No One Fears God Anymore

Hayom Harat Olam. Today the world was born.

That is what we say about Rosh HaShanah. On this very day, 5763 years ago, the world was born. One can only imagine from the descriptions in the prophets and the Midrash how the angels and all the heavenly host were overjoyed and awestruck at the sweeping majesty of God, revealed in the Creation of the world.

Of course in solar years, the planet is a lot older than that. But astronomy and geology tell one kind of truth and obscure another. They give us verifiable factual information, but there are much larger truths they cannot describe. The very existence of Creation, the existence of reality, our own existence--these are wonders that should command our complete attention from time to time. Over the holidays, we will do a lot of imitating of those heavenly choirs; standing and singing out our praise, our gratitude, our fear, our hopes.

That there is a universe is not merely a fact of physics; it is a spiritual phenomenon of massive power, beauty, brilliance and love. In Jewish mystical tradition, we try to capture this with the mysterious idea that God brought the world into being through the making of the Torah, that there is a spiritual truth underlying all else. We are sometimes privileged to be able to rise to a consciousness of this wonder, and those moments may be the only ones in which our vision is really in focus. When our complacency falls away, we get a glimpse of the magnificence all around and within us. Then our gratitude flows effortlessly. We are terrified to see our absolute helplessness, but our hearts melt in the realization that we are utterly loved and sheltered nevertheless. We are struck with a hearfelt urgency to meet the demands to take our true place in this world. We can see the uselessness and irreverence of trying to do anything else. We may feel a great deal of shame at how energetically we have been trying to do almost anything else but face what it is that life demands.

Perhaps on the days our own children are born, we come close to that level of awareness of the root-level miracle it is that we simply get to be alive. When you are present at a birth, there is a profound sense of overwhelming forces working out destiny while you’re just a long for the ride. It’s the kind of moment Rabbi Lawrence Kushner describes as a time when you can “feel the wing of the Shehina [the dove-like Presence of God] flapping the pages of the book of [your] life.” That is the book we try to read today; that is the book we force ourselves to look over with God, as we prepare to try living another year as if we knew we were alive. At a birth, there is a sense of absolute dependence on these forces. You see exactly where we all come from, and realize that it is still an awesome mystery how a person comes to life. It’s one of those brushes with the ultimate.

Or at least, it ought to be like that. A truly reverent and perceptive person might experience that.

I remember four years ago when my youngest child was born , the scene was a little different. It was a planned caesarean, so there was no big drama of labor. I was awake for the surgery. It was a very intense and emotional time for me, ofcourse. I had gone through a month or so early in the pregnancy when it appeared there might be a chance of Downs Syndrome or something truly deadly.

But by the time I came to the birth, we knew that everything looked healthy. I was thrilled and frightened and feeling strange from the anesthetics, but ready to be there for the miracle. I was tied down to the table while they went at me with knives, trusting that I was safe in careful hands, and that the child would be fine, and she was.
There was a cheery feeling in the operating room. But as the surgery went on, the doctors started chit chatting about some procedure and new medications that were being tried at some other hospital; typical doctor shop talk. They knew I was awake, but they were ignoring my presence and getting on with it like it was just a job. I was too timid, but I wanted to interrupt them and say, “Umm- excuse me? This is an answered prayer I’m having here, ok? This is a moment of ultimate holiness here. Could we have a little respect?”

I suppose when you work so close to blood and life and death, it becomes ordinary to you. Just as the glorious sunset everyday becomes something we take entirely for granted. Once in a while we experience a sunrise or a night sky that takes our breath away with wonder at the fabulous beauty and mysterious power of creation. But most of the time, we face the morning frowning with the sun in our eyes, without mindfulness of our blessings, just tired and grumpy with too much on our minds.

That’s the nature of being human, I guess. We easily forget the high illuminated moments when we know there is nothing ordinary about waking up, nothing mundane about having a day ahead of us and breath in our body. Just let the breath become a little short, or let us see someone we love struggling to breathe, and things become much more clear. But we don’t stay in that clarity. It is too exposed. It reminds us in the most unpleasant way how totally vulnerable we really are. We avoid awareness of the precariousness of life and act as if we are entitled to our lives and will live forever. And in this way, we waste precious days and years, not quite willing to plunge into being alive.

And so we have created this holiday; this artificial kick in the spritual pants to wake up and realize the danger of wasting moments of life. We do all kinds of things to remember who we really are and what we are supposed to be doing here. We need to rediscover both the danger of trying to escape it, as well as the true terror of willingly getting on with it. We read this odd story from the Torah of Abraham, the ancestor of our people, who finally proves himself to God by taking the one child he has waited until his old age to see born, and tying that child to an altar, fully willing to end the one life upon which everything he has prayed for depends. This story bothers us, and I imagine it is supposed to bother us. Why is it part of our sacred history?

Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher, has written,

“We don’t experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away…not holding anything back, not preparing our escape route, not looking for alternatives, not thinking there is ample time to do things later…[This] softens us up so that we can’t deceive ourselves ; so that we can’t be deaf, dumb, and blind; so that we always get the message…”

“…looking for alternatives is the only thing that keeps us from realizing we’re already in a sacred world. Looking for alternatives-- better sights than we see, better sounds than we hear, a better mind than we have-- keeps us from realizing that we could stand with pride in the middle of our life and realize it’s a sacred mandala…”

Something must be done to actively reinstate our awareness and awe, lest our lives slip by without ever having truly been lived. In the hasidic view, God is waiting for us, depending on us to raise our spiritual awareness and take part in the creation and repair of the world. All the sparks of truth we need are hidden in the world for us to find and gather and restore. They will wake up when we do. The hasidic master, Yakov Yosef of Polnoy, used to tell this story:

“It once happened that some travelers lost their way and decided to go to sleep until someone came along who could show them the right path. Someone first came along and led them to a place of wild beasts and brigands. But then someone else came and showed them the right path. It is the same way with the letters of the Torah, through which the world was created. They came to this world in the form of travelers who have lost their way and fallen asleep. When someone comes along and studies Torah for its own sake, such a one leads them on the right path so that they can become one again with their root.” - Yacov Yosef of Polnoy, Toldot Yakov Yosef s.v. Shelah lekah, 172.

A large part of what we are doing here on Rosh HaShanah is attempting to wake up, to let that shofar pierce the daze we’ve been in, and restore a sense of majesty to our lives. We do this symbolically by trying to restore a sense of the majesty of God.

In our prayers at this season, you hear more emphasis on the term “melech,” King, than you do at any other service. First of all, it has a historical antecedent. Rosh HaShanah is set on our calendar at the time of a pre-existing Near Eastern coronation ceremonies, in which all subjects publicly reaffirmed their duties to the king every year. We hear echoes of this when the morning service begins with the words “Ha Melech,” and we have a section of the Amidah called the Malchuyot. We sing to Avinu, Malkenu, our father, our king. This image is always present in our prayers; think of the words we whisper after the Shma: Baruch Shem Kavod, Malchuto LeOlam Vaed--Blessed is the Holy Name, May God’s malchut, God’s "king-ness," majesty, sovereignty, go on forever. But this daily theme is especially emphasized on Rosh HaShanah, along with that most misunderstood religious aspiration, the fear of such a powerful God.

But nobody wants a God who is King, and nobody wants to be afraid of God. These ideas strike our ears as archaic and wooden, making us passive, inviting blind faith. Jews are famously argumentative about such things, refusing to accept anything we haven’t wrestled with ourselves.

There are obviously many reasons why modern folks, particularly Reconstructionist Jews, would not especially like kingship and fear as ways of describing our connection with God. None of us wants to be told what to believe, and many of us have discarded the sense of a personal supernatural God who intervenes in history causing special effects. Many of us see all that as just a story to make desperate people passive. And it’s not democratic to rejoice in kingship. We don’t like top-down leadership, even from Heaven. It’s obviously not egalitarian either; it is exclusively masculine imagery for God. Few of us today are moved by the image of God as King. For many, it is exactly what we reject.

In fact a recent study conducted by Catholic priests, surveying worshippers’ images of God, concluded that people today mostly believe in a pleasant genderless God; a loving, nurturing, bringer of blessings. That’s what people want--a friendly safe easy God, who would never possibly demand, for example, that we sacrifice a child.

But “You can’t always get what you want.” What you happen to believe or want has no impact at all on what is. You can decide you don’t believe in gravity and it won’t make us all float off the big spinning world. We are not the boss here, we are not the king. We don’t get the opportunity to design God. God designed us. This means that we have to grow up and face the way things are, including the presence of a lot in the world that is far from pleasant or comfortable.

Judith Plaskow, the Jewish feminist, discusses what we gain and what we lose in coming to grips with the awesome transcendent and terrifying aspect of God. She writes,

“Facing the Ambiguity of God,” Tikkun Vol. 6, No. 5, p.96 (via R Mychal Copeland)

One of the things I have always most valued about the Jewish tradition is its refusal to disconnect God from the contradictory whole of reality. ‘I form light and create darkness, I make well and create woe, I the Lord, do all these things,’ Isaiah announces (Isaiah 45:7) This has always seemed to me a far more religiously satisfying perspective than a theology that would close off huge areas of our experience and declare them devoid of sacred power. I do not know how a monotheist can choose to find God in the dry land and not in the tidal wave that destroys it--or only in our power to choose life and not also in our power to choose (see Deut 30:15 & 19).

Yet I certainly understand why I and other feminists have not raced to deal with this aspect of God. It is not unique or central to feminist experience; and in addition, it is difficult and painful. More than this however, the ambiguous God threatens to bring us back to the images of domination we see as so problematic in the tradition.

I and many other feminists have pointed to the destructiveness of hierarchical images of God such as Lord and King, images that draw upon and in turn justify oppression in our society. But what if God as Lord points not simply to the manipulative ruler of history, the cosmic patriarch who authorizes numerous forms of oppression, but also the nonrational and unpredictable dimension of experience, the forces we cannot control or contain? How do we name the power in the world that makes us know our vulnerability that terrifies and overwhelms us? Can we name this power without invoking images of Otherness? Can we jettison the Lord of History without also losing the Lord of contradictory life? Can we name the ambiguous God without resorting to the traditional metaphors that have rationalized oppression and denied the humanity of women?

We have to have enough openmindedness to hold this ambiguity; to believe in egalitarianism among people of all genders, all classes, all races…and still realize that there are powerful forces beyond our control, powerful spiritual forces that pull us toward a destiny that is both frightening and magnificent, if we have the courage to move towards it.

We live in a terrifying, challenging, fast moving awesome world. There are ghastly things going on here; things like like war, terrorism, biological weapons, normal airplanes made into bombs, children taken from their beds at night, children trained in the use of gasmasks, callous fraud that impoverishes the vulnerable, civil rights evaporating, the ice caps melting, starvation, flood, poverty…Humanity is making a gruesome mess, and it’s easy to want to throw up our hands. But then there are senselessly wonderful things happening anyway-- people choosing to give themselves to healing, learning, teaching eachother, protecting the natural world, demonstrating for peace, engaging in scientific inquiry, enlarging what is technologically possible, looking at birds, writing music or making art. I don’t know which surprise me more; the acts of desperation or the acts of faith. Abraham Joshua Heschel talked about seeing the world most truly when we see it with “radical amazement”, root level wonder, able to be profoundly surprised. When you can step back and consider all the pain, all the glory, all the madness, all the potential that suffuses our world…we begin to be able to relinquish the childish sense that we can take anything for granted. Just because we are alive and maybe we’ve had a pretty easy time and been fairly nice…that doesn’t mean we’re entitled to our ease, our health, or that we have no stake in the suffering of others.
Imagining God is holding our hand and making our lives nice weakens us. When something horrible happens, this anemic little God image isn’t there for us at all. This good fairy God excites no awe or fear. It doesn’t give us chills or remind us that there is much more to it than we can possibly know. It doesn’t offer any meaningful response to hardship or disaster or death. It has nothing to say to us in the middle of the night when our losses or fears are tearing at us, and our heart is breaking. It doesn’t come flaring up in a burning bush demanding that we turn back and do the one thing we never wanted to do, something impossible that can’t possibly help, that we know will exhaust all our energies and probably fail, but that we cannot refuse.

In trying to describe how Abraham came to an awareness of his call to leave home and begin the story of the Jewish people, the Midrash says:

R. Isaac told the parable of a man who was traveling from place to place when he saw a palace in flames. He wondered, is it possible that the palace is without someone to look after it? At that moment the owner of the palace peered out at him and said, ‘I am the owner of this palace!’ So too as Abraham was wondering, ‘Is it possible that the world should be without someone to look after it? The Holy One peered down at him and said, ‘I am the world’s owner! LECH LECHA (Breshit Raba 39:1).

Lech Lecha: "Get going", “Go forth"… the famous words of God’s call to Abraham.

The world is a palace in flames; what are we doing just walking by as if we weren’t involved? God is peering out at us, with very specific instructions.

Lech lecha me’artzecha umimolad’tcha, umibet avicha
El ha-aretz asher areka

Go forth from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house
To the land I will show you.

This journey culminates in the Akedah, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, near the end of Abraham’s life, when God breaks out and calls again, in very parallel language:

Kach na et bincha, et Yachidcha, asher ahavta, et Yitzchak,
v-LECH LECHA el eretz haMoriah, vhaalayhu sham l’olah
Al echad heharim asher omar elecha

Take your son, your only one, the one you love, Isaac
And GO FORTH to the land of Moriah
And there offer him up as a sacrifice
On one of the mountains that I will tell you

Eretz Moriah, the Land of Moriah could be understood to mean the Land of the Fear of God.

Abraham’s encounter with God culminated at the binding of Isaac; the moment when he seemed to be asked to relinquish all he had ever hoped for. And when he shows his willingness to do it, and raises his hand to strike his only beloved son, a voice is heard saying: “Do not raise your hand against the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from me.” (Gen 22:12)

The fear is the kind that says, “I am terrified but I will do what I must do. I am terrified and so I know this is exactly what is required. I will trust You, despite everything. I am in Your hands more than this child. I am utterly exposed before you. I have no power at all but to do as You wish.”

And then a ram is found to take Isaac’s place, and it is the horn of this ram that we sound on Rosh HaShanah. The shofar is a souvenir of the Akedah, our assurance that God won’t finally act without love, but also that God is always testing us to see how willing we are to face our fears and find our destiny. The Shofar on Rosh HaShanah tells us to wake up. God’s nature is not changed by what we happen to want it to be. Life and death were created by God and are in God’s hands right now.

Our life is in God’s hands right now.

This is the time to listen to what is being asked of us. This is the time to stop pretending we don’t know. This is the time to stop making excuses.

Today the world was born. And we are privileged to have come into it for purposes that go far beyond living happily ever after. Let us open our hearts to be able to hear God calling us, requiring us to do things we can’t imagine doing, and let us know the holy fear and awesome peace of moving toward the place that God will show us.

©Rabbi Alexis Roberts
Erev Rosh HaShanah
September 6, 2002