Like many contemporary ethical dilemmas revolving around religion, this question pitting patients’ interests against religious conviction presumes a fault line or dualism, characteristic of modernity, which has now led us into what T. S. Eliot called a wasteland. It is hard to believe that just a few hundred years ago the great philosophers, theologians and religious figures like Maimonides were also the era’s greatest doctors. And it would have been unimaginable to them that patients’ interests (to be cured) and God’s desires (to choose life) could conflict. No wonder, that well into this century, this sensibility was expressed by many like my grandparents who saw doctors as gods!

The explosive advances in medicine since the enlightenment were to a great extent dependent on the differentiation (Kant) between the knowledge spheres of science and religion, and the emergence of scientific and empirical methods to study the body. This healthy differentiation became, over the centuries, an unhealthy separation and even antagonism between medicine and religion with the unfortunate consequence of medicine seemingly always associated with pushing the limits (a good thing) and religion seemingly always being associated with holding the line (a bad thing). The fact that this question feels so pressing reflects the failure of both physicians and religious leadership to understand their respective expertise’s, roles, limits, and to ultimately see the patient as a whole human being.

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The answer to the question how does God allow disasters like hurricane Katrina depends on what kind of God we believe in. The question assumes a God living high up above, a Divine Puppeteer or Shepard of sheep who rewards and punishes as he sees fit.

This conventional and most common God image of the Axial Age monotheistic religions, founded in the time of the great city-states with their kings ruling from on high, is simply one very limited and partial image of God. Using this puny, patriarchal, and punitive attempt to describe our experience of God (one I admit still works for me at times) leaves us with a number of explanations of the “problem of evil” each of which captures a partial truth about our experience of Reality and therefore does speak to us at different moments.

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I live in New York City. Two friends, including someone at whose wedding I had recently been the rabbi died in the World Trade Center. The acrid smell came through my apartment windows for days and sacred ashes, which I wiped away with tears, fell on my window sills for weeks.

My children who were 13 and 10 at the time were cut off from me and my wife as they could not get home from school on 9/11 because the subways were closed. The father of one of my daughter’s playmates from the time she was a toddler was killed on 9/11. The fear we felt was unforgettable and the innocence our kids lost forever so very sad.

So what message would I like to send to religious extremists? No words at all. Simply the following chant (using an ancient melody used to chant the Biblical book of Lamentations which describes the destruction of Jerusalem) of actual final cell phone conversations of people, who in the face of terror and the dearness of the vanishing moment, showed no anger or any desire for revenge but simply and heroically witnessed a yearning to love and the faith that love ultimately swallows up death.

Click here to listen to Rabbi Kula chanting.

After close to three decades of profound experiences sitting with people who are dying and with their families, I am very pragmatic about the question of life after death. Rather than worry about intellectual consistency or religious dogma, or simply adhere to a scientific or secular materialist view or to one of the many spiritual and religious “truths”, my criteria is simple: Does your view – whether that there is no life after death and this life is all there is, or the many after-life intuitions, e.g., immortality of the soul, the next world, resurrection, reincarnation, rebirth, heaven, hell, the bardos, Kabbalistic mansions – create less or more fear around death? Does your view support you as you fight for life until you’re ready to die? Does it allow you and those around you to be more honest, more hopeful, more compassionate, more present, more loving and even more joyful in the face of death? Does it allow you to grasp the truth of the Ecclesiastes poet who wrote that there is a time for birth and a time for death?

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The craziness around Halloween is hard to ignore and as with anything “sacred”, be it a day, a story, an object, it has multiple meanings. These days, as with so much in our polarized public culture, each meaning has its own advocates who ardently believe they have the whole truth. There are our religious fundamentalists who oppose Halloween because of its pagan origins and occult and satanic symbols and believe the holiday undermines Christian values with its embrace of devils, demons, and goblins. Just as seriously, there are Wiccans who oppose Halloween for its offense to real witches by promoting stereotypes of wicked witches. (Opposition to fun often makes strange bed fellows.)

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The Question: Which "ism" is more entrenched in America, sexism or racism? Which should religion address?

I am not big on arguing whose oppression is the most severe or who is more of a victim than whom or which prejudice and discrimination is more entrenched in America. Women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Jews, homosexuals, etc., are all in different and similar ways strangers in this country. With all the important and significant advances in political and human rights there is still much work to do.

As a Jew, I know personally, from stories of my family’s immediate past and of my people’s historic past, the pain, vulnerability, and humiliation of the “ism” anti-Semitism and the consequent damage, anger, and resentment it has produced in my community. I know what it is like to be made to feel like a stranger because I practice a strange/different religion from the majority. But as a white male I can only imagine what it is like to be the object of hate and discrimination simply for being of a “strange” race or of the “other” sex – identities that unlike my Jewish identity one can not conceal.

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