#BlogElul Day 13: Excuses and The Binding of Isaac

Shabbat Shalom friends. You'll find my sermon anticipating Rosh Hashanah, which deals with the Akedah and the stories we tell ourselves as we sacrifice our children. 

 

The father loves his son. He is the child of his old age, the one promised to him by the God he followed to a strange land, the one who gave his wife laughter, the one who will carry on the promise given by that God he cannot see but whose name he called out. The father loves his son, and now that same God who has promised that his progeny will be as the stars in the sky, commands him to do the unthinkable, to sacrifice his child in some distant land. There is no explanation, no qualification: only the commandment to kill his beloved, his precious one. The father loves his son, He is the child of his old age, the one promised him by his God; but still, he saddles up his donkey for the journey ahead. Every Rosh Hashanah we read a tale that is every parent’s nightmare: Abraham’s binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac. Some say it is a story of faith, a test of Abraham’s willingness to follow God’s commands and his ability to trust God’s intentions. And certainly this is how it has been taught. In Ma’asei Avraham Avinu, or “The Doings of Abraham our Father”, the rabbis explore the various midrashim surrounding the so-called 10 trials of Abraham, culminating with the Akedat Yitzchak, the binding of Isaac. Each one depicts a man committed to his belief regardless of the consequences, at times braving death and destruction but each time protected by God. Likewise, the midrash even presents Isaac as being a willing participant in the binding, committed to his faith as much as his father. As we might imagine, this story became a powerful metaphor for the massacres that took place throughout the middle ages, as Jewish communities throughout central Europe wrestled with whether they would have to face the same choices Abraham and Isaac faced. But we do not read the Akedat Yitzchak at Rosh Hashanah exclusively as a story of near-martyrdom. It is a story of redemption and remembrance. Our rabbis teach: When God stops Abraham’s hand and provides him a substitute in the form of a ram, Abraham elicits a promise of God: that every year, when the sound of the ram’s horn heard, the same ram caught in the thicket and sacrificed in place of his son, God will remember Abraham’s willingness to obey without question, will hear the prayers of Abraham’s children, our prayers, and redeem us. The shofar, and the story of its origin, proclaim: remember our ancestors, remember their zechut, their merit, and whatever our faults or failings, whatever our human frailties, preserve and forgive us for their sake. That is a comfort for us. And yet, and yet, this story is not one of comfort. Quite the opposite: the Akedah is a mirror, an unsettling reflection of our willingness to seek comfort—in religion, in easy rituals and easy answers, in superficial communication. How can we read this text without reflecting on how we sacrifice our own sons and daughters: sacrificed not to God but our expectations. Sacrificed not for holiness, but for competition, for prestige, for acclimation. Our children are offered up on foreign altars of ambition and we over over them, pressure cook them, that they may have the ‘right’ experiences, the ‘right’ backgrounds. To say nothing for the children who toil that we may have our coffee and chocolate and tea, the children working in horrific conditions the world over, the children whose parents are taken away from them that those parents may provide for our wants and needs. As Leonard Cohen sang: You who build these altars nowTo sacrifice these children,You must not do it anymore.A scheme is not a visionAnd you never have been temptedBy a demon or a god.You who stand above them now…You were not there before.When I lay upon a mountainAnd my father’s hand was tremblingWith the beauty of the word. So on top of all these meanings, the Akedah is about power. Our power over our children, and God’s power over us. It is a reminder that, despite our best efforts and all our energies, we are not in control over our own lives. The Akedah stands to remind us of our limits, re reassert that we are not God, merely caretakers of God’s gifts. And so, as we anticipate Yom HaZikaron, this day of remembrance, as we hear the Akedah, as we hear the sound of the shofar, we remember of our spiritual ancestors, and we pray for redemption: from our sins, from our failings, from our anxieties, from our reaches and overreaches for power. A redemption that comes not on our behalf, not on our merits, but the merits of our ancestors and our children. As it is written: O righteous one, do us this grace! You promised Abraham mercy for our fathers. Let then their merit stand as our witness…break the yoke and snap the bands of the…flock that yearns toward Thee.” Amen. 

#BlogElul Day 12: Image

And who best to contemplate the issue than Art Green?

If the Maimonidean seeks to purify one's thinking about God by questioning and progressively removing all anthropomorphic and anthropopathic images, the Kabbalist seeks to mentally flood the reader with an overwhelming excess of images, leading to the conclusion that the divine reality must ultimately transcend them all. Virtually everything, almost any noun encountered in Scripture and any object within the natural realm, becomes an image term that leads back to contemplation of some aspect of God. If the same element or stage of self-revelation within the Godhead may be called by a diverse set of names (the third sefirah, for example, is “mother,” “womb,” “jubilee,” “fountain,” “repentance,” “upper Eden,” “heart,” “understanding,” “palace,” and a host more), it becomes clear that all of these are somehow pointing beyond themselves and that no single name, image, or symbol fully expresses just what this sefirah (or symbol cluster) is. “You are the One who fills all names,” as the Tiqquney Zohar famously expresses it, “but You Yourself have no specific name.”

Green, Arthur (2010-02-18). Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) (p. 64). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

#BlogElul Day 11: Change

And now, a reminder from our liturgy. Change doesn't only happen at the High Holidays, you know.

THIS IS AN HOUR of change.
Within it we stand uncertain on the border of light.
Shall we draw back or cross over?
Where shall our hearts turn?
Shall we draw back, my brother, my sister,
or cross over?
This is the hour of change, and within it,
we stand quietly
on the border of light.
What lies before us?
Shall we draw back, my brother, my sister,
or cross over?

#BlogElul day 10: Memory

I thought about giving a sermon teaser, but instead, here's a story from Rabbi Shmuel Betzalel Sheftel, known as Rashbatz (circa 1829–1905) as told by Yossy Gordon:   In a small town in Russia lived a porter who made his living by transporting people and packages to and from the train station. The porter had a young son who assisted him with his work. Every morning the two would awaken very early, recite their morning prayers, eat breakfast, prepare the horse and wagon, and hit the road. During the summer months, when the sun often rose as early as 3:00 AM, the porter and his son awoke even earlier.  A summer fast day arrived on the Jewish calendar. The porter roused his son at the usual time, and off to the synagogue they went. When they had finished praying, the porter informed his son that today there would be no eating due to the fast. The day wore on. The son grew hungrier and hungrier. He began to ask his father incessantly when they would finally eat. Finally, the day ended and his hunger was satisfied.  The following morning, the boy refused to budge when his father tried to wake him. With an air of indignation the boy told his father, “I do not want to get up, and I do not want to work. I am afraid that you will not let me eat anything today either!” “Ah, my son, have no fear,” replied the porter. “Today is not yesterday.” Whenever Rashbatz told this story, he would tap his listener on the shoulder, as if to exclaim, “Get up! Get up! Today is not yesterday!”

#BlogElul Day 9: Blessings and more Heschel

We tend not to talk so much of Blessings, except in the most abstract sense; what a 'blessing' it is to succeed or fail at something, to be surrounded by friends, etc. This is different from the idea than the words we pronounce as blessings, which are a kind of 'Thank You', but also an acknowledgement of the sanctity of a thing (or a time, or person) and how we are changed by the opportunity for blessing. Blessings as speech acts are powerful, but we forget that power; as Michael Marmur pointed out to us a long time ago (I really remember his sermons!), we say 'bless you' mostly when people sneeze! I have always loved when people respond to questions about how they're doing, how their day is or the like with "God Bless" or "Baruch Hashem", and continue to respond in the same fashion most of the time. But we must also remember that those same blessings, those same speech acts can be turned to curses. 

So with that, the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who speaks more eloquently on the subject:
Moreover, words must not be said for the sake of stiffening the mind, of tightening the heart. They must open the mind and untie the heart. A word may be either a blessing or a misfortune. As a blessing it is the insight of a people in the form of a sound, a store of meaning accumulated throughout the ages. As a misfortune it is a substitute for insight, a pretext or a cliché. To those who remember, many of the words in the prayerbook are still warm with the glow of our fathers’ devotion. Such Jews we must aspire to recall. While those who have no such memory we must teach how to sense the spiritual life that pulsates through the throbbing words.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua (1997-05-16). Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (p. 117). Macmillan. Kindle Edition. 

#BlogElul day 8: Prayer

The following is a reprint of an article I shared in the Beth Emeth Orbit in February 2010, explaining my own worship experience. 

Some students of the Baal Shem Tov came to him one day with a question. "Every year we travel here to learn from you. Nothing could make us stop doing that. But we have learned of a man in our own town who claims to be a tzaddik, a righteous one. If he is genuine, we would love to profit from his wisdom. But how will we know if he is a fake?"

The Baal Shem Tov looked at his earnest hasidim. "You must test him by asking him a question." He paused. "You have had difficulty with stray thoughts during prayer?"

"Yes!" The hasidim answered eagerly. "We try to think only of our holy intentions as we pray, but other thoughts come into our minds. We have tried many methods not to be troubled by them."

"Good," said the Baal Shem Tov. "Ask him the way to stop such thoughts from entering your minds." The Baal Shem Tov smiled. "If he has an answer, he is a fake."

One of the wonderful, joyous things about being Jewish is there is no one ‘right’ way. There are mitzvoth, there are traditions that are so weighty and meaningful they might as well be mitzvoth, and there are observances that are purely stylistic or aesthetic in nature, that we do as Jews simply for the joy of it.

So it is with movement, the way we position our bodies during prayer. Jewish prayer is not for standing (or sitting) still! We bow at the knee to show homage to the One God; we cover our eyes at the sh’ma to concentrate on the words; we take three steps forward and back at the beginning of the Amidah to approach God correctly; we rise on our tiptoes at the kedusha to try to fly like angels as we pronounce God’s holiness.

I’ve always been a mover-call it shuckling, call it dancing, call it davening, call it just a failure of standing still-the rhythms and cadence of the service flow through me. Body movement helps me stay focused on the prayers I utter; swaying to the music helps me stay attuned to my kavannah, my intention as I pray and lead the prayers. The movement centers me the way achieving a yoga position helps someone find his chakra or the way the movements of tai chi chu’an slow the person down to achieve real awareness of her chi. Movement in prayer is meditation, it is focus and attentiveness, it is fun. 

Of course, like yoga or tai chi, many of the movements are choreographed, specified for a reason. There is a reason that at times we rise, bow, take three steps back and forward, go on our tiptoes, beat our chests, and moonwalk (just kidding about the last one). For some of us, those movements are so rooted in our experience they’re second nature, though we may not know their origins; for others they appear foreign and mysterious. Over the last year I’ve had people ask me about the movements, either privately or right before or after services, and some requests to discuss those movements during the service, but I’ve been loath to do so; I fear that, interrupting the flow of worship, I turn it into a seminar or worse, an exhibition rather than an opportunity for prayer. 

However, after further requests and discussions, and with our adoption of our new prayerbook, I’ve seen the wisdom in taking some time during services and, in lieu of a sermon, speaking during the service itself of the prayers and movements, explaining their origins and purpose in a (hopefully) prayerful fashion.

The point is not to force anyone to do what is uncomfortable or meaningless for them; quite the contrary. These movements are opportunities for us as a congregation and as individuals to find our own rhythm, our own sense of prayerfulness, and an acknowledgement that each of us must find our place in our spiritual home. For some, movement conveys holiness and ruach. For others, complete stillness and silence allows for real spirituality. For yet others, that sense of kedusha comes not from prayer but from study, or meaningful social justice work, experiencing some piece of Jewish art or literature or culture, or just knowing that she is surrounded by others who, figuratively speaking, also stood at Sinai. We are at our best when we embrace all of these ways of breathing in God’s Oneness, when we stop trying to separate dancer from dance and appreciate the intention, the connection, and the joy.
  

#BlogElul Day 7: Shofar

A story: when I was a student, one High Holidays at my pulpit in Muncie IN, the ba'al T'kiah, the shofar blower for the congregation, gave me a head's up. A surgeon (and someone who rarely attended shul), he was on call for Rosh Hashanah that year, and couldn't get out of it. I reminded him that pikuach nefesh--the saving of a life--took precedence, and both I and the soloist were capable shofar blowers. Sure enough, he had surgery that day, early in the morning, and I prepared to sound the shofar at the appropriate time. As we reached that part of the service, the doctor arrived from surgery--still in his scrubs!--with a tallit over his shoulders and shofar in hand. He was exhausted, he was filthy, with another person's blood upon him, he was not a regular synagogue-goer; he had every excuse in the world. And he came to blow shofar for his congregation. He had to be there. 

The Shofar service, as my teacher Michael Marmur reminded us 15 (!) years ago, is made up of three parts: Zichronot, Malchuyot and Shofarot. Zichronot--invoking God's memory of our patriarchs (and matriarchs) and invoking their zechut, their merit, on our behalf. Malchuyot, a proclamation of God's majesty and sovereignty, a reminder that we are not in fact, in charge, no matter what we may think. And Shofarot: the primal sound of the Shofar hearkening to a time before time, invoking no logic or rationality, but pure Mystery, the essence of the Sacred unfiltered, shaking us, disturbing us, freeing us in that moment from what binds us. That is the power of the shofar; as Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us: not a symbol, referencing something else, but a mitzvah, an act of holiness that elevates and sanctifies our lives. 

What will you be thinking as you hear the Shofar's sound?