Seven Sacred Questions from Rabbi Noah Farkas

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