My Credo
God is a loving God whose intention is for us to fulfill our potential of being humane, responsible, compassionate, and cooperative creatures who seek to evolve ourselves to the next level. We do this not just through relation to each other but through relation to our larger purpose in a universe that may well be very different than our best secular understandings. The key theological virtue in Judaism is humility; the key social virtue is compassion; the key intellectual virtue is perceptive questioning.
God is not a Being, but the universe in its true essence, which we know primarily through intuition and sensitivity. The mitsvot are a spiritual discipline to orient us in this universe instead of the everyday world with its presumptive habits and understandings. Human beings are creatures of habit, and in our practical orientation to the world, we can easily find ourselves in habits which are from the best part of ourselves, the part the wants to create, participate in meaning, and be equal with others. The reward of a life of mitsvot is wisdom. When not kept properly, we fall into apathy and mere obedience. The sense of God's presence, like true relationship, needs to be reinvented every day.
The role of the rabbi is to see individuals as God would see them -- at their best, as strivers, as human, as feeling their way to connection with the transcendent, to others, and to their own purpose. The gaze of the rabbi should energize them and raise them up -- and in this way, lead them. When possible, the rabbi should help to create for each person a new experience, a new consciousness, which, ironically, is also very old, and engender in each person the ethic of living up to the insights we gain at these times rather than dismissing them as out of place in our lives and in our commitments. Faith is, as Heschel said, the faith that our moments of insight "add up to something" and we keep faith through a daily honoring of the commitments those insights prescribe. To prepare for their mission, rabbis should undergo as much self-healing as possible, in order to open them up to true kind-heartedness.
Each generation's vision of Judaism is temporal and situated: our Torah, our mission, in this time and place is specific. Ours involves developing a compassionate society, saving the environment, and elminating all cruelty to animals. It also means "growing up" intellectually to harmonize science and religion, scholarship and faith --without cleverness-- and to break down barriers between people who aren't hurting anybody. Maturity is our spiritual goal, and its own reward.