On Faith......

The following is excerpted from the PBS Frontline documentary, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. I can't express how amazing this documentary was - to view interviews and excerpts from it, click here.

A Conservative Jewish rabbi, Rabbi Irwin Kula is president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York City. This is the text of his interview. I thought it was fascinating.

Nothing really changed between 9/11 and post-9/11 regarding how I felt about God. ... Before 9/11, already for many, many years, I did not believe in the popular voyeuristic God who watches what we do from outside. That died. That image died for me a long time ago.

What I believed in is the experiences that we name "God." Those experiences were the experience of love and experience of connection and the experience of caring and the experience of feeling both small and large. The experiences of connection, fundamentally. Those experiences, I recognize, are what I call "God." ...

I've been called an atheist quite a few times in the last 10 weeks. You have to develop some pat responses to "atheist." What I say to people is, "I have an atheism, but it beams with holiness."

But atheism is the greatest cleanser. Atheism may be the most religious posture in a moment in which either most people think they have to believe in something they don't believe in, or the people that actually believe in that God are doing so much damage. So maybe atheism is the great corrective right now and is actually the most religious response.

From my tradition's perspective, God was always invisible. God, you never used words for. Whatever words you used for God never adequately described that God. So for me, that's actually, I think, a return to the truest, most genuine understanding of our tradition. We had a God you couldn't see. We had a God you couldn't name. We had a God whose name was, "Yahweh," or "Jehovah." That's just "was," "is," "will be." "Was, Is, Will be" is the name of our God. ...

For me, that there's something "out there," and that I'm here, no longer meant anything, because every time I thought there was something "out there," it turns into inevitably something opposed to me. Something I have to define myself against, whether that's God, or whether that's a Christian, or whether that's a Muslim, or whether that's a Buddhist. And that's not my experience. My genuine experience of life is that there is nothing "out there." This is all there is. And when you see the seamlessness of it all, that's what I mean by "God."

Every tradition has that. Every morning, three times a day since I'm five or six years old, I've been saying, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." Right? It's one of our few creedal statements, the Shema. Three times a day, since I'm six years old. If you ask what 9/11 really did, it made me understand the truth of that. The truth of that, "Everything is one." Not that there's some guy hanging out there who has it all together, who we call "One," but that it is all one. We all know it deep down. We've all had those experiences, whether it's looking at our child in a crib or whether it's looking at our lover or looking at a mountaintop, or looking at a sunset. Right? We've all had those experiences. And we recognize, "Whoa. I'm much more connected here." That's what those firemen had. They recognized -- they didn't have time to think about it, right? Because actually, if you think about it, you begin to create separations. They didn't think about it. All they knew is we're absolutely connected. We're absolutely connected to the 86th floor. Well, that's where God is. That's not "where God is"; God isn't anywhere. That's what we mean when we say "God." ...

Could you sing that particular Torah of the last words. ...

These are final conversations that were recorded on cell phones, recorded on voice mail. They seem to me to be incredible texts, because they were at the moment of confronting life or death. They're so pure about the expression of love between husband and wife, between mother and child. ... When I read them, I just felt they were texts as sacred as the text that we end up having recorded, that we transmit from generation to generation.

I read these every single morning now, or most mornings, because they remind me that whatever my tradition is about, it's about this. It's about being able to express love. It's about being able to understand. Taking care of our children. It's about being in real, genuine friendships.

They just seem so real to me. ... I know all these chants because my father is a cantor. He transmitted all these ancient Jewish chants to me, so they almost naturally came out in chant. I realized, "My God, the chant that we use to read one of the Scriptures that tells the story of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the burning down of that temple, those chants fit this perfectly," although that's not how I thought about it. The chant came and then I said the chant worked, which, of course, is the way a good tradition works. The chant has made them even more alive to me and then links these new texts to my traditional text, even though I don't know these people. But the fact is, we all knew these people in our own way. ...

[Singing]:

"Honey. Something terrible is happening. I don't think I'm going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children."

"Hey, Jules. It's Brian. I'm on the plane and it's hijacked and it doesn't look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I hope to see you again. If I don't, please have fun in life, and live life the best you can. Know that I love you, and no matter what, I'll see you again."

"Mommy. The building is on fire. There's smoke coming through the walls. I can't breathe. I love you, Mommy. Good-bye."