Who Owns the Castle?

At the opening of this week’s Torah reading God calls on Abraham to go, and he goes, and so the story of our people begins.
I have often referred to the famous tale of Abraham in his father’s idol shop, smashing up the idols and being dragged before the local potentate, most recently here.  But this year my attention has been taken by a more nuanced tale, from Midrash Hagadol.

In this tale, all the wrestling happens within Abraham’s own mind. He is ‘Shotef b’Daato’ roaming in his mind. He is initially attracted by the power of the sun but when it sets he turns to the stars. He gives up on the stars as they disappear before the dawn. He yearns to know if there is something truly ultimate, something which has no causation. The Midrash continues, “To what can this be compared?

To a traveller who saw a tremendous large castle and wanted to enter it. He examined it from, but could find no entry. He called out, but there was no response. Then he lifted up his eyes and saw red woollen cloths spread out on the rood. After that he saw white flaxen cloths. The traveler thought, ‘Surely someone lives in that castle, for otherwise how would the cloths appear and disappear?’ When the owner of the castle saw that he was in distress over this, the owner asked, ‘Why are you in distress? I am the owner of the castle.’”

In later Chasidic thought this Midrash inspires a much-cited teaching about a King hidden in the innermost chamber of a palace. Fine draperies and gold trinkets abound in the outer courtyards and most of those who come to seek the King are distracted by the first piece of sparkle they find and give up on a deeper search. It’s only the truly great seeker who penetrates to the heart of the castle to sit with the King.

The point is that Judaism prizes theological questing (a favourite word of our founder Rabbi). Theology isn’t supposed to be easy. The easy theologies are the stars and the fancy drapes, simple, but dishonest and false. The quest of a source of power that has no causation isn’t a childish vision of a deity on a cloud, it’s stripping back of distractions and accretions. It’s ultimately a belief that there is an owner of the castle, that all this beauty is not without any meaning at all. Talking about God is hard, expecting it to be easy is refuse to consider a true theology at all.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Jeremy

God Optional - Kol Nidrei 5778

God Optional

A long time ago, now, I started thinking about the Rabbinate. There was so much that enticed me; the study of Torah, the majesty of Shabbat, even - I’ll admit it - the idea of having a bunch of people sit and listen to me pontificate for a while - thanks for coming. There was just the one problem - the God problem.

I didn’t really have any relationship with God. I hadn’t heard any voices. I hadn’t spent my life in fear, or in love, with a white bearded deity on a cloud. I’d uttered a bunch of words in shul - I’d even found inspiration and comfort in prayer - but I’d never taken the God-ness of our liturgy too much to heart. And here I was thinking about the Rabbinate - chutzpah, dishonesty or possibly on to something?

We had a visit earlier in the Summer from one of my dearest American colleagues, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavi. Amichai runs an organisation called Lab/Shul - it’s branded ‘God-Optional - Open To All.’ I get what he is trying to achive; saying to people that it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t believe about God. Here’s Judaism, you want it, come on in. Take what you want to take, and leave what you want to leave. Perhaps most of all, Amichai is acknowledging that the G-word is a barrier for many of us. Calling Judaism ‘God-Optional’ opens a path to those who are never going to take seriously something they feel is predicated on a deceit.

So here’s my ‘does it matter’ question for Kol Nidrei - does it matter if you believe in God?

I know it’s easy to insist it is; I can cite Rambam and Rashi, and the rest of ‘em. There is a mighty list of theologically inclined Rabbis who all agree that Judaism without a relationship with God is an impossibility. But I also know the reality of Jewish life in this special community, and many others. There are loads of us busily getting on with Jewish lives; learning, cultural engagement and even prayer - who don’t do God. Many of us are actually quite comfortable customising our Judaism to exclude the God bit. Does that matter?

OK, that’s the question clearly put. And here it gets a little tricky. I occasionally joke with upcoming BMs that there’s a trapdoor under the Bimah, and if they make a mistake in their leyning they’ll find themselves dropping into a piranha pit underneath. I say it with a smile. But this sort of sermon does feel a little like that. I know what’s coming.

The truth is I don’t care much about a person’s use of the G-word. You can tell me you believe in God. You can tell me you don’t. It would figure pretty low on a list of things I would want to know about your qualities as a person and your relationship with Judaism. But that’s not because I’m into what most people refer to when they talk about God-optional in Judaism.

Most people, when they talk about God-optional Judaism, mean that there is a fully realised Judaism that can be lived culturally, with a love of the Jewish people, Jewish history and even Jewish study. And that’s it. That’s not what I’m trying to say at all. I think Judaism needs an existential component - existential as in - connected to a grand vision of the nature of existence. It’s just that I think that if you connect to three key elements of that existential sense of what I think Judaism has to be about, I would encourage you not to worry so much about the G-word. If you can go along with these three key parts of Jewish life - you’ve already got it.

So these are the three key parts of the existential nature of Judaism.

The first is an awareness that you are not the most central thing in the Universe. None of us is. I’m aware that’s a little counter-cultural. We live in a world obsessed with placing our own needs and desires front and central - a view it has to be said, largely fostered by those making money from exploiting our desires to satiate own needs to line their own pockets. More fool us. But seeing our own desires as not ultimately important is more than a waste of money. It’s shallow and dangerous. Placing self-interest at the centre of our world view, turns the rest of the world, and certainly all the people in it, into the means to our own ends. Seeing our own desires as supremely important empties out an ability to care about anyone or even anything else. It spells disaster for any serious attempt at relationships. It’s dangerous but we all do it, all the time. We judge political parties, friends, professional colleagues, even the ecology of our planet in terms of what they could do for us, rather than see our lives as opportunities to serve, to care and to tend.

Locating ultimacy as beyond self-interest is an essential component of what people who use the G-word should mean when they use the G-word. Belief in God is a training in recognising the power otherness. “I am God,” reads the first of the Ten Commandments, and you are not. Belief in God is belief in there being something more important that anything we could possess, tame or own. It’s a training in humility. It opens us up to realise that what we have is not some kind of right but a gift and a grace.

If you can get to this place of grace, recognising otherness and our relationship to that which is truly important in the work - without the G-word. And there are plenty who do. That’s genuinely fantastic. That’s the first thing.

The second element in an existential Judaism is an awareness that the most important things in life can’t be measured.  This is the thing that most drives me to staggered bemusement when I encounter the blockbuster atheists who seem only to value that which can be measured and double-blind tested under laboratory conditions.

I know measuring is terribly important. I don’t want to take a train across a bridge that hasn’t been measured and checked to beyond any conceivable chance of collapse. Of course measurement is important. But you can’t measure a life in the same way you can stress test a bridge. You can’t measure love, happiness or kindness. Or rather something rather sad happens to these things if we pretend they can be force between callipers. The more we measure the more we turn everything in our life into commodities - just other things in a world of so many things. That’s not the way to treat that which is most important - our relationships in particular.

In one of the most famous tales in the Talmud the great Rabbi, Shammai loses his temper and ends up beating a stranger with a question with the Talmudic equivalent of a ‘2 by 4.’ I wonder if the violent response might be occasioned by Shammai’s profession. He’s a carpenter - indeed that’s what he’s doing with the 2 by 4 in the first place. And carpenters do a whole lot of measuring. I’ve known some lovely carpenters, but I wonder if Shammai was just too used to measuring things, and began to measure people in the same way he measured joists and beams. Hence the frustration with anyone who didn’t come up to the expected height - whack. Hillel - who brings the poor soul under the wings of the Divine Presence - is presses olive oil. That’s a job which entails drawing sweetness from something that seems intolerably bitter. Pressing olives is probably not a bad training in valuing things that cannot be seen and none the less needs to be valued.

My great teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, wrote[1] about the ‘wind that sighed before the dawn.’ He noted that if we treat the phrase as a description, it’s meaningless. But if we consider it indicative - if we think these words point towards that which cannot be accurately pinned down technically, it’s a great phrase. It’s a line from Lewis Morris’ Le Vent de L’Esprit

The wind that sighs before the dawn
Chases the gloom of night,
The curtains of the East are drawn,
And suddenly—'t is light[2]

That’s the sort of stuff that can evoke wonder and drawing from us an amazement that is the greatest achievement of our human grasp.

Believe in the sights that cannot be seen, the sounds that cannot be heard and the emotions that cannot be plotted on some fancy electronic feed that won’t tell you anything about the quality of your love or the wisdom of your soul.

If it helps to count God among the things you value, the things you believe in, that do not belong in the category of things that can be measured, but are still important. Great. If it doesn’t, if the G-word gets you feeling hostile or embarrassed or preferring some quotidian explanation of why we are the way we are, then don’t use the G-word. I don’t mind. Really.

Just don’t consider you are the most important thing in the universe you inhabit, and value the stuff that can’t be measured.

And the third thing.

The third key element of an existentially valuable Jewish existence is to believe that actions matter. What we spend our money on matters, what we eat matters, the way we speak matters, the way we treat people - strangers and friends matter.

We’ll do the prayer tomorrow, the Unataneh Tokef, there’s a reference to a books recalling our every action, even the forgotten one and the Hebrew reads - Hotem Yad Kol Adam Bo - the seal of every human’s hand is within it. You don’t have to believe in literal books. You don’t have to believe in God as some kind of cosmic accountant running profit and loss accounts on our merits and failings. But if you want to be a good Jew - frankly if you want to be a good human being - you need to live as if the actions you take leave behind some kind of cosmic fingerprint. You have to believe that just as the wind sighs before the dawn, you write a book with Hotem Yad Bo - a book sealed in the trace of your actions and inactions.

Here’s the tricky piece - about actions. I think you need to believe that your actions matter even if no-one else sees you doing the thing you do. In fact particularly these things matters; the things you think you can get away with. I was having a conversation with a friend about trolling, and the way the anonymity of the internet seems to have begat an overspill of nastiness into public society. That’s bad. The hidden nastiness has had very public consequences.

The Jewish understanding of the significance of these hidden actions gets its fullest expression in the understanding of a Biblical verse which prohibits placing a stumbling block before a blind person. ­Lo Titen Michshol Lifnei Iver (Lev 19:14). The blind person, of course, can’t see the stumbling block infront of them. And the Biblical verse goes on to say, ‘I am the Lord your God’ which the Rabbis understand to mean - God watches, even if you think God doesn’t.

But you don’t need to bring God into the picture. You can hold tight to a pithy aphorism about butterflies and hurricanes. You can hold tightly to a notion of God who knows and is the force of order in amongst all this chaos. But you have to believe that actions matter.

If you live your life locating the centre of the Universe as ‘not you,’ if you can value the hidden things as more important than the things that can be measured and if can live as though every act is cosmically significant. That’s great.

And that is really what I wanted to say tonight. If there is someone at home who wants to hear what the Rabbi spoke about in Shul this evening, tell ‘em this. Tell ‘em that the Rabbi said that if you lived life with a sense of humility, if you cared about the things that couldn’t be measured and if you lived life as if every action counted then, the Rabbi told you, you didn’t have to worry about the whole God thing in Judaism. Be my guest.

But here’s the kicker. Here’s the bit for anyone still paying attention. You’re a smart lot, you’ve probably figured it out already. The things I’ve been talking about are the very essence of a perfectly noble theology. This is what Judaism means when it talks about centrality of God. This is what I mean when I say I do believe in God. I believe in God as the point of ultimate otherness. I believe in God as the location of ultimate immeasurable value. I deem God as mechanism of record keeping of all actions. Zeh Hu Zeh. This is that. A belief in God isn’t an abdication the belief that science matters. It’s not a foxhole in which to crawl when things get hard. It certainly isn’t a children’s story. It’s a description of ultimacy, value and meaning. Almost a location.

I’m aware this might sound a little new fangled, or heretical, but it’s what the Rabbis of the Talmud, I think were getting at when they began to use the Hebrew term HaMakom as the word they used when they referred to God. HaMakom means ‘The place.’ God is the place where ultimacy resides.

I believe in God. I got over my nervousness and fear of the word, got on with my Rabbinic studies and here we all are. I began to find insight and strength from allowing myself to feel more at ease with the whole God thing - even if my beliefs in how we got to be here haven’t really changed. I used to believe I wasn’t the centre of the Universe, I used to value the things that can’t be measured and I used to take action seriously. I still do. I used not to take the G-word seriously, but now I do. I don’t think it’s as necessary as some make it out to be. It’s not as necessary as some other more important stuff. But it’s not as far away as some would suggest either. It is, in the sense of that extraordinary verse at the heart of my sermon on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, not in the heavens, it’s not so far that you have to leave your senses or your rationality to find it. It’s very close, in your heart. And the pathway to my feeling a relationship with God are these very three elements of a Jewish life lived well.

You don’t have to believe in God. It’s not necessary, but it could be.

Chatimah Tovah

---

[1] In God in Search of Man p.182

[2] Le Vent de L’Esprit by Lewis Morris

Rosh Hashanah II Sermon - Boing

Rebbe, said the Chasid, I have a problem,

              Tell me your problem my dear one.

My problem, dear Rebbe, is that I don't know if I want to come to the Synagogue to pray?

              Why is it, my dear one, that you don't want to come to the Synagogue to pray?

Dear Rebbe, it is that I find prayer very hard.

              And why, my dear one, do you find it hard to pray?

Dear Rebbe, I find it hard because I don't know if God is listening.

              And why, my dear one, is that a problem?

Because if God isn't listening, maybe there is no point to any of this?

              Ah, my dear one, what makes you think I am any different?

It's the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I'm amongst friends. So I want to ask a very big question. What exactly are we doing here - stepping out of the confines and opportunities of the rest-of-the-year world - draping ourselves in festive finery and rocking and shockeling when our belief structures are, how can I say it, unsteady on their feet? It's not a bad question. It's a question I ask myself.

Perhaps you have experienced the same thing I've experienced, every now and again? A sort of ambivalent envy towards a more literalist faith - the sort of faith that neither our Rebbe nor our Chasid  actually have - but the sort of faith that would - if we could only believe in it - justify our decisions to come to shul and lead us to pray as if our lives literally depended on the fervour with which we recite our benedictions.

It's an ambivalent envy because it's not purely an attractive tug. It's also a deeply unattractive one. It's not just that I don't believe literally and I can't pretend that I do, but more than that I distrust anyone  who espouses a literalist theology - I find such things dangerous as well as nonsensical.

So what do we have left, and is it enough?

I'll share what, exactly, I think I am doing here shortly, but I want to give a few kicks to the notion that a literalist theology is what we, as Jews, are should believe in, because I don't think it is.

We read some very special verses this last Shabbat;

These instructions I instruct you in today, they aren't miraculous for you and they aren't far away. They are not in the Heavens that you should say, who will ascend to the Heavens for us and get it for us. Neither is it across the sea. Rather this thing is most close to you, it's in your mouth and your heart. (Deut 30)

In Moses last great speech to the Children of Israel he doesn't call on them, on us, to lobotomise, to give up on our rational selves and seek to adopt something beyond our ken. Rather we are urged to feel the connection to Torah and Judaism from the place where we find ourselves.

It's not in the heavens, it's not across the sea. Rather it's most close to you.

I'm reminded of a wonderful poem of the Sufi master, Rumi;

              I've been wanting to know reasons

              Knocking on a door. It opens.

              I'd been knocking on the inside.

It's here - this religion thing. Not there.

The notion that Jews should suspend our critical faculties and go off after some voice that echoes from the heavens has undergone an enormous rethink, in Jewish thought, in the centuries since God's call to Abraham made that call in precisely that way. In the past millennia, time and time again, Rabbis have walked away from the literalisms of a over-simplistic theology. You are not supposed to listen to the story of Abraham offering up his son as a sacrifice and think, let me too.

One example,

The Talmud in Baba Batra[1] observes that since the destruction of the Temple there is no more prophecy and therefore Hacham Adif Mi Navi - a wise person is preferable to anyone professing to be a prophet. That is to say if a wise person advises you to do one thing, and a person, claiming prophecy advises you to do the other, you follow the wise person, not the person claiming prophecy. You distrust the claim made in the name of theological purity, theological certitude. Since the destruction of the Temple, since the dawn of Rabbinic Judaism we are taught to distrust theological literalism. That's not some newly reformed diluted-down affectation of Judaism, that's the Talmud.

I don't mean to suggest that religion is only following what our eyes tell us is right, or what we decide on any given Wednesday is the will of God. I'm not making the claim that the aim is to do whatever we feel like doing and call that religion. That's not the aim at all. I'm trying to do offer something between the literalist interpretation - that the will of God drops down from the heavens in such a way we can trap it, understand it and follow it blindly - and the entirely earthbound claim that the thing we call the will of God is nothing other than the internal machinations of our own mind.

Let me start here;

There is a verse, early on in the Book of Numbers, when the Children of Israel are lined up in marching formation; each tribe, in the language of the Torah is arrayed tachat diglo - underneath their flag. At this point in the narrative,  certainly in the Rabbinic commentaries on these verses[2], there is a real sense of excitement. After so much waiting at Sinai the children of Israel are, at last, going to move on towards the promised land. And it's responding to this excitement that the great Chasidic teacher, the Sefat Emet, plays with the letters of the word diglo - their banner or their flag - and suggests, that the word should be read delugo - their jumping. Everyone is stood  tachat delugo - underneath their jumping. I know that phrase doesn't make much sense in the English. To be honest it doesn't make much sense in the Hebrew, but it's struck me very deeply since I first came across it, because it sums up, for me what I am doing today. I'm jumping, or to be more precise, I'm standing under my jumping.

Jumping is a strange thing to do with one's life. To jump is to point at the heavens and take off. We know that gravity will bring us down again, but we seek, nonetheless, this momentary escape. This is my version of the leap of faith. Jump up in search of the transcendent, knowing what it means to be earthly, knowing that what is beyond my leap. It's this double nature of jumping that appeals to me so greatly.

In part jumping is about throwing yourself at the heavens. You can't be half hearted in your jumping. You'll never take off.

But to jump isn't to misunderstand the nature of the human condition. No matter how high or elegantly I rise into the air, I'm still coming back down. In fact that's what makes jumping such fun; it's a kind of a dance between the rising and the falling. In religious terms, when I pray I'm not expecting to encounter God face-to-face, for a man-to-divine-being chat. I'm not expecting to receive some literal prophetic clarity. I'm not going to float off into the air never to return. I'm expecting to jump, to come down to land, and then to get on with the rest of my day energised, perhaps with a new perspective, perhaps with a new insight.

I do believe that there is something that is beyond my knowledge, I do believe that there is a realm that will forever be beyond human grasp no matter how hard we bang the sub-atomic particles together. I do believe in God. And I do believe, again, in a way I can never fully grasp, that there exists a thread that connect me, as a Jew, to God. I do believe that the pathways, of Jewish observance, observance of Shabbat, Kashrut and prayer are the best way I have of training, learning how to jump higher and for longer. And the more I train the more fleeting moments of insight I get, suspended momentarily in mid-air.

To be a Jew is to be a spiritual high-jumper. Jewish observance year round, prayer year round, is how we practice; lighting candles, reciting the Shema, avoiding Treyf and the like just as track athletes work on their Frosbury Flops or hops, steps and jumps. We practice, just as the real athletes practice, through the year so that on the most important of occasions we fly furthest. And if our training is effective, we can perhaps, in the most special of moments, succeed in brushing against the lowest levels of the heavens for a moment, but no higher, and only momentarily. This is my understanding of the nature of the human relationship with God.

This is my understanding of the strange phrase the Sefat Emet leaves us with when he flips around the letters of our verse to suggest that the Children of Israel stand, tachat dilugo 'under their jumping.' I'm both jumping and standing under my jump. I'm both escaping the plain of my day-to-day existence and rooting more deeply into it. I'm experiencing both polarities almost simultaneously - I'm standing under my jumping. Will you join me?

This is what I want to say today, jump. Know what it means to jump, and practice, practice jumping.

Is it enough for you - this jumping business - are you only to become more interested, more committed to a Jewish journey in the coming year if I offer not merely jumping, but actual flight - literal miracles, literal theology? Would it help, or hinder if I were urge you to suppress all rational faculty and accept that the things you are liable to read in the Bible literally took place?

Or maybe this jumping metaphor is already too much - too hokey, perhaps. Perhaps you are only interested in a Jewish approach made up purely of the rational and nice elements of Jewish life where any notion that there is a transcendental possibility seems to you ridiculous.

To the real wannabe literalists, I'm sorry to fail you. To be fair, this has never been a community for the adherents of literal theology and to you I hope you'll forgive us our blasphemies.

To the staunch literalists, I urge you to open you heart, actually I don't need even that. I just need to urge you to start jumping. There are few whispers of prayer left on this sacred day, but rumours of a marathon of prayer ahead. Jump in. Practice committing. Sing as if you mean to sing, stand silently with a commitment to standing silent. Profess regret for the failings of your past year as if you really regret them. And reflect on whether the jumping really helps, I believe it will.

Practice jumping. It's the easiest thing in the world, you've done it since you were children. We all have.

Know what it means to jump, and practice, practice jumping.

And in so doing may we all be merited to enjoy a joyous, healthy and bouncy year ahead,

Le'Shannah Tovah U'Metukah - A sweet year to us all

---

[1] TB BB 12a

[2] Bmidbar Rabba 2:2. I am grateful to Avivah Gottlieb-Zornberg whose book Bewilderments introduced me to this reading.

On Balance - the power of good and evil, A Yizkor Sermon

[I opened the sermon talking about walking through the cemetery and wondering whether the forces of death are indeed stronger than the forces of life, or indeed if the forces of good, in the world, are indeed stronger than the forces of darkness.]

 

After all it’s not even so clear to us down here that there is a heavenly court.

It’s not so clear that there is anything beyond the maggots that are the eventual fate of all mortal flesh, even back in Biblical times .

 

It’s an argument our tradition has engaged in over time and across distance.

 

When Jacob hears that his favoured son, Joseph has been devoured by wild animals he is bereft.

He speaks of his death, he speaks of going down to Sheol.

It’s the first time the Bible has spoken of what happens in the death, the first time this word has appeared in the Bible, and it prompts rabbinic comment.

Rashi says – Sheol is a grave – dark, closed, over.

Ibn Ezra castigates one of the great early translations of the Bible into Aramaic for suggesting Sheol could be understood as some kind of after-life.

He cites a verse from Isaiah^[1]

 

For Sheol cannot praise you, death can not celebrate you; they who go down into the pit cannot hope for your truth.

 

This is death as a pit, dark, hopeless, beyond the reach of life and of love.

The end.

 

But there are whispers of something other than the utter bleakness of Sheol that begin to emerge in the prophetic books – elsewhere in Isaiah the prophet suggests,

 

Thy dead shall live, awake and sing you who dwell in the dust, for your dew is as the dew of light and the earth shall bring to life the shades.^[2]

 

By the time of the Talmud, a panoply of differing views present themselves. At one point the Rabbis paint a picture of a great feast in the world to come where King David himself will take the cup of wine for grace.^[3]

 

Elsewhere more rational voices have articulated less corporeal images.

Maimonides, basing himself on a different section of the Talmud, suggests the world to come will be marked by the righteous basking in the radiance of the divine presence, void of body with [nothing surviving death but] the disembodied souls of the righteous, just like ministering angels.^[4]

 

Through time and space we Jews have argued about whether, after our death, we are to be involved a physical resurrection or just a survival of the spirit,^[5] whether any resurrection will be permanent or temporary,^[6] whether we have but this life in which to perfect ourselves or whether we will be granted with, or punished by another gilgul ­– reincarnation.^[7] We have argued about the nature of Heaven and about whether there will indeed be a hell with punishments or merely the deprivations of the heavenly.^[8]

 

Maimonides suggests that our ability to understand what happens after death can be compared to a blind person’s ability to appreciate colour,^[9] it’s perhaps his only non-controversial utterance on the whole subject of what happens after we die.

 

But for all the argument, and disagreement it wouldn’t be correct to say that Judaism just throws up her hands and shrugs in the face of this unknowable beyond. Modern Jews of every theological and denominational hue have largely divested ourselves of what Will Herberg called the ‘pseudo-biological fantasies’ of some of our earlier and more graphic predecessors, but we can’t let go of a belief in something that conquers death, something that stands on the other side of the end of our mortal reach.

 

We refuse to allow this world, these lives, the lives we remember, most especially on this day

We refuse to allow their deaths to be The End.

We refuse to give up on those who have passed away.

We refuse to let go when we stand and commemorate, when we light candles, when we give tzedakah, when we cry, when we call our loved ones zichrono l’vracha – may their memory by a blessing.

We refuse to let death conquer life.

What is it that binds us so tightly to this refusal to give the death the last laugh?

I think it is a position we take as a matter of faith.

 

This is our founder Rabbi, Louis Jacobs, in his tour-de-force survey of Principles of The Jewish Faith,

 

The strongest argument for [something existing beyond death] is that God is good and will not allow His creatures to spend their lives in efforts at attaining goodness and perfection only to be snuffed out like a candle. Men may work at improving the conditions of life here on earth and earn the blessings of posterity, but posterity itself will die. The earth itself will one day become inhospitable to life and all man’s dreams and achievements will vanish like smoke. Shakespeare’s vision of the ‘cloud-capped towers’ is true. Of what use is man’s elevated soul if this life is all there is? For all Judaism’s teachings on the values of this life can we believe that God, who created this wonderful world, will allow man to die forever with his spiritual powers at the best only just beginning to develop? Judaism never tires of assures us of the justice of God, but how can this justice be realised unless all who have striven for the good eventually find it?^[10]

 

For Rabbi Jacobs this conviction that something outlasts death is predicated on the belief that God is indeed good and kind.

If God is indeed ultimate good then, indeed, there must be something other than Sheol and its attendant maggots.

But we should be brave enough to ask the question that Louis’ articulation begs.

But who is to say God is good, who is to say that justice will, in the end, win out over the powers of chaos or destruction? Looking at the devastation and the heartbreak, the loss and the fear, bearing the memories we bear on a day like this, it’s not so clear cut.

 

And this brings me to where I left off last night.

Last night I spoke about faith – I spoke about what a person can rely upon when there is no material, corporeal substance on which to lean.

And I think we are in the same place today.

When faced with the question of what is there that is capable of competing with death we ultimately come back to a question of belief not so much in the precise nature of an afterlife we can never see, but rather a belief in the nature of the Divine.

 

I suggested that faith whispers its truths to us in a place beyond the material.

And I shared two of faith’s whispers with those who were able to join us last night.

And this is the third whisper, the third credo of my belief.

 

Hodu ladonai Ki tov, ki leolam hasdo

Praise God for God is good, God’s loving kindness is eternal.

 

The verse appears a number of times in the Book of Psalms, but I have in mind its appearance as the first and last lines in Psalm 136. Indeed the second half of the verse – the piece about God’s eternal loving kindness appears in every line of the Psalm. Every line adumbrates one great success of God or another and then in comes the chorus ki leolam hasdo.

 

For God brought Israel out of Egypt; ki leolam hasdo;

With a strong hand, and an outstretched arm; ki leolam hasdo

For God who parted the Red Sea ki leolam hasdo;

And lead Israel through it; ki leolam hasdo.

And on we go until we end were we began

Praise God for God is good, ki leolam hasdo

 

I don’t think it is supposed to be theologically complicated. I don’t think this is a Psalm forged in the furnace of the attempt to square a belief in a good, just and kind God with our experience of death, brokenness and loss.

But, nebach, I encounter this Psalm torn. Because too often when I sing it, or hear it, there is another psalm ringing around inside my mind; an unwritten Psalm –heretical, dark and desperately sad.

 

Hodu L’Adonai ki tov Ki leolam hasdo

For all the parents who passed away before their children were ready to let go

For all the loved ones who passed away leaving their lovers behind

 

And the worst line of all

 

For all the children who passed away in the lives of their parents.

 

And it’s hard, bitterly irreducible hard, to end this unwritten psalm

 

Hodu L’Adonai ki tov Ki leolam hasdo

Praise God for God is good, God’s loving kindness is eternal.

 

And I’m scared to measure up the respective load-weights of good and bad in this world.

I’m scared to put on one side of the scale all the miracles and goodness which the Lord my God has performed for my ancestors and I, and then set on the opposing scale all the loss and the heartbreak.

I can’t sing Psalm 136 as a function of my experience of the material world.

And so I don’t.

I sing the Psalm as an act of faith.

As an act of faith I proclaim that God is good and just and fair and all the rest of it.

And as an act of faith I refuse to believe that this world is the only stage on which our lives, our essence, will be played out.

This third whisper of faith provides something on which I can build not only a relationship with God, but also a relationship with my own life – and its aftermath, as well as a relationship with the lives of those I have loved and lost.

 

Again, it’s not a claim that bears proof.

But in a world of faith the belief in the power of the good and the kind in the face of the experience of loss and destruction underpins the belief in a world to come – a life beyond. It underpins a notion that some things are indeed more powerful than death.

It’s possible, I suppose, to believe in the power of good above experience of destruction without giving the label of ‘God’ to that belief, but I think that is merely semantic. To believe in the power of goodness and meaning over the power of death is, I think, to believe in the goodness of the Holy Blessed One.

 

I don’t know what happens when we die, when I will die.

I can’t count the number of angels on the pin, or the levels of heaven or hell.

I can only lean on a belief that there is something beyond this.

I can only have faith in the notion that despite all the loss, the power of good, and decency, the power of love and kindness are stronger.

Even despite all this, I believe.

---

^[1] 38:18

^[2] 26:19

^[3] Pes 119b

^[4] MT Tesh 8, based on Ber 17a

^[5] Jacobs, Principles of the Jewish Faith suggests that Maimonedes, Seliger (with an approbation of Rav Kook) and Hertz can be counted among those who, at the very east, are deeply uncomfortable with notions of physical resurrection, preferring instead the Aristotelian notion of spiritual immortality. Hertz suggests that Ha-Levi can be counted in this group too, though Jacobs isn’t convinced.

^[6] Maimonedes Maamar Tehiyat HaMaetim vs Nachmanides Shaar Ha Gemul

^[7] Luria, see Vital Shaar Ha-Gilgul

^[8] Nachmanides Shaar Ha Gemul vs Maimonedes Maamar Tehiyat HaMaetim. See also Jacobs’ discussion of Dessler’s use of images of hellish flame and fury. (loc cit p.431)

^[9] See Jacobs p.451 and sources cited there

^[10] Principles p. 449

Two Whispers of Faith - A Kol Nidrei Sermon

I want to speak tonight about emunah - faith

In part because this is the root from which everything else grows, but in part because I’m not sure if we understand the meaning of faith and the value of faith;

Whether we think we have it or not,

Whether we describe ourselves as a person of faith or not.

 

A tale of a Guantanamo Bay Detention Center detainee I recently had the opportunity to meet.

 

Bisher Al-Rawi came with his family from Iraq to Britain in 1984 after his father had been tortured by Saadam’s regime. The father was a successful businessman and Bisher was sent to a posh country boarding school.

He founded a successful business, it involved taking mobile peanut processing plants to peanut plantations to extract peanut oil at source without having to ship the peanuts.

Then, in November 2002, on a business trip to Gambia Al-Rawi was arrested.

The British Secret Service tipped off the CIA that he had been consorting with Al-Qatada, a suspected Al-Qeda sympathiser, now in prison, and he was suspected of carrying some kind of electronic device that could be used for setting off a bomb.

It emerged immediately that the electronic device was a battery charger, purchased at Argos.

And it only emerged some years later that Al-Rawi’s contacts with the Al-Qatada were pursued at the instigation of MI5 – in other words Al-Rawi was working with the British secret service when the British secret service tipped off the Americans.

He was shipped first to Afghanistan and subsequently taken to Guantanamo where he spent five years before being released, uncharged.

He is now back, living in Britain with a job, a wife and a kid.

 

Guantanamo Bay was and I’m sure still is, a degrading, dehumanising oppressive place. When I say that inmates there have been treated like dogs, I mean interrogators would teach detainees lessons such as ‘stay, come and bark’ to, and I quote from a published interrogation log, ‘elevate [their] social status up to that of a dog.’^[1] The culture of Guantanamo Bay was one of extreme control where inmates are rewarded for good behaviour with so-called luxuries – a toothbrush say – or punished for, say, failing to put their dinner tray away correctly, with the removal of these items.

 

Al-Rawi spent almost five years in this place, five years for the crimes of working with the British secret service and carrying a battery charger on an international business trip.

And after a time, perhaps unsurprisingly, this treatment wore him down. His lawyer told me that his sense of humour faded, he began to lose his positive outlook, his ability to concentrate. He was becoming depressed.

 

And then he made a decision.

He decided that he wasn’t going to play along with the reward and punishment ordering of life in Guantanamo that his captors offered him.

He was going to be prepared to be punished.

He would remain ‘in orange’ - the colour of punishment.

So he pulled some chains through the door of his cell and used them to smash up the contents of his cell and then he passed the chains back out through the cell door.

The guards responded by removing everything from his cell with the exception of an inch thick mattress, a copy of the Koran and the steel bunk and steel basin which were bolted into the concrete.

No comfort items – no spoon, no cup, no blanket, he was even denied toilet paper,

And after 30 days when these luxuries – the toothbrush and all – were returned, he did something else, non-violent, to remain in punishment. And the so-called luxuries went again.

And so he remained for the last eight months of his imprisonment.

 

And here is the part of the story that caught my attention.

He got stronger.

He stopped declining. His convictions, energy and vitality returned.

The less the prison authorities rewarded him, the stronger he felt.

He found a way to reject his external reality’s grasp over his inner state, his sense of himself.

That’s an incredible accomplishment, I’m going to call it a spiritual accomplishment.

 

Of course I don’t make the claim that there is any comparison between the foulness of Guantanamo and the genocidal horrors of Auschwitz, but I can’t help but be reminded of Victor Frankl’s masterwork – Man’s Search for Meaning.

Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist, spent the Holocaust in a series of labour camps including Auschwitz and has come closer than anyone else to understanding why some inmates coped and some could not cope with the appalling abuse, physical and mental, they suffered.

 

In the concentration camp, [says Gordon Allport, paraphrasing Frankl] every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is ‘the last of human freedoms’ the ability to ‘choose one attitude in a given set of circumstances’^[2]

 

Frankl is saying that those who survived had the ability to stop their external circumstances from riding roughshod over their internal compass.

He is saying that those who found a way to protect their internal sense of value safe from the horrors of Auschwitz were the ones who coped best.

 

When the exteriority of our lives is rendered dark that hurts. Of course it does.

But if we can find a way to stop the penetration of that pain from seeping into our soul, then we do something more than hold back the floods, we gain access to a strength that comes from a different place to the material challenges we face;

A place that is not susceptible to the slings and arrows of fortune.

A place which is, and I use the word even though it is so overused and mis-used, spiritual.

 

Spiritual – antonym – material.

The spiritual is that which exists beyond the reach of the material, beyond the calculation of exteriorities, exterior points of reference.

The spiritual is what is left once all the material, corporeal, tangible, finite elements of existence have melted away, or are transcended, or – as I think Al-Rawi did – are simply rejected.

 

I hardly need say that this is not the way we are encouraged to face our decrees –our material externalities by the world out there.

Secular society teaches us that we are as rich as our bank balance and as successful as our wages.

Secular society teaches us that the externalities of life make us who we are and hold the key to our feelings of worth; the silky smooth hair, the fast car, the new this, the newer that.

Even in worlds more profound than the commercial the temptation is still to judge our value by measureable exteriorities – we are as healthy as our blood pressure, as sensitive to the needs of the world as our carbon footprint. Measurable externalities all.

 

And there are two problems with all these scales of material success.

The first is that measuring worth against a material scale breeds discontent.

Partly we risk discontent when we look at our fellows.

We can’t help ourselves, comparing the size of our pay-packets, cars, pensions, houses.

And partly we risk discontent because there is always another level on the scale tempting us, wooing us with its siren call.

I remember reading that Roman Abramovitch had become disenchanted with his biggest yacht since it only had one helicopter port and he was now after a yacht which could handle two helicopters.

Two is always more tempting than one.

And all this labouring under the sun is nothing more hevel u’raut ruach – vanity and a striving after wind – ultimately empty.^[3]

 

And the other problem of allowing our external circumstances to rule our inner sense of self is that our experience of living by external circumstance is rocky and uneven at best.

The sum of our material experiences refuse to move only ever upwards in a nice straight line.

We want all the increments on our journey to be channelled in one upwards direction.

 

From bondage to freedom, from darkness to light and from slavery to freedom

 

That sort of thing. We like our stories when they move in one straight upwards incline.

But life just doesn’t work like that.

 

Mi yanuach, umi yanua,

Who shall rest and who shall wander

Mi yishalev umi yityasayr

Who in tranquillity and who in torment.

 

Externalities ebb and flow, they come and go, they flirt with us only to deceive, and then reward us, all of a moment, and confound us in bounty as much as in loss.

Life is lived in choppy waters, not on a still pond, and if we measure our deeper internal sense of worth on the basis of external measurables we allow our sense of self to become tossed around like a boat in a storm.

We’re not sure if we are successful or not, valuable or not, worthy or not and we need to take better care of our soul.

 

And this is where faith comes in.

Faith is what we rely on when we are not relying on the material world.

Faith is what we count on when there is nothing material to count.

Faith is what holds us up when there is nothing in the exterior world we can hold on to.

Faith is the root of our sense of value, or worth, of identity that has nothing to do with external circumstance.

 

Esai einay el heharim – main yavor ezri

Psalm 121 – I lift up my eyes to the hills, where will my help come from!

Ezri maim adonai – osay shamayim v’aretz

My help comes from God who created the heavens and earth

 

My help comes from the place beyond corporeal heaven and earth.

Help comes from the place beyond the material world.

 

Gam ki eilech bgay tzelmavet

Psalm 23 – though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

 

Though I find myself void of any corporeal, material comfort or support

 

Lo ira ra, ki atah imadi

I fear no evil, for You, God, are with me

 

These turnings to the spiritual, perhaps among the most beloved in the entire Hebrew Bible, are the turnings of those whose external circumstances offer nothing; no succour, no sense of value or worth.

They are tentative turnings of a person abandoned by the external, abandoning the external, reaching to the spiritual.

They give us an opportunity to feel that there is something on which we can rely, on which we can lean, even as the material world fails us.

And it is the turn to faith that provides the foundation stone on which our true identity, our true worth and our truest values are constructed.

 

Don’t get me wrong, faith is no invisible friend who will keep us engaged in witty conversation, or a teddy bear to ward who can be used to scare off the things that go bump in the night.

Faith can’t be measured out or counted on like a maturing pension which we might use to pay off the mortgage.

Faith insists on remaining aloof from the material world.

It won’t be pinned down.

It exists only to give us this grounded sense of value immune to the ebb and flow of the material world.

 

Faith whispers its truths.

And looked at, from the outside, a person may indeed feel that, faced with the pain and challenges of the material world, faith makes for a flimsy protector.

But that is to miss how faith holds us up most especially when, and maybe even only when we refuse to give the material world the power over our sense of self.

Faith works when, like the Guantanamo Bay detainee I met, we refuse to allow the external world to define us, to define our inner state.

 

So, what are whispered truths of faith?

What are the pillars on which we can rely when there is nothing in the corporeal world we wish to turn to?

Let me share three.

 

Vyivra et haadam btzelmo

And God created every human being in the image of God.^[4]

 

No matter how rich or how poor, how healthy or how sick, how decrepit or how virile…

You, me, each of us is made up of Godliness folded in so tightly that it becomes matter. And inside and behind and beyond all this exteriority we retain that inner core of divinity l’olam vaed – and will do forever more.

That faith will withstand the challenges of the exterior world.

 

And a second truth

 

Atem nitzavim hayom culchem leav’recha bivrit adonai elohecha

You are all stood here this day to enter into a covenant with the Lord your God^[5]

 

There is a covenant, we are in relationship, God - You – and I and my ancestors before me, a covenant that stretches back to the time I stood on the Banks of the river Jordan having spent 40 years wandering the wilderness. And through the good times and the bad, through the moments of elation and destruction I have stood with you and I refuse to let you, dear God, leave off standing with me.

And that faith has stood our people well through ills and worse for some three thousand years.

And when we hold to our faith in the covenant we know we are not experiencing our grieving alone.

 

And thirdly,

Well there is a third, but it deserves a sermon of its own. I’ll be giving that sermon after the Yizkor service in the morning.

 

For tonight, I’m leaving us with this sense of what faith is about – a grounding that transcends whatever the material world may throw at us with two whispered truths. The first is the universal truth that I, you, each of us is a physical manifestation of the  divine.

The second is the particular truth, that as a Jew I am in relationship with my past, with my God and with my people and that relationship retains power as long as I refuse to allow it to break.

 

And when I say ani mamin – I believe

This is my creed.

This is how I ground my sense of value and worth in a world beyond the material.

This is the creed that underpins my religious leadership of this community.

It’s a creed I commend to us all.

May it serve us well in the year to come.

May it come to us in peace, health and joy,

 

Gmar Tov

---

^[1] Quoted in P. Sands Torture Team p.127

^[2] In V. Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning preface p. xi

^[3] Kohelet, freq.

^[4] Gen 1:26

^[5] Deut 29:9&11