Robert Frost and Revelation

Revelation by Robert Frost

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are. 

I think we are done, don’t you, with the question of whether this is, or is not, the letter by letter, word, by word record of some divine dictation.

Long done.

There’s a lovely passage comment in the Talmud Yerushalmi that imagines Moses taking dictation from God on top of Sinai, writing away in black fire on a scroll of white fire, when, sweating from the heat of the fiery letters he mops his brow on his sleeve and some of the fiery ink rubs off on his forehead – and that is why the Torah speaks of Moses having horns of light – carnei or.

The sort of thing pictured by ... well everyone.

This is Jose de Rivera’s image

But this tale of the fiery quill isn’t meant to be taken literally.

It’s a poetic image.

And revelation is always going to come down to a matter of poetry

Light words that tease and flout ...

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire

The greatest problem I have with the notion that this, all this, represents some letter by letter record of Divine dictation is not based on Biblical archaeology or Ancient Semitic philology or Higher or Lower literary Biblical criticism or fossil records or astral physics or anything like that.

The greatest problem I have with the notion that all this represents some letter by letter record of Divine dictation is theological. If the will of god, revealed to humanity, ultimately boils down to a bunch of letters placed in order, then the will of God ceases to be something infinite, touching the heavens, beyond human ken, and becomes instead something ultimately two-dimensional and all too simple for a true encapsulation of what is willed for our existence.

It’s more than the sort of theological problem that should be filed with the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. People die because other people think that the will of God is really encapsulated in a series of letters so that they can claim some kind of monopoly on an understanding of God’s will. They think they can know what God wants and it’s at that point that other people start getting excluded from being important in God’s eyes. Other people end up getting hurt, excluded, killed even.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

‘Tis pity indeed if we make the mistake of thinking that God’s will is capable of being trapped by printing presses, ink scrawls of pixellated imagery. Revelation is poetic, not literal speech.

I know the letters, in the order in which they fall, are capable of revealing the most extraordinary truths about the nature of human existence. I love the stories; I live my life by these stories, and the commands and all of it. But that’s not because of the precise letter by letter nature of how these verses appear in the good book. It’s because of the way the letters open up something that is beyond the letters themselves. It’s not that the letters are the product of revelation, they are the symbol pointing to the reality of revelation; a reality that can never be pinned down, like a lepidopterist’s butterfly.

This is Abraham Joshua Heschel, ‘ The nature of revelation is something words cannot spell, which human language will never be able to portray. In speaking about revelation, the more descriptive the term, the less adequate the description.’[1]

In other words if you make a point about something being literally revelatory, you fail to understand what revelation actually is – it’s beyond.

So therefore we are all, seeking after that which is beyond all letters. And the role of the letters becomes not encapsulating the will of God, but pointing instead at that which is beyond all letters.

To put it another way, in the words of the very Sidra we read today.

Vchol ha’am roim et hakalot – ‘All the people saw the thunder’

That’s impossible, of course, or rather it requires a blending, a bending, of sensory perceptions.

It becomes poetically possible as it is literally impossible.

Is this a little highfalutin, I’m sorry. But this is important. This is who we are, as a faithful, non-fundamentalist community.

Maimonides[2] puts it like this.

We believe that the Torah has reached Moses from God in a manner which is described in Torah figuratively by the term ‘word’, but nobody has ever known how that took place except Moses to whom that word reached.

Those words – the words that were heard on Sinai are not the same kinds of words I’m using today. That revelation is quite unlike anything I can articulate.

Or another Midrash. There is a tale of the way in which the letters of the Ten Commandments were carved into the Shnei Luchot – the two tablets Moses brought down from the mountain.

Rabbis hold that the carving went right through the stones and that it didn’t matter whether you looked one way on or the other way on at the letters

They still read the same way.

In other words they were nothing like the largely non-symmetircal letters we now know.

In other words it wasn’t written in the sort of letters we would consider letters.

One last example, my favourite.

From the  C19 Hasidic Rebbe, Naftali Tzvi Horotvitz of Rophshitz.[3]

What was heard on Sinai? Asks the Rophshitzer, ‘The sound of the first letter of the first of the Ten Commandments.’ Now that’s terrific. The first letter of the Ten Commandments is an Aleph. It doesn’t have a sound.

Or rather, maybe, it is the sound of a letter before there is noise, the sound that encapsulates all possibility of future sound, it’s the aural equivalent of a microdot in which contains all possible written information.

I’m trying to articulate an ambivalence, in the strict sense of the word – a simultaneous tug in two different directions – or valences.

On the one hand every revelatory text, every purported experience of revelation has to be tugged back down to its proper earthly station. By the time we, humans, are speaking about revelation it’s already gone.

On the other hand every text, every experience that point beyond itself towards something unknowable has to be cherished. These texts serve as pointers, a roadmap towards that which is beyond.

And the more these texts become used in this way, the more carefully and more profoundly their spiritual core is unpacked and used, in turn to point ever higher, the more important they become. They serve like spiritual ladders pointing away into the heavens. You climb them not to get to the top, but to be one who climbs, one who seeks out the heavens.

From the perspective of the heavens revelation works in the opposite way.

There is, somehow, some need of the Divine to disclose, to reach down, to share with us puny humans.

But as the information arrives it is whisked away, less we should find ourselves carrying too great a burden for our fragile human minds.

Those who claim to understand too precisely the will of God are dangerous, to themselves and others.

Frost again,

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are. 

Are you still with me?

I know you don’t believe in the literal letter by letter version of revelation.

My hope, in giving this sermon is that you are with me in making two other claims.

I hope you don’t believe that what I’ve been trying to articulate is less profound, a sort of ortho-lite pseudo-faith. It’s not. It’s stronger and more holy than fundamentalism. It’s the very nature of what Jews, the most spiritually refined of Jews in any event, have felt about revelation and the letter by letter nature of this book.

I hope, equally, that you can feel, even if only on those fleeting moments, that there is something which is beyond, there is something all these letters and words point towards; not graspable, not capable of being turned into a plaything for humans to do their worse, but rather an invitation to turn towards the heavens and gaze on at the animating power of the Universe and the will for our existence.

Because a true Jewish sense of revelation exists in the middle of these two claims.

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are. 

Shabbat shalom

---

[1] God in Search of Man 184-5

[2] Perek Helek Principle 8

[3] Zera Kodesh Shavuot

Abraham Joshua King, Martin Luther King Jnr and the Accident of Birth

One of my greatest spiritual inspirations is Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Here’s in a picture with his good friend Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jnr

Heschel was born in a Hasidic family. He was expected to become a Rabbi. And he became a Rabbi, also with a PhD. He survived the Holocaust because he ended up in America, as a professor at the Seminary where I studied for the Rabbinate.

King was born in a Baptist family. He was expected to become a Baptist preacher and he became a Baptist preacher, also with a PhD and became the greatest human rights hero of in the history of the United States of America.

The two men met on the 14^th January 1963 - almost exactly 55 years ago to the day at a conference in Chicago on Religion & Race at a time when racial tensions in the States were high. The conference opened with a statement from JFK and then Heschel spoke.

This is how he started his speech.

Speech to conference on, “Religion and Race” (14 January 1963)

At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to Me.” While Pharaoh retorted: “Who is the Lord, that I should heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go.” The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a [black man] to cross certain university campuses.

It’s an extraordinary speech. I love it for a couple of reasons. More than two, but I’m going to share two today.

I love it because it reminds me how quickly humans forget this story - the story we read today, in this Shul, and in Synagogues the world over.  Every year we tell the story of the oppression of a people - our people - by another people who forgot all the good we could do and focussed only on how scary it was to have a different people among them. Every year we remind ourselves, and frankly the whole world, of how quickly we invent supposed sins committed by those ‘not quite like everyone else’

It reminds me that human beings are quick to invent some meaningless supposed sin of people who are unlike everyone else - the supposed sin of being a Jew, the supposed sin of having black skin, the supposed sin of ....

So this is how I’m defining racism - to treat two people different because of an accident of birth is racist; whether that accident of birth resulted in different colour skin, different gender, different anything. There is no justification for treating people differently because of an accident of birth.

Well, it’s kicked off again, just this week.

There are reports that the President of the United States rejected a bi-partisan plan to bring child refugees to America with language I cannot repeat, but he seems to have rejected the plan because the people who are fleeing to America are coming from poor countries like Haiti. It’s not a sin to come from a poor country. It’s not a sin to come from a country visited by earthquakes and hurricanes, and beset with political instability. The stories of the destruction of Haiti should move us to empathy, not disdain.

You are not better than a Haitian because you were born into wealth and health. You are better, or worse, than the next person because of how you treat others, frankly, how you treat the poor and wretched most of all, frankly, how you treat the poor and wretched you don’t particularly feel drawn to treat well. It’s us, the wealthy, healthy inhabitants of what we like to call the free world, who get judged on an issue like this. Not the people born in Haiti, and Congo and Syria and the like.

We are not better than Haitians because we had the fortune to be born here. It’s not a sin that they were born there.

Here’s Heschel again.

Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity.

The sad news is that racism remains present, even 55 years after the Chicago conference. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Race remained present even 1300 years after the conference in Egypt - the one with Pharaoh and Moses.

Of course Black Lives Matter, of course it’s appalling that black men have a likelihood of being shot - shot even by police who are supposed to be guardians of justice - crossing the road far, far, far higher than white men. Even 55 years after Heschel pointed out

“it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a [black man] to cross certain university campuses.”

That’s the first reason I love this speech. It reminds me how much we need to do to combat and oppose and challenge racist language and behaviour - language and behaviour that suggests one person is better or worse than another and deserving of different treatment simply because of an accident of their birth.

But here’s the other thing.

I love A.J. Heschel, and this speech particularly because it’s a reminder of what we need religion for, in this day and age, in a time when we’ve learnt to peer into the very earliest moments of the big bang and have learnt to split atoms and genes and become so very very clever.

I love A.J. Heschel and this speech in particular because it’s a reminder that religion can play a role in changing people’s hearts - in fact, it’s probably the greatest source of anyone changing their mind in the history of humanity.

Here we all are, in our silos - we know what we know and we like to surround ourselves with people who agree with us. We select the newspapers that agree with us. We curate out Facebook and Twitter feeds to echo the thoughts in our mind. And we are pro-Brex-this or anti-Brex-that. And we if we let different voices into our private echo chambers at all, we congratulate ourselves on our liberality, as we scoff at those people who have the temerity to think differently from ourselves and go back to reinforcing whatever opinions we have already decided are correct.

When we discount religion, when we no longer listen hard enough to the stories like the great story of Exodus, when we no longer spend enough time in Synagogues and other places of religion, when we no longer make space in our lives for God, we get to a place where human beings are the most important things there are. And that’s not completely errant, but it's woefully insufficient.

If we lock religion out of our lives I am left with just me. And if you disagree with me, in a world without religion, who is to say that I’m not right? Who’s to say that I have to listen to you?  If we stop listening to the voice of religion who is to say that one lot of people aren’t, indeed, more important than another lot of people. Who’s going to jab their finger at us and call us to account for the times we’ve treated different human beings as being of different worth.

Here’s the religious take on race - all humanity is created in the image of God, white skinned, black skinned, yellow skinned, male female, gay, straight, poor or rich ... who is to say, say the Rabbis, that your blood is redder, perhaps their blood is redder?

The thing about religion is that it puts us all in second place, as human beings, behind a God who is our creator in whose image we are all pale reflections. And I don’t care if you understand gene splicing or the big bang, if that makes you confused as to whether you are really the most important creation in this world. Because you are not. I am not. None of us is.

We need religion to remind us an existential humility, we need religion to remind us of how insidious it is to treat another human being as worse less than us. We need religion to remind us that even if we do behave in ways that are subtly racist, God still sees, God still knows and God still records.

In fact that’s the very point of religion - to stand above us and point out our falling short. And I know that that is not very trendy in this, I’m alright, you’re alright world.

But the truth is we need religion today more than ever. More than ever it matters that I do not consider I am the most important person in the world - when the costs and the dangers of seeing other people as less important than me are so huge - when the costs and dangers of seeing the world around me as there only for me to use and abuse it.

We need to learn how to place ourselves below the level of God. We need to learn we are all children of God. We need to learn that our responsibilities, as Jews, as humans, are greater than our claims to be in control of our destiny. We need a humility. That’s what religion teachers.

In our faith, you get up on the morning and the first words on your lips should be ‘Modeh Ani Lefanecha’ - I am grateful God for the gift of another day alive. That should make you think before you oppress another before you place yourself above another.

Let me leave the last words with A J Heschel

Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking. Perhaps [Heschel went on, reflecting on the conference on Religion and Race to which he had been invited] this Conference should have been called “Religion or Race.” You cannot worship God and at the same time look at man as if he were a horse.

Yizkor Yom Kippur 5777 - Meditations on the Lifecyle of a Fruit Fly

To call it a plague would be unnecessarily biblical. But we’ve a minor outbreak of drosophila - fruit flies - at home.

Tiny things half the size of a sesame seed. Too small to buzz. They orbit flowers that arrived for Rosh Hashanah, hover around the compost and seem particularly attracted to toothpaste.

Once upon a time I studied a bit of genetics. Geneticists love drosophila for the brevity of their life cycle. Four days to pupate, two days to reach maturity, then they are ready to mate. Funny how things like the lifecycle of a fruit-fly can remain in the mind. Having mated, of course, the flies die. And it all feels so brief.

Mi Yichiye uMi Yamut - who shall live and who shall die.

Mi b’kitzo uMi lo b’kitzo - who in the fullness of days, and who not at the fullness of days.

And it all feels so brief.

A flash of a moment. We last longer than a fruit fly. But really, what are we capable of achieving? Even our very best efforts. Even the brightest of us. Life a vanishing dream - cchalom yauf.

Yom Kippur can do that to you. So raw an encounter with our mortality that it can become hard to see beyond our terminal state.

Actually Yom Kippur isn’t the worst of it. On the Shabbat of Succot we read the Book of Ecclesiastes; things get bleaker still.

Before the silver chord snaps and golden bowl crashes. The jar is shattered at the spring and the jug is smashed at the cistern. And the dust returns to the earth as it was.

Hevel hevelim amar kohelet - everything is vanity.

That’s an irony, I suppose. A book about the absolute futility of our attempts at immortality, written some three thousand years ago, is still re-read today. The book bears the name of its author Kohelet, and the author lives on through his work.

Despite its antiquity, it’s holding up pretty well.

I have observed, [says Kohelet,] that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the brave, nor is bread won by the wise, nor wealth by the intelligent, no favour by the learned. For the moment of death comes to us all. And no-one knows their time. As fishes are enmeshed in a fatal net and birds in a snare, so is humanity caught by death when it comes without warning.

Sartre would have been happy with that. Kohelet has survived; achieving, if not immortality, then surely a life beyond mortal grasp of its author. That’s a neat paradox. The bleakest, most honest encounter the Bible gives us with the mortal condition reads today as possibly the most contemporary book in the entire Torah.

Here’s another irony. On a day for considering our mortal predicament here we are at, possibly, the most cherished moment in the day, remembering those loved and lost. Giving them, through our memories, a life beyond the grave. The day on which we consider the brevity and fragility of our existence is the day on which those we have loved and lost live on in our reflections on them.

The neuroscientist David Eagleman imagined forty different versions of the afterlife. It’s a great book, called Sum. In one of his essays he imagines an afterlife where the dead gather to live on only as long as there are those who remember them, only to experience a second sort-of-death when there remains no-one who tells stories of their life. He’s right that there is a kind of immortality in stories told about us, even after we have gone.

Woody Allen once said he didn’t want to achieve immortality through his work. He wanted to achieve immortality through not dying. But I’m not sure it works like that. I’m back engaging with Yuval Noah Harari and his new book Homo Deus. This time approvingly.

Harari notes we aren’t dying like we used to. We used to die of pestilence or poverty or violence. Now we get propped up by medicine and prosperity and, as a race, we aren’t even as violent as we used to be. We are living longer and pushing harder at the edges of science to live longer still. We are heading for not quite immortality, but, says Harari, a-mortality.

Future superhumans could still die in some war or accident and nothing could bring them back, but unlike us mere mortals, their life would have no expiry date. So long as no bomb shreds them to pieces or no truck runs them over, they could go on indefinitely.

And here comes a sensational observation.

Which will probably make them the most anxious people in history. We mortals daily take chances with our lives because we know they are going to end anyhow. So we go on treks in the Himalayas, swim in the sea and do many other dangerous things like crossing the road or eating out. But if you believe you can live for ever, you would be crazy to gamble on infinity like that.

His point is that living longer isn’t the same as living better. In fact one might be at odds with the other. Last night I suggested that if we live for tomorrow we are destined never to reach it. Today I’m suggesting that if we worry too much about living for ever we can end up not living at all.

We are mortal.

So we should get on with living.

None of us know how much longer we have.

In the unataneh tokef we read of books, one book for each of us written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed today - v’chotem yad kol adam bo - with the signature of each person in them. We are all writing books. You, me, each of us. And each of our books contains an image of our life. Our values, our efforts, our kindnesses.

And those of us here remembering today, at Yizkor, we are leafing through the books left for us. bo.

We are all writing books and reading books.

So here are a couple of ideas about the books we leave for others to read.

First, make it good.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great American Rabbi of the last century, warned, that the greatest problem is not how to continue, but how to exalt our existence. The cry for a life beyond the grave [he taught] is presumptuous if there is no cry for a great life prior to the grave.’ [2]

What exactly do we want to achieve in this world? We are all too busy running to keep abreast of the speed with which this world turns to pause to think about what we are actually running for.

This, Heschel wrote, is the meaning of existence, ‘to reconcile liberty with service, the passing with the lasting, to weave the threads of temporality into the fabric of eternity.’

Or if that sounds a little too high-falutin, in an interview given just months before he passed away in 1972 Heschel suggested this,

‘remember there is meaning beyond absurdity. Be sure that every little deed counts, that every little word has power and that we can, everyone, do our share to redeem the world in spite of all frustrations and disappointments.’

‘Above all,’ he continued, ‘remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art. You are not a machine. Start working on this great work of art called your own existence.

For each of us, with our different lives at our different points in life, that answer will look different.

But how much more glorious would all our lives be if we constructed them as works of art. Not just factors off a production line.

My favourite moment in the story of Ester comes when Mordechai attempts to get Ester to protest the upcoming destruction of the Jewish people. She’s declines the invitation, lacking courage, or perhaps distracted by the trinkets of court life. Mordechai is having none of it.

Mi yodeah im leayt hazot higat lemalchut.

Who knows, perhaps it was for this moment that you became queen?

Who knows, perhaps it was for this moment that you are here.

It’s so precious this life. And the brevity of its existence enhances its beauty. If we knew we would life forever it wouldn’t be so important. Here, today, in touch with our mortality because of the themes of this day, and reminded of our own mortality by this service of Yizkor, we have a chance to pledge our lives to the creation of something beautiful, powerful, meaningful.

Something that justifies our existence and allows the flicker of our flame to burn beyond our years.

So that’s the first piece of advice - live bigger. Live for a purpose. Make your life a work of art.

The second piece of advice is - record it, write it down.

Theodore Zeldin, the academic whose responsible for the idea about Forts and Ports so many of you have responded to since Rosh Hashanah has an obsession for autobiographies. He loves them. Each chapter of his book, The Hidden Pleasures of Life, engages with a different one; Lao She the nineteenth century Chinese humourist, the seventeenth century Earl of Shaftesbury, Haimabati Sen, born in Bengal in 1866. He loves autobiographies because they contain the insights into otherness he feels is so vital for human progress. Write it down, he urges, record stuff. Leave a trace.

There is a lovely tradition of the Tzavah - the ethical will. Through Jewish history the great, and the not so great, have passed on their ethical inheritance in documents, many of which have survived to this day. Judah Ibn Tibbon died in France in 1180 leaving this instruction;

Examine your Hebrew books at every New Moon, the Arabic volumes once in two months, and the bound codices once every quarter.  Arrange your library in fair orders so as to avoid wearying yourself in searching for the book you need. A good plan would be to set in each compartment a written list of the books therein contained. If, then, you are looking for a book, you can see from the list the exact shelf it occupies without disarranging all the books in the search for one. [3]

This is al, of course, pre-Google. But I wonder if the good Reb Judah spotted something in his son that led him to pass on this rather different instruction.

My son! I command your to honour your wife to your utmost capacity. Remember her assiduous attendance on you in your illness, though she had been brought up in elegance and luxury. If you would acquire my love, honour her with all your might; do not exercise too severe an authority over her; our Sages [Gittin 6b] expressly warned men against this. If you give reprove, it is enough if your displeasure is visible in your look; let it not be vented in actual rage.

Most of us are blessed with material goods to pass on to our inheritors. But what about the non-tangible gifts; the really important gifts. Write them down.

Leave a record for those who come later. It needn’t, I suppose, be a physical book, but leave a record.

The pre-funeral visit comes with the job. And I’m always fascinated by how a family reflect, admittedly at such a raw moment. Sometimes I arrive and the photos are out and the letters. And there are stories being told and retold. And sometimes there are emotions, but only scarce specific recollections. If we want to be remembered we should make sure there is something to remember us by. Write it down.

It’s a way to live beyond our years.

Live well and leave a record.

And the proof that it works is our very experience here at Yizkor. Remembering, recalling, giving life to those who have passed and celebrating their achievement not necessarily in the public realm, but in the personal, private realms in which their lives have touched and lifted us.

Live well and leave a record.

And in the fullness of time, we pray, there will be those who will remember us.

Hatimah Tovah

                                                                            

---

[1] Haimabati

[2] Moral Grandeur p.378

[3] http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/jewish-wills.asp

A Three Part Guide to Jewish Life - Part One - Belief

I've never seen it put this before - that's the sort of thing that should make a Rabbi nervous - but I think it's possible to distil Jewish existence into three ideas; belief, love and otherness.

Today I want to talk about belief. What is it, what should we believe in, and how - if the idea of belief feels strange - can we find it.

This is what I don't mean by belief. You might have seen this in today's papers. There is now evidence that gravity waves exist. There was a piece in the  papers yesterday from a contemporary physicist talking how relieved he is no longer having to belief, he now knows. From a scientific perspective, beliefs are provisional theories, dangerous things which can blind a researcher from seeing a reality. Beliefs can distract and the goal of scientific research is to replace this kind of belief with proven rigour. That's all fine and good, but it has nothing to do with the kind of thing I mean when I talk about belief.

When I talk about belief I have in mind a line from the German philosopher of religion, Ludwig Feuerbach. 'What is finite to the understanding,' said Feuerbach, 'is nothing to the heart.' Belief is the realm of that infinite to the understanding, that which is purely an underpinning of a soul.

Belief exists in the realm of love.

I'm not interested in pitching religious beliefs against scientific discoveries. That's a kind of religion I have no interest in whatsoever.

But a person who says they believe they are loved, or that they feel an emotional or spiritual connection to a cause or an idea - you can't double-blind test these kinds of emotional states of existence. You can't objectively prove or disprove the stirrings of the heart.

Actually, there are scientists who think you can, there are scientists who think that our ever emotional reaction is nothing more than a rationally explicable matrix of neurons and hormones. I'll have more to say about that kind of science - and hugely interesting science it is too - later.

I'm talking about a sort of rational supernaturalism. I think we, to be a good New London kind of a Jew you need to be a rationalist, of course you do. The very creation of this community was a refusal to accept a religious dogma in the face of rational disproof. But I also think we need to open our hearts, our souls to something that is beyond the rational. Rather I fear that if we only work from the rational we will fail to understand who we truly are and what we are truly called to be.

On sabbatical, I reread on of my all time favourite books, Stages of Faith by the American 20th Century writer James W. Fowler. Fowler suggests that faith works in stages. As a child, we believe things literally. There really are monsters hiding under the bed, tooth fairies and the like. As we grow we enter into a stage of critique of these childish simplicities. We know that there is no such thing. The adolescent is a great iconoclast. Everything is rubbish and anyone persuading us otherwise is deceitful and to be distrusted. And then there comes another stage, in Fowler's work it's the Fifth, and not everyone gets there. The Fifth Stage of Faith - for those who leave behind the stage of the adolescent - is 'conjunctive.' One comes to acknowledge paradox, complexity, we come to relate to the symbolic nature of truth - the sense that something can be literally untrue, but in some deeper sense emotionally, or spiritually true.

My favourite example of all this is the colour of the sky. As I was writing this sermon the sky was blue. The small child version of this truth claim is that someone had got up on a ladder and painted the sky blue. The adolescent version of this truth claim is that the sky isn't blue, of course it's not. Rather it just appears that way when the sun is closer to us because of the way the molecules of the atmosphere refract sunlight into blue. Doh! claims the adolescent, don't be so daft. But then, for some people, we grow beyond that iconoclasm to appreciate the blueness of the sky as poetic and emotional reality, as a reality whose truth is in some ways more important than the scientific claim.

There is something wilful about this kind of belief - this fifth stage of faith. One has to open one's heart to the possibility of meaning in places beyond the scientifically proven. One has to believe, as it were in the possibility of belief; that there is something beyond the realm of the observable testable physical universe and that notion of a realm beyond has something to do with who I am and who I should be.

So what are we called upon to believe in?

This is Rambam on the subject, at the very opening of his groundbreaking Mishneh Torah;

The base of belief and the pillar of wisdom is to know that there is a First Cause which is the causation of all causation from heaven to earth and everything in between.[1]

When Rambam made the claim that the basic obligation in Judaism was the belief in God it wasn't at all obvious. For one thing nowhere in the Torah are we ever explicitly commanded to believe. But Rambam is surely right; without some reference to something, 'beyond,' Judaism doesn't make sense; rather it collapses into a grab-bag of Woody Allen movies, falafel and the like. But if there is something beyond humanity, beyond the reach of any calculation then there might be a purpose to this existence. There might be a purpose to our Jewish engagement - even the parts of Jewish engagement that are less tasty than falafel or less funny than Woody Allen.

In one of the great Midrashim of our faith, the Rabbis imagine Abraham, rejecting the nonsense idolatrous world of his childhood, in search of what becomes the birth of monotheistic faith.

They explain his journey with a Mashal, a parable.

Abraham is wandering from place to place when he saw a bira doleket - a castle in flames. He wondered: "Is it possible that the palace has no owner?" The owner of the palace looked out and said, "I am the owner of the palace." So Abraham our father said, "Is it possible that the world lacks a ruler?" G‑d looked out and said to him, "I am the ruler, the Sovereign of the Universe."[2]

It is out of this moment of wondering about the purpose of existence that an encounter with that purpose becomes possible. Belief arises from that nagging quest for an understanding of why we are here, who shall we be. And astral physics, as glorious as its achievements is, isn't capable of stretching beyond the realm of the physical. Belief is that which provides the framework understanding more about our lives than the notion we are simply a decaying collection of atomic particles.

Of course to the atheist we are just this collection of meaningless dust, for the atheist there is no external meaning - it's all just random happenstance that we are here. But my call on us all is that we will ourselves to open our heart to the possibility of meaning, the possibility of belief. I know it's a little circular - in order to find meaning we need to will ourselves to believe that there is meaning. But that doesn't worry me. Because acting as if there is meaning and message to my life seems such a more profound way to live than living as if nothing matters and there is no point. There is something of Pascal's famous wager in all this. If I live my life as if there is a purpose I might stumble on that purpose. If I live my life as if there is no purpose, then surely I won't. I'll take that gamble.

I'm also a fan of people who live their lives with this sense of the rational supernatural. I suspect the rational-supernaturalists live better lives than those who don't. The religious fundamentalists scare me and the nihilists, frankly, strike me as too often too selfish, boring even.

Belief has gone out of fashion these past years.

We are increasingly uncomfortable using the language, the atheists are winning the PR battle.

So I want to share two ways to help us feel easier with this notion of belief that is both familiar and unfamiliar. They are deeply connected, one to the other.

The first is borrowed from the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, probably my most significant Jewish teacher. We should, wrote Heschel,

live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

Radical amazement, the single key to unlock a life infused by belief. To live life amazed is a beautiful thing. It's not a retreat into an ignorance about the way science works, in fact quite the reverse. The more I understand about evolution or embryology or quantum physics or neurology the more I am amazed at the beauty of the world. But when I get up in the morning and the sky is illuminated by floods of pink and purple I find it amazing - and the fact that I understand that when the sun is further away from I will see more reds and purples doesn't make my sense of being amazed any less likely.

Develop within ourselves a sense of being radically amazed. Find things glorious, remarkable, miraculous; breath, smiles, the ability to put one foot in front of the other - for those of us so blessed as to be able to walk - how miraculous is that? As we do that we inculcate in ourselves a willingness to find belief, to believe in belief and the possibility of meaning. Inculcating a sense of radical amazement into our lives also, I believe, makes it easier for us to complete this next spiritual exercise.

Develop the practice of gratitude

In so many ways this is integral to a Jewish existence. The very Hebrew term for Jew - Yehudah - comes from the same root as the word for gratitude. Being thankful is who we are. We should say thank you more often, place ourselves in a position of grace - how much we receive. Heschel again, 'The cure for the soul begins with a sense of embarrassment.' How can we possibly be worthy of our lives. We should be moved to grace, gracefulness at all times. The more we pause to show our gratitude the more we place ourselves open to the possibilities of feeling in our souls that which is beyond scientific measurement, that which is beyond the rational.

Try developing these practices of radical amazement and gratitude and see if it does help with this belief thing. Try and see if it becomes easier, or more impossible to believe that there is purpose behind this creation. See if you can feel your way into an understand of that which is beyond the observable Universe. If you can, great, I'll see you there. If you can't I suspect we, as a religion, are indeed in trouble.

So this is how we should believe, we should will ourselves to open our hearts to that which is beyond, we should will ourselves to accept a notion of a First Cause who has created a Universe and everything in it

We find this belief, I believe, in understanding the true nature of a rational-supernatural belief system and we develop this ability through the practice of radical amazement and gratitude.

Shabbat shalom

---

[1] Mishneh Torah Yesodei HaTorah 1:1

[2] Bereishit Rabbi 39:1

Heschel & The Price of Freedom

Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Price of Freedom

 

Who Is Man?, Lectures Given at Stanford 1963

The first thought a child becomes aware of is his being called, his being asked to respond or to act in a certain way. It is in acts of responding to demands made upon him that the child begins to find himself as part of both society and nature. This is the most important experience in the life of every human being: something is asked of me. Meaning is found in responding to the demand.

Indebtedness is given with our being human because our being is not simply being, our being is being created. Being created means that the ‘ought’ precedes the ‘is.’ Religion begins with the certainty that something is asked of us, that there are ends which are in need of us. It is in man’s being challenged that he discovers himself as a human being. Do I exist as a human being? My answer is: I am commanded therefore I am. There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, of being called upon at certain moments to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.

 

Speech to conference on, “Religion and Race” (14 January 1963)

At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to Me.” While Pharaoh retorted: “Who is the Lord, that I should heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover I will not let Israel go.” The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began, but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.

Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self reproach? Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking. Perhaps this Conference should have been called “Religion or Race.” You cannot worship God and at the same time look at man as if he were a horse.

 

Telex To JFK in Moral Grandeur, 1963

A telex to President Kennedy

TO PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, THE WHITE HOUSE, JUNE 16 1963

I LOOK FORWARD TO PRIVELEGE OF BEING PRESENT AT MEETING TOMORROW AT 4 P.M. LIKLIHOOD EXISTS THAT NEGRO PROBLEM WILL BE LIKE THE WEATHER. EVEERYBODY TALKS ABOUT IT BUT NOBODY DOES ANYTHING ABOUT IT. PLEASE DEMAND OF RELIGIONS LEADERS PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT NOT JUST SOLEMN DECLARATION. WE FORFEIT THE RIGHT TO WORSHIP GOD AS LONG AS WE CONTINUE TO HUMILIATE NEGROES. CHURCH SYNAGOGUES HAVE FAILED. THEY MUST REPENT. ASK OF RELGIOUS LEADERS TO CALL FOR NATIONAL REPENTENCE AND PERSONAL SACRIFICE. LET RELIGIOUS LEADERS DONATE ONE MONTH’S SALARY TOWARD FUND FOR NEGRO HOUSING AND EDUCATION. I PROPOSE THAT YOU MR. PRESIDENT DECLARE STATE OF MORAL EMERGENCY. A MARSHALL PLAN FOR AID TO NEGROES IS BECOMING A NECESSITY. THE HOUR CALLS FOR HIGH MORAL GRANDEUR AND SPIRITUAL AUDACITY.

 

ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

 

The Reasons for my Involvements in the Peace Movement, Moral Grandeur

For many years I lived by the conviction that my destiny is to serve in the realm of privacy, to be concerned with the ultimate issues and involved in attempting to clarify them in thought and in word. Loneliness was both a burden and a blessing and above all indispensible for achieving a kind of stillness in which perplexities could be faced. Three events changed my attitude.

One was the countless onslaughts upon my inner life, depriving me of the ability to sustain inner stillness.

The second was the discovery that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself. The most wicked men must be regarded as great teachers, for they set forth precisely an example of that which is unqualifiedly evil. Cain’s questions ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ and his implied negative response must be regarded among the great fundamental evil maxims of the world. The third event that changed my attitude was my study of the prophets. From them I learned the niggardliness of our moral comprehension, the incapacity to sense the depth of misery caused by our own failures. It became quite clear to me that while our eyes are witness to the callousness and cruelty of man, our heart tries to obliterate the memories, to calm the nerves and to silence our conscience.

 

Death As Homecoming, Moral Grandeur

Our greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The cry for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future, but perpetual presence. The world is not only a here-after, but also a here now.

This is the meaning of existence: to reconcile liberty with service, the passing with the lasting, to weave the treads of temporality into the fabric of eternity.