Rabbi's
Sermons
Rosh HaShanah
Day One
Rosh HaShanah Day 1
Sinai Synagogue, Friday AM, September 13, 2007
The Onion is a humorous newspaper that parodies the news. Here is a recent example:
Headline - Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory – Dateline: Kansas City, KS.. As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday…. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling. "Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
I don’t know if this is a sign that I am getting soft in the head or just a sign of the times that one tries to see all sides in an argument, but I found myself thinking, “hmm… interesting idea, intelligent falling.” But here’s the point: We can’t wait for the gravitists and intelligent fallers to resolve this scientific dilemma! You just have to put our two feet on the ground when you get out of bed in the morning and assume that for whatever reason you are not going to fly up in the air.
Sometimes it is necessary to act first and reason it out afterwards. When the People of Israel stood at Mount Sinai and saw the thunder and lightning and heard the Commanding voice of God speaking to them, they responded with the famous words, oDmVvˆn◊w hRcSoÅn. We will observe and we will hear. Tradition understood the order of the words as significant - the Jewish people promised to observe the mitzvot before even hearing what they were.
But a story in the Talmud questions that assumption. “rDhDh tyI;tVjAtV;b …wbV…xÅyVtˆ¥yÅw (Ex. 19:17) And they stood under the mountain: R. Abdimi bar Hama bar Hasa said: This teaches that the Holy One, blessed be He, overturned the mountain upon them like an [inverted] cask, and said to them, ‘If you accept the Torah, ‘tis well; if not, this shall be your burial.’ R. Aha b. Jacob responded: This (explanation) furnishes a strong protest against the Torah.” And of course it was a strong protest, Rav Abdimi suggests that the Jews were coerced into accepting these commands! Put a gun to a person’s head and say “keep kosher!” you can’t really fault the individual if he starts eating pork when the gun is put away. This was a very different model for accepting the mitzvot then oDmVvˆn◊w hRcSoÅn “we shall observe willingly!”
Though this discussion took place almost 2000 years ago, this argument is extremely contemporary. It is no secret that in our day Jewish observance, Jewish commitment to mitzvot, even Jewish awareness of the mitzvot has receded and receded and receded. I grew up with tremendously strong Jewish neshamah and yet I was clueless when I got to Brandeis University and went to the traditional Friday night minyan and Shabbat dinner the first time. Why are we washing our hands before we eat? Oh, you’re not supposed to talk yet! Wait, you can’t even turn on your room light?
In a recent talk to Conservative rabbis, the new Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr. Arnie Eisen, suggested that aside from various sociological reasons for the lessening of observance, there lies a philosophical basis to this change. The great philosopher of the Enlightenment and modernity, Immanuel Kant, suggested this distinctive dichotomy. Kant stated that one is either a free and sovereign self, the way of mature adults, or one is commanded by something or someone outside the self, subject to the rules of others, and thus not free but rather coerced. Such a person, he suggested, was either a coward or lazy.
Dr. Eisen indicated that all of us whether we know who Immanuel Kant is or not, are walking around with his choices in our head. Either I command myself and live as a free person or I am commanded and live beholden to others, a lifelong infant. This of course is a problem for Judaism. Judaism without commandments is no Judaism. Our entire faith tradition is premised on a belief that the entire Jewish people accepted the Covenant with God at Mount Sinai millennia ago. oDmVvˆn◊w hRcSoÅn “we will do and we will obey.”
So the modern Jew is stuck. For the tradition to be authentic to me I have to choose it, I have to understand it. To follow mitzvot blindly is either irresponsible or inauthentic. But on the other hand Judaism is all about mitzvot, deeds and actions that we believe have, at some point, a transcendent, divine, source, that is outside of me.
So what do you do? How do I develop my authentic self within a context of rules and behaviors that others created for me? And how does a people maintain its communal links with each other and with God if everyone is writing their own constitution?
Dr. Eisen pointed out that one response to this dilemma is the response of Martin Buber. Buber was a German Jewish philosopher who was greatly influenced by Kant as well as early existentialist thinkers. Buber worked upon the premise of existence as encounter. The highest form of encounter, which he called I-Thou, was when two beings met in their authentic existence, without any qualification or objectification of one another. This was true for individuals, groups and for God. Thus anything commanded, anything scripted, anything that is not spontaneous destroys the encounter between the individual/group and God. Buber’s famous formulation of this was “revelation is not legislation”. God’s revelation at Mount Sinai could not have been a group of laws that the Jewish people would have to follow forever because only in that moment of encounter with the Other could the summons to act be heard. What does that mean for me today? If you sensed that God was calling you to observe Shabbat and through Shabbat that week you would sustain that sense of communion with God and the world, terrific. But to observe Shabbat every week just because you did it last week and everyone tells you, that you should observe Shabbat, this was unacceptable. This was stultifying.
In a series of letters with his colleague Franz Rosenzweig, Buber outlined his thoughts, “I may not just accept the “statues and judgments” (Leviticus 18:26) (of the tradition) but must ask of each one, and ask again and again: Has that been said to me, rightly to me?” For Buber, the answer to the dilemma of “what should I do” was: Only those mitzvot that are addressed directly to me, that I hear in my true encounter with God. Obviously if everyone is awaiting personal encounter and revelation from God, this makes it hard to maintain peoplehood and it is a challenge to the one who never senses that encounter with God.
Franz Rosenzweig, also a student of existentialism and Buber’s intellectual companion, came from an assimilated Jewish home and was on the verge of converting to Christianity when an encounter in a little traditional shul on Yom Kippur brought him back to Judaism with renewed enthusiasm. Rosenzweig recognized the danger of Buber’s position for the Jewish people and for Judaism. As important as ethical and moral freedom were to him he knew that a community had to live by certain norms or it could not function.
Regarding Buber’s comment that Revelation is not Legislation, that our encounter with God is not limited to the delivery of a set of laws, Rosenzweig responded: “For me, too, God is not a lawgiver.” Rosenzweig does not want a person to obey the mitzvot out of coercion. However for Rosenzweig God may not be a lawgiver, “But,” he wrote to Buber, “He commands. It is only man in his inertia who makes laws out of the commandments by the way in which he keeps them.” Rosenzweig distinguished between a law, which I do because someone told me to do it, and a command, which I sense myself to be true. For Rosenzweig, God does command. That command is Love. V’ahavta et Hashem Elokeicha, b’khol levavkha, uv’khol nafshekha, uv’khol meodekha. Love God is the command and the mitzvot are human responses to that command.
For example, a few months Lizzie decided that in fixing up our basement, the linoleum floor tiles had to be stripped. I did not see the point, it was only going to get dirty again but I dutifully went to Home Depot and rented a floor stripper. I did not know that they weigh about 350 pounds. And I did not know this until I got to my van in the rain, because of course they have easy traveling wheels until you need to lift them into the van. I get the floor stripper into the van but then of course I have to get it out. And take it down a flight of stairs and my kids are in school so I am doing this all on my own. I get it downstairs and I turn it on. The machine takes off and I am flying around the floor. It’s like one of those cartoons, my feet are in the air. Machine smashes into walls, breaks the full length mirror down there, cleans nothing. Turns out the machine is broken. So why did I do it? Because Lizzie told me to! I thought it was nuts, but if Lizzie says we need to it, I do it. Because I love Lizzie and what she tells me to do, I do. That is the power the lover has in commanding obligations. And that is how Rosenzweig understood how we can freely obligate ourselves to God’s command.
A community of Jews has to start with what is given and make that its own. Shabbat, Kashrut, Holiday cycle, Hebrew, social justice are basic communal activities that unite the people. And in as much as the Jewish people are a nation that has lived so many generations apart from one another and apart from its land, these actions amount to a communal love letter to God. Whereas for Buber, the only true command is that expressed to the individual, for Rosenzweig, God’s one command, Love me, is responded to in communal fashion through various observances.
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a student of Buber and Rosenzweig’s but came from a very different background. A descendent of a distinguished Hasidic dynasty, Heschel received rabbinic ordination as a teenager but then went on to study philosophy at the University of Berlin and received another rabbinic ordination from the leading liberal Jewish studies academy in Germany. In Heschel we see a different approach to the mitzvot. Through mitzvot, holy deeds, we actualize our partnership with God. For Heschel the greatest concern for the human person is “What should I do?”. Buber needed to know that God was speaking to him in order to act on mitzvot. But for Heschel it worked the other way: We seek and find God in the acts themselves. Heschel’s question to Buber would be: If one must wait for God to speak before acting, how could one know when it was God speaking and when it was the self? Heschel desired to bring the individual and his uniqueness into concert with an ancient spiritual tradition that had developed in sacred community. Owing to his background, he had great respect for the spiritual giants who developed and practiced a life of mitzvot and he trusted in the nobility and grandeur of this tradition. But he also knew that religious behaviorism, doing the commandments simply out of inertia, because you had to, led to spiritual death. Thus he wrote, “Religion is not given to us once and for all as something to be preserved in a safe deposit box. It must be recreated all the time. Mitzvot are forms; to fulfill a mitzvah means to fill it with meaning.” For Heschel then the mitzvah was not only an act that linked a Jew to the past, mitzvah was also an opportunity to create meaningfulness in the present. Heschel saw in mitzvah observance an opportunity to engage the Divine in encounter. This encounter, this opportunity to meet God, is an ever abiding possibility since the individual’s access to God’s presence comes through the observance of mitzvot.
Dr. Arnie Eisen has called on Conservative Jews to think about mitzvot in a different way then in the past. Instead of identifying mitzvot that Conservative Jews should do, he is asking that we first begin to think about the meaning of mitzvah and the meaning of obligation. What obligates us as individuals, as Jews and as human beings and why. And that is why you have the handouts before you.
1. What actions do you feel obliged to perform as a Jewish human being?
Are these mitzvot ritually related, ethically related, combination?
2. . Are these obligations of the same sort or a different sort than the following?
Then compare these obligations to others you sense in your life – how are they the same or different? Do they have the same force or source of authority? Does providing for my children relate to keeping kosher and coming to shul on Rosh HaShanah? Or is it biological intuition? Or self-aggrandizement – the greater my kids are the greater I am?
3. What do you recognize as the source of authority of the mitzvot you perform? More than one answer may apply.
Why do we do this?
5. What mitzvot do you think are the ones most pressing for you personally to remember at this New Year?
Which are most pressing for your community?
Which are most pressing for our society as a whole?
Over these Yamim Noraim ask yourselves these questions and begin to consider how you look at the notion of mitzvah.
Let us conclude with a pressing mitzvah for this community. In the past I have spoken about minyan, and Shabbat and Kashrut and environmental stewardship. This year I have a much simpler challenge. It has to do with singing.
Heschel taught that a mitzvah without a melody is devoid of a Soul; Torah without a tune is devoid of spirit. Kavvanah is the art of setting a deed to inner music. “come before God’s Presence with singing, wrote the psalmist. In singing we enter God’s Presence”.
Many of you know that this year we are the recipients of a Legacy Heritage Innovation grant. The grant had basically three components to it: 1) teacher training and inspiration 2) training several Sinai people in the bibliodrama in order to teach Torah in a fun, exciting and Shabbat friendly way and 3) to bring in a music specialist who would teach the students and the congregation zmirot, traditional Shabbat table songs. Why Shabbat table songs because it would be a way to add music to our program without instrumentation, offering a way to make Shabbat music special and to enhance our Shabbat lunches to make them more festive.
So this is my mitzvah challenge to you this year – to find the joy and oneg in Shabbat through song. So when you come to shul on Shabbat – it’s okay if you don’t come until 10:30 – 11:00, as long as you come to hear my sermon, and then you stay for lunch, I want you to stay until the singing. I want you to stay until the singing and learn the songs and then take the songs home with you and sing them at your Friday night table or Saturday evening dinner.
If you say, that’s it? That’s the big deal this year at Sinai, singing songs? I would say yes, because who knows where and when the moment of inspiration, the moment of encounter will come. If you are like Buber, perhaps that song will unlock the impediments to the I-Thou moment of encounter. If you are like Heschel you will know that it is the song itself that is the encounter if we could just open ourselves to it.
If you still think songs are too trivial a path to God listen to this story of Rabbi Israel of Rizhin.
The rabbi of Rhyzen once entered a room where he found his closest disciples playing checkers. When the students saw their master, they were deeply embarrassed; for they knew they should have been studying sacred texts rather than squandering their time playing games. But the rabbi was not angry.
He approached his disciples and said, "I am glad that you are playing checkers, for if you have learned the rules of checkers, then you have learned something important about spiritual and moral development-ethical fitness. There are three rules in checkers that are also three rules for spiritual and moral development.
1. You may only move one step at a time. Don't skip steps.
2. Second, you should move only forward, and not backward.
3. Finally, when you have reached the highest rung, you can move whichever way you want."
May this coming year be a year of reaching the highest of spiritual rungs. Shanah Tovah.
