You can't make this stuff up, folks

Some preachers say you shouldn’t pay attention to the news; it just gets you worked up and can be detrimental to spiritual growth. As a newspaper and magazine journalist by trade (starting with my high school newspaper in the early ’80s), I don’t agree.

You can forever hear from the pulpit about how bad things are getting around the world, your country and in your hometown, but there’s something about reading direct, up-close and personal accounts and correlations to it that help make it really real in your everyday consciousness and brings you under conviction in some way that honors Christ and compels you to “fight the good fight.”

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In my onetime Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater, I lived on the same stretch of Sheridan Road as a very prominent Jewish synagogue, Emanuel Congregation. I passed it on a near-daily basis and even parked smackdab around it many times as a steady customer of The Metropolis Café on Granville Avenue near Sheridan.

Monday’s Chicago Sun-Times had a glowing tribute article about “the celebrated Edgewater leader who turned 99 years old last week,” Emanuel’s revered rabbi emeritus Herman Schaalman, who was the senior rabbi of the congregation for 32 years, from 1956 to 1988.

Schaalman is newly retired this year from his 58-year-old position as adjunct professor of Judaism at world-renowned Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, a 160-year old institution on Sheridan Road in Evanston that represents the first Methodist seminary in the Midwest.

He was interviewed by the paper from his lakefront condo, having just “returned from a trip downtown to pay his final respects to a friend, Cardinal Frances George” and “retaining a childlike amazement about all that surrounds him, from the purple-and-gold tulips in a vase on his dinner table to Lake Michigan glittering beyond his balcony’s glass doors.”

He was quoted in the third paragraph confirming, “God is simply an idea that humans have created because they are overwhelmed by something for which there is no answer.”

The next several paragraphs informed, “On the possibility of life after death: ‘I think death is the end.’

“To be fair, Schaalman’s views represent an evolution informed by his extensive readings of the Torah, scientific literature and his understanding of life and the Holocaust.

“ ‘I said to myself, there must have been billions of prayers said every day by millions of people who were in these [Nazi] camps,’ Schaalman said. ‘Nothing happened. Not a single answer. Not a single rescue. No response from whatever we thought God to be.’ ”

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Schaalman, who assured that his mind is “clearer than it ever was,” credits his “total revolution in theology, my whole religious life,” in part to the fact he doesn’t have the “immediate, continuous responsibility for a group of people.”

At Emanuel, where they are currently “planning a birthday gala for the retired rabbi and his wife, Lotte, who recently turned 100,” Senior Rabbi Michael Zedek called Schaalman a “remarkable guy” who “defies the stereotype that old people tend to live in the past,” according to the Sun-Times.

“He’s not a creature of nostalgia,” Zedek boasted. “I’ve never seen that in him — ever. He is always looking ahead.”

The article went on to quote Schaalman, who recently finished a book about quantum theory, saying, “There is so much mystery. Why am I alive? What makes my body? . . . How come there is a sun, a moon, an Earth and billions of galaxies?”