Looking for God in All the Wrong Places
Rabbi David Locketz
“Looking for God In All The Wrong Places”
Kol Nidre 5778 – September 29, 2018
As we journey through these High Holidays, Kol Nidre…The Evening of Yom Kippur has a different feeling. Rosh Hashanah was triumphant. The sound of the shofar celebrating the great gathering of our community. Kol Nidre has a different sense. It is a plea. With our arms open and heavenward…we are asking to be forgiven. Sometimes we don’t even know for what.
Our gaze is drawn up to the heavens. The images of our scripture draws us upward. Esa Einai…I lift my eyes to the mountains. The natural world in its beauty also draws our eyes upward too.
In August with a cereal box held to my eyes so as to not be blinded, I sat with my family and observed the total solar eclipse. While we discussed what we were seeing, I wondered out loud what it might have felt like to observe an eclipse before we could predict them in the same way…before social media told us exactly what time to watch in our particular location alongside a 30 second video on how to prepare a viewer from said cereal box.
We can read a description of the Blood Moon in The Book of Joel, one of the Minor Prophets. He perceived it, as did I imagine many of our ancestors, that these natural phenomena were signs from Heaven. God telling us something.
I have never been very knowledgeable about astronomy, but I enjoy a clear summer night when you can see the stars well as much as anyone. And since it has been popping up in my newsfeed a lot over the past few weeks, I’ve intently viewed all the photographs of Saturn, and its rings, that the spacecraft Cassini sent back to Earth as it completed its 20 year voyage to and around Saturn. It is amazing to think that human technology has taken us out into the heavens as far as they have.
I am sure you all know the somewhat bizarre story that comes right in the beginning of the Torah referred to as the Tower of Babel. It is the story of the People of Bavel who settled in the plains of Shinar building a city with a tower that reaches the heavens. As the story goes…God came down to see the tower…a small but defeating point in and of itself…no matter how high humans reach…God has to come down to see our works. Those people in the story thought they could build access to the heavens…to God on high…to use their own human technology to reach God on his throne…and perhaps even to surpass it. In the end they were punished as God sent them each to their own corner of the world and gave them different ways of speaking so they could not communicate one with another. A world where people cannot communicate is a world where such a tower that surpasses God’s greatness can’t ever be built.
We can relate on some level. We live in a world where people have difficulty communicating literally and figuratively. Yet our eyes are drawn up. Thousands of years later, we still want to build higher and higher to see what is out there.
I am not saying, in any manner, that NASA, or anyone who is an avid follower of our space program, is sinning or trying to supplant God’s throne. But it is striking how we are drawn out there to the skies and beyond. There is an irony in it all…Our attempts to build to eternity…God coming down to view the Tower. And we both miss each other.
The Biblical images are also striking. Our Creation story depicts the miracle of the first Day. It was then that God brought the earth out of the depths of the water…imagine separating the primordial waters to make space for our world...like a bubble. A big fragile bubble. The word for heaven in Hebrew…shamaim…perhaps a compound word for sham-mayim - “there is water.” And then somewhere beyond the water is God’s throne.
The Rainbow is also a significant Biblical image. The Torah described it as a sign of the Covenant between God and Noah that the world would never be flooded again. The rabbis argue about whether the rainbow is actually a sign of war or peace because it is a bow…the shape of a weapon. They conclude that it is a sign of peace because if God placed it there, with the bow pointing away from us, arrows shot from it can’t harm us. We even have a blessing for when we see a rainbow, “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech HaOlam Zocheir et ha Brit. Blessed are you Adonai, Ruler of the World, Who remembers the Covenant.”
And so we sit here on Yom Kippur because WE remember the Covenant. We gather here in prayer…at a time when these images are the strongest in our liturgy and perhaps in our minds…we sit here ready to renew that Covenant and to do our part.
Where the people who built the Tower of Babel missed the mark, was not in their building or expanding or exploring. It was not that they were arrogant in their ability to create. It was that they were just spending too much time and energy on it. If it was God they were trying to find…they were looking in the wrong place.
Perhaps we too spend too much of our religious energy on God. Maybe it is Judaism’s emphasis on God that actually pushes us away…it’s that emphasis on our scriptural images makes some of us to feel as if these stories need to be understood as literal events…we know that kind of pressure pushes some literally away from our community. And maybe it prevents others from having a meaningful relationship to our traditions which on the surface do sometimes seem to direct our gaze to the heavens rather than toward ourselves and the world we live in.
In his 2016 book, “Putting God Second,” Orthodox Rabbi Donniel Hartman expresses what perhaps generations of Jews have been nervous about saying out loud. That we have been focusing too much on what is out there, rather than what is in here. The subtitle to his book is even more provocative, “How to save Religion from itself.” Perhaps he is suggesting that we can save ourselves if we adjust our focus.
I don’t know Rabbi Hartman, but I have read almost everything he has published. And I know many who have had the opportunity to study under him at Jerusalem’s pluralistic Hartman Institute. He is one of the great rabbinic leaders of our time. I tell you this, because I want you to understand this is not a man who is trying to take down religion. He is in fact trying to do the opposite. He believes deeply that Judaism, like with many religions, has allowed an obsession with God to take precedence over the ethical imperative that Judaism teaches.
In a recent interview, he shared, “I’m not saying act like an atheist and get rid of God. I’m not saying put God 14th. I’m saying put God second. Second is not bad. I think God wants to be second. God didn’t come into this world for self-aggrandizement. It was in order to create a different type of human being, in order to elevate this world.”
So let’s turn our telescopes on ourselves. Let’s build ourselves up. There is so much going on in the world. Let’s just take this time and work on us. Let’s not worry so much about God. Let’s just do what Yom Kippur demands.
And perhaps we can unlock the mystery of where God is…by looking inside. I know we all have theological differences. I am not trying to define a new theology…In our community there is such diverse belief. And there is room to have different understandings. Some believe that God literally forgives. Other see God in how we forgive each other.
I am also not suggesting that we are bad people. Yom Kippur assumes the goodness in each of us. But it also assumes that we can all do better. We all need Yom Kippur. We all need THIS Yom Kippur.
The Rabbis of our tradition saw Yom Kippur as a great and holy day…they linked it with the day when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai the second time after he broke the tablets in anger when the Israelites built the Golden Calf…this time he came down with those second tablets that represent an eternal second chance.
Perfect Righteousness may be beyond human reach. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reach for it. There are many images associated with this day, the Sabbath of all Sabbaths that can touch us regardless of how you understand God’s presence in the world. In the book of Ezekiel we are reminded by the words of the prophet, “I will remove your heart of stone and I will give you a heart of flesh.” Pharaoh’s hardened heart represents his unwillingness to try a new way. It is that hardened heart that separates us from each other.
Yom Kippur is about us. The words of our liturgy remind us that Yom Kippur can’t atone for our transgressions against God until we have forgiven one another the transgressions between us.
Rabbi Naomi Levy writes, “So perhaps this is a good time to hear your soul asking you: ‘What are you running from? What are you afraid of?” And perhaps this is the right moment for each one of us to ask ourselves, whose heart is hardened against me? And whom is my heart hardened against?’”
The machzor doesn’t promise that making teshuva is easy. It does however suggest that it is necessary. But not easy. This is soul work. It isn’t magic. Maybe it would be easier if it was magic…that we could just come together and utter a prayer…and poof…we are whole again. It is much harder than magic. It is a difficult labor to look deep inside oneself and admit we have work to do.
In one of the introductory essays at the beginning of the machzor, my teacher Dr. Richard Sarason reminds us that the Rabbis used a singular word for this day. Yoma. The Day. He states that it is the “most important day of the year. We move from the depths to the heights, from anxiety to reassurance and reconciliation, wiping clean once again the tarnished slates of our lives as we enter upon a new year with renewed hopes for the future. We go through stages of sin, confession, repentance and finally forgiveness.”
I think we can hear these same timeless ideas in the song Dan Nichols taught us two weeks ago when he was our musician in residence. “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten, you’ll be who you’ve always been. You’ll go where you’ve always gone. “*
It’s our own actions that will lead us to some place new…some place better. In the past year, were we bold enough? Were we generous enough? Put any adjective in there that is right for you…inclusive and welcoming enough…kind enough. Was I myself enough?
When we look at that rainbow and Praise God for remembering the Brit…may we remember it too…may we remember our part of the deal. When we gaze out there…let’s us remember to pay attention to what’s in here too. As we build…may we go from the depths to the greatest heights in who we are as a People and in who we each are as individuals.
And no matter what you understand God to be, I am pretty certain, as certain as any of us can be, that God will forgive you for what you haven’t yet done right.
Psalm 118, Pitchu Li Sha’arei Tzedek Avo Vam odeh ya. Open the gates of** righteous for me that I may enter them and praise God. May we recognize on this Yom Kippur that we each carry a key in our souls that unlocks those gates.
And may we soar high and reach great heights in the year to come. And may your Yom Kippur experience be a meaningful and transformative one.
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*Where You’ve Always Gone By Dan Nichols. From the CD The Sound of What Cannot Be Seen.
**Psalm 118:19