Hearing God's Silent Song: Toward a Naturalistic Theology of Judaism

Rosh Hashana 2009 – 5770 by Rabbi Noah Farkas

I believe that God is a Master Teacher. God teaches not Torah only through direct instruction, but educates through hints, behavior, and subtle provocation as well. It was the Prophet Elijah who gave me the key to understand how God Teaches. Elijah was a zealous prophet of the God of Israel. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, turned away from God and started worshiping the idols of Ba'al. In the first great purge of human history, Ahab and Jezebel ordered all of the prophets who followed the God of Israel to be executed. Elijah, was the last prophet to survive. In his zealotry he challenged the prophets of Ba'al to a duel. After defeating them easily, Elijah put them to the sword. When the Ba'al- worshiping, Queen Jezebel heard of her prophets' defeat at the hands of Elijah, she put a price on his head, sending Elijah to flee for his life. Elijah escaped out into the desert, for forty days he walked alone looking for direction, a sign from God telling him what to do. He wandered to the top of a mountain and tried to rest in a remote cave. That night, God encountered Elijah:

"Why are you here?"God asked.

"Because I am moved with zeal for You! I am the only prophet that is left."replied Elijah.

"Come out,"God called, "and stand on the mountain before Me, and you will hear my voice."

But Elijah was unsteady and unsure. Suddenly there was a great and mighty wind, the mountains cracked open, rocks shattered. And yet, Elijah heard nothing – for God was not in tempest.

Then an earthquake ripped the ground open like cardboard. And yet Elijah heard nothing – for God was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake a massive fire burned shrubs and trees, flames spewing smoke into the air all the way to heaven, charring the ground with black soot. And yet Elijah heard nothing – for God was not in the fire.

But after the fire came a kol demama daka a soft murmuring silence. When Elijah heard it, he put on his tallit and went outside where he met with God who gave him comfort and direction, sending Elijah back to become a teacher to raise up new prophets and teachers in Israel. (Kings 19.9-14)

It was not in the maelstrom of direct command; it was not in the earth shaking epiphanies, nor with fiery passion, that Elijah heard God's voice, but it was the still, small, silent voice that echoes quietly through the universe that touched the prophet's inner ear. If we quiet down a little we might be able to discern something special, something sacred, moving in the background of creation – the voice of God's masterful teaching.

Thousands of years later, another prophet went out into the wilderness and heard God in the silence. Her name was Rachel Carson, a young biologist. Rachel loved to take long walks in the meadows and glens near her home in upstate New York. In the spring of 1962, when Rachel went outside to greet the morning with the exuberance only experienced by naturalists and mystics, she noted a strange stillness. She wrote:

"On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn choirs of robins, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh."(Silent Spring)

To Carson, the silence of nature itself was a wake-up call:

To the silence, Carson asks, "Where had all the birds gone?

To the silence Carson worries, "Why did they leave?"

And to the silence Carson adds, "Our world is a mess what can we do about it?"

Rachel, like Elijah heralded the changing of the world. She is seen by many to be the mother of the American environmental movement. Like Elijah, Rachel's calling did not come from the cracking open of mountains through strip mining, the quaking of tread on soil, or the burning of rainforest. Rachel's prophetic vocation came when she quieted herself to hear the reverberating song of God's creation and she heard – nothing. Silence. Carson wrote of this experience in an article entitled, "Silent Spring,"which later became a book with the same name. She prophesized the demise of biodiversity, she foresaw the destruction of natural habitat, and envisioned a world with a rapidly changing climate. Both Elijah and Carson received their prophetic calling not by noise, but by silence.

When we turn down the iPod, shutdown the computer and turn off the car and listen to the world, do we hear nothing but silence? Not the buzzing of the bees, the humming of birds or the babbling of churning brooks. What if we hear nothing, nothing at all? What is God teaching in that silence?

To say that we live in an age of environmental crisis is already cliche. It seems that we have fallen into the morass of crises - the financial crisis, the Israel-Palestinian crisis, the housing crisis, the flu crisis. We are numb to the word despite the pack of predators standing at the gates.

All of us in Southern California know we live in a state of imbalance between our consumption and our environment, and we suffer the consequences: Sniff the air and you can still capture the wafts of smoke from the fires that still smolder on our city's edge. Look at the sky and you will find the pepto-colored hues that smog casts over our homes. I'd say taste the fish in our local rivers or right off the coast, but don't please don't. The largest EPA superfund site lies at the bottom of the ocean between the Santa Barbara and Santa Monica coasts. You don't want to taste the fish, trust me.

We all know it is chic to promote environmental living. What you might not know is that it is very Jewish to promote environmental living. Many of us associate Judaism with ritual practice and social ethics, not with recycling, energy consumption, or organic produce. And for good reason: In the Tanakh, we were exiled from our Land, creating a break between a Jew and his place in the world. In medieval times, we could not own land or work the land, pushing us into urban areas and urban jobs. In modern times, the closest most of us come to nature is the produce isle in the local supermarket. This leaves Steven Schwartzchild, a Jewish philosopher, to describe Jews as "unnatural."We are doctors, bankers, and lawyers, certainly not farmers.

In fact, there are those who blame our biblical tradition for the environmental mess that we are now in. For philosophers and historians Lynn White Jr. and Arnold Toynbee, it was God's command to Adam to "fill the earth and master it,"(Gen. 1:28) that gave the metaphysical orientation to permit over-cultivation, over-consumerism, and over-production. Toynbee writes:

In 1661 the verse read like a blessing on the wealth of Abraham in [the form of] in his children and in livestock. In 1971 the verse reads like a license and an incentive for mechanization and pollution.

If we take these thinkers seriously – and we must – then this first command we have fulfilled wholeheartedly. For we have mastered the skies with airplanes, we have tamed the seas with mighty ships, we have spread across the land plowing it under for crops, constructing buildings laying vast networks of concrete and fiber optics. In fact, there are not a single tract of land in America that has not seen the spade. Just look outside the window the next time you fly across the country to see the checkerboard pattern of greens and browns signifying the various cycles of industrial agriculture. The view from 30,000 feet is clear. As Jean Baudrillard wrote, the word "wilderness"carries no meaning anymore because it describes no place on earth. When I can see any place on earth at any time through my computer, there is no more mystery. We have indeed filled the earth and mastered it.

And yet, Judaism stands for the sacredness of creation rather than its destruction. This is the mistake of White and Toynbee. They missed the mastery God's subtle teaching. Sometimes God's command is clear, but often we learn more from God's own remarks than we do from God's direct instructions. Think back to the story of creation. When God created the world, according to the Torah, the world was disordered chaos. Then God said "let there be light"and there was and God said it was good. God said "separate the waters and form dry land"and there was a separation and God pronounced this to be good. The same went for the fish and birds – God said, "fill the seas and the skies,"and as they did, God pronounced this to be, well good. The sun, the moon, and the stars, as their light burst forth God said, you know this one, – Good. Grass and trees – Good. All the Animals – Good.

What is God teaching by saying that each day is good? Especially when God, the all knowing and all powerful Creator in this story, already knows how good the earth already is? He created it. Here is the subtlety: Beyond being good for doing something for someone else, the world has an intrinsic goodness. Each stone, each drop of water, each leaf, and each living breathing-creature is itself inherently good, capturing, as the mystics believe a small piece of the divine within.

The Psalmist crystallizes this truth when he exclaims, "Praise God, sun and moon/ Praise God, all the stars of light"¦Praise the LORD from the earth"¦all mountains and hills, fruit trees and cedars, all wild and tamed beasts, all creeping things and winged birds, all kings, princes, judges and peoples of earth, all maidens and young men, old and young alike. (Psalm 148 3-4, 7-12). There is a symphony in the universe, Psalmist states, that allows for every heart song of every living creature to have a unique, enduring, and interconnected relationship to the Divine through the harmony of the polyrhythm found in the vibrations of electrons, the collision of atoms, the rushing of leaves, and the beating of trillions of hearts, each affirming its own sacred existence.

It's difficult to hear this. We see world in anthropocentric terms. I know that when I walk down the street or sit in a park, it's nearly impossible for me to escape my own headspace. What can I say? I can't experience the world on a daily basis from some omnipresent perch. I live in the world not above it. It's so easy for me to confuse my first-person experience of the world with the notion that the world belongs to me. Each of us declares, "bishvili nivra ha'olam", the world was created for my sake. The rabbis acknowledge our existential schema of being first-persons, but they turned this idea on its head. In the Talmud, the conviction that bishvili nivra ha'olam (M. Sanhedrin, 4:5TB.37a) the world was created for my sake, gives energy to the divine within each of us. "God created the world for my sake,"we think, "I must have a sacred dignity because I sit at the pinnacle of creation."

But I am responsible.

I am responsible to recognize the divinity in the soul of every person.

The world was created for me and for you.

I am responsible to protect what is divine in the other.

And when human haughtiness reigns, God reminds us that even the gnat was created before us. For when we overlook the inherent beauty of a river and see only a means to grind flour or power homes, when we calculate the price of timbre and miss the mystery of the living forests, and when we see only the subdivision and ignore the open plain we are humbled by God. Nothing in the world on the most basic level was created for us. Each creature has some measure of divine worth because each creature was created by God. And we are responsible for each of them.

Like the Psalmist we must join the living chorus with all that is created in a song of awe and love praising God. Judaism did not see the world only as an instrument for us to use. The world moves along its own course, each created thing is endowed by the Creator to live in it and flourish. This is the naturalistic theology of Judaism. In a very human phrase, aeina bishvili nivra ha'olam - the world was not created for our sake but for the sake of the Creator. If we forsake this maxim, we forsake our God. Thus:

It is a sin, deserving of repentance, to think that the world was created for our sake.

It is a sin, deserving of repentance, to act as if the world was created for our sake.

It is a sin, deserving of repentance, to treat the world as a garbage can, as a machine, and as a slave.

The Torah does call for human exceptionalism – God did not intend for the earth to be a level playing field. Unlike the other six days, in which God merely said tov, or just good. On the day when the Holy One inflated the lungs of humanity and caused its heart to beat, God called this act of creation tov ma'od, exceedingly good. Unlike the animals, plants, fish and birds, we are invested not only with our own inherent goodness, but with capacity to reach higher, stretch farther, and exceed the limitations of our natural instincts. The word ma'od you might be familiar with. It crops up again in the Torah and is reiterated in our liturgy in the words of the shema. "V'ahavta et Adonai Elohecha b'chol levavcha b'chol nafshecha u'vchol ma'odecha"(Deut. 6:5) "You will love the LORD your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your ma'od." Our might, our ma'od, is our capacity to transcend our creaturely selves, for making moral choices, and for reflecting the image of God (M. San. 4:2). When we don't use our ma'od, we sin. Thus:

It is a sin deserving of repentance, to turn our backs on God's silent protest.

It is a sin, deserving of repentance, when we abuse the created world.

Our Torah tells us the world was born on Rosh Hashanah. Today. A day unlike any other – because it is on this day when or Kings were crowned, a day when God is enthroned on a seat of judgment, and a day when we must reflect on the consequences and possible finality of our choices. We celebrate creation today precisely because of our ma'od.

ma'od – our innate, God-given capacity to transcend our creatureliness – to look at the environment and see its existence as a value that is not for our benefit, but for itself

ma'od – we have the opportunity to change, to make teshuvah by recognizing our partnership with God in the project of Being itself.

ma'od – we celebrate God's creation today, and Rosh Hashanah casts our relationship to the environment as a spiritual and moral issue.

It is a sin, deserving of repentance, to pollute the ocean for our sake without a sense of divine judgment.

It is a sin, deserving of repentance, to use the air for our sake without a sense of divine judgment.

It is a sin, deserving of repentance, to destroy the soil without a sense of divine judgment.

When God planted Adam in the Garden, the midrash teaches: that God led Adam to pass before all the trees and said to him, "See My works, how fine and excellent they are! "Think about this and do not corrupt and desolate My world; For if you corrupt it, there will be no one to set it right after you. (Kohelet Rabbat 7:13) The garden belongs to God, but responsibility belongs to us. For our choices matter.

Our Torah says God put humanity in the garden "l'ovda u'shomra, in order to plant it and to protect it."(Gen. 2:15) We have divine permission to build homes, to cultivate crops, and earn livings. But we must balance our personal gain with our personal responsibility. We must guard the garden as much as we work it, for our choices matter.

A great shofar is sounded in heaven, and the still small voice is heard. Our responsibility is to be like Elijah and like Rachel Carson and hear God's voice in the silence. When the birds stop chirping and bees stop buzzing, and the planet grows hotter, and the rains no longer come in their season, and when they do they bring murderous floods. We do not need to wait for God's explicit command telling us to halt. We hear the echoes of the Infinite as our earth begins to fight back and the land which we were given attempts to spit us out! For our choices matter.

As our world has grown flatter, more plugged-in and connected, we must globalize our collective conscience to include an ethic that cherishes the one thing that we all truly have in common - the fact that all things which exist are all connected in a web of life. We need a theological understanding that human beings are not the center or pinnacle of creation; we are the stewards of creation; for there is no greater transcendence than to partner with God by becoming the caretaker of God's creation.

Baruch ata Adonai Elhoheinu Melech ha'olam asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav vitzivanu lishmor et hagan.

"Blessed are you, Adonai, God, king of the universe, who adds holiness to our lives by commanding us to protect the garden."

This is the blessing that acknowledges our purpose as God's stewards. This blessing makes buying local, organic produce a mitzvah. It makes walking or biking to work, a mitzvah. It makes using a CFL, using cloth napkins, or turning off a your sprinklers a mitzvah.

We believe that great changes in the world begin with the smallest acts. As a synagogue community we are reducing our power usage and water usage through audits and conservation. We are hosting a symposium on water conservation in October, with government officials, business executives, scholars, and authors, in order to seek how we can change the way we use water in Valley. We recycle thousands of pounds paper, plastic, glass, and metal every month. And we are planting a community garden here at the synagogue and another just up the street, so that our children will know the importance of feeling the earth between their fingers. So that our children, whose eyes never stop watching us, can see us reclaim our connection to the land with the dirt under our fingernails. We are working with an organic farm to bring local, organic produce to VBS, binding our livelihood to his. Each of these are mitzvoth. Each of these are deserving of the blessing.

Baruch ata Adonai Elhoheinu Melech ha'olam asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav vitzivanu lishmor et hagan.

"Blessed are you, Adonai, God, king of the universe, who adds holiness to our lives by commanding us to protect the garden."

And today we are giving away 1,000 CFL light bulbs, so that you know that we are committed to protecting our world through energy reduction. Join us, become a VBS Gardener, or learn how you can reduce you water usage, or help us to recycle. Join us. Because when each of us does something small, when we change our light bulbs, when we reduce our water usage, when we cultivate locally grown food, we know that each of these together can change the world.

Be like Elijah. Be like Rachel Carson. Join us. So that each of us can protect and preserve God's world for our children and for their children. Even though our voices are seem small, our collective impact will be great. Join us.

I promised Rabbi Feinstein I'd end with a joke.

So, "How many Jews does it take to screw in a light bulb?" The answer to the question really doesn't matter if we can get 1,000 Jews screwing in 1,000 light bulbs, this is how we change to world.

L'shannah Tova

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