5765 Rosh HaShanah Day

So over these holy days, I am teaching you about a prayer you mostly know pretty well, the Adon Olam, attributed to Solomon ibn Gabirol.. Although it is a meditation on the nature of God written about a thousand years ago, I see it as a starting point for framing a religious dilemma we have today: how to relate to God as being real and concerned with us, while at the same time holding to our rational belief that God is a force or energy, not a supernatural person. Or to put it another way, I want to explore how Reconstructionists can have an inspiring, anchoring spiritual and emotional connection with the divine, while being intellectually honest.

Rabbi Jacob Staub, a scholar of medieval Jewish history and philosophy, my teacher, and a key spokesman of our movement has written about this. He frames the dilemma for Reconstructionists like this: “It is easy to locate God as you recover, as the Source of resilience from which you derive the strength to apologize and build anew with shattered fragments. It is more difficult to identify God in the darkness, before you pick yourself up, as the Source of hope, for which you acknowledge your mistakes and feel sufficiently held to begin to be healed.”

We gather here on Rosh HaShanah to examine our lives and make a sincere commitment to a clean start for the coming year. We do this using spiritual tools of prayer and ritual that are in some cases several thousand years old. In some ways, these pages in the book may mean nothing to us, and it takes great effort to open them up and encounter what they are saying, and process it through our own values and beliefs. You might say that Judaism is an archaic instrument through which our spirit can find expression. Its hard to play an archaic instrument, and many don’t bother. On the other hand, some instruments make a sound that touches us in places where words fail.

Cynthia Ozick , a contemporary Jewish writer, says that the symbol of Judaism is the shofar, the ram’s horn -- the ancient instrument blown on the High Holy Days. The air for the blast is a symbol of the soul, which emerges from the divine. This air, this universal spirit, is channeled through a small hole, symbolic of a distinct people and tradition. The sound that emerges through the large hole, which symbolizes the world, is a universal call to return in faithfulness to the source of life and in partnership to heal the world. Our ability to make an impact in the world is enhanced by our belonging to a religious community, which provides an entire system of religious living.

But this system has crashed in some ways. And one of the ways in which Judaism can feel distant and irrelevant is when we cannot make our own connection with what is referred to as God. If no spirit blows through the instrument, it is only a useless relic.

Rediscovering our connection to God, or godliness, or however we describe the holy, is the work of every single generation. In the early medieval period, the challenge to faith was from Greek philosophy. But the ways ancient poets and teachers found to harmonize the different kinds of truth they knew can be a useful starting point for our process of harmonizing the apparently discordant truths we know.

The Adon Olam’s second stanza proclaims that spiritual reality goes far beyond our personal concerns. It goes like this:

vacharei kichlot hakol levado yimloch norah,
vehu haya vehu hoveh vehu yihyeh betiferah

V’achareit kichlot hakol - and after everthing is over
Levado yimloch -- Alone he will rule
Norah -- awesome
Vehu haya vehu hoveh vhu yiyeh -- And He was and He is and He will be -- God exists throughout and outside of time --
Betiferah -- in splendor

So the author is saying that no matter what happens, no matter what people believe, the eternal reality of the divine will never change in its everlasting awesome splendor.

It surprises some people to learn that, while most Jews take the reality of God for granted, being Jewish does not require a specific belief about God. Being Christian is generally a matter of believing certain ideas of Christianity to be true. But being Jewish is more a matter of belonging to a people, whether by birth or by choice. As Reconstructionists say, Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people. Peoplehood is primary. But we are a people who belong to a religious civilization. Our people has a religion and certain religious ideas and practices that convey our values and insights. We may or may not feel moved to accept them; but we don’t lose our membership as Jews over that.

This situation leads to some interesting questions that test the limits. Can someone who is an avowed atheist convert to Judaism? Can people who are born to Jews but believe Jesus is God rightfully call themselves Jews?

An atheist can become a Jew. In fact, there is a small branch of Judaism called “Humanistic Judaism” that is based on the premise of atheism. They stress philosophy and history, but consider the idea of God to be false. They are on the fringe, but they are clearly considered Jews.

On the other hand, people who believe that Jesus is God and still want to call themselves Jews are not considered part of the Jewish people. It's true that Jews can believe a wide range of things about God and still be Jews, but there is a boundary line. I mention this because, as you may have heard, there is a major evangelizing effort going on in San Diego right now by Jews for Jesus. They have $100,000 to spend and dozens volunteers all over town who want to save our souls their way. These are Christians who have adopted Jewish cultural and religious forms in order to present a form of Christianity they think Jews ought to be able to accept. Their message rests on the mistaken idea that Jews are waiting intently for the messiah, and they want to prove to us that Jesus is exactly what we’ve all been waiting for.

But Liberal Jews are not waiting intently for a human messiah. Salvation in Jewish terms means saving the world we live in, repairing and uplifting it to be a place of godliness, filled with justice, kindness, peace, and harmony. We believe in joining together with each other and all people to take part in this with our own hands. Reconstructionists understand God to be the energy working through us when we are doing this healing work. We hope in our prayers for a world at one, committed to the same spiritual values. We pointedly do not hope for all peoples to accept one religion, and we aren’t expecting any single individual to arise and accomplish all this for us. We have even changed our prayers to look forward to an era of redemption, rather than to a particular redeemer or messiah. This is one of the key changes Kaplan made in our liturgy, based on the fact that most Jews of his day didn’t take the idea of a messiah literally anymore.

And we can’t accept that a person can be God, or that we need some intermediary to reach God. Our tradition teaches that all human beings are made in the divine image. All of us have the capacity to open up to the divine and develop a profound direct relationship with what we call God. No one can do this for us. During Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, we admit the wrongdoing we’ve done, confess and apologize and atone, and try to make a sincere new beginning. But we do not see human beings as essentially sinful and needing to be saved from hell. We don’t claim to know what the afterlife holds, but we do trust God’s love enough to reject the idea of everlasting damnation. So what the Jews for Jesus try to offer us is not something we are shopping for, however nicely it may be packaged.

Picking up the thread, the second verse of the Adon Olam continues,

ve hu echad, v'ain sheni -- He is One. There is no second one.
l'hamshil lo, l'hachbira -- to make a comparison to Him, or to be a companion to Him

This is a reference to ancient pagan pantheons, and also to Christianity. God has no consort, like Zeus had Hera, or Marduk had Ishtar. God is not a man who needs a partner. God is much larger, much deeper, much farther beyond human experience, without gender or sexuality, without a wife and without a son.

But Jews for Jesus offer more than a Jewish-looking way to be a Christian. The people most susceptible to their message are those who are lonely and insecure. They respond more to the human warmth and excitement than to the arguments made to them, and we mustn’t disdain this as irrational. They feel lost; and they are hopeful that this Christian message means they can find meaning, connection, and comfort. It's likely they never found those kinds of things in their Jewish background. Have we? So this issue is bigger than the annoyance of busybodies who want everyone to believe what they believe. This reminds us that for many Jews, the Judaism of our time is failing to capture the imagination and the heart. It's not enough to warn people not to be taken in by manipulative proselytizers. We must also be able to show that Jewish life and practice can touch the heart and soul, and honestly ring true.

Kaplan noticed and articulated the gap between modern life and traditional religion. His view was that there are things of lasting universal meaning in Judaism, and other things that are just the accumulation of superstition and custom that are no longer relevant. A thousand years ago, Solomon ibn Gabirol (the poet to whom the Adon Olam is attributed) tried to show how philosophy and religion were telling the same truth. In his day, Kaplan tried to show how anthropology and other social sciences, as well as geology and astronomy and other hard sciences, do not contradict the essential truths of Jewish religion, or prevent a Jew from having religious and intellectual integrity.

There is a wonderful odd intriguing little movie causing a stir lately, called “What the BLEEP do we know?” It’s a combination of documentary and drama, mixing interviews with scientists and mystics, and a dramatic narrative starring Marlee Matlin. It attempts to show that science and spirituality are not different modes of thought, but are in fact describing the same thing. And it brings the power back to the individual man and woman as it demonstrates creation as the god-like capacity of every individual.

The inspiration for this film was the continual convergence of two great modes of human inquiry – science and spirituality. Quantum physics, neurology and molecular biology seem to be saying things that are in agreement with what mystics have been saying for centuries about our essential unity with all that is. Furthermore science as a language of the spirit seems to cut across old beliefs and superstitions, and present ideas in a fresh way that encourages people to examine for themselves and make their own decisions.

The film’s various demonstrations are very refreshing because they indicate that there is deep creative wisdom embedded in everything, and also that we have a tremendous amount of power to create the world of our dreams through our choices, our beliefs, and our will. It hints at a conception of God that is much bigger and more powerful and at the same time more accessible, loving, and forgiving than we might have guessed.

The character in the film is in a spiritual and emotional crisis. She has lost her faith in herself and in love because her trust was betrayed badly by her husband. This is coloring her perceptions and making her miserable. As she slowly comes to forgive him and herself, her sense of being trapped in a life she can’t stand melts away and she finds a new freedom and joy. This process takes time, courage, and open mindedness to be willing to let go of false beliefs. There is a point of great confusion when nothing is what it seems. All of this is set against interviews with biologists and physicists explaining how many of our assumptions about the nature of matter are false and limiting. Its about spiritual growth as much as it is about science; and finally about how they tell the same truth.

Part of the process of growth is to go beyond intellectual ideas and work with our habits and attitudes. If what we habitually assume about life controls what we experience, why not expand what we assume and imagine a more wonderful world? The Adon Olam goes on to say of God,

beli rashit, beli tachli -- without beginning, without end
v'lo ha oz ve ha misrah -- and to Him is the power, or strength and the control

Or in other words, the divine is utterly unlimited. And the power to transform things for the good is rooted in this infinity of possibilities. But if we close our minds and believe in more limited ways, our perception is immediately more limited. So one of the reasons religion tries to emphasize the grandeur and awesomeness and wonder around the divine is to help us let go of limiting conceptions.

One of the limitations people have imposed on ourselves is to think about God as a person. We think by comparing things in our experience, so we have often expressed our feelings about God by making comparisons to the most grand people we can think of -- typically kings and elders, people of wisdom and authority. This might be a helpful tool, as long as you do not hold that your metaphor is what God actually is. People relate to non-human things as people because we are relating beings; a sailor thinks of the sea as a woman, a climber may look on the mountain as a friend or adversary. But they know these things are not in fact people. There is nothing wrong with relating to an image you have of God, as long as you do not “worship” the image.

As Jacob Staub puts it, “My God is not a person, but that does not preclude a relationship that feels very personal.” He discusses a change, a broadening in his ability to relate with God through a practice of contemplation. He says, “…Of late, I have been practicing experiencing God’s loving embrace: God as the Source of wellbeing and peace, the Source that enables me to forgive myself and embrace others. I am able to bring before this God more of the details of my life than I can with any human being…I find that the Hasidic rebbes were right: God is present when I let God in.”

So as we settle into the hard work of forgiveness and apology at this season, let’s see if we can open our minds and hearts to the possibility that there is much more to it than we have imagined. We may feel some of our limitations fall away, and find that God is more forgiving and patient than we are, more willing to take us back the moment we humbly realize we are not in a position to judge others, to know their truth or their struggles. When our hearts open in true love and acceptance of ourselves and others, our will is suddenly more available to the call of the holy. From there, there are no limits.

Rabbi Alexis Roberts
© September 2004