Sermon by Rabbi Michael Robinson
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L'shana Tovah Tikutevu. Today is the 56th time I have stood before a congregation on Rosh Hashanah morning. I began in Ligunier, Indiana as a second-year student at the Hebrew Union College with the president of the seminary, Dr.Julius Morgenstern, in the congregation; enough to make any neophyte nervous. His daughter was a member of the congregation. Dr. Morgenstern complimented me on my sermons and informed me that I had only made one mistake in my Hebrew. When reading the Avinu Malkenu, I had read Mashtin (urination) for Mastin (oppression). The only time I have missed this privilege since then was Rabbi Gittleman�s first Rosh Hashanah at Shomrei Torah when I stayed away for a year to give him a chance to be with you all without me in the way. Since then he has kindly extended to me the privilege of the pulpit on Rosh Hashanah morning every year. I love being able to be here and look out at all of you. I see so many of you I have come to love. Will it embarrass you if I tell you I love you? Love is what it is all about. Emily Dickinson wrote that, .I don�t know what love is, but I know that love is all there is.. I am encouraged by the presence of those of you I don�t yet know. I love you for being here, for enlarging our community, and for your bravery. It is a difficult time to show-up. It is so much easier to come on an ordinary Shabbat, if Shabbat can ever be ordinary, when the service is more accessible. I hope that you will try that too, and acknowledge that you really are part of this congregation. It is a holy privilege to face a kehilah kedoshah, a holy congregation, at this awesome time. I believe that every rabbi must question her or his worthiness to do so. I console myself with the prayerful wish that God might use even me for holy purposes. This is the miracle of God; all of us can affirm by word and deed that holiness is inherent in each of us and in the lived life of humankind. This Shabbat will be Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of Return, or Repentance. This and the Sabbath before Passover, Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath, were traditionally considered the most important Sabbaths of the year. Realistically, I know many of you will not be here for Shabbat Shuvah services, so I will quote here from the Haftarah, the second lesson, for the morning of Shabbath Shuvah, this coming Saturday morning, from the prophet Hosea, .Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God...take with you words and return to the Lord.. Take with you words and more words. On Yom Kippur it is a full day of words. We certainly come to these holyday services with many words, most of them not our own, but the words of the machzor, the prayer book. A few decades ago, the National Assn of Temple Brotherhoods conducted a survey of lay persons. response to the worship services. Not surprising, with all due respect to the rabbi, cantor and choir, the most valued part of the service was the silent prayer. Jews, this verbose people, actually preferred quiet in which to move inward over the words from the Bima. Silence belongs to each of us, not the rabbi or the cantor. Do you think a survey done today would produce different results? I doubt it. The most common questions I hear about holyday worship are about the words of the prayer book. Some words seem meaningless, others offensive, along with words that are probing and meant to get us in touch with our feelings and sometimes in touch with the better parts of our selves. I recommend, though this may be hearsay, not to focus on the words. Let them wash over you. Feel the presence of the generations before us who listened to the same words, worship with them at our sides. They had the same questions that we do; they were at times bothered by the same words that trouble us and at times by other words. And there were always those who were able to let the words wash over them; who repeated them like a mantra. For those of us for whom Hebrew is not the language of our speech and thought, it must have been easier when the service was all in Hebrew. A Jew came to his rabbi and said, "Rebbe you haven't seen me in shul for a long time, and I want you to know why." "Please tell me", was the response. "Well, I have to tell you, whenever I pray, I get a headache." "Of course", responded the rabbi, "You are praying with your head and not your heart." Is this anti-intellectual: A plea for Jews to ignore words and their meaning and merely to feel and not to think? I believe it would make all of our worship experience more profound if we would read all the words before we get here, especially on Yom Kippur, and note what bothers us and work it out if we can. We have to remember that the siddur or the machzor is not a technical manual. The language is connotative rather than designative. I have a close friend who tells me that he cannot stand all the "Praise the Lord" language in the service. We have to know that our language, the language of translation of the Bible and the prayer book, is all in Christian theological terminology. Praise is not a great translation for the Hebrew word "baruch" or "barchu", which comes from the Hebrew word berech which means "knee". A bracha is an acknowledgement of that which brings us to our knees in humility, awe and wonder. Are we too jaded to be brought to our knees. When you recite the Shechechyanu, do you have a sense of wonder that we, you and I, are here together for another Rosh Hashanah? I do. When I sit down to eat and recite the motzi, I feel overwhelming gratitude that I am eating food that, for the most part I didn�t grow, brought to me through an incredible chain of people who have placed it on the table in front of me, from the miners who dig the iron ore, to those who manufacture the combine that reaps the grain, and on and on, and this in a world where many of the people are inadequately fed. William James, in his seminal volume Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote that "All religion begins with a sense of wonder, or a b'racha, of being brought to our knees in awe." To recite b'rachot over and over is to affirm over and over the beauty, holiness, and possibilities inherent in life. Barchu says "yes" to life. Of the other words that get in our way, the most obvious on these holydays is the translation of the Hebrew word "Chet" as sin. Again, Christian theology, with its concept of being born in sin and of being sinners who must be redeemed, gets in our way. The Hebrew word Chet, originated with a marksman.s term. It is to "shoot an arrow and to miss the mark." The good marksman thinks about what went wrong; bad aim, too much tension, a tricky wind, and then takes another arrow out of the quiver and tries again. Repentance, tshuvah, is simply a refocusing, turning again to God, getting our life back on course. This implies that we are in control of how we live our lives, that we can make choices that determine the character of our lives. Of course that gust of wind is out of the marksman�s control, but how she responds inwardly and outwardly is within a person's control. Yes, it takes discipline and practice not to blame oneself or God. It is important to me to remember that YHVH, that unpronounceable name of God that we read as Adonai and the King James Bible transliterated as Jehovah and appears in the prayer book over and over as Lord, is part of the Hebrew verb "to be". It is the imperfect of the verb. The proper Hebrew translation, as I understand it, would be, "the continuous unfolding of being which flows through us and all other living things." You've all probably heard that old joke about the Buddhist hamburger order: "Make me one with everything." It doesn't have it quite right. I am already one with everything. The prayer, not the hamburger order, is to wake me up, raise my consciousness that I may be aware that you and I are one; that everything is one. Each Iraqi and each death diminishes me; each Palestinian and each Israeli death diminishes God. All are one with us. There is a paradox here. I am also a separate and discreet being. We are like the wave which separates itself from the vast sea. It makes its way to the shore, where it soon blends back into the sea again. So, you can�t feel my pain. Ultimately each of us lives in our own skin bag. But we are not impermeable. The oxygen I exhale as carbon dioxide is inspired by a tree which expels oxygen which ultimately you inspire. We are one again. I do not believe that we come here today to argue with the prayer book or the rabbi, but to find that dimension of ourselves that we sometimes lose, that dimension we call God. If you want to experience God's presence you have to prepare yourself. It takes deeds of loving kindness (gmilut hasadim), dedication and commitment (kavana), and we have to act in a certain way. The Shechinah is not easily won. S'forno, the great fifteenth-century Italian commentator wrote that, "God is the essence of all existence." We will have to wake-up. Jacob woke from his dream and declared that, "Surely God was in this place, v'ani, and I, I did not know it."
It is far beyond our words today which help to move us to lives of holiness. The hands that help, that feed the poor and clothe the naked, are at least as holy as the lips that pray. The late Dag Hamarjkold, Secretary General of the United Nations, a mystic himself, wrote that "In our age the road to holiness passes through the world of action." Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Polish rabbi and philosopher who was rescued by our seminary, the Hebrew Union College, said that the mystical experience is to turn to God while the prophetic experience is to turn to the human. During the Vietnam War he had an awakening and became aware that the life of the involved Jew could not be lived in an ivory tower refuge. He became one of the symbolic leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement. It was then that Heschel declared that all true prayer is subversive. It cannot merely affirm the status quo (which is Latin for the hell of a mess that we are in), but must question and challenge the institutions that maintain a war machine, that permit the vast inequitable distribution of the earth's resources which are the heritage of all humanity. Can we face God on Yom Kippur, without also facing the 43 million people in this richest of all nations who have no health insurance, those who have to choose between paying the rent and buying medications? We choose to believe all the rationalizations which do not disturb our comfortable lives--six of the largest pharmaceutical companies are primarily European-owned and charge much less for medication and we choose to believe that the high prices are necessary for research and ignore the incredible profits of the drug companies, except when buying their stocks. Can we face the homeless, who, according to the ordinance passed by the county board of supervisors, may not sleep in their cars anywhere in Sonoma County? I have worked with the homeless. I know that when people lose their housing, if they manage to hang on to their vehicles, they sleep in their cars because for many, they feel more like menschen and less like social problems than going into a shelter. It is illegal to be poor, to be homeless in this county. It was the poet Rilke who wrote that, "To be close to God we have to be where pain and hope meet. We have to be willing to experience the pain of those whose children are hungry, of the little boy, a war victim in Iraq, who said simply 'I'd like to have my arms back'; all those whose dreams dry up like a raisin in the sun" (Langston Hughes). Going to that place of pain, we reaffirm our determination to engage in tikun haolam-to work to change the world, to acknowledge the abuse of power and wealth, and pray our subversive prayer that we might work to reorder the structures of our society that we and others might have hope, and in the place where pain and hope intersect, that we may experience the God in us and in the world, the God who is the unfolding of the life force itself.
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