VBS High Holidays 2015-5776: Sermons

For each sermon from our clergy, please click on the BLUE BARS below to access both text and video. 

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Rabbi Ed Feinstein: 2015/5776

[collapsed title="2015 Rosh Hashanah sermon: Rescuing God"]

(His sermon begins about 30 minutes into the video)

This is the first holiday in 45 years that Rabbi Harold Schulweis will not be on the bima. In his memory we offer this sermon.

Elie Wiesel offered a parable about our times:

Once upon a time, Man complained to God: “You have no idea how hard it is to be human -- to live a life darkened by suffering and despair in a world filled with violence and destruction, to fear death and worry that nothing we do or create or dream matters.  You have no idea how hard it is to be human!”

God responded, “You think it’s easy being God? I have a whole universe to run, a whole universe demanding constant vigilance. You think you could do that?”
“I’ll tell you what,” suggested the Man, “let’s switch places, for just a moment. For just a moment, You be Man, and I’ll be God, and that way we’ll see who has it harder.”
“For just a moment?” God considered, “Agreed.”

So Man and God switched places. Man sat upon God’s throne. And God descended to the earth. After a moment passed, God looked up and said, “OK, time to switch back.” But Man refused. Man refused to give up the throne of God. This is our world -- where Man plays God, and God is exiled. 

Once upon a time, our ancestors attributed everything in their lives to the will of God. Health and sickness, war and peace, poverty and affluence, were rewards and punishments cast down from heaven.  No matter how random, arbitrary and cruel their fate, they had faith that this too is God’s will, inscrutable and mysterious as it may be. But there came a time when we lost that faith.  We coveted the power to control our destiny. So we turned our efforts from deciphering God’s will, to discovering the patterns in nature and society that might help us predict and control our world.

Sickness, we discovered, is not a divine punishment, but the result of infection, faulty genetics, the deterioration of organs and cells. Drought and deluge are the products of shifts in atmospheric pressure and moisture. The movement of tectonic plates brings earthquakes, and the movement of capital markets produces economic booms and busts. We don’t look to God’s will to explain our fate. We look out upon a reality shaped by politics and economics, by forces of nature, by our own choices. God has been dethroned, and for better or worse, we control things now. We sit upon God’s throne.

Even when we achieved that dominion, we weren’t finished. We set about liberating ourselves of all vestiges of the old faith. We demythologized, desacralized, secularized. We admit no authority beyond ourselves. We tore down heroes, debunked myths, discarded taboos.

Once upon a time, we had heroes: moral heroes, great leaders, sports stars. On our walls hung pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Sandy Koufax. Who do we revere today? Political leaders today are just politicians representing entrenched special interests. Sports heroes are free-agents, playing for the money, or cheaters, or felons. Instead of artists, we exalt celebrities, and we cheer on the circus antics of their narcissism.

We subjected our myths to rigorous revisionist historiography and relished the opportunity to point out all that is unheroic and flawed. When I was young, I was taught to revere the American Founding Fathers – that extraordinary gathering of wise men, who cherished liberty, fought the Revolution for American freedom, and framed our Constitution. Now, we open a textbook and discover that the Revolution wasn’t fought to establish freedom but to defend the interests of a colonial merchant class. Just steps from Independence Hall in Philadelphia where our Founders declared “all men are created equal,” you’ll find the newly-excavated quarters where George Washington’s slaves stay while the Constitution was being drafted. In Monticello, you learn about all the children Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave, Sally Hennings. Lincoln was a depressive. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were notorious for their White House peccadillos. It is as if, one by one, we’re tearing the images off Mt Rushmore.

Who is left to revere today?

I grew up with Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, who told me each night: And that’s the way it is. And we believed him. Is there anyone we believe today? According to a Readers Digest poll, the most trusted Americans are Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Denzel Washington, Merle Streep, Four actor. We don’t know them, their values or their character. We only know the parts they play on screen.

We have lost our heroes, we have lost our myths, and ultimately, – we are losing the sacred. What is the sacred? The sacred is that which we serve with love and loyalty; the core of value upon which we build a life; the ideals which inform life with purpose. The sacred lifts us above the ego, above the endless desires and drives of the narrower self, to reach a bigger, truer, more generous self. Modernity is committed to liberate us from repression, superstition and authority. But in the process modernity, has subverted all that is sacred.

What is sacred today? What is inviolable?  

Patriotism? Patriotism is sullied by the divisiveness of our politics – the radically different views we hold about what America is, who it belongs to, and what it ought to be. Patriotism has become just another advertising slogan.

Religion? The most popular Broadway show of the last decade is “Book of Mormon.” I’ll confess, it’s hysterical. But halfway through the show, you realize what it’s about. It’s a complete denigration of a community’s faith. What if they’d written “Book of Moses” instead? Would we be laughing?

Family?

Once upon a time, we saw family as sacred. But research at the University of Michigan found that American children today spend about 20 hours a week interacting with their parents, but more than 30 hours a week, outside of school, in front of a TV screen or a computer monitor. Think of what those kids are seeing on TV. Is family really sacred?

The images of ISIS destroying ancient artifacts and places of worship shock us. But the truth is that we’ve been destroying the sacred for a long time now.

The problem is that human beings can’t live without a sense of the sacred. We need a core of value to motivate and inspire and provide purpose for life. We need myth – we need organizing narratives that answers our deepest questions – Who am I? What am I living for? What matters? Where do I belong? What’s my purpose?

People are so hungry today for myth and meaning, for the sacred, they run to embrace all sorts of belief systems. It was once imagined that as science progressed, all closed systems of belief would disappear in the face of scientific skepticism. The opposite has occurred. As modernity has progressed, fundamentalism has thrived.  No matter how irrational, intolerant, authoritarian, people run to embrace fundamentalism because it fills the deep hunger for the sacred. In fact, it seems the more authoritarian, the more attractive it is.

Of the five armed forces in the US – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard – which one do you think has the most success recruiting young people? The Marine Corp. By far. In fact, there is a wait list to get in. Why the Marine Corp? Why would the most demanding and authoritarian, of the armed service be so popular? Listen to their slogans -- The Army promises that you can “be all you can be.” The Navy offers you the chance to see the world. The Marines offer myth. In the Marines, it’s not about you. It’s Semper Fi. It’s about belonging, serving, sacrifice. In the Marines you give up the self to become one of the few, the chosen.

Modernity asks questions, modernity casts doubt. The fundamentalist has no doubts. He has certainty, and there is a charisma that comes with that kind of certainty. He has absolute truth. That’s compelling.  Standing in the presence of absolute conviction, we can imagine that the sacred is at least possible. Even if the God he worships is sexist, chauvinistic, domineering, abusive, even if his ideology is primitive and prejudiced -- at least he believes with all his heart, soul and might, without qualification or condition. That provides a kind of security. Even if it means relinquishing our critical sensibility, and democratic values, standing in the presence unqualified faith, we are granted a momentary reprieve from the spiritual emptiness of modern life.  

Fundamentalism today is growing. So is addiction.

The human soul craves the sacred. And if we can find nothing sacred, nothing to serve, we live with a hole in the soul. And that hurts. So we run to fill that hole with something to numb the pain. Drink and drugs, shopping and acquisition, sex, pornography, exercise, fantasy, obsessive work, and the relentless pursuit of entertainment. Karl Marx once condemned religion as the opiate of the people. Rabbi Schulweis pointed out that today, it’s the other way around. Today, opiates are the religion of the people. Addiction fills in the hole where the sacred once lived.  

In another gripping tale, Elie Wiesel tells of the day his boyhood synagogue was filled with worshippers, when the crazed shamas ran it, and screamed, “Sha. Quiet Jews. Don’t you know that God is hunting the Jews of Europe?  Sha. Don’t let Him know where we are!”

The Holocaust was the capstone of the project of Modernity. As Dostoevsky predicted, when anything goes, everything goes. Absent a sense of the sacred, the unthinkable is suddenly possible. It is as if Western Civilization brought absolute evil into the world just to prove once and for all there is no Father in Heaven who will save us. 

In the chilling words of Wiesel’s memoir, Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget the smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. 

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. 

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. 

In a moment of painful candor, my teacher, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, once asked, how is it that we say the same prayers, pray to the same God, observe the same holidays after the Shoah, as before? How has this cataclysm not changed us indelibly? The question raised by Job in the Bible and revisited throughout the generations of Jewish existence – How can a just and loving God tolerate a world of such suffering? That question comes to a climax in the Holocaust. In the presence of a million and half murdered Jewish children, Greenberg argued, we simply can’t talk about God in the same way anymore.  An April, 1966, cover of Time Magazine asked, in huge bold letters, Is God Dead? After all we’ve witnessed, is there any way today to speak about God, about faith, about God’s role in the world?

The purpose of religion is to identify the sacred, and cultivate and nurture our sensitivity and connection to the sacred. The sacred is rooted in our narratives, our myths. Sacred values grow out of the stories we tell. In Jewish tradition, our core values are rooted in the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation of God at Mt Sinai – the story of a God who hands down mitzvoth, commandments, to a covenanted people. The problem is, so many of us don’t believe those narratives any more. Science questions their facticity. Modernity makes it impossible to admit any transcendent source of values. But most of all, we find the tradition’s images of God, impossible to accept. What we’ve witnessed in the 20^thcentury has changed us. We have known too much horror to embrace the old narratives of a God who interrupts history to save His people. We just can’t tell those stories any more. No amount of theological sophistry can bring us back the faith of our ancestors.

This is the task that Rabbi Harold Schulweis faced when he first stepped onto this pulpit, 45 years ago: Addressing a generation deeply yearning for the sacred, but a generation for whom the old narratives, the old beliefs, simply don’t work. That’s what every one of his books, his articles, his sermons are about.

Rabbi Schulweis did not deny or ignore or censure the disillusionment experienced by this generation. He didn’t blame us for doubting and question what our grandparents believed. On the contrary, he honored our doubt. He recognized that our questions of God didn’t grow from cynicism or indifference or despair. Our questions grew from love – love of the Jewish people, love of humanity, love of justice. He recognized in this generation’s doubt what the Talmud called “chutzpah klpei shamaya” – holy protest, sacred dissent. He perceived that our difficulties with the tradition’s image of God are rooted in a set of expectations that reflect traditional, Jewish sacred values. He heard in our questions the voice of Abraham: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do Justice? Ironically, it is our very fidelity to traditional Jewish sacred values that makes it impossible to believe in the traditional narratives about God.

This is precisely where Rabbi Schulweis begins to rebuild faith. If we can longer find the tradition’s sacred values in a narrative about God, he taught, let’s turn the process around, and root a new narrative of God in our sacred values. The goal of Judaism, he argued, is not to make us believers in a God above. It never was. The goal of Judaism is to make us vessels of divine holiness here on earth. It’s not about God, but Godliness, about the sacred values we express in our conduct of life. God is a verb, he taught, not a noun. Not a Someone. But a way of encountering the world.

This sounds strange to many of us, but it wasn’t to him, and most importantly, it wasn’t to the Jewish tradition. This idea has been in our tradition from the beginning. Open Maimonides. The greatest book of Jewish philosophy ever written, the majestic Guide for the Perplexed begins with the same dilemma, the God we inherit from tradition, we can no longer believe in. In the 12^th century, Maimonides set about developing a radically new idea of God and religion. The ultimate goal of human life, he taught, is to perfect oneself so that one can know God. Moses is the Maimonides’ model of the most realized human life, and Moses’ ascent up Mt Sinai, is his metaphor for the journey of human perfection. But one important fact of Moses’ story vexed Maimonides: Having achieved perfection, and standing face to face with God, Moses turns around and descends the mountain. He returns to his people, and all their trouble. Why Moses doesn’t stay on the mountaintop with God? Only on the very last page, the very last paragraph  of the Guide to the Perplexed does Maimonides gives the answer: the perfection in which man can truly glory is attained by him when he has acquired knowledge of God, and God’s Providence, … Having acquired this knowledge, one will then be determined always to seek kindness, justice, and righteousness, and to imitate the ways of God.  Do you hear that? Achieving intellectual perfection and knowing God is but a penultimate objective. The real goal of human life is to embody God’s justice and lovingkindness in the world – to live God, to do God. The last line of Maimonides is the first line of Schulweis. Godliness is the goal of human life.

You know this. You know that the fundamental building block of Jewish prayer is the bracha– Baruch ata Adonai Eloheynu melech ha-olam. If the purpose of faith is to express belief in a God above, then the bracha should have stopped there. That says it all: Praised is God, Ruler of the Universe. Period. Why say anything else? But we continue -- Ha-motzi lechem min ha-aretz; borei pri ha-gafen, Shehechianu V’keemanu because the real purpose of the bracha is to build a vocabulary of sacred values, to identify what in life is sacred. Tradition commands that we recite a hundred brachot a day. This is our Jewish spiritual discipline. Its aim is to train our sensitivity for the sacred in life everyday.

Ralph Waldo Emmerson wrote that we become what we worship. The bracha invites us to move beyond the boundaries of the self, beyond our endless needs and desires and moods, to become Godly. To recite a bracha, is to recognize our capacity of self-transcendence, to care, to heal, to help, to give, to touch the lives of others. When we recite a bracha, we bind ourselves to a vision of what we can yet become – to the Godliness latent within.

Rabbi Schulweis believed that this curriculum of self-transcendence had to be more than a solitary spiritual experience. So he introduced a program of initiatives, beginning here at VBS and spreading throughout the country, which re-made the American synagogue.  All of the initiative he introduced to the synagogue share this quality of breaking boundaries. He perceived the loneliness of suburban life, and so he gathered us into havurot. He felt our need to care for one another, so he trained us to serve as para-rabbinics, and para-professional counselors. He decried the divisions within the Jewish community, and called for cross-denominational youth programs. He felt the narrowness of the Jewish community, and so he reached out to welcome Jews by choice through a program of Keruv, he built a relationship with the Armenian community to commemorate our shared experience of Holocaust together, and in his ninth decade, he demanded we respond to genocide in Darfur and the Congo, and established the Jewish World Watch. Every initiative, an exercise in self-transcendence – becoming more.  

But he still faced one problem. How do we believe in anything after the horrors of the Holocaust? In the face of that evil, that absolute evil, how can we maintain any sense of meaning? 

A few years before Rabbi Schulweis came to VBS, he was attending a Jewish community affair at a hotel in San Francisco, when the owner of the hotel, Ben Swig, introduced him to hotel’s maintenance supervision, a German immigrant named Fritz Graebe. Graebe shared his story with the Rabbi. During the war, Fritz Graebe ran a construction company under contract with the Nazi, on the German-Ukranian border. Graebe had once been a member of the Nazi party. But he grew to hate the Nazis. He witnessed the massacre of Jews in the Ukranian town of Dubno, and it sickened him. So he told the Nazis he needed large numbers of workers, and he took Jews off of trains, and out of concentration camps, and put them to work on his projects. He invented projects, and inflated projects, so the Nazis would give him more work permits. When the Gestapo announced new deportations, he put Jews on trains to nowhere, holding bogus work permits. He used all the privileges afforded him as a civilian contractor, and he used up all his wealth, to save Jews. The Nazis had suspicions, but when they came to arrest him, he escaped to the Allies’ lines. Eventually he would testify at the Nuremberg trials. And when he received death threats, he moved his family to San Francisco. How many Jewish lives did Fritz Graebe save? There were 5000 Jews on his payroll on the day the war ended. 5000 rescued Jewish lives.

Fritz Graebe was only the first of the rescuers that Rabbi Schulweis discovered. He soon found Jacob Gilat, a young mathematics instructor Berkley who, with his brothers, was hidden and rescued by a German Christian family. Sempo Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who saved 3500 Jews in Kovno, Lithuania. The Bulgarian royal family who defied the Gestapo’s order and allowed them to take not one Jew from their country. And so many more.  Collectively, they testified that God did not die in the concentration camps. They rescued Jews. Through their testimony, Rabbi Schulweis rescued God. Even in the deepest darkness, there were sparks of Godliness. 

In our history, there is a rare and special tradition of Jewish spiritual revolutionaries who were called upon to rescue Judaism at moments of profound disruption: Yohanan ben Zakkai after the destruction of the Temple, Maimonides when philosophy shook the foundations of Jewish faith, the Baal Shem Tov addressing a generation deeply disillusioned and despairing of faith. At these extraordinary moments, Jewish existence reached a crisis – when the sacred narratives of the past expired, and new narratives were yet to be born. These were the singular personalities who perceived that the survival of the community depended on its ability to transcend, to transform, to reinvent its ideas and institutions. They provided resilience, the courage and the inspiration to let go of the old, and to imagine the new. Rabbi Schulweis stands within that extraordinary tradition. As we sing at Hannuka: Hen b’chal dor, yakum hagibor, goel ha-am. In every generation, a hero arose to save our people.

He didn’t grow up in synagogue. Far from it. His father rebelled against religion, and raised him in a rich tradition of secular Yiddish culture. He didn’t set foot in a synagogue until he was 12 years old. It was Rosh Hashanah, and school was out in his Bronx neighborhood, so he was wandering the boulevard, when he heard the most remarkable music coming from one of the storefronts. He entered, and because he was small, they assumed he was a kid looking for his mothers, so they sent him upstairs to the women’s section, where he sat transfixed by the majesty and melody of the service. And so for the past 45 years he has sat here, again, transfixed by the majesty and the melody, the prayers and yearnings of the Jewish people.

Yehi Zichro Baruch. May his memory be our blessing.[/collapsed]

[collapsed title="2015 Yom Kippur sermon: It's Complicated"]

There is a new conversation beginning to be heard in the American Jewish community. You need to be part of it. ​

It’s complicated.

If you’ve ever tried to explain being Jewish to an outsider, it’s complicated.

You’re sitting on an airplane, and the fellow sitting beside you sees you’re reading a Jewish book  and he asks you, Excuse me, but could I ask you something: Are you Jewish?

Yes, very much so.

I’m Christian. I love my church. I go every Sunday. You must go to synagogue every Saturday?

No, not every Saturday. Only on holidays and special occasions.

But you’re really Jewish? Don’t you need to pray?

Well, but it’s complicated. There are lots of ways to be Jewish. My family is more cultural than religious.

You do believe in God, don’t you? The Jews are God’s people, right?

Well, it’s complicated.

Israel must be important to you?

Yes, Israel is very important.

I’ve never fully understood that. How come Jews are committed to Israel?

Israel is our homeland; where it all started.

Homeland? But you live here, in America.

Yes, I’m live here, but Israel is my homeland.

Have you been there, to Israel?

I went when I was in high school, and the last year, we took our kids for a visit.

So, Israel is your homeland, but you’ve only been there twice in your life.

Yes, as I said, it’s complicated.

But you took your kids to the holy land? That must have made a big impression. I bet they’re deeply committed to your faith!

Well, it’s complicated.

The truth is, it is complicated. It’s frustrating trying to explain our Jewish lives.

So let’s draw a map. This is based on ideas suggested by my friend Rabbi Donniel Hartman.

The Jewish story begins in the Bible, in the book of Genesis. God chooses Abraham, and he puts Abraham through tests and trials. When he has passed every one, God makes a covenant with Abraham’s descendants. It’s in Genesis 22:

“I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of the heaven and the sands on the seashore; and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes. All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your descendants, because you obeyed My command.”

Abraham’s obedience earns a blessing for his descendants. But they don’t have to do anything to gain that blessing. It’s not earned. There are no commandments to follow. Just by virtue of being a descendant, they are blessed. As if to test the proposition, all of characters we meet in Genesis, all of Abraham’s descendants, are deeply flawed. There is not one tzadik, one moral hero in the bunch. Jacob steals the birthright from his brother, his sons attempt fratricide against their brother, Joseph. Joseph parades about in his Technicolor coat. Not much there to admire. That’s the point of Genesis – the blessing is inherited, no matter what we do.

This is a narrative of identity -- Genesis Judaism. We are bnai Yisrael, literally, the children of Israel, of Jacob, and through him, of Abraham. We are family, and we’re proud of that. We were born into this family. We do anything to earn or deserve our membership. We are members of the family and that carries only one obligation, only one duty – to protect the family.  

When we turn to the Bible’s next book, to Exodus, we find a different narrative. In Exodus 19, we stand at the foot of Mt Sinai and accept God’s covenant:

“You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me. Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully, and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is Mine, but you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

Exodus introduces a new word into the conversation: “if.” If you will obey… This covenant is conditional. Something is demanded of us.  Identity is bound to the fulfillment of obligations. Jewish is not something you are; it’s something you do. The tradition counts 613 commandments, mitzvot. 613 is a made-up number: it’s the 248 parts of the body plus 365 days a year. To be a Jew, in this Exodus model, is to serve God  with every limb of the body, every moment of life.   

This Exodus Judaism is built upon our core narrative – we were slaves in the land of Egypt and God brought us out from there to a Promised Land. As slaves in Egypt, we experienced ultimate social invisibility. We were unseen, unvalued, inconsequential, socially erased. The bitterness of slavery stayed with us, and an exquisite social ethic grew from it. Egyptian slavery taught to see the Other, and to see ourselves in the Other, to identify with the pain and plight of the Other. This is an ethic of empathy:  “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Ex 23:5) Exodus Judaism is an identity rooted in moral aspiration, a social vision for the world. To be a Jew is to build a world where no human being is ever relegated to invisibility.

These two dimensions of Jewish identity -- Genesis Judaism and Exodus Judaism live side by side in us, as they coexist side by side in the Bible…but not easily. The Bible’s drama flows from God’s struggle to impose Exodus Judaism on a people firmly planted in a Genesis Jewish identity. Look at the Haftarah we read on Yom Kippur morning, from Isaiah 58.

The prophet, Isaiah, sits up on the walls of the Temple, and watches the rituals of Yom Kippur. The citizens of Jerusalem come up and offer their sacrifices, and then they complain that the holiday hasn’t the impact it once had:

“Why, when we fasted, did You not see;

when we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?”

Like the truculent child forced to come to a family dinner – “I’m here, now give me my Hannukah present” -- the Israelites came to do Yom Kippur out of family obligation. These are good Genesis Jews. Their rituals are an affirmation of their place in the family. These are gestures of belonging, of ethnic solidarity. They transmit affiliation from one generation to the next. The rituals are performed carefully, but with no religious depth.  They have no effect.

Witnessing this, the prophet explodes. The prophet lives a different Judaism, an Exodus Judaism. For him, Judaism is not about ethnic pride. Judaism is a moral vision, with an unyielding sense of moral responsibility.

“Is this the fast that I desire,

A day for people to starve their bodies?

Is it bowing the head like a bulrush

And lying in sackcloth and ashes?

You call that a fast?

No, this is the fast that I desire –

To unlock the fetters of wickedness,

And untie the cords of the yoke

To let the oppressed go free; to break every yoke.

It is to share your bread with the hungry,

And to take the wretched poor into your home;

When you see the naked, to offer clothing,

And not to ignore your own kin.

In the late 19^th century, each of these Judaism’s gave rise to its own version of Zionism. Theodor Herzl was the quintessential Genesis Jew. He knew little Judaism, and practiced less, but carried a deep sense of Jewish belonging. Herzl recognized that Emancipation had failed Europe’s Jews. Emancipation offered Jews the opportunity to enter European society as equals. It struck a bargain – give up all that separates you from the majority, and you will be accepted. So Jews gave up all the expressions of their separateness, in dress and language, custom, even religion. But still they met a wall of rejection, a wall of anti-Semitism.

Herzl’s moment of truth came during the trial of Alfred Dreyfus. A Jews who reached the rank of captain in the French Army, and a posting in the General Staff headquarters, Dreyfus was falsely accused to treason, of giving over secrets to the Germans. On the 5^th of January in 1895, Dreyfus was convicted, stripped of his rank, and exiled to Devil’s Island. Herzl covered the story as a reporter for the Vienna New Free Press. What traumatized him was that the mob wasn’t shouting, “Death to the Traitor,” or even “Death to Dreyfus,” but “Death to the Jews.” If Jews were not accepted in liberal France, he concluded, they would not be safe anywhere.  

Anti-Semitism had plagued Europe’s Jewish people since the rise of Christianity. Herzl perceived that modern anti-Semitism was different. Christianity would never destroy all the Jews. Christianity needed Jews as visible evidence for their narrative. Modern anti-Semitism had no such need. Modernity could anticipate a final solution to the Jewish problem. Herzl lived with the burning awareness that the Jews of Europe were in immediate peril. He saw Auschwitz in his dreams. He launched a manic effort to secure a state for the Jewish people – an effort that would kill him at age 33. All to get the Jews out of Europe, away from the plague of death he knew was coming. In this world, he lamented, might makes right. Jews could argue tirelessly for their rights as human beings, as Europeans, and as citizens. But without the power to defend ourselves, the power that only comes with sovereignty, we will not survive.

In 1897, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress to start the political process that might bring his vision to reality. Sitting in the back of the hall at that First Congress, was a curmudgeon with a different vision. Asher Zvi Ginsburg, was a Russian Jew, who wrote under the pseudonym, Ahad Ha-Am, one of the people.

If Herzl was the quintessential Genesis Jew, Ahad Ha-Am was the archetypical Exodus Jew. He received a traditional education in Eastern Europe. He was an illui, he mastered the entire Talmudic tradition while still a boy. And then he got the keys to the community’s library, where he taught himself a dozen languages, and read European literature, science, philosophy.

Ahad Ha-Am understood Judaism as a culture -- as a vision of the world, way of life, a body of ideas. He perceived that Jewish culture was dying. In the Bible, Judaism was a moral code touching every aspect of life. In diaspora, we have shrunk Judaism down to religion, down to the regulation of pots and pans, rule for constructing a Sukkah, what’s kosher for Passover this year. Diaspora has choked the life out of Judaism. Judaism, argued Ahad Ha-Am, will stagnate and die until it is challenged to engage the real problems of contemporary life – economic justice, war and peace, the rights of individuals. The purpose of Zionism is to save Jews, but to save Judaism. What we need is not just a state where Jews live. But a Jewish state – a state whose national life, whose policies, whose culture are shaped the values and aspirations of Jewish culture. In a truly Jewish state, Judaism will come alive in new ways and will enliven the entire Jewish world.

We lived with two kinds of Judaism, and two kinds of Zionism, until the Holocaust.

The Holocaust proved Herzl right. The Holocaust elevated survival above all other Jewish values. Survival became our prime imperative, our only mitzvah.

The Holocaust justified the founding of Israel, and continues to be at the heart of its narrative. Why does Israel exist? To protect the Jewish people. Every state visit to Israel of a dignitary of any note begins with a trip to Yad Vashem, the national memorial to the Holocaust. Yom Hashoah is celebrated the week before Yom Ha-Atzmaut.

Following the trauma of the Holocaust, the Jewish family around the world, was so deeply wounded, we desperately needed a symbol of life, of resurrection, of renewal. Israel has become that symbol – the salve that heals the deep wound of the Holocaust destruction. Israel lives at the heart of our identity as a sacred symbol that our family lives. A Jew today can deny God, deny the truth of Torah, deny tradition, and still be counted a faithful Jew. But denying Israel as the Jewish homeland will bring expulsion and exclusion from the Jewish community.   

The Holocaust proved Herzl right, and even we who live in the Promised Land of American freedom, even we see the world through Herzl’s eyes.  We see the world as unimaginably dangerous for Jews. And we accept our duty to defend our own. We slip so easily into binary vision, with no room for nuance -- you’re either with us, or you’re against us. Survival is our mitzvah. All else, most especially Ahad Ha-Am’s call for a state rooted in Jewish moral aspiration, has been set aside. 

Until this summer.  During this Summer’s controversy over the Iran Nuclear Agreement, the Jewish community split almost evenly. But if we factor out age and generation, it turns out that younger Jews overwhelmingly supported the agreement. Despite the vocal opposition of nearly all of the organized Jewish community, as well as Israel’s leadership, young Jews supported the President. This portends a profound change in our Jewish conversation.

There are those of us who remember the Six Day War. We grew up with an Israel that was vulnerable and endangered. There are those who were raised among the survivors of the Holocaust, whose stories are part of our own memories. There are those of us who have known anti-Semitism – the foul word, the prejudiced glance, the closed door. We don’t take for granted that we are the first generation of diaspora Jews who have never feared a knock at the door in the middle of the night. For us, the instincts of Genesis Judaism to defend our family are strong. For us, the warnings of Herzl are poignant. We live with a constant undertone of insecurity. We know how quickly a liberal society can turn hateful. We have an exquisite sensitivity for dangers that lurk beneath the surface of genteel society. Call it PTSD. Having been through the worst trauma in human history just a generation ago, we carry in our genes a quality of suspicion and fear.

But our children have none of these memories and none of these suspicions. They don’t live with our insecurities. They’ve never experienced a moment of prejudice or rejection. America’s democracy, its tolerance and pluralism are permanent features of their reality. The Israel they grew up with has always been overwhelmingly strong. In their experience, Israel’s problem is not its vulnerability but its power; the ethical dilemmas of occupation, and the conduct of warfare. The Israel they grew up has not been pristine. Sabra and Shatila, Baruch Goldstein, Yigal Amir – their Israel bears the faults of violence, extremism, intolerance, even brutality. They don’t resonate to Herzl’s Zionism, to the Zionism of Jewish survival. If our talk about Israel is all about fear, they will not respond.

They don’t resonate with our Genesis Judaism. They don’t see themselves born into the age-old Jewish family. They are born into the human family. They reserve the right to choose to be Jewish. They don’t feel themselves responsible for the Jewish family. They are universalists before they are particularists. They are focused outward toward the world, not inward to the family. And if they accept Judaism, it is not as an inheritance, a place at the family table. They look to Judaism as a vision of the world, a body of ideas, a moral aspiration. If they choose to be Jewish, it is as Exodus Jews, not Genesis Jews like their parents. Judaism is not about loyalty to the family. Judaism is about remaking the world.

This is a different Judaism than many of us are accustomed to.

Rabbi Schulweis discovered this by accident. When he established the Jewish World Watch, he got all kinds of resistance from older Jews. Why do you care about Darfur? You should care about Jews in trouble! The people who took to Jewish World Watch the quickest, and with the most enthusiasm, were young people. High schoolers, college students, young adults, were waiting for a Judaism that reflected, not inward on the Jewish family, but outward, on the world and its suffering. Their Judaism is not a survival mechanism, but an activism to do tikkun olam.

Younger Jews do not support Israel reflexively, instinctually, as their parents did. They expect more of Israel, than ask more of Israel. They are critical of Israel when Israel does not live up to the values we taught them – equality, pluralism, the pursuit of peace, the pursuit of justice. When they do find these values in Israel, they will fight passionately for Israel’s place in the world. That’s how the BDS movement has been defeated on campus after campus. Not by asserting Israel’s right to exist, but by asserting its dreams for democracy and equality. They are Zionists, but they are Ahad Ha-Am Zionists. Israel is the sovereign expression of a Jewish moral aspiration and a Jewish vision of the world.

This will be the new/old language of Jewish life. It is a language we must learn to speak. When I was  young, I planted trees in Israel. It took 20 dimes, two dollars. I babysat my brothers, saved Hannuka gelt, did my chores, and gathered my 20 dimes, then filled out the card and sent it in to the JNF. I received back a certificate that my tree was dutifully planted in downtown Jerusalem, and I could go visit anytime. I had a stake in the land of Israel. I was engaged in the process of making Israel.

If we want our children attached to Jewish life, if we want them to feel they have a stake in Israel, we have to engage them. We need to talk together. And we need to listen.

If you sit with your children at the close of the holiday and you ask them why younger Jews are not engaged in Jewish life, why they don’t attend the synagogue or stand up to defend Israel, they will roll their eyes and dismiss you with a curt, “Whatever!” But if you engage them and ask them,

            What should be the Jewish response to a half million Syrian refugees stranded on Europe’s borders?

            What should be the Jewish response to the “Black Lives Matter” campaign? What do Jews hold in common with African Americans seeking visibility in American culture?

            What should the Jewish community do to address the problem of income inequality in America?

            What should a Jewish state be like? What does it mean to have a Jewish state?

Ask these questions, and you will see a light shine in their eyes. They are only waiting for us to ask.

I know what you’re thinking….Rabbi, so many are alienated, distant, uninvolved? How can this be the beginning of something significant?

It’s a good Genesis Jewish questions: How many? What will be the demographic implication of this? But that’s not the only way to perceive this.

In Exodus we were taught that counting Jews is forbidden. Moses was told by God: “When you take a census of the Israelites to count them, each one my pay the Lord a ransom for his life at the time he is counted. Then no mishap will come on them when you number them.” (Ex 30:12)

According to the Torah, we don’t count Jews. King David once held a census, and disaster struck his kingdom. If you need to count the population, you have each one bring a half-shekel, and you count the coins. You don’t count Jews, you count their contributions.

This is the Exodus understanding  -- To be Jewish is to be asked to give, to contribute, to make a difference, to be a blessing to the world. And when it comes to these kinds of contributions, it isn’t the number that counts, it’s the passion, commitment, dedication. Jews aren’t counted by the size of our numbers. They are counted by the magnitude of our aspiration. And no one in human history has had bigger dreams than us.

Abraham Joshua Heschel reflected this truth:

The significance of Judaism does not lie in its being conducive to the mere survival but rather in its being a source of spiritual wealth, and source of meaning relevant to all peoples. Survival, mere continuation of being is a condition man has in common with animals. Characteristic of humanity is concern for what to do with survival. To be or not to be is not the question. How to be and how not to be is the question.     

How to be and how not to be. This is the question that will open a new era in Jewish life.[/collapsed]

---

RABBI Joshua hoffman: 2015/5776

[collapsed title="2015 Rosh Hashanah sermon: I Am Jewish"]

A Jewish man is disgusted with his faith, decides to leave the Jewish world behind, and join a monastery.  He takes a vow of silence, but he is permitted to say two words every seven years. After the first seven years have past, the elders bring him in and ask him for his two words."Cold floors," he says. The elders nod and send him away. After seven more years, they bring him in and ask for his two words. "Lousy food," he mumbles. Again, the elders nod and send him away. Another seven years pass and the elders bring him in and once more ask him for his two words."I quit," he says. "We're not surprised," replied the elders, "you've done nothing but complain since you got here."

It’s fair to say that Jews have an aversion to silence. At best our silence is meditative, a pause to give us the proper motivation and intention to speak with meaning and purpose. Often, our silence is an attempt to formulate action rather than to listen and respond to the thoughts of another.  We suffer from a ‘patience deficiency’ - we don’t listenwhen someone is speaking...we wait. Jews have an aversion to silence for sure.  

Here's another joke...27 rabbis go to a convent.  Okay, this isn’t really a joke, it happened for me this summer, and we were hardly silent during our visit!  I and my cohort of rabbis from all around the world visited the sisters of the Beit Jamal convent outside of Beit Shemesh in Israel.  Our goal there was complicated.  We were there to experience how the sisters encounter prayer and to compare their expressions of faith to ours. In preparation for our visit we had to best understand what brings us together as seekers of God’s presence and what distinguishes us.  

We learned that the sisters there have a practice of silence for the week. They do converse during Sunday afternoon meals and walks.  (Thank Gd!) We sat in astonishment to hear that it is even common practice for the sisters to wake up at 4 in the morning and begin their daily prayers in silence.  For the sisters, silence isn’t an act of submission or weakness in the presence of an all-powerful God.  Silence is the entry point into divine service. Their faith is in their silence.  

Jews have a different relationship with silence altogether. The difference between the rabbis and the sisters was not found in our tolerance for the decibel levels of sound.  We learned the difference is in how we relate to the silence.  For the sisters, silence is a tool of connection - a means to bring God’s presence closer to themselves.

For Jews, silence is active. In our Tradition, Shimon ben Gamliel taught, “All my days I grew up among the Sages, and I did not find anything good for a body but silence. The study of Torah is not what is essential, but the action. And whoever increases words brings sin.” (1:17)  For Jews, silence without action is impotence; we fear that a moment of silence may bring us to the brink of oblivion.   

Silence for Jews feels like a weakness - it is a sense of powerlessness and submission that we cannot tolerate.  There are many moments this year alone where Jews spoke out in full voices, expressing grand measures of empowerment and moral responsibility.  

Take this past summer, for example:  Jewish voices collectively spoke when Dr. Judea and Ruth Pearl bestowed the 14th Daniel Pearl award to Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that was brutally attacked by extremists earlier this year.  Antonio Fischetti was at the Los Angeles Press Club this past August to accept the award on behalf of the magazine. On that fateful morning in January, however, Fischetti was excused from work to attend to his Aunt’s funeral. While his family shared loving thoughts and received comfort in the presence of extended family and close friends, two men stormed Antonio’s work place, killing 12 of his co-workers.  

Reports of the awards event related the palpable affection and honor given to him and the magazine for its bold tenacity and commitment to continue publishing in spite of such tragic circumstances.  It was a tremendous honor for the magazine and in the words of one journalist, an honor that we should all wish never had to be given.  This story comes even closer to us at Valley Beth Shalom as Judea and Ruth Pearl courageously inaugurated these awards here, in memory of their son, Daniel who was slain by Pakastini extremists in 2002.  

And even still our Jewish voices trembled when only two days following that horrific attack at Charlie Hebdo, the hyperCacher Kosher supermarket in Paris was attacked by other Islamic extremists taking the lives of 4.  There was a profoundly healing response from the global Jewish community and the French citizens, but the reverberations of doubt and uncertainty for Jewish safety in the world lingered for months.

These events suggest that Jewish power today is defined by the ability to mobilize the largest and loudest voices in response to our perceived attacks.  The more support we have for us, the more we can combat the voices of extremism and maligned protest.  It is the power that the Prime Minister of Israel expressed to the Jews of France at the time, “You have a home in Israel.”  We are powerful there.

What words shall we use to speak of this power?  In the wake of the attacks in France, the short lived anthem  “Je Suis Charlie”/“I am Charlie” became a temporary salve for the wounded conscience of our global society.  By showing solidarity with the writers and artists of the magazine, notorious for publishing some of the most salacious and primitive human behaviors to offer incisive commentary on the French intellectual elite, we identified with the values of free speech and expression, of noble truths our modern societies protect and celebrate. In our particular community, we even heard our own VBS members proclaim, “Je suis Juif” in solidarity with the French people and Jewish communities worldwide, to proudly state, ”I am a Jew.”  

“I am Jewish”  These words were reportedly the last words of Daniel Pearl before he was murdered.

“Je suis Juif” “I am a Jew” “I am Jewish”  More than a statement of identity, it is the voice given to the numbing silence when we feel powerless.

Certainly, my own “I am Jewish” identity was pummelled this year hearing about the constant attacks and acts of anti-semitic vandalism in cities like Copenhagen, suburbs of Maryland and even here in the San Fernando Valley.  When one of us is vulnerable, we are conditioned to shudder with pain.  We are compelled to correct the injustice we feel. We feel violated, threatened, weakened. And still, we may even feel powerless.

Portraying the image of the broken Jew, the emaciated, cowardly, fearful Jew led off to slaughter is not so subtly underneath the surface.  Our restraint is contained with ferocious animosity.  The Jew wants to say, we’d like to completely prevent you from harming us, but we can’t, because it’s not the moral thing to do. And so, “I am Jewish” sometimes means we are unwillingly forced into silence.  

Shall Jewish power then mean we can walk the world with a clenched fist and be permitted to punch any bully who threatens our safety and security? Does our power entitle us to deter anyone from causing us any harm, and the reason we don’t is because we simply choose not to? Conversely, does Jewish powerlessness mean we are subjected to our weakness and subjugation to the point of enslavement?  We’ve said, “Never again!” to this form of powerlessness.

Living in a “Never Again” reality means our powerless selves will never be bent to the subject of another’s will.  Never again means we stand proudly and confidently in the face of political, spiritual, and personal adversities and in an act of power throw down our fists onto the table, grit our teeth, and seething with rage shout, “Never again!”

And we really hope...Never again.  In the cacophony of our shouts and screams, our clenched fists pulsate each day the news hits the screens - and ‘again’ keeps happening.

No doubt, this tension is what animated Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who just over twenty years ago stormed the Cave of Machpelah in the city of Hebron, Israel and took the lives of 29 people and left 125 wounded before being killed himself by worshipers defending themselves against his attack.  A founding member of the Jewish Defense League and an active settler of Hebron, his response to relentless antagonism by Muslim residents of the city was to stand up and take power into his own hands. Dressed in Israeli military uniform, he opened fire as nearly 500 worshipers came to pay their respects to our shared spiritual patriarch, Abraham Avinu.  The world repudiated his attack.  The impact of his exercise of power still lingers.

I visited the Cave of Machpelah this summer, much to the concern of my wife (and now that I can share this experience safely with you, you should have been concerned too!). I could not have felt more uneasy.  There is such a thing as desecrated ground, in the heart of our homeland, in Hebron, where the words of God to Cain scream forth, “The blood of your brother cries out to me!”  

Nothing could have been more striking in this surreal moment than listening to a man, standing underneath the olive tree outside the gravesites of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah.   Responding to our questions regarding Goldstein’s morality and our experience of this place that day, our host spoke with a sense of awe and honor for Goldstein’s heroic behavior leading up to the massacre.  In the blazing heat we listened and seethed. The disparity of the olive tree of peace and the persistence in his deeply held belief that power expressed in violence is justified was numbing to witness.  This was not the emblem of power we should carry from this day.

We’ve learned this before:  The moment our voices are raised to the point of a scream, we lose our power.  It’s more than an argument among friends or family.  Our screams now have global implications.

Goldstein’s memory stands among the rarified few in our modern Western society who crossed lines of power and powerlessness and broke the moral fulcrum between the two.  Such actions are the supreme manifestations of powerlessness. In the minds of the perpetrators, such actions are the expression of ultimate power.  The deafening silence in Hebron even to this day speaks a different message.  Power wielded with the sword of annihilation is not power - it’s a violent expression of fear, and this is not the power we’ve been entrusted to share.

For Jews, the prevailing definitions of power and powerlessness are wrong.  Power and powerlessness are moral categories that must become an inspiration for our actions and not the thrust of our reactions. Powerlessness is not weakness.  Powerlessness is the willful restraint of our power.  

One more story from Hebron.  As our bullet-proof bus drove through the desolate streets of Hebron, a Palestinian child, no older than eight, was standing by the edge of the street with a rock in his hand.  In an instant I saw the child’s older sibling rush out from the courtyard behind him, knocking the rock from out of the boy’s hands.  Preventing violence is the courageous act to put the stone down and begin dialogue.  Jews should not throw rocks.  We can learn this from a little Palestinian boy.  It’s a lesson we need to hear and respond to today.

Jewish Power is the personal and collective expression of moral responsibility - it is to speak for the voiceless and to inspire goodness in the self and others.

Responsible Jewish power begins with how we use our voices. It’s the wisdom of the 19th century rabbi Menachem Mendel Lefin of Satanov. “Before you open your mouth, be silent and reflect: Ask yourself “What benefit will my speech bring me or others?”

Several years ago, Rabbi Schulweis was asked to contribute to the book, I Am Jewish  a compilation in honor of Daniel Pearl and in memory of those last words of courageous fidelity to his tradition and culture to which he is quoted.  Rabbi Schulweis shares the observation made by the words of Torah we read on the Rosh Hashanah holiday.  On the first day we read about Ishmael and Hagar and on the second day about Abraham and Isaac.  He writes, “Both Ishmael and Isaac are God’s children and their genealogies are recorded in Scriptures...The compassion of God is not restricted to one people.  The Jewish tradition, properly understood, will not allow God to be segregated.” (I Am Jewish, p. 180)

The Rabbi teaches here that when power is exerted inappropriately, our Source of Power is isolated.  Raising our voices to  speak with Jewish power should bring us closer to Infinite Truth, to the blessings of Godliness. Power in any other form is selfish.

These are the words we carry as our clenched fists beat against our chests on the Yom Kippur holiday.  Al Chet Sh’Chatanu - Ashamnu - these words are in the collective, for this is where our power is manifest.

When the pain and torment of losing our friends and loved ones as victims of terror is unrestrained, there is a sordid justification in exacting punishment upon the perpetrators as a morally courageous act. Unmitigated power reaches to the depths of our moral fiber, and challenges those ideas which ought to permeate the best of our selves.  Power unrestrained leaves a moral stain upon our conscience written in indelible ink.  Its why we hate reading about Tag Mahir - the Jewish extremist group that enters Palestinian neighborhoods and murders small children.  This is not Jewish power - this is fear and it’s not Jewish.

Our definition of responsible Jewish power must be one that brings God together.  To say, “I am Jewish,” is to unify the human being, to bring conflict and our segregated selves into the whole presence of God.  

Responsible Jewish Power begins with the “Kol dmamah daka - the still small voice” and takes heed of our collected wisdom. When our Sages teach, "Who is powerful?  The one who conquers his impulses."  we model ourselves as ones who recognizes we don’t have to use power to define or protect our relevance.  The mark of courageous power is to turn inward and to speak with moral authority.

Here is the equation for responsible Jewish power:   The broader you define yourself in the definition of the collective, the more power you possess.  “I am Jewish” is the shorthand for this moral theorem. Jewish power conquers the self so the voice of the collective may be heard.

And, as a community concerned with Jewish power, each and every expression of our identity is bound up with sacred restraint.  In other words, such expression of power is dependent upon your voice and your support.  

1. We need your voice when our community calls for a response to the crisis of Syrian or Eritrean refugees.

2. We need your voice when our community needs to inspire vigorous debate over security and existential threats to Israel and Jews around the world

3. We need your voice when our community pours out concern for the powerless in our midst, the homeless, the ill, the neglected and rejected innocent ones in our midst.

4. We need your voice when our community speaks out to the pillars of leadership in this great country, to support responsible diplomacy with the nations of the world, and to challenge the albatrosses of social injustice afflicting our great society.

We need your voice, and we need your hands. Let this be a year to speak with full voices, “I am Jewish.” And this year, may be pray that these words will speak of a Jewish power to be proud of.[/collapsed]

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RABBI Noah Farkas: 2015/5776

[collapsed title="2015 Rosh Hashanah sermon: Seven Sacred Questions"]

There is an old parable of a rabbi that reached the end of his life. He was sitting at home and his students came to visit him on the Sabbath as they did every week.  Now he was frail and ill, and his talmidim asked him to reflect on his career in the hopes of gaining some wisdom for themselves. The rabbi said that when he left the walls of the seminary he was eager to fix the world.  And with all the confidence that comes from graduating at the top of his class, he set forth on that agenda.  Yet after a few years he felt that he couldn’t quite get the power to fight for justice and turn the world on his head, so he turned his eyes downward and thought perhaps he could redress the problems of the city in which he lived.  A few years hence, now mid-career he saw that he did not have the power to change his city there was too much crime, too many poor what could he do? So he turned his eyes downward again and felt that maybe he could affect his family. And towards the end of his tenure his eyes cast downward again, and realized what he really needed to do was to change himself.  So on his death bed when asked at the end of his life, what he felt was his most important accomplishment, this old rabbi said – I wish I could do it all over again, just in the reverse order.

And so I want to begin this holiday season not with the threat of Iran, not with ISIS, not with our melting planet, and not with global embarrassment of the millions of Syrian refugees.  I don’t want to focus this year on our political malaise in America or the corrosion of the discourse on our families. Nor will I speak of the number of homeless sleeping unsheltered, or the number of children who go to bed hungry tonight as these too are painful embarrassments.  I will begin this year with what our tradition asks all of us to do in this season, to ask us to think about ourselves. What kind of people we are, and in this place; these walls, these lights, these flowers, and most importantly these people – all of us together at the dawning of this New Year.

Most critically, I peer through the looking glass of my own life and reflect on our lives as Jews today.  This is the beginning of my eighth year at Valley Beth Shalom. When I moved here I was not yet a father, I wasn’t even thirty, and only newly a husband.  We had nothing, and we knew relatively few people.  When I found out that we were moving to Los Angeles from New York City, I picked up the phone and called the only car dealership I knew and bought a car, because the very first thing anyone needs in L.A. is a car.  We arrived weeks before our furniture, and through the generosity of our family, Sarah and I slept on a queen mattress given to us by my parents, and we stored food in a dorm room refrigerator given to us by Sarah’s sister. Now after seven years, my marriage has blossomed as has my family. Sarah and I having celebrated the birth of our fourth child, Naomi earlier this year.   We have a beautiful home and a community of friends.  Not bad for seven years of work.  It took Jacob our ancestor fourteen years to get the life he wanted.  I did it in half that time.  Eat your heart out, Jacob.

I’ve completed seven cycles around the sun living in this community. Seven Rosh Hashanahs, Seven Yom Kippurs, Seven Sukkot, and Hanukkahs, Seven Passovers.  I’ve seen seven classes graduate our Early Childhood Center.  Seven classes graduate our Day School and our Etz Chayim Learning Center. I’ve seen seven years of Bar Mitzvahs, and seven years of parents saying goodbye to their children as they leave for college.

In our religion the number seven signifies spiritual movement, change and renewal. Sarah and I decided that many years ago we would take this number seriously. And that we would reevaluate our spiritual lives at the end of every cycle of seven. It is a kind of a spiritual check up.  We won’t talk about money or how many kids we have.  We won’t talk about our home or retirement accounts. We won’t talk about or next vacation.  Instead it is a deep conversation about what we hold sacred.  What are our deepest beliefs?  What do we care about?  As we have lived in this community for seven years, Sarah and I are about to engage in this spiritual strategic planning, and I’d like you to join us in this process.

I will return to this number seven at the end of my sermon today. So when you hear me speak of seven again, you at least will know when to wake up your neighbor or call home and tell your wife to put the lasagna in the oven. I’ll get back to seven. But it is fitting that after seven cycles of life here at VBS, I take seriously the notion of spiritual change, and renewal by reflecting with you today on our ancient and precious religion and its search for the sacred.

Over two hundred years ago, Napoleon swung open the gates of the Jewish ghettos and welcomed us to finally rejoin the march of history as a free people with rights and privileges denied to us for centuries. His outward tolerance and fairness toward Jews, however, was not based on his largess or his magnanimity, but based upon his grand plan to have us disappear entirely by the means of total assimilation, intermarriage, and conversion."

In fact in November of 1806 he wrote that:

“[It is necessary to] reduce, if not destroy, the tendency of Jewish people to practice a very great number of activities that are harmful to civilization… it is necessary to change the Jews. [...] Once part of their youth will take its place in our armies, they will cease to have Jewish interests and sentiments; their interests and sentiments will be French.”

Napoleon’s goal was to have us disappear by cleverly setting before us an unrelenting question, one that he would hope would erode our sense of otherness.  A question, like the tide of the mighty ocean, which pounds everyday against the breakers of ritual observance and laps consistently against the shores of our culture. A question that seeks through its ebbs and flows to slowly dissolve our separateness like salt into the sea.

From the moment that we were freed to walk the world and no longer feel as outcasts, as the rotten ones, as the detestable Jews, and we began to walk the long and winding road of acculturation, assimilation and secularization - from that moment - Napoleon’s genius has set a single ineradicable question before us:

“Now that you are free, with fading oppression, and increased inclusion in the wider society, at the end of the day when you have nothing left to fear or feel separate from the world, what of your spiritual life is truly sacred?

What is sacred?”
What is sacred enough for you, oh Jew, to keep practicing given that every form of philosophy, entertainment, and business opportunity will one day be open to you?
What is sacred enough for you oh Jew, to hold onto now that our young men and women will no longer stigmatize you; they will fall in love with you, and ask to marry you?
What is sacred to you when even if you are accepted, you will still be despised, hunted and murdered not for your beliefs, but for whom you are?
What is sacred, oh Jew, once you learn enough science to question religion all together? Where a transcendent God loses all meaning?
What is sacred, oh Jew, once the fear is gone, and the pressure to be like everyone else is overwhelming?

Napoleon’s talent as a conqueror proved to be of both body and mind.  He created the framework from which this single question in all its forms and permutations became our central preoccupation for over two hundred years. It is the single question that has been on our collective Jewish mind for centuries. It preoccupied Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Schechter and Geiger. It was the central question for Kaplan and Heschel.  It was the single question that Rabbi Schulweis, may he rest in peace, attempted to answer with every word he ever wrote.

What in this messy world that is vast and open can still be called sacred?

Of course it is not only Jews who have faced this very question.  Faith in all its forms has seen radical shifts and diminishment in all religions. I do not need to quote you the studies.  I would like to quote for you, however, the poem I’m reminded of called “Dover Beach” by the 19^th century British Poet, Matthew Arnold.

The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full,
and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Arnold wasn’t speaking about Jewish faith. He was a practicing, if not believing Christian.  The sea of faith is drying up because the idea of the sacred has been eroded by the spiritual climate change wrought by modernity. It is worth reading Arnold’s last stanza to show what is left when faith, the sacred, has been swept over the horizon:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another: for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused armies of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

They say that Arnold was one of the first moderns.  He envisioned the flow of faith, the shining sun of the holy, set beneath the waves, and we, having given up any idea of the sacred, are left on the shore of an ever receding ocean wandering on a darkling plain without certainty, without direction, swept up by confusion, while forces more powerful than us clash unendingly. This darkling plain, this uncertainty is meaningless as is in the Hebrew idiom, tohu v’vohu, the dark chaos without order.

One only needs to flick our thumbs through our timeline on Facebook on our smart phones to see the frenetic teetering nature of our entire world.  Sometimes it’s funny.  We flick the thumb and see a friend’s weekend post of her family at a local farmers market petting piglets and chickens.  And then we flick again and see another friend taking a selfie with his bacon and egg breakfast.  If those chicks and piggies only knew…

And sometimes it’s not funny, it’s utterly tragic and bitter. When with a flick I see three-year olds holding a sign saying “first day of preschool” with happy and bewildered faces as my own children and the children of our community did this week.  But then we flick our thumbs again and see the photo of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian three-year-old boy, lying lifeless by the sea which took his life while trying to escape the war in his home country.

Flick – happy.  Flick – sad. 
Flick – flowers in a garden.   Flick- melting ice caps.
Flick – kids first baseball game. Flick – another kid killed by a stray bullet.
Flick, virtue. Flick  vice.
Flick, goodness. Flick, evil.
Flick. Flick. Flick.    

It is by definition, what Nietzsche called madness.

This is the moment we find ourselves in now more than any other generation in the history of Jews.  We reveled in our freedom.  We’ve achieved amazing success.  And yet why have I heard from so many saying that their life feels too dizzying and out of control?  Why do I speak to so many who live in beautiful homes and have successful careers but feel so empty and bored with life?  I believe because in the Western World, we have lost our sense of the sacred. 

Because the modern world regulates the sacred only to sanctuaries, rooms without windows where the naïve go to sing songs and hear stories about a long dead God, are we left, as Arnold said, on a darkling plain. Where the best in life is to look good, feel good and most importantly have lots of goods.    

I think it’s time to answer this two hundred year-old question differently. Given our freedom in this country when we are asked with all of our choices available to us, with access to everything at any moment, what in our lives as Jews is truly sacred?  Where do we find holiness today? And how can we make room for it in our busy lives?

When God created the world, God lived in that same chaos, the same darkling plain of tohu v’vohu that we feel today. Yet out of the darkness, the vastness, and the void, God said, Ye’hi ohr, “Let there be light.”  The darkness was not enough for God. The vapid back and forth, the lack of purpose and meaning, was not enough for God.  A world without sanctity was not enough for God.  And it shouldn’t be enough for us either.  Just as God said against the void of nothingness, “Let there be light” So can we. But we must make the divine choice to create a sacred life, just like God.

Let there be light – Judaism is called a Western religion, but it’s most basic and fundamental notions are not Western. The word sanctuary is foreign to the ear of rabbis.  This is what Napoleon’s Western mind could never fathom.  The word for sanctuary has no cognate in Hebrew.  We use the word bayit, or home, to describe our sacred places. It is our home. We pray not in a sanctuary, a place walled off from the world but in a Beit Kenneset, a house of in gathering - a place to meet friends and hear who they are. A place to see their struggles and cheer on their victories. A place to see children grow strong and the aged grow weak.  The rabbis teach that it is forbidden for a shul not to have windows.  The light of the world must come in.  You must be a part of it. Because in the Jewish mind, as opposed to the Western mind, the sacred and the profane are overlapping categories. They co-mingle at any moment. Unlike the Western idea of sacred and profane, in Judaism the opposite of belief is not disbelief, but indifference to each other and the world.  Because all of us are profane and all of us are sacred at the same time, and out of the darkness, when we see the pain and the madness of the world out of the windows of our bayit, we must say, Ye’hi ohr, let there be light.

Rabbi Hanoch, the Hasidic sage, is asked by his disciple, “But don’t we believe in two worlds, this one and the other world? And do not the nations of the world also believe in two worlds, this world below and the other world above? Then what difference is there between us?”

Rabbi Hanoch answered, “There is a difference. They believe that the two worlds are separate, severed – one above and one below. But we believe that the two worlds are one. And to find the sacred we need to mold the two worlds into one and say, Ye’hi ohr, “let their be light.”

You have the power of creation, of Bereishit. It is said in the Midrash that the world was created specifically for the opening moment when the light came pouring in.  The world was created for the sake of the beginning, for the sake of human beginnings ever anew.  Making something sacred begins within the depths of your heart, not to some other place walled off in the Western mind, but in your heart where choosing, deciding and meaning take place. At the moment when you lock yourself out from your own heart, holding in your deepest regrets and begin to feel lost in the darkness, when you feel surrounded by the dizziness of life, when you feel overcome, you can find a pathway to goodness, to sanctity, to the sacred, because at that moment you can say, Ye’hi ohr, “let there be light.”

From your heart to your lips, we say blessings on all occasions; it is because we want to make sacred the moment that stands before us.  We become more connected to our food through motzi, we become more connected to the world around us through kedusha. We become more connected to the passage of time through kiddish, and we become more connected to our loved ones even when they have died through kaddish.  Any moment is both sacred and profane but it is up to us.  We shouldn’t let any important moment pass: a child’s first step, a graduation, a first job, a marriage, a divorce settlement, a promotion, a retirements, a sickness, a recovery, any moment worth remembering without willing ourselves to the sacred by mustering the spiritual forces within us, the Divine embers that glows at the center of our being and say, Ye’hi ohr, “Let there be light.”

In a world with no boundaries, in a world of ultimate choice, in a world that tells us that nothing is sacred, in a world that is at every moment reminding us of the madness of modernity, you have the power of Bereishit within you as a Jew, and as human being to uncover what has been lost, and to create a sacred life that fills you up, gives you purpose, pushes you into the world not out of the world, and makes your life complete just as Torah is only complete with both darkness and light, prose and poetry, mourning and dancing.  Under the madness of the sky, you have the opportunity to join with God and say I want the sacred in my life. I want to push out the chaos and the darkness I want to say Ye’hi ohr, “Let there be light.”

God chose to create the world out of the darkness and chaos of meaninglessness.  It took God seven steps. Seven is the holiest number we have because it symbolizes the idea of creation and renewal.  There are seven Noahide laws that our tradition teaches govern all of humanity and not just the Jews. Universal ethics are created through seven. Our matriarchs and patriarchs, our holy ancestors that first laid out the path of Judaism for us number seven. Several Jewish holidays are seven days long. In the Torah the Land of Israel was allowed to lay fallow, called shmita, one year in seven. The menorah that lit up the Temple courtyard had seven branches. To become anointed as a priest, takes seven days. 

There are seven blessings of creation rejoicing between bride and groom.  The bride makes seven circles around the groom marking a sacred space, a holy of holies for their love to be protected and to blossom.  And the people of Israel marched shofar in hand, seven times around the impenetrable city of Jericho.  And those walls came a tumbling down.

The number seven can destroy, and it can create. It is our most sacred number.

I want to ask you using this sacred number of seven to think about your power of creation and to find what is truly sacred in your life. The tradition teaches that the days between now and Yom Kippur are the most consequential days of the year. It is when your life matters the most. I want you to discuss seven sacred questions with a friend or a family member sometime between now and Yom Kippur.   These seven questions can give you direction, take relationships to a new level, and reveal our deepest selves to each other. They are a guide to self creation, to creation ex nihilo, to creating a sacred world for you, your family and your community.  I’m going to give them to you now, and I have materials you can pick up at the usher’s desk to take home, and I’ll post them on my page on the VBS website. 

I’m asking you to carve out an hour, turn off your phones and use these seven questions as a guide, and then if you’re up for it, email me some of your thoughts and answers before Yom Kippur. I want to know your thoughts, truly.  One last thing, as you go through these questions, truly listen to each other, make eye contact, and don’t judge anyone for what they share. 

Number one:  Gratitude: A third of all prayers in Judaism are about gratitude, including the modim prayer said three times a day that thanks God for the nisecha sh’bechol yom imanu, the little everyday miracles that make life possible. Share with the others what you are most grateful for in life.  Tell a story about it if you can and include what made you so grateful. Gratitude.

Number two: Purpose: In Moses’ last speech to the people, he sets out a path, between life and death, blessings and curses, and he implores us to uvecharta b’chayim, to choose the path of life. The goal of the Torah is to set this path before you and give you meaning and purpose. What moments in your life have given you the most meaning? When have you felt that “this is what life is supposed to be about?” When have you felt that you were living in accordance to your purpose? Purpose.

Number Three: Regret: The Kol Nidre prayers create a moment of deep reflection and meditation with the intention of letting go of the past regrets in order to seize the future.  It says, Miyom Kippur She’avar ad Yom Kippur Haba aleinu l’tova. From last year’s Day of Atonement until this year that has come upon us for goodness. What in your life is your greatest regret? Try to tell it as a story if you can and why this incident became your greatest regret.  Regret:

Number four: Prayer: Prayer is a way of addressing our deepest concerns in the most poetic manner. If we don’t expect an answer we take moments and find ourselves saying words of prayer. When in your life have you ever truly prayed?  What did you pray for?  Try telling it as a story. Prayer.

Number five: Learning: Rabbi Akiva was once asked, what is more important, “learning Torah or doing mitzvoth.”  He responded “Learning Torah because it can lead you to doing mitzvoth” Our tradition is one that expects much of us.  But what it expects more than anything else is to keep learning and growing.  What is the one question you have about Judaism but were always afraid to ask? Who can you go to, to find the answer to that question? Learning. 

Number six: Transformation: Personal transformation is at the heart of the sacred experience.  Sarah was transformed by the birth of Isaac. Moses was transformed by God at the burning bush. When in your life have you ever felt personal transformation?  What part of your life today is open to personal transformation? What do you think keeps you from experiencing transformation? Transformation. 

Number seven: Justice:  Tzedek tzedek tirdof, Justice, Justice shall you pursue, says the Torah. This is the widest margin of expectation for justice that we have. Moses meant in the word tirdof, for all generations to pursue justice. The moral arc of the universe never stops bending.  Where in your life have felt that you participated in making it better?  How do you want to leave the world better than when you found it? Justice.

Seven questions about Gratitude, Purpose, Regret, Prayer, Learning, Transformation, and Justice.  Each meant to point towards what is truly sacred in your life.  I ask you to have this conversation as a family, or with a friend, or write then down in a journal.  You can find copies outside or on my page on the website. You can email me at the synagogue nfarkas@vbs.org or contact me some other way. I very much look forward to hearing your thoughts.

These seven questions can help you seize your power of Bereishit, creation, to answer the primary question of modernity.  In our open, dark, and melting world, what is truly sacred to you? It is here, where you open up and say, Ye’hi ohr, “Let there be light.”  It is here that you can find Judaism’s greatest gifts and a spiritual compass that can fill you up with meaning and purposes. Remember to follow the adage of the old rabbi that if we want to change, if we want to let the light in, if we want to have a sacred life then we have to begin with the self.

Here’s to another seven wonderful years together.

Shanah Tovah[/collapsed]

[collapsed title="2015 Yom Kippur sermon: Hide and Seek"]

My house is full of kids.  With four children - the oldest topping out at age seven - our house is just like summer camp.  It’s always loud, messy, the kids are always eating, and there are splatters of paint everywhere.  One of my kid’s favorite games to play is hide and seek.  Once earlier this summer, my second child, Shaya, he’s five, ran off to find the perfect hiding spot.  He crouched down low behind a rocking chair and threw a blanket over his body for good measure.  Shaya had found the perfect hiding spot.  After a few minutes his siblings just couldn’t find him.  Getting bored, his brother and sister went on to other activities.  Now as time passed Shaya sat there under the covers wondering what happened to the others playing the game.  He started making peeping noises and then louder calls in the hope that someone would find him.   After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, he began to cry loudly.  I heard him from my room and came down the hallway where I found him under the blanket.  He was angry and sad that no one found him.  Because, you see, despite his desire to play hide and seek perfectly, to find the perfect hiding spot, what he really wanted - was to be found. 

Take this seriously for a moment.  At this moment in a child’s game there are truly amazing religious, philosophical, and theological points.  The goal of the game is to hide so successfully that he would remain hidden even from the most earnest of searchers. Yet, there isn’t a child in the world, probably not a person in the world, who would at some point undermine the very goal of the game in order not to feel alone.  Imagine him at that turning point between wanting to hide and wanting to be found - between rising and sitting, between feeling proud and ashamed, between laughing and crying.  Imagine that amazing moment of change where success no longer means meeting your goal or knowing that you’ve played it perfectly, but being connected to those around you.   Truly profound.

It’s this sacred moment that I want to focus on this morning.  There is theology in this moment of hide and seek.  A moment when everything shifts from the pursuit of a goal like knowing God’s perfection to simply wanting to have a connection.  When do we cast out old categories of understanding about God because being found and giving up is more important than being right and remaining hidden?

There are two needs each of us has in our spiritual life, both exemplified by this hide and seek moment. The first is a drive for knowledge. We want to learn, to know that perfection exists. Our natural desire for knowledge leads each of us to probe the depths of the world to learn its secrets.  We’ve gone to the bottom of the ocean and top of the stratosphere, in the pursuit of knowledge.   We’ve asked daring questions like: how does a tree grow?  Why does the apple fall downward?  How does the pendulum work?  Why do the stars move the way they do?  What happens when we split an atom? To try to know the world is to try to attain perfect knowledge of how and why the world is the way it is. 

Aristotle said, “Man by nature desires to know.” Maimonides rings the same bell when he names the first book of Jewish law, sefer mada, or the Book of Knowing.  The very first mitzvah in this book, states “The very foundation of all foundations, the pillar of wisdom is to know that there is a first cause that has created all that is.” The quest for knowledge about the world is a spiritual/mystical drive that has inspired science and art for generations.  To know perfect morality is to know a God who is perfectly moral.  To know the perfections of ontology is to know a God who is the perfection of being.  To know the perfections of the intellect is to know a God who perfects the intellect.

In the midrash, we find this to be true as well.  When God created the world there were two trees in the garden that were forbidden to Adam and Eve.  The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.  In the midrash, these trees were but one tree with different names.  For when the serpent convinced Eve to eat of the tree in order to be like God, it was not eternal life that pulled on her ego, but the chance for unending knowledge. As Maimonides writes, “in every being that has consciousness, life and wisdom are the same thing.” The drive to know God’s perfection is the drive to know our own existence. Cognito ergo sum “I know therefore I am” is Decartes’ rallying cry that knowledge and life are two sides of the same existential coin.   

But there is a cost for this cognitive drive for perfection.  It has been seventy years since the smoke stacks of Auschwitz have stopped sullying the sky with our ashes in the name of perfection.  Yet hardly a conversation passes about God that doesn’t accuse God of abandoning us, or “letting the holocaust happen.”  Rabbi Schulweis in his very first book “Evil and the Morality of God” makes the case that striving for God’s metaphysical perfection has left us in the moral lurch.  Rabbi Schulweis understood that the primary drive of theology in the western mind is that of the cognitive drive for perfection and the pursuit of perfection.  Rabbi Schulweis also knew that if the goal is attaining Divine perfection, one can easily justify any means to achieve that end.  It tries to bend our beliefs into a shape that we no longer recognize.  Any cause whose goal is perfection leaves those who are imperfect dead in its wake.  So in the shadow of the greatest of evils perpetuated in the name of perfection, one can justly and rightly abandon a God of perfection who has abandoned us.

This is the cost of perfection.  When we think that God is perfect, we think of God’s attributes which are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, unchangeable, perfectly good, perfectly beautiful, and perfectly just.  For millennia Western philosophers sought this God of perfection.  To me, this God of perfection sounds more like the kind of JDate profile you’d want to set your daughter up with than a God that actually lives with us in the world.   All that’s left is to add that he’s in finance and we can find that it’s a perfect match.

The truth is that the God of the Bible is not perfect.  God is not all-knowing in the Torah.  God does not know what Abraham will do on Mt. Moriah with his son Isaac bound to the altar.  After the akedah, God says, “v’ata yadati,” “for now I know.” God did not know whether Abraham would go through with the child sacrifice.  Later in the Torah, God is surprised that the people turned from Mt. Sinai to pray to statue of the Golden Calf.  God is surprised again by the intransience of the people in the desert.

The God of the Torah isn’t all powerful either.  God cannot prevent the people from mingling with other tribes, from sin, from moral depravity.  When Moses stood on the craggy shore of the Red Sea and saw Pharaoh’s army bearing down on the huddled masses of freed slaves, he called on God to save the people and God said “No!  You go down.”  When Moses heard the ruckus at the base of Mt. Sinai of the people praying before the Golden Calf, God called on Moses to go down to address the community.  The God of the Torah is not always the actor in our most important events.  This is not a God of sheer coercion and power. 

The drive to know - to know of God’s perfection, to strive for God’s perfection has placed the sense of the sacred over the horizon of human experience.  This is what I alluded to on Rosh Hashanah.  It is easy to be an atheist when one sees how imperfect the world is compared to God’s perfection.

When one sees suffering when compared to God’s perfect goodness. 

When one sees the ubiquitous injustice in the world when we compare it to God’s perfect justice.  Part of atheism’s justification is a response to the chasm between the way the world is and the way the world should be under a perfect God.

Let’s give up on a perfect God. Perfection has always cost too much. Instead of solely using our cognitive drive to “know God” let us shift to another equally sacred need as spiritual people. Let us play this hide and seek game differently with God.   I would like to focus on the need to be found, not the goal of finding the perfect hiding spot.

Instead of a drive to know, what this theological moment calls for is a drive to be known.  

Instead of cognition, we need recognition.

Instead of understanding, we need connection.

Each one of us wants to be known, to feel connected to each other.  That’s what Shaya wanted when he cried out.    Dr. Brene Brown defines this drive for connection saying “it is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued.”  Connection is the energy between people when they feel that they matter. 

Last year I spoke of Dr. Brown’s work on shame.  Shame is something that keeps us from being connected. Shame is the force that pulls us away from each other.  Shame is what keeps us from achieving our highest success and most blessed life.  The prophet Jeremiah described shame as the turned back and the fallen face when he described the destruction of the Temple and the exile of Israel.  Connection, on the other hand, is depicted as panim el panim, face-to-face.  Connection is the drive to be known, to be valued, to be found.  Connection is the drive to be in relationship.  Connection is covenant.  Connection is the meeting place, the makom,  the name of God, and it is at the center of Judaism both physically and philosophically.

Today is Yom Kippur when the High Priest walks slowly with trepidation into the center of the holiest place on earth, the kodesh kodeshim, the Holy of Holies.  When he enters the chamber with his head bowed, he first prays for himself, and then his family, and then all of Israel and then the entire world.  His eyes would then gaze upon the angels that topped the Holy Ark which houses the Torah, the Book of Life, the Ten Commandments, and he smiles.  Atop the ark, Bezalel fashioned the angels of God.  Yet these angels who form the seat of God in the world carried no sword.  These angels carried no shield.  These angels stand not as sentries on the watch, facing outwards towards the entrance of this holy space. The wings of these angels spread not upward towards the heavens pointing at the perfection and transcendence of God.  No. 

The Kohen Gadol smiled as his eyes gazed upon these guilded angels with eyes locked in an eternal gaze, panim el panim, face-to-face with each other -connected to each other.  Their golden wings spread reaching towards each other in an eternal embrace of love. 

At the center of the religious universe is not a God that wants us to marvel at God’s perfection but a God that wants to be known through connection and relationship with each other.  God’s throne is connection, not perfection.  It is as the liturgy of the Unetantokef says, “Until the day of one’s death, does God wait for us.”  Echoing the psalmist who wrote, “For it is on your behalf, my heart says Seek my Face.”  Connect with me. 

For in the cognitive drive the opposite of Perfection is imperfection. 

For in the cognitive drive the opposite of belief is disbelief.

For in the cognitive drive, the opposite of theism, is atheism.

But in the drive to be known, the relational drive, the opposite of belief is not disbelief.  The opposite of theism is not atheism, it is indifference.

Indifference to the world.  Indifference to each other.

Belief in God only animates half of us as Jews.  The latest study says that only 50% of Jews “believe in God.”

Apathy, by definition, motivates no one. 

Our tradition does not expect you to be perfect because life is not perfect, it is messy and hard.  Our tradition on the other hand expects you not to wallow in your disconnectedness.  It is not a sin not to believe in a God whose perfection is unfathomable.  

It is a sin to hear the cry, the woe; the need for connection and to do nothing but yawn.  

At any moment where we disconnect from each other, that is where we hear God saying “ayeka” “Where are you?”

The voice of God, “ayeka” can be heard in the mother who says “you never call me anymore” It’s true.  And yes mom, I’ll call you after the holiday.

The voice of God, “ayeka” can be heard in the child who says, “Daddy, can you stay home tonight and read me a story instead of going back to work?”

The voice of God can be heard in the friend who says, “my boyfriend broke up with me.”

Ayeka - Where are you.  The voice of God is heard in the cries of the sick who say, “Don’t let me die alone.” 

The voice of God can be heard in voice of a homeless man who says, “You got a dollar to spare?”

The voice of God can be heard in the nearly 11 million refugees who have left their homes because of the war in Syria, who are saying, “Can I live with you?”    

The voice of God was heard through Eric Garner whose last words uttered under an illegal choke hold were “I can’t Breathe.”

All injustices, all social maladies stem from our disconnection with each other.  Anytime we feel a disconnection from others, God’s voice rises in response.  This is the shuttering pathos captured by the words of the prophets:  The calling for connection and our indictment on this Yom Kippur for disconnecting from each other. In the words of Amos:

Listen to this, you who devour the needy, annihilating the poor of the land, saying ‘If only the new moon were over, so that we could sell grain; the Sabbath, so that we could offer wheat for sale, using an ephah that is too small and shekel that is too big, tilting a dishonest scale, and selling grain refuse as grain! We will buy the poor for silver, the need for a pair for sandals. The LORD swears by the pride of Jacob, ‘I will never forget any of their doings” Shall not the earth shake for this?..” 

We disconnect from each other and let the poor suffer, we let the displaced remain homeless, we let our families fall apart, our marriages fail, our communities dissolve , and then the voice of the prophet calls out us.  And the world shakes.

The drive to know and the drive to be known. The cognitive drive and the relational drive. Two categories of human need.  Two categories of philosophical desire.  Rabbi Schulweis understood this innately.  For thousands of years we have used our cognitive drive to know God and bend our Jewish lives into the Western mind of Greek philosophy.   What this moment calls for, is the turning from our goals of perfection to the crying out in connection.   Our central book of wisdom, our philosophy has been called by many names, Torah meaning teaching, Chochma – meaning wisdom.  Sefer Chayim  the Book of Life.  There are two other names, however, that this hide and seek moment calls for.  There are two other names that describe our central understanding of how to be in the world, what God really wants from us, and how we find the meaning of existence.

The first is Rachmana – meaning compassion.  The rabbis use this term to refer to the Torah when they quote its verses.  In Judaism, our Torah is our guidebook for connection, and compassion. Not of perfection.  The Rachmana is the source of life that draws us together.

The second name is Mikra – meaning the calling. It is used by the rabbis to quote verses of authority to outline the mitzvot, the deeds of our lives.  The Mikra is the teaching that is not just for teaching’s sake. It is the Torah that calls for a response.  It calls us to be better, more just, and more loving. It calls us to covenant, it calls us to connection.

It’s time to give up on a perfect God. Instead of perfection let’s try for connection. Instead of falling into the polarity of theism and atheism, let’s pull ourselves out of apathy.  Only then, can we know what it means to grow spiritually, to live more ethically, to love each other more, to care more, to be more Jewish and indeed to be more human.  For it is the most human thing in the world to not only hide, but to want to be found.

Gmar Hatima Tova.[/collapsed]

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Kol Nidre: Remarks from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

[collapsed title="Kol Nidre remarks from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti"]

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State of the Synagogue 2015 with VBS President Nancy Sher Cohen

[collapsed title="State of the Synagogue 2015 with VBS President Nancy Sher Cohen"]

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