Erev Yom Kippur 5765

So finally its really time for Adon Olam, the prayer I started teaching on Rosh HaShanah. This prayer apparently first came into the liturgy as a piyyut, a liturgical poem, used on Kol Nidre. Its grandeur and poignancy reflect the spirit of this evening perfectly. Later it became a traditional bedtime prayer, and some time later, crept into daily practice as an optional closing reading to any service.

By liturgical standards its not very old; about a thousand years. It is attributed to Solomon ibn Gabirol, a medieval Jewish philosopher and poet who lived in Spain under Muslim rule. He was a Jewish and secular scholar who studied Plato’s philosophy in Arabic, and became the author who conveyed neo-platonism to Christian Europe, which knew him as Avicebron.

His religious poetry portrays both his philosophical views and his Jewish religious ideas in ways that help us expand our sense of the range of meaning for traditional religious language and insights. Like us, ibn Gabirol lived in a complicated convergence of civilizations. Like us, he did not accept a literal or simplistic interpretation of tradition. Like us, he strove for integrity; for a way to show that truth is truth, whether understood through the language of philosophy or religion. And, while not a mystic, he had a deep understanding of the spiritual life. He suffered much in his short life, and developed a deep faith that made these experiences bearable and meaningful.

And so he is a touchstone in the effort to revitalize our Judaism, and perhaps recover the sense of an anchoring faith and trust in God that may have eluded us, or seemed to us to be the property of fundamentalists.

Many of us find the spiritual fire of ethical imperatives easier to access than any other part of Judaism. We may not know what we believe about God exactly, but we surely know that the hungry must be fed, the courts must be just, the homeless must be housed, the weak must be protected. When we take part in such efforts, we sense that we are doing something transcendant, something that has meaning beyond the actions themselves. When I spoke about ibn Gabirol’s idea of the will of God, I said that when we bring our individual will into harmony with God’s will, we find holiness. Or in other words, when we do godly things, when we perform mitzvot as we understand them, we can touch the highest and best in ourselves.

But we also know that the forces of injustice and cruelty are powerful, in our own hearts, and collectively, in society. We’re particularly aware of this on Yom Kippur when we review the long lists of the sins of humanity; when we try to take responsibility for the dozens and dozens of ways we inflict pain, humiliation, cruelty, and violence on others. There is so much of it. We could work every day with all our strength and probably still not get very far with ending hunger or domestic violence or race hatred or poverty or pollution or social injustice.

But what about when you have been giving it your all, breaking your teeth on it, banging your head on it, and the problems only loom larger? What about when the injustice is overwhelming and you lose heart? Ethical convictions are very good, but where do we get the power to keep going despite discouragement, failure, and loss? Most of us hold back from giving our all to try to protect ourselves from suffering bitterness and futility.

Martin Luther King said, “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only instruments of Love.”. It is said there are two great sources of strength in this world: one rests with those who are not afraid to kill. The other rests with those who are not afraid to love. The willingness to love fearlessly is a huge source of spiritual power; perhaps the essence of faith. Dignity, discipline, love—these come from certainty of your worth, and the worth of what you are trying to do. Certainty is part of faith. Will is one place where we can feel in harmony with the divine, but the heart needs faith as well.

In the first three verses, the Adon Olam emphasizes God’s eternity, majesty, uniqueness and power. Now for the last two verses, the Adon Olam changes its focus.

V’hu eli -- and He is my God
V’chai goali -- and the life of my redemption, or my redeemer lives!
V’hu eli -- He is my God.

This is where the Adon Olam gets personal. It changes from singing out about the transcendant, limitless, awe inspiring source of all being, to a whispered affirmation of what it means to come into a relationship with this Adon Olam, this master force of all that is, and relate to it as a worshipper. Eli is a possessive form: my God.

As I have explained before, the relationship between a person and God is active, and does not concern belief exactly. Many times in the Torah, God is portrayed as saying “IF” you follow my laws and accept the covenant, THEN I will be your God and you will be my people.” It is an interactive covenantal two-sided relationship. That God exists is one thing; but the power to say “my” God is something that only happens when I become willing to serve. Its not that God rejects us if we disobey; ibn Gabirol thought of God as Plato did, the unchanging source of reality that does not “act” in the world, so to speak. God doesn’t accept or reject. God just IS. We are the ones doing all the accepting and rejecting, meeting the challenges or hiding from them.

When we devote time to looking carefully and deeply into our lives, without fear, when we study the tradition and grapple with its failings and its truth, when we humble ourselves in the face of the unimaginable complexity of which we are a part, when we act out of love and discipline, when we sense the immensity of the gift we have been given in being alive right now -- at times like that, we are involved in praise and worship and living by the divine will. We have a God, and we are blessed by the awareness that these mutual bonds of love are infinitely kind. We recognize our total debt to this God, and become willing to transcend our limitations by living in devotion and gratitude. This can be a joyful place to be, a redeemed and healed place. We want to serve.

Rachel Naomi Remen draws an interesting distinction between serving, and helping or fixing. She says,

… service…is an experience of mystery, surrender, and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being causal. A server knows that he or she is being used, and has a willingness to be used in the service of something greater, something essentially unknown…Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. From the perspective of service, we are all connected: all suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy.

Many teachers today look to Jewish mysticism and are moved by the idea that the world is somewhat broken and our spiritual task is to be involved in its repair, in Tikkun Olam. But the Torah calls us to serve, not to fix. As Remen says, “We serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.” We may not understand the painful and overwhelming things, and we may not be able to change them very much, although we must do all we can. But being in a relationship of service to God and to life around us doesn’t always mean we will be able to fix or change things. We keep an open mind and realize we do not always know what the larger meaning is of the things that hurt or upset us. Sometimes they spur us to take action, sometimes they teach us or someone else an unexpected lesson. Pain sometimes leads to misery, but sometimes it leads to birth.

V’tsur hevli b’et tsara -- and a rock in my troubles, at the time of sorrow.
V’hu nisi umanos li -- and he is my banner and my refuge

It's easy to thank God when everything is great, when everything is falling into place even better than you had hoped. What about the times of tsuris, tzarot, the sorrows and troubles? What do we cling to then, when it can seem the world we rely on is falling apart? There are people who lose faith when something terrible happens, just when they need the love and shelter the most. This is one of the most tragic outcomes of the lack of deep faith so common today: just when you need it most, it falls apart. Jews today by and large do not learn how to feel God’s loving presence even when things are bad.

Even if people have some sense of the transcendent aspects of God discussed in the first several verses of Adon Olam, they often do not understand or feel the personal connection that is also part of the divine reality. They don’t see how God could be concerned about them. They don’t see themselves as one with the whole mysterious universe. They think they are somewhere apart from it, and so God seems far away or unreal. What is unreal is the distance. Ibn Gabirol is saying that God is both utterly beyond and lovingly attentive, down in the foxholes with us, in the hospital bed, in the broken heart. Because God’s loving and wise nature is embedded in all levels.

Psalm 27, the ancient poem we read daily during the last month of the Jewish year coming into the High Holy Days is all about this aspect of God as a source of salvation and protection when we’re most under attack. It describes the experience of feeling abandoned and then taken in. It is written by someone who has sufferred much, and been in great fear and danger, but now feels utterly safe in God’s hands.

What is this all about? We’re not safe! Anything can happen and it does all the time! People we depend on die on us! We can lose our money, our health, our home. Things explode and break and accidents kill us, wars rip us apart, thieves break in and rapists violate us. The earth shakes and freezes and burns and has winds that can blow us apart. Our own health or sanity can betray us, desert us. We are afraid because we feel vulnerable to the painful, unpredictable, wild world we are a part of. At times, there is no safety and no discernable sense.

The Psalmist knew this. Ibn Gabirol knew this. So what is this rock, this refuge they are talking about?

Rachel Naomi Remen helps us see that it is not about avoiding difficulties. She writes, “ Suffering is part of being alive. Hiding ourselves only means that we will have to suffer alone…In the depths of every wound we have survived is the strength we need to live. The wisdom in our wounds can offer us a place of refuge. Finding this is not for the feint of heart. But then, neither is life.”

"Pain often marks the place where self knowledge and growth can happen, much in the same way that fear does."

"Grieving is the way that loss can heal. Yet many people do not know how to grieve and heal their losses. This makes it hard to find the courage to fully participate in life. At some deep level, it may make us unwilling to be openhearted to the present, to become attached or intimate."

"Surprisingly we may find sanctuary in the presence of death, a place of refuge from everything that is not genuine in our culture and in ourselves. Many of us have learned to cover over what is most authentic in ourselves in order to protect ourselves or gain the approval of others. We may have lived this way for so long that we no longer know it is not our way. But many people who are dying have taken their masks off and let go of lifelong roles and self expectations, ways of being that are not genuinely their own. At first, they may let go of these things because they don’t have the strength to hang on to them, but later they let go because it has become clear at last that these things do not really matter. They have come home to themselves. In their presence, we can come home to ourselves as well.”

Solomon Ibn Gabirol "wrote…dozens of poems about nature and landscape, feasts and pleasures…But life and its joys are tangential to Ibn Gabirol’s poetry: God stands at its center. The poet found refuge from his fate in solitude, with God.”

Vhu nisi umanos li, mnat cosi byom ekra -- He is a wonder and refuge for me, and fills my cup on the day when I cry out.

Days of crying out will come. But we can be safe and protected even if pain and trouble are present, by keeping and open mind and heart, keeping faith, not hiding from or avoiding the troubles. We let them wash through us, we suffer and grieve, and heal. We find ourselves wiser, more loving, more able to be of service, more able to trust ourselves and God, more able to affirm and celebrate the wonder and sweetness of all creation.

This can happen even as we die. And that is the subject of the last verse, and we’ll save it for tomorrow.

Rabbi Alexis Roberts
© September 2004