wonder.
And so there’s a really beautiful conversation actually. It derives from a line in the book of Deuteronomy and the Torah. And it talks about, essentially, Moses is imparting some final wisdom to the Israelites before they cross into the land that they’ve been journeying toward for 40 years. And it’s his swan song. He knows that he can’t go with them. So he’s trying to really kind of double down on some good life advice. And he’s like, “This is what was asked of you to be in awe, to be in reverence of the creator of all things, and to walk as a result, walk in God’s ways.” So fast forward a thousand years later, the rabbis are sitting around and they’re like, “What does that mean?” To translate this awe and reverence into walking in God’s ways. How do you walk in the ways of the source of all things?
What does that even mean? And so they look actually to the Torah for examples. They say, “Oh, it’s to manifest some of the actions and qualities that God manifests.” And so what does God do in the Torah that we can follow the example of? Clothes the naked, visits the sick, comforts the morning and buries the dead. Those are four of the things that God does in the Torah directly to other human beings. And so you’ll notice that those are the exact opposite direction of the fear that pulls us inward. It’s actually a sense of awe and wonder that pushes us outward. Maybe even precisely in the moment we want to pull inward. What do we do if we’re truly in awe of the world around us? We offer our presence. We show up and we show up in ways that are uncomfortable and not always pleasant.
We show up in ways that actually we get no benefit from. In particular, the bearing of the dead. That person can’t say thank you. You’re not going to even get a thank you out of it. It’s actually why it’s held up in our tradition as one of the most sacred things that we can do because there is no benefit other than showing up and being present for a person who’s in need. And so there’s a really beautiful sense here that one way to respond that yira is fear that pushes us inward. Another way to respond to it is a sense of awe and wonder that actually drives us to show up for each other even when it’s not easy and even when it’s hard.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
It’s a beautiful concept. Yeah. Well, can you give us examples from the tour of people who actually dealt with anger and the way it led to kind of spiritual growth? And maybe speak to a little bit about how Jewish teachings talk about courage.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
There’s a beautiful teaching. This is not from the Torah actually. It’s from a Hasidic rabbi who lived in kind of Eastern Europe in the, I think 18th or 19th century. Don’t quote me on that. But Rabbi Simchabunam talks about how do we respond to our sense of smallness in the world? And he says you should always carry two pieces of paper, one in each pocket. And both are quotes. One’s a quote from the Talmud, from the kind of compendium of Jewish teachings. We’ve been in conversations from about two millennia ago and one’s from the Torah itself. One of them is the world was made for me. Which is that sense I think that comes from marveling at the vastness of the world. If you’ve ever had that experience of, for me, it’s the ocean. I stand at the ocean or Lake Michigan’s a very good substitute.
You stand at the edge of the water and it’s so big and somehow everything seems, I don’t know, solvable or I can handle it. Actually, the vastness of space and the vastness of time, somehow I exist in this moment and that’s really miraculous. And that’s deeply empowering to recognize that billions of years of creation have led to this moment of me existing, that actually the universe inspired me into being in this moment. That is incredibly powerful. To recognize that that entire vastness is contained in me and me arriving in this moment. I could do anything. The other one is I am but dust and ashes because if our ego gets too big and we think the world is only about us, we have to be reminded that actually in the vastness of space, we are only stardust here for a short period of time. And so to have a little humility as well.
But to kind of always modulate between those two things. To take that kind of that fear and awe and to understand. On one hand, I am a miracle of creation. The world was made for me to exist within. And on the other hand, I’m also stardust. I’m but dust and ashes, just like anybody else.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Okay. Great. I think Reverend Amy used that in a talk not so long ago. Yeah. Yeah. Good. So are there prayers and rituals within Judaism, Steven, that help people navigate fear and uncertainty? And are there any that particularly resonate with you?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
So a particular teaching that I love, this is actually by another Hasidic master, Rabbi Nachman Abratslav. And it’s a phrase that I come back to often. It’s also been translated into many beautiful musical arrangements. So if you’re a musical person, I am happy to recommend a few. But one of his teachings in Hebrew, it’s which means the entire world, it’s like walking across an extremely narrow bridge. And the key is to not fear. Great, Rabbi Nachman. Super helpful. Love that recommendation. But the idea is, okay, well, how do we not fear walking across the many narrow bridges that we have ahead of us is that we look back. We look back and we recognize that you are here because you have overcome every single difficult moment that has previously presented itself. And you are through your heritage, through your chosen community, part of a long history of people crossing narrow bridges.
I often think about all of the people who had the courage to take that next step just so that I could arrive in this moment. I’m the inheritor of an incredible history as a Jew. I’m the inheritor of an incredible history of resilience as a queer person. All of us belong to communities and stories of people who crossed so many narrow bridges to arrive at this moment. And I am sure each and every one of you has had to cross narrow bridges in your own life that were incredibly frightening and incredibly fraught. And somehow you are still here and you are in this room, you’re in this space. So how do I not fear the narrow bridge that lies ahead of me? Well, I look back and I say, “Oh, I got this. This might be different. This might be hard in its own way, but I’ve crossed narrow bridges before.” And that’s actually how.
It’s not that we don’t fear, it’s that we don’t allow fear to dictate our actions. Again, we don’t allow it to condense us or to turn us inward. We say, “I am afraid and I’m going to translate that into intent and purpose and turning out and having that courage and knowledge that I have the ability to take that next step.”
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Okay. I like that a lot. All right. Someone’s going to have to just give me a high five in terms of our time, but I want to move to the question of anger then. So that’s our other emotion that we’ve been looking at this month. Is it considered fear in Judaism to have some positive uses or maybe some benefits? Or is it something to be avoided like it’s not good? I think I was in preparation for this, I ran across Memonides, for example, a philosopher, a scholar in Judaism, and he likened anger to idol worship and something that should be avoided or considered destructive. What’s your take on anger, Steven?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Well, it depends. No, but in actuality, anger, like I said earlier, like fear, anger is a feeling that can either be used for constructive purposes or destructive purposes. One of my supervisors when I was an intern working towards my degree in social work often said that anger is a life force. It points to an injustice. It points to something that is wrong and it motivates us to address it. Anger says that there is something off in the world around us and that we’re not going to tolerate that, which is incredibly life-giving in a sense. Because the other response could be apathy or despite It’s fair. Anger says no. I want to do something about it. In the Torah, God gets angry a lot. God gets angry a lot.
The question is how do we act out of anger? So I’ll use God as one example and then we have a few other examples as well. When God acts out of anger, there is a moment in which the character of God is furious at something that has gone wrong. Usually it’s our ancestors having complained a lot and been given very simple instructions and not being very good at following them. But that transforms into justice, into seeking justice, into repairing what has been wronged. And it’s an evolutionary process. The way that God initially acts in the Torah is actually less restorative in the process of justice than the way that God acts much later in the Torah. So there’s an evolutionary process there. Beautifully actually, humankind is the partner in that evolutionary process. We’re often the ones who stand there and say, “Hey God, I know you’re angry, but remember there is a way to channel that anger into something that is constructive rather than destructive.” There’s the beautiful example of Abraham standing in front of God before God wants to destroy Sudom and Gomorrah, these two cities where there’s kind of a rife with just really dehumanizing behavior towards each other.
And Abraham’s like, “You’re the God of justice. You’re meant to bring more life into the world.You’re going to destroy these cities.” And they have this great back and forth actually. And there’s a lot of thought that the greatest failing in that moment is that Abraham actually gives up after a while. He kind of whittles God down. He loses that battle. In the end they’re destroyed because he whittles God down. The beautiful thing is actually in our own evolutionary kind of moral development, Moses, many generations later, a very similar situation happens and Moses just says no. Moses is like, no, that’s not how we act out of anger. God, come to remember there’s a way to channel anger into something that’s restorative. And in the end, that actually is what happens in that story. So we also kind of evolve in our own moral compass alongside God and how to channel anger to justice.
Because the other examples were given of a more destructive anger, we take Cain, the Cain and Abel story. For those who are familiar, they both offer sacrifices to God. Cain’s sacrifices are rejected and Cain is angry. And understandably, why are my sacrifices rejected? But he turns it into jealousy. He turns into a jealousy that actually leads to violence. He kills his brother. Esau is another great example. Esau has his birthright stolen. He translates his anger again into fury, into violent theory against his brother. Again, that anger is totally justified because I mean, his birthright was stolen from him. That’s not very nice. But there is a way to act out of that that might have been restorative, but they both turned to a violence. And that’s where I think the idolatry comes in. Is an anger that warps our perception of other human beings is I think one of the worst forms of idolatry that we could think of in the Jewish tradition because we conceive of every single human being as a reflection of the divine into the world.
And so to allow our sense of that, to allow our understanding of that, to even forget that, I mean, that’s the worst form of idolatry. To transform somebody else from an image of God into the source of our ire or hatred or God forbid our violence, violent tendencies, that’s idolatry.
Because we’re forgetting a fundamental feature of every single human being. The baseline of Judaism is that every human being is inherently good and is a reflection of the divine, which is why justice in its best form is restorative, not punitive. It is a justice that holds people accountable on one hand while having compassion for them on the other and an understanding that they have the ability to change. This is the season we’re in right now actually in the Jewish calendar. We’re coming up on our new year in a few weeks. I have so much to do before then.
We’re coming up on our new year and this is a time of reflection and introspection. But it’s not like a self-flagellation of all the mistakes I’ve done. Oh, I’m such a terrible person. It’s like there’s a beauty in the process of being able to reflect and actually having the confidence and the faith that we have the ability to change. The word for repentance in Hebrew, which is a terrible translation, is to shuva. It literally means to return. What are we returning to? We’re returning to our best selves. We’re returning to that inherent goodness, that image of God that is stamped into each and every single one of us that gets kind of shbutzed up because life is hard. But we have the ability to wash that Shabbatz off and get back to that thing that’s always been there, which is not an inherent brokenness, it’s an inherent goodness.
And that’s what anger warps. If we allow it to, it warps our ability to identify that inherent quality in every single human being.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
It’s a very mature either psychological or spiritual ability to hold both that compassion for others as well as accountability, whether it’s yourself or it’s another person. And that kind of leads me to this idea of righteous anger. Is there an in Jewish thought? Is that a concept? And how is it distinguished from sinful or destructive anger? I think you kind of just mentioned some of that, but are we justified, Steven, in these really, really difficult times to be royally pissed off? I think that’s what I really want to know. Yes,
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Yes, yes, yes. No, we really are. There’s a really one of my favorite memes is there’s this little image of these two little people yelling at the sun. And the top says, “It’s a great day to yell at God.” And one says, what the F? I don’t know if I can curse in here. One’s like, “What the fuck?” And the other one’s like, “Come out, you coward.” So no, there is reason to be angry at the world. I mean, look at the world around us. The gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is so big. There’s a lot of reasons to be angry because part of that is knowing that closing that gap is possible.That’s actually, I think, where the anger can come from, the righteous anger, which is like, it’s not just that the world is out of whack.
It’s that we know it could be different and it’s not. And that’s where I think, again, anger can be channeled into that drive for justice. There is a teaching from the Talmud. Again, that’s kind of a compendium of rabbinic conversations that really is the foundation of the Judaism we practice today that talks about how they say when a Torah scholar is angry, their Torah goes out the window. And when a prophet is angry, their prophecy goes out the window. And I think what they mean by that is that often if we sit in our anger and allow it to just kind of fester unfiltered, it can be very destructive. But if we kind of keep our Torah, and by what Torah means is kind of our ethical tradition. And if we kind of keep our prophecy, which is the vision of the world as it could be, the vision of that better world, those actually become the filters for our anger to pass through.
If we go back to those stories of humankind kind of being the good moderator for God’s anger, that’s what those people were doing. Abraham, Moses, they were just reminding God, don’t let your anger lash out unfiltered. We have an ethical tradition. We have moral vision. And anger channeled and filtered through those can become an incredible source of motivation, of identifying injustices and working towards that better world. But those filters are so important. And they exist. And they exist within community because we sometimes need that reminder. We are the reminders for each other. When somebody is sitting in their anger or their distress, their fear, their sadness, all very real human emotions, all completely legitimate responses to the world as it is. And the fact that life is hard sometimes. The community comes around us to support us, to lift us back up and to help us kind of find our grounding again in what other ethical tradition kind of helps you live a more purposeful and more kind of life-giving life.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
So this comes up in spiritual community, I think. At least I’ve heard it and struggle with it myself sometimes. We see what’s out there in the world and it’s in what we call the world of form. What’s happening right now is bad. It makes us angry. And there are people that say, I’m not watching the news. I’m not reading the newspaper. It destroys my peace. And that’s all really valid. Is that what we should do? Should we just kind of avoid the stuff that makes us angry or do we approach it? What was that?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
I will say that actually we are obligated to show up in the way that we can. Each of you exist in this moment because as I said, the universe conspired you into being. So there’s a reason you’re here. There’s something that you give to the world that only you can give to the world, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. There’s a beautiful teaching from the rabbis that says that you are not obligated to finish the work, but you’re not allowed to desist from it. Which is to say that each of us can do something. Each of us can do something. It’s not the same thing as the other person. And there’s no way that all of us can do everything. And that would be complete hubris. I think that any single one of us could reshape the world in our image. We know actually the destructive consequences of people in power who believe that they could reshape the world in their own image.
None of us could do that. But each of us can do something. So it’s about finding what you can do and recognizing that not every mantle is yours to carry, not every cause is yours to champion. That’s why, again, we exist in community because each and every one of you is showing up in different ways. And you have your passions and you have the thing that calls you to serve the world in a particular way. And it could be marching in the streets. It could be signing up people to vote. It could be showing up for somebody in need. It could be holding your friend’s hand in a time of incredible difficulty. It could be teaching. It could be care. It could be creating art and music. It could be building a space like this. There’s so many ways that we show up for a world that is so needed.
And to maybe have a little bit of another kind of awareness to appreciate what it is that you bring to the world around you. And breaks are important.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
So it’s not avoidance. It’s
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Just
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Finding your way.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Yeah. I mean, God and/or the rabbis was onto something when they instituted Shabbat, our Sabbath. You need a break. You need to stop. Put the phone down. Even for an hour. We’re not meant to live in the fire hose of information that we constantly live within. Having your own personal Shabbat is okay. And not only okay, but it’s spiritually necessary because really what do we do in that space when we kind of put the news away is we should be reconnecting to that, which gives us life, is important to us, reminds us of what we’re fighting for. I think a space like this is so beautiful because we’re singing songs of joy. We have to remember what that feels like because when we do, and I’m going to say when, when we do finally reach that world that we’ve been fighting so hard to live within, we still have to remember how to sing.
We still have to remember how to dance. We can’t forget how to do that. Instead of yelling
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
At each other.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Right. And so we have to create spaces to continue doing that. To continue manifesting that kind of world that we want to live in and to give ourselves a break from all that other stuff. It’s still there. You all know that. I don’t need to remind you of that. Honestly, the harder thing is to create space like this. To remind us of actually what is good and beautiful in the world. And to hold that alongside that so that when we go back out there to do whatever it is that we’re called to do, we remember why.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Okay. I’m getting the high sign. Can you just summarize this really quickly? For these two twin themes of anger and fear, what from the Jewish tradition could people of all face utilize going forward?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
I think something that I think is just on my mind because this is the season that we’re in. We’re in the season of self-reflection in the Jewish calendar. We’re leading up to the new year and then quickly after the new year, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement as it’s often translated. Which again, I want to go back to this idea of what that introspection looks like and what it points us to, which is there are many reasons to feel guilty about what we do. Guilt is a helpful emotion because it reminds us that maybe we didn’t show up in the way that we meant to show up in. But shame is very different. Actually, it was Brene Brown who taught this, right? Guilt says, “I did something wrong.” Shame says, “I am wrong.” And that’s not where this time of year is pointing us. Again, to Shuva, the ability to analyze our behavior, to think about how we want to show up in the world, to recognize what ruptures we’ve caused and where we need to repair, to acknowledge where we need an apology, or maybe send that text that you mean to send, or call that person you’ve been meaning to call, or sign up for that newsletter you’ve been sign up for, donate to that cause you donate to us.
Guilt kind of motivates us a little bit like, “Okay, I’m not showing up the way I want to,” but it’s not because you are wrong. And so when we feel fear, we feel anger, those are completely legitimate responses to a world that is scary and out of whack sometimes. But it doesn’t mean that you are broken. The brokenness of the world does not mean you are broken. And again, the whole process of this season, the Jewish calendar is to remind ourselves that we are inherently good and we are worth being treated with love and dignity. And that is a undeniable, right? That is an eternal quality of human beings.
We live in a world though that often pushes us towards shame. We live in a world that often makes us feel bad about the feelings that we feel in response to the world around us. So as much as I can encourage folks to hold as much as you can onto that reminder that you are okay, not you’re more than okay, you’re beautiful. You are a manifestation of the divine in the world. To remind each other of that too. And to carry that out into the world, I think there’s one teaching I come back to consistently. It’s that one. It’s that you’re good. You are so good. You’re so beautiful, right?
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
That’s
Rabbi Steven Philp:
A beautiful
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
One. It’s a thank you for Steven.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Yeah, of course. Of course.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Yeah. So we are going to do question and answers, but I really want to thank Steven for this wonderful conversation. It was beautiful. So does anybody have some questions that they’re going to pass? You want to just hand it to me? You can’t write that fast. Oh. You introduced him as a congregation is reclaiming. You used that word. What does that mean to you? Okay, let me repeat that.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Sure. Yeah, I can repeat the question. The question is, Mishkan, the community that I work for, our mission statement, our vision statement is that we’re reclaiming Judaism’s transformative and spiritual essence, which is to say that we are a community that sincerely believes that Judaism can be inspiring, that can be fun, that can be life-giving, that it can be uplifting, that can be challenging and productive ways to push against I think some of the. I think Judaism, like many traditions, kind of fell to the sense of people kind of shuffling their feet into the sanctuary, sitting there dutifully in a pew, listening to somebody sing at them, dozing off during the sermon, and then kind of taking their yamaka off at the door and going home and forgetting about it as fast as they could. So really the reclaiming is that we actually don’t necessarily need to look outside of our tradition to find that inspiring essence again.
It’s there. It’s there. Our job is just to kind of create the space and to have, I think, the creativity and the fun in doing that.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
If anyone else has, just hold your. Nashua will come by. And I think there’s one back there too, Chris. Okay. Is there a metaphysical way to interpret, to bury the dead, that Judaism. Okay, it’s not. That’s just it. A metaphysical as opposed
Rabbi Steven Philp:
To as opposed to a literal way. I mean, there is actually a sense that we are all obligated to carry a person to their final resting place. It’s a very practical mitzvah commandment, which is if you ever go to a Jewish funeral, for example, once the individual is put into the resting place, they’re actually. Everybody gathers to pick up the shovel and to put some earth into the. Everybody does that. There’s a sense of expressing that. But in terms of a metaphysical way, we’re not very attached as a people to physical spaces or monuments. We are a wandering people, often not through our own choice, sometimes through own choice. And so a lot of Judaism is around what can we create where we are? There is a sense when somebody passes, when somebody dies, that we say their memory should be for a blessing. And why do we say that?
It’s because we believe that we should take their best qualities. We should take the best parts of who they are and live them out in our own lives. And so in some ways, bearing the dead is not only putting their physical self into a resting place, but it’s also creating that space within us to become that living memory of who they are. I think that’s actually one of the best ways that we can honor those who are no longer with us.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
So this question is, how does Judaism see the idea of salvation in heaven or hell? And in what ways, if any, do fear and anger relate to those ideas in the Jewish faith?
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Oh, that’s a big, it depends. There are conceptions of an afterlife within Judaism. There’s actually conceptions of a complete bodily resurrection after we die. There are in some more traditional. The Jesus thing came from somewhere. There’s an idea of bodily resurrection within the Jewish tradition. And even in some more traditional communities, there’s a though that once we reach that kind of end of times, once we reach this kind of messianic vision of a redeemed world, that we’re all going to be hanging out together again, having a good time. The rabbis actually envision that it’s one big study hall where we spend all day studying hora.
I’m not quite so sure that that’s my vision of redeemed future, but they really love. I mean, I love studying too. But the interesting thing is that even within the threads of that kind of tapestry of which there is some sort of afterlife or promise of a world to come, there’s a rabbinic teaching that the reward is not then. The reward is actually in this life and in how we act in this life. We’re not motivated by what might happen in the afterlife. We are motivated by the world that we create now. And so we are obligated to show up in the way we show up, not because we’re going to get some sort of reward or punishment one day, but because that actually, what we do in the here and now is vitally important.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
Okay. So I’m going to ask the music team to come up. Are there any other questions before we have our music? And we’re going to do a little prayer afterwards. And again, I just really want to thank you, Stephen, for a really wonderful conversation. We could talk about this all day, but thank you. Thank you so much.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
No, you can put that away. You can put that away. Yeah. But stay here. Stay here. Oh, you will need it when we pray.
Paige Kizer – singer:
I am light. I am light. I am not the things my family did. I am not the voices in my head. I am not the pieces of the brokeness inside. I am light.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
So we’re going to close like we always do in prayer. I’m asking Rabbi Steven to do a brief prayer and do the Hebrew and English translation, and then I will finish.
Rabbi Steven Philp:
Of course. There is a prayer within the Jewish tradition called the. And it is a blessing when we do something for the first time, when we gather in a particular way that we want to gather again in the future. It is a blessing of new moments, new gatherings with the intent that we are hopeful that we get to do this again. And so the Hebrew is. Which means let us bless the source of all things, that spirit that exists within the world, who has given us strength, who has sustained us, and has allowed us to reach this moment here together today.
Rev. Judy Ranniger Meza:
And so knowing this, knowing the truth of that one spirit, that one source that provides all that we need, all of the strength, all of the power, all of the love and the peace and the joy and the wholeness that we need to live this life, to live our fullest life, that whole spirit of God, the Holy Spirit that is here now within each and every person, within the sound of my voice, it is here, it is now, it is always and ever. And so it is in that oneness, knowing our oneness with it, knowing that we are always supported by it, always enlivened by it, always enlightened through it and as it. I just speak this blessing, just this word of thanksgiving for all that has transpired today, knowing that we have been enlightened. We have learned, we have grown to this conversation. And that in each and every moment, in these moments and the moments going forward, that we embody this light of God, this wholeness of God, this truth of who we are, whether we’re facing anger or fear or any other emotion, dealing with the world as it is, we are in community with one another.
We are in our faith and in our strength as children of God, as the ocean that we both swim in and are in this wonderful, beautiful way. And so I just give great thanks for everything that has conspired together today to create this moment, this service, this time. I give great thanks for this. I bless it. And together we say in one voice, and so it is amen. Thank you.