SECOND DAY ROSH HASHANAH 5765-2004
Our 14 year old daughter, Ariela, enjoys watching television shows or movies
with her parents. Often, many of the movies Ariela prefers are tolerable
to Sharon, but don’t have a prayer of being acceptable to me.
One exception is not a movie, but a television show that Sharon, Ariela and I watch together with regularity. The show centers around the life of a teenage girl whose name is Joan. That is one of the reasons why Ariela likes it so much. It also has another major character who is very important to me, and that is God.
The show tries to teach quite a bit about God; not so much about religion, at least not organized religion. That’s not as critical to the storyline and plot of each episode. This television series called “Joan of Arcadia,” fits into the modern-day classification of being spiritual without being connected to any specific religion.
Yes, “Joan of Arcadia” is broadcast on CBS every Friday night at 8:00 P.M. I don’t watch it live – you know where I am at that time! Rather, we record it and watch it at a later time, most usually, to be honest, after I get home from synagogue.
Sharon, Ariela and I spend the rest of the evening together watching the show
and then discussing it thereafter.
(Rebecca’s not into this show at all.)
Let me tell you a little bit about the television series. Arcadia is a small city, where, Joan attends Arcadia High School. She is the middle child in a family that includes her mother who subsequently becomes an art teacher in the same high school, her father, who is the Chief of Police, an older brother played by the late John Ritter’s son, Jason Ritter, and a younger brother.
This older brother brings to the show the disability of being a paraplegic due to a car accident that occurred prior to the first episode of the series. In other words, we only get to know him after this accident. But we learn that when he was in high school, the older brother was the cool school jock. This is in contrast to Joan’s younger brother (name) who is the geek, the computer nerd, and who is also a student in this very same high school.
Quite interestingly, Joan’s parents were both raised as Catholics and have essentially become non-believers. Joan’s father has very little, if any, tolerance for organized religion and looks with disdain upon any conversation his wife even accidentally has with a local priest.
In other words, Joan’s parents have not guided the children toward religion in any discernible way. There are no worship patterns in the family. There is no religious instruction. Joan’s family is the thoroughly modern secular suburban family with three children in high school. They are smart, they are together, they are with it. The parents are caring, supportive, helpful, yet religion and God are not in any way part of their regular lives.
By the way, a very interesting aside that appears occasionally in some of the episodes is that Joan’s new best female friend, an avant-garde young teenage girl who is not exactly with the most hip and together popular crowd in the school, is a young girl named Grace. In other words, literally, Joan is drawn to Grace, who happens to be the daughter of the local rabbi, although you would never know it by looking at her (don’t tell my daughters I said that).
We did not know this when we were first drawn to the show. That was just an extra ironic curiosity that obviously makes the show even more appealing to us. Even more amazing to us is that we learn in a later episode that Grace, get this, never even had a Bat Mitzvah, and she is a somewhat rebellious teenager. Whoever heard of such a thing? A rabbi with teenage daughters who are rebellious?
Well, in the opening episode of the show, suddenly one night, God chooses to speak to Joan. How does God appear to Joan – first, just through voice while she’s asleep. Later, God appears in human form, and the very first human form is that of a hot, young, very good-looking older teenage male.
Eventually, Joan gets to the point of asking God, “What do you want from me?” And God responds, “I need you to do a few errands.”
And so God begins to tell Joan exactly what to do, not why, but what! God charges Joan with various missions, and often Joan can’t figure out why or how any of this relates to her. One week she’s told to work at a bookstore. The next week she’s told to join the chess club. The next week she’s told to join the debate team.
Often Joan resents these requests because she has no interest in many of these activities. She reacts with anger and challenges God.
I’m impressed with God in the show. I happen to be impressed with God in real life, too, by the way.
In this show, God accepts Joan’s anger, has a sense of humor, and doesn’t always expect Joan to succeed in fulfilling the instructions upon first command.
It sometimes takes Joan a while to get it, to obey, but when she does, usually something worthwhile happens to her, or to others, or both.
Now, Joan is afraid to tell anyone about these experiences, these revelations. Only at the very end of the first season does Joan’s mother, who seems to have some religious tendencies of her own, begin to realize that there is something different going on with her daughter.
In the last episode of the season, Joan becomes ill and when Joan struggles with her illness and seeks God, that is when unfortunately God seems nowhere in sight, or in sound. Joan feels abandoned. When Joan is hospitalized and seems very confused, she begins to disclose to her boyfriend, whose name is Adam, that indeed she sees and speaks with God.
Adam asks incredulously, “You mean in your dreams?”
“No, in every day real life.”
“You mean you imagine that God is talking to you?”
Joan responds, “No, God is really talking to me.” And she explains a little bit more about her experiences.
Adam looks at her with pity and concern. He tells her, yes, she’s really sick and soon she will be better.
Shortly thereafter Joan does start to feel better, and now she is thoroughly worried that what she has disclosed of her vision of God may frighten Adam, so she recants her testimonial and says, “God doesn’t exist – there is no God.” And that’s how season one of this show ends. I can’t wait for next season’s opening episode.
Now I’m going to tell you a joke, a joke I’ve shared with the congregation very often in the past. Usually I tell this joke around the time of Passover. So I imagine you’ve heard it before, and if you have, I apologize in advance for repeating it. I do so because the point of the joke is critical to the message I wish to share with you today.
A young boy comes home from Hebrew school. He’s sitting at dinner with his parents.
As is customary, his father asks the boy, “So what did you learn in Hebrew school today?”
The young boy answers, as you might expect, “Nothing!”
The father says, “C’mon, you were there for two hours, you must have learned something. Tell me what the teacher told you in class.”
The boy said, “Okay, here’s what I learned today – we learned how Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt.”
The father said, “Okay, tell me, how did Moses lead the Jewish people out of Egypt?”
The boy continues, “Well, Pharaoh finally decided to let the Jewish people go free so they started running toward the sea. After they leave, Pharaoh changed his mind and decided he wanted them back as slaves. The Israelites get to the sea and they have a big problem – the water is in front of them and the Egyptians are behind them. They turn to Moses and ask for help.
Moses said, ‘Don’t worry, I grew up in Pharaoh’s palace and I went to engineering school. We specialized in learning how to build bridges quickly. Come with me and I will show you how to build a bridge over the water so we’ll be able to cross to the other side.’
So Moses quickly instructs some of the Israelites to build a bridge. They do so and the Israelites scamper over the Red Sea. Moses turns to the Israelites and says, ‘Now watch this.’
He tells them that in Egypt he became an expert in explosives and so after crossing the bridge, he detonated the bridge with dynamite. Moses waits for the Egyptians to begin crossing the bridge, and at the exact precise moment, sets off the explosives to send the Egyptian soldiers flying into the air. They fall into the sea and drown. The Israelites are free and begin to sing songs of praise to God.”
The father’s eyes are bulging out at the boy. He turns to him and says, “Son, is that what they taught you in Hebrew school today?”
The son responds, “Dad, if I told you what they taught me in Hebrew school today, you’d never believe it.”
This lesson, the lesson of the joke, and the lesson of the television series, “Joan of Arcadia,” is, I think, one and the same.
People just don’t want to believe us, or trust us fully, when we say that God directs our lives. People look at us with suspicion, if not worry and concern, when we say that we hear God’s voice or that God speaks to us directly, or even more so, that God appears to us in some form or another.
There is a book I read this summer. It came recommended to me by our congregant Barbara Cohen. The name of the book is The Life of Pi and the author is a Canadian writer named Yann Martel. I recommend the book and I think it also shares the same lesson about belief in God.
The back of the paperback edition of the book Life of Pi tells us the following, so that by reading this I’m not giving away any of the story that you wouldn’t know already anyway -
“Pi Patel, a God-loving boy and the son of a zoo keeper, has a fervent love of stories and practices not only of his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is 16, his family and their zoo animals emigrate from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship. Alas, this ship sinks – and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi. Can Pi and the tiger find their way to land? Can Pi’s fear, knowledge, and cunning keep him alive until they do? “
Basically, Joan, the boy in Hebrew school, Pi, and all of us have the same challenge – do we live our lives looking for God, seeing God, finding God, experiencing God in everything that we do, or do we prefer to ignore God?
And, is one of the reasons we ignore God simply because were we to share our thoughts, feelings and ideas about God with others, no one would believe us, just like no one will believe Joan, the boy from Hebrew school, or Pi.
By the way, Pi’s family, his parents and his older brother aren’t into religion at all. That he shares with Joan of Arcadia, and with someone else about whom we read this morning and yesterday.
The main characters of the Torah readings on Rosh Hashanah, and the very first and almost unsurpassed main characters in Judaism are of course Abraham and Sarah.
While there are many legends that Abraham’s father was an idol maker, the Bible, the Torah tells us nothing about Abraham and Sarah’s family, other than some of their family members’ names.
What we do learn is that Abraham and Sarah break away from their family and leave their parents’ home because they understand the world differently.
They believe in God, the God Who calls to them and tells them specifically to do something that they might otherwise not do, namely, go to a different land and make that land their home.
They understand that this God cares about other people and not just them.
They understand that this God cares about the poor, the abused, the abandoned.
They understand that this God will eventually not permit slavery and subjugation of human beings, but that this lesson will take a long time to promote and to truly be learned by humanity.
They understand that their lives make much more sense, when their lives are connected to a belief in God.
That’s what’s happening to Joan in the television series, “Joan of Arcadia.”
That may be what’s happening to the little boy in the joke I love to tell.
That is clearly what happens to Pi in the book Life of Pi.
And that is supposed to be what happens to each one of us year after year as we move through the years that God grants us in our lives.
Am I, are you, are we, like Joan, like the Hebrew school student, like Pi, like Abraham and Sarah?
Are we able to admit that we need to see God in our lives for the world to make more sense, better sense, ultimate sense?
Or, are all of us just going through the motions of living out our schedules and performing our tasks without any overarching sense of purpose and meaning?
Joan of Arcadia, Pi of India and Canada, Abraham and Sarah of Haran and the promised land of Israel, all decided, and apparently with good reason, that their lives made more sense, certainly was much more interesting and meaningful with God than without God.
Joan, Pi, Abraham and Sarah, all have the ability to ignore and reject God, but they all sense and feel God’s presence so strongly that they are compelled to follow God’s word, even when they don’t want to.
If you don’t feel that in your lives, so be it. But I have the strong suspicion that many of you feel exactly that.
You need to know you’re not alone.
You need to know there is clearly a Jewish way of recognizing that call and bringing God into your lives.
You need to know that it has everything to do with hearing God, and from our perspective, not so much to do with seeing God in some human form.
There has been much attention paid to the missionary efforts of Jews for Jesus which began a month ago and will conclude in just a couple of days.
If you remember, last year I read a letter written to me by a local Jew for Jesus who also claimed that he grew up in a Conservative synagogue and found religion through this mutated form of Judaism, which of course is no Judaism whatsoever.
The timing of this missionary campaign is absolutely deliberate, purposeful and brilliant. Those who organized it knew that virtually all rabbis in our Washington area would address the issue on the high holidays unless something much more newsworthy or disastrous were to occur, like what happened on September 11, 2001.
They wanted nothing more than every rabbi to bring attention to them. Perhaps curiosity would be raised if they received attention when more Jews are in synagogue than at any other time of the year.
Success is often just determined by playing the numbers correctly, and the numbers are always in our favor more on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur than at any other time of the year. They know that too.
And I will also tell you that the best way to combat their efforts is to understand what Judaism has to say about God.
That’s why in my recent newsletter article I asked you to take the Belief-o-matic quiz. Obviously this is not a foolproof method of investigating your religious belief, but at least it gets you thinking about it. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, in the last newsletter I suggested that congregants complete an on-line religious belief questionnaire. Your response to certain questions would determine with which religion your beliefs are most compatible.
When I did so, the results were somewhat surprising. There were two possible Jewish categories: Reform Judaism and Orthodox Judaism. While I am pleased to tell you that Reform Judaism was my number two religion, and Orthodox Judaism was number three, I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that number one was Sikhism. Actually, it makes me feel a little sikh, but only a little. Obviously, Jewish beliefs are central to my belief system, as indicated by the results of this test.
The more comfortable we are in our own beliefs, in our own practices, in our own religion, the less likely we are to be susceptible to threats from the outside, even well disguised threats.
Long ago our tradition taught us this following idea and principle, which, if you will remember, if you act upon it, I know that you will have a much more worthwhile and blessed year in 5765.
And that is, much more important than how we, the Jewish people, see God in our lives, is how we, the Jewish people, as individuals, and as a Jewish community, are seen by God.
We are a community that really emphasizes hearing God’s word, Shema Yisrael – Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
God spoke to Abraham and Sarah and they listened. God spoke to Moses and he listened. God speaks to each and every one of us. Can we hear God and will we listen?
These are really much more authentic Jewish questions of theology than the question of whether or not we can see God.
God’s voice is audible, but the appearance of God is generally defined to be invisible in Judaism and for good reason.
We have learned in our history that worrying too much about what God looks like, and how we might be able to see God, removes us from the more important responsibility of worrying about how we appear before God.
I’m like everyone else. I want to see God. But as a Jew, I know that ultimately it is impossible in any concrete form.
Therefore what I must do, what we must do, is find ways to make ourselves more visible to God and build a relationship from that perspective. That is the dominant theology in Judaism, and that is how we differ from most other religions, especially Christianity.
The rabbis of the Talmud bring this issue of the ability/or inability to see
God to the forefront in the following discussion: in the Torah portion Re’eh
it states, “
- follow the Lord your God.”
The Talmudic rabbis asked, “What does this mean? How is it possible for a human being to follow God’s presence?”
We even have trouble writing God’s name let alone being able to see God in this world.
We all know that we are careful not to take the Lord’s name in vain.
Stand-up comic Jaffe Cohen jokes about how a Jew on the television show “Wheel
of Fortune” would attempt to purchase a vowel for the middle letter for
God, as some Jews spell it G-d.
First I’d like a G, then I’d like …uh…
This is really a code question for the question I’ve been talking about this morning, and that is, how do we see God in this world?
The rabbis tells us the verse means “to teach us that we should follow
the attributes of the Holy One, praised be God.”
God clothes the naked, as it written: “And the Lord God made for Adam
and his wife garments of skin, and God clothed them.” Similarly, we
should provide for those in need.
God visited the sick, as it is written: “The Lord appeared to Abraham
by the terebinths of Mamre” (when Abraham was recovering from circumcision).
We too, should visit the sick.
God comforted mourners, as it written: “After the death of Abraham, God blessed his son Isaac.” We should comfort mourners.
God buried the dead, as it is written: “God buried him (Moses) in the valley.” We should follow the Divine example and bury the dead.
As Rabbi Bernard Raskas wrote many years ago, “the point of this remarkable talmudic passage is that through simple every day acts of kindness we can ‘follow the ways of God’ and prove that we are indeed made in God’s image. This message is constantly underscored in our liturgy and our sacred texts.”
In other words, the way to see God is to find ways to be seen by God.
Bad things happen to us when we try to see God – remember that golden calf, it wasn’t a pretty situation. It was so horrendous that sometimes when we read that story we don’t even read the whole plot. We leave out the worst parts on fast days. That’s the only time in the year that we are allowed to read a Torah portion and skip a section from the middle.
The people want to see God – that’s why they make a golden calf.
Moses thinks that if they can just have a better understanding of what God looks like, then there won’t be any golden calf incidents in the future.
God says, “It doesn’t work that way, and it has nothing to do with your ability or how smart you are. You are among my children, and I’m just like any other parent, all my children are geniuses. You can’t see Me because it’s impossible. I have no form or no shape.”
And yet, God tells Moses, “However, let Me teach you the following: Stay here in this cave while I pass by, and then take a look. You won’t be able to see My face, but you’ll see my back.”
Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the interpretive commentary to the Torah portions found in Etz Hayim Humash, quotes the 19th Century rabbinic sage, the Hatam Sofer in answering the question, “What does it mean that a human being cannot see God’s face – but can see God’s back?”
We learn that we cannot see God directly; we can only see the difference that God has made after the fact. We can recognize God’s reality by seeing the difference God has made in people’s lives.
Joan sees the face of God, but more than that, she sees the reality of God in her life as she works to help improve and better the lives of the many people around her.
Pi has the same understanding of God from his own experiences, but there I don’t want to tell you more about it because you should read the book.
I’m told that no scientist has actually ever seen an electron. I’m also told that no physicist has ever seen a quark. Yet they are convinced that these phenomena exist because too much cannot be explained adequately without their existence.
So it is with God. We don’t actually see God, but too much in the world seems to be happening and is dependent upon the belief in the existence of God.
Rabbi Kushner writes –
“In much the same way, none of us has ever seen fear or anger or love. We have seen people acting out of fear, out of anger, out of love. We have seen fear, anger and love make people do things and we have no doubts that those feelings are real.”
When a doctor saves a life through surgery or cures an illness with antibiotics she is entitled to feel that she has seen the hand of God at work.
When a person is ashamed of himself for something he has done and is afraid that people will shun him but he discovers there is forgiveness in the world, or when he finds the power within himself to love people close to him who have disappointed him, he can feel that he has met God in his life, not God’s face, but God’s back.
God has made something happen, because forgiveness doesn’t come naturally to people. We can forgive and we can love only when God stirs our souls.
Why are Abraham and Sarah selected to hear God’s voice and to be charged with God’s command to fulfill God’s mission?
Yes indeed they are wonderful people, but you know if you really stop to think about it, the Torah doesn’t tell us they’re wonderful people until after they hear God’s voice, until after they begin to hear what God wants them to do, until after they begin to fulfill what God wants them to do.
Then they become great, wonderful, special, holy, righteous people and they are described as such in the Torah, but not before they hear God and not before they do God’s will.
So it is with Joan in the television show “Joan of Arcadia.” There’s no sense as to what’s special about her. She is an average, pretty, fairly typical teenage high school girl. Why does she get to hear God’s voice, and why does she get to see God’s face? She doesn’t know why, and neither do we.
But what is clearly evident is that once she listens to God’s word and follows God’s commandment, her life is different, her life is better, her sense of identity is stronger. She becomes a regular, ordinary person who is performing extraordinary acts, not only to help her, but most often to help others.
And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, we know that the best way, the Jewish way, to see God is to see the things God would want us to do. We know that much more important than seeing God is to be seen by God, to be noticed by God and to have others who see our activities realize that there is holiness, a connection to God in what we do to help others, and also to thereby help ourselves.
There is a most beautiful paragraph recited within the first two minutes of every single daily service that reminds us of this priority – the priority not so much to look for God during the day, but to look for ways in which God can find us, and see us.
Begin each and every day by taking these words to heart and you will have a good day.
Begin this New Year by taking these words to heart and remember them each and every day and you will have many good days in 5765. You will end up, I feel confident, with a very good year indeed.
May we feel at home with Your Torah and cling to Your mitzvot.
Keep us from error, from sin and transgression.
Bring us not to trial or to disgrace. Let no evil impulse control us.
Keep us far from wicked people and corrupt companions.
Strengthen our desire to do good deeds; teach us humility that we may serve You.
May we find grace, love, and compassion in Your sight and in the sight of all who look upon us, this day and every day.
Grant us a full measure of lovingkindness.
Praised are You, Lord, Who bestows lovingkindness upon God’s people
Israel.”
Shana Tova.