Congregation Beth El

When Jim Wallis published God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It three years ago, he sounded a call to “take back faith” – from the agendas of the far right (which defined issues of faith as almost exclusively in the realm of abortion or gay marriage) and the far left (which tended to be dismissive about any role that faith could play in a democratic political system). Wallis wrote about faith’s role in challenging both the right and the left from a consistently moral ground. And he has continued to speak about developing an agenda across party lines in support of giving real attention to core faith-based issues, such as health care for all, the obligation to treat the stranger with compassion and respect, worker’s rights, the problem of poverty, and the fact that the earth does not belong to us, that we are among its caretakers.

In this primary season, there is much excitement around the possibility of, if not greater unity, at least less fractiousness and divisiveness in this country. The key, I think, is in imagining not a watered-down middle ground, where every issue feels compromised, but a legitimate collection of voices that are primarily and fundamentally concerned with social justice issues. This image of a collective body responding to the call to respect and work for real human rights is the prophetic voice in action. Wallis wrote that moral values can either be wedges that drive us further apart, or can be precisely that which unites us and leads us to higher ground. “Family values” has too often become a vague ideological term, when it should be about the day to day work of protecting families, working to ensure a living wage, working to feed the hungry. Says Wallis: “Family values are about human beings, not ideologies.”

Religion doesn’t need progressive as an adjective. Religion is progressive when practiced deeply, with a whole and open heart. Rather than being part of the problem, religion (when it is practiced like this) can be the fertile ground from which we might prospect for solutions. The image of America divided into Red and Blue states is not as bandied about as it was four years ago, and I think there is authentic hope that unity can be more than just a campaign slogan if it emerges organically and rallies around a re-appropriated “faith-based” agenda.

Nicholas Kristof just wrote a piece in the Times that says the age of the religious right is passing and that issues of social justice are again taking precedence in evangelical communities. Wallis is quoted as saying that half the white evangelical vote is up for grabs this election season, and that evangelicals are voting more on issues like poverty, which a CBS News poll found was at the top of the list as to what informed their voting choices.

Illinois Senator Barak Obama gave an address a couple of years ago that has stayed with me, in which he talks about why religion is dangerous to democracy and why it is also essential. He argued that, as non-fundamentalists we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse: “when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends. Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause…[But] democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values.”

There is an unmistakable energy this primary season, which I think is reflecting one of those moments in time when the possibility for real change is apparent. It is a movement away from a politics of cynicism, fear, or scarcity, and towards abundance, towards the possibility of real alliance. When faith enters the realm of the political, it only works when it reminds us that what we are ultimately serving is not our own parochial agendas, or party ends, or more power, but something larger than ourselves that we are included in. It is possible that Wallis’ call to action has not fallen on deaf ears.

It’s not quite mud season here in Vermont – we have a couple of months to go, hopefully. But you can never start getting ready for mud season too soon. There’s a wonderful Robert Frost poem, “Two Tramps at Mudtime,” which describes two tramps happening upon the poet as he is chopping wood, and requesting that they be hired to do his task because they are in need of pay. He is reluctant to give it up, but comes to see that their desire – to work because of genuine need - is greater than his, which is to work because of love: And he longs for his work, and perhaps work in general, to be driven from a place of need and love.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

The Torah is perhaps the place where, at least ideally, our avocation and our vocation come together, our love and our work, and this past week we read about the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, the giving of the Ten Commandments. Now, it says in many places that the whole world was created for the sake of the Torah; that, in other words, everything that had previously transpired in the history of humankind was only to bring us to this place where there could be an intimate encounter between God and humanity, represented here by Israel. But it took a while to get to this point, right? To go back to the story of Noah, God regretted ever making humanity; God looked down and saw muddiness, the messiness of being human – being hurt, hurting others, otherwise behaving badly - and sent a flood to wipe it all out. It wasn’t worth it – having to endure this muddiness to get to a place of intimacy in the future. But after the flood, to keep using this imagery, God probably looked down and saw even more muddiness, literally and metaphorically. Humans couldn’t really change, but God saw that they tried hard – so God’s heart opened and God said, I’ll never destroy again. Despite the perpetual muddiness. In fact maybe seeing the muddiness again taught God that it wasn’t the muddiness that was the problem, it was God’s response to the muddiness.

So what does all this mud have to do with the giving of Torah this past week? There’s a wonderful midrash from a verse in Shir HaShirim that describes Israel as a lily among thorns. The midrash plays with this verse a bit, and says that even many generations after the flood, God again looked down on humanity and saw – and this is a wonderful image - “muddy water within muddy water.” God again wanted to order the world destroyed, but then God caught sight of Israel, a lily growing up out of the mud, and God breathed it’s fragrance, and decided not only to spare the world, but to give the Ten Commandments, to give the Torah. To reach out in what we talk about as the greatest act of intimacy in the Jewish imagination – the giving of the Torah.

A meditation teacher of mine, Reb Anderson, once said that this is our work: to live in the mud, and to live skillfully. If we embrace mud season best we can, if we live this way, where our heart is opened by the muddiness of the human condition and not moved to anger and destruction, then a lily can grow out of this mud. Not in spite of the mud but because of it. The lily – Israel – doesn’t grow in spite of the mud, but out of it. And when this happened in our Torah portion this week, God smelled the fragrance, and was pleased, and gave the gift of intimacy, of the Torah. So this teaches us to not try to escape the mud, but to go towards it, to go further into this world, because that is where the lilies are. And our spiritual traditions, in Judaism, the Torah, help us to cultivate lilies in the midst of the mud. And when we are really living a life of Torah, to return to the Frost poem, maybe we are living a life where love and need are one. Where our work is our love and our love is our work. Something that we sometimes only realize in mud season, even if mud season is still a few months away.

We are all familiar with the opening creation story in Genesis. God says, let there be light, and there was light. But eleven verses later on the fourth day, the text says that God created lights in the sky - the sun and the moon - to tell time by. When we stop to consider this, we might ask: if the sun and moon were created later, then what was that first light? One tradition in Judaism says that first light created is the ‘hidden light:’ light that is stored up for us and that we can find only in those darkest moments of our lives. There are many verses in Psalms and the books of the Prophets about light rising out of the darkness, or about those who are walking in the darkness and come across a great light. The tradition says that this light is the first light in the creation story, and that strangely enough, it is only visible in times of great darkness.

Hanukah and Christmas are descendents of the winter solstice, the celebration that marked the longest night of the year (and the fact that each day afterwards there would be a little more light). As the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer, humans have banded together from time immemorial to celebrate light, and to pray for its return. Essentially, all the winter holidays are about this work: finding, creating, and recognizing light in the darkness. In our different faith traditions, we call this light by different names.

On Hanukah, which begins on the evening of December 4th, we light the menorah for eight nights, each night adding another candle, each night witnessing more radiance. The Hasidic teacher, the Sfat Emet, writes that the light that the Hanukah candles give off is precisely the hidden light from the first day of creation, the light that shines only from within the great darkness, when we need it most.

The Jewish tradition has long argued about what the true miracle on Hanukah actually was: the oil lasting eight nights when it was supposed to only last for one, or the Maccabees and their successful revolution against their Syrian-Greek occupiers. Perhaps another way of describing the miracle of Hanukah is like this: when one candle lights another, the light from that first candle is not diminished - there is simply more light. My teacher, Norman Fischer, has said that we are in the candle-lighting business; meaning that we are put here to give light to each other. When we give to another, it does not diminish our light, but makes the overall light more brilliant.

This holiday season, one way of being in the candle-lighting business is supporting the Interfaith Council’s Food and Fuel Fund, which provides basic support to those in our Bennington community who most need it. You can send a donation to the Fund c/o Congregation Beth El on 107 Adams Street – and you can also go to hear Rabbi and Stand-up comedian Bob Alpert perform a benefit for the Food and Fuel Fund on Sunday, December 16th at the Mack Performing Arts Center at the Arlington Memorial High School. And finally, we are having our annual Hanukah party at Congregation Beth El on Friday, December 7th at 6pm featuring the Wholesale Klezmer Band, which the whole Bennington community is invited to.

When I lived in Jerusalem years ago, I heard the story told at a Shabbat dinner, of a young Jewish couple, Sarah and David, who had taken time off from college to travel together to an ashram in India, where they lived for a year. I think the story goes that the couple broke up towards the end of the year, and Sarah left to return to the States. There she got interested in Judaism, and first visited, then later moved to Jerusalem. She and David did not keep in touch. For years, she lived in a women’s yeshiva, where the students study ancient Jewish texts, and though she went out on dates, she never met someone who felt right for her. Then one day, she found a wallet on the ground and because she learned in yeshiva, she knew that Jewish law obliges you to return a lost object, no matter what it takes. So she found an address in the wallet and set out to return it. When she walked into the apartment, she saw David there. He had also moved to Jerusalem a few years after she did. They fell back in love of course, married, and, as our host who was telling the story said, “they live right around the corner down the street! You can go there for Shabbat dinner next week…”
It’s a romantic story, but it hinges on a very practical element: the return of the lost wallet. There is a big distinction between Jewish law and common law when it comes to the issue of lost objects. Common law generally doesn’t put any duties on us to protect the property of strangers; you can see someone’s lost property and just walk right on by. The finder can do whatever she wants including keeping the object or choosing not to pick it up. By contrast, Jewish law requires that one who sees a lost object is duty-bound to pick it up and return it, and if the person they’re returning it to is not there, then they need to bring it home and care for it, and wait until the owner comes home. The origin of this law is in the Torah:
If you see your fellow’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it; you must take it back to your fellow. If your fellow does not live near you or you do not know who he is, you shall bring it home and it shall remain with you until your fellow claims it; then you shall give it back to him. You shall do the same with his ass; you shall do the same with his garment; and so too shall you do with anything that your fellow loses and you find; you must not remain indifferent (Deuteronomy 22:1–3).
Rabbi Marc Wolf teaches that the rabbis of the later eras took this commandment even farther: restoring lost property involves actively engaging ourselves in the return. He shares this ancient rabbinic teaching:
When Rabbi Pinhas ben Yair was living in city of the south, some men came there to work. They had two measures of barley they left with him which they forgot when they went away. Rabbi Pinhas ben Yair sowed the barley year after year and harvested it and stored it. After seven years the men returned and when Rabbi Pinhas ben Yair recognized them, he said to them, ‘Come take your storehouses full of grain.’ From the faithfulness of Man you can learn the faithfulness of God (Deuteronomy Rabbah 3:3).
So not only did Rabbi Pinchas keep the barley for them faithfully, he ‘invested’ it for them, and reminded them to come collect it. There are many stories about crazy rabbis running after people who tried to throw something out, trying to return it to them. People take this commandment very seriously. Jewish tradition devotes pages and pages to the fine points of returning lost things: is it just any object you see, from what point does one become a finder, what if there are no identifying marks, etc.
Rabbi Wolf connects this zealousness for returning lost objects to this time in the calendar of preparing for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the holiest time of the year in our tradition. It is in this preparatory period where we do soul-searching about how we can treat others better, and how we can get back on the right path for each of us. The Hebrew term for this is teshuvah, which is usually translated as ‘repentance,’ but literally means ‘return.’ It is this time of year that we try to return ourselves to God. We are the lost objects in question.
In Jewish law, if the owner still holds out hope of finding something, then we must return it. There is a restorative passion in Judaism: so much of the tradition talks about return, restoration, and fixing of the world. Rebbe Nachman says that Judaism devotes so much time to the laws of finding lost objects, because that’s all we do in life. To be human is to be a finder of lost objects, both literally and figuratively. In this respect, we learn that we are all on the same team, as it were, in that we’re commanded to look out for one another. To quote the Torah, we must not remain indifferent.

The Jewish festival of Shavuot, which we celebrated this past week, commemorates when Moses and the Jewish people received the Torah on Mount Sinai. One of the customs of Shavuot, is to stay up all night studying Torah, as a way of not only honoring the revelation way back when, but also to remind ourselves that revelation is ongoing. There is still thunder on the mountain, and a great spiritual task for all of us, is to remember that, as our brothers and sisters in the UCC say, “God is still speaking.”

In thinking this year of the idea of ongoing revelation, I have found myself returning to the poetry of Stanley Kunitz, the late Poet Laureate, who recently died at the age of 100. When Rabbi Ira Stone was in Bennington recently, he spoke about Torah as that which paradoxically expresses in words what words cannot express. This is how Kunitz saw poetry. For him, words and language were revelation. He describes being a child growing up loving the sounds of words, and that he was particularly fortunate to live in a home with an unabridged dictionary. “I explored it every day for new words, and then I would go out into the woods behind our house and shout my latest discovery and listen to the words reverberate. I considered it my duty to give my new words to the elements, to scatter them. Even though language is so limited, it is still our bridge between the touchable and the untouchable. If any moment where we feel close to God is impossible to adequately describe, or is ineffable, we still, in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, have no choice but to “eff” about it. If Moses came down from Mount Sinai with holy words, it makes sense that prayer could take the form of us offering the words back. Kunitz shouting words into the woods is, in this way, a wonderfully Jewish image. After all, Judaism holds that the world was created through speech, and that revelation came in the form of words of fire.

Every Shavuot, Jewish communities come together and attempt to find their way back to Sinai. This involves leaving the familiar confines of what we imagine we know, and this is one reason why revelation is hard to bear. Again, Kunitz: “If the poem moved only through the familiar, it would be so relaxed that it would have no tension, no mystery, nothing that could even approximate revelation, which is the ultimate goal of the poem.” Revelation is also hard to bear because it asks us to be partners in a covenant of life, it asks us to be responsible. Kunitz writes that there are obligations when a poet writes a poem. It must speak the truth. It must reach towards another. And it must have a social sense. And so it is with revelation. Revelation is true if it leads to truth: if it brings us closer to one another, if it has a sense of obligation, if it helps people suffer a little less.

When Kunitz was dying, he spoke often about wanting to become language, to become the words themselves. “The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue.” In my bones, I feel that this is what the Torah is also trying to do. Maybe one way of looking at what happened on Mount Sinai is that Moses entered into the realm of the unspeakable, and came back with a great poem that we call the Torah. Even though it might not adequately capture what happened, it is our best human effort. On Shavuot, we explore these words, but we also do our best to speak our own words back.

March 7, 2007

I was moved by a recent interview I read with Katherine Jefferts Schori, who in November of 2006, became the first woman to become the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of America. Jefferts Schori is a pilot and a former oceanographer. The interview was on the topic of what it might mean for one to have faith.
“I don’t see faith as adhering to a list of propositions,” she says, “I understand faith more in the sense of faithfulness in relationship; I understand it in the root sense of both the Latin and the English word, that it is what you give your heart to.”
Often we equate faith with what we know to be true, but Jefferts Schori is reminding us that, at its root, faith is mysterious. It is the act of the heart being given, of the heart going out to another; and the giver does not necessarily know what will happen from that point on. That is why I think her equating faith with faithfulness in relationship is a model that illustrates this well. What does it mean to be faithful to another? It means, in the words of Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron, “learning to stay.” Learning to stay is learning to be present, the best we can moment to moment, to what is happening in our lives and relationships. Learning to stay perhaps could be defined as how Jefferts Schori defines faith later in the interview: “It requires vulnerability to say I will show up with my whole being and I will engage.”
The religious question we most often get hung up on is whether or not someone believes in God. For some reason, this has become an important question in our society. Rabbi Ira Stone has taught, “Whether or not you believe in God is not a Jewish question. A Jewish question is how true are you to your experience of God in the world.” Another way of putting this could be: how true are we to the sense of wonder we experience in our lives? Or how true are we to our ethical obligations to those around us? In this respect, belief in God is only as important as what we do with it, or where it inspires us to place our heart. Maybe faith is whatever moves us towards another.
The new age culture has spawned a whole new vocabulary about individual spiritual seeking and fulfillment. On balance, I think this is a useful vocabulary, because we know that each of us has our own path to walk. But it can also be a vocabulary that leaves us feeling isolated and alienated. Jefferts Schori reminds us that, “Judeo-Christian tradition has always said that wholeness, holiness, [and] salvation come in the midst of community - and the aberration is to say that I myself can understand, can just make my own decisions and go my own way.”
Judaism teaches that there is no such thing as individual redemption, that we are all inextricably tied to one another. If we’re going to make it, then we’re all going to make it. This is an ecological teaching as well, one that we’ve been painfully slow to realize. As a former biologist who studied squids and octopuses, Jefferts Schori is probably in a good position to be a religious leader in that she can see how ecologically and spiritually, we’re all in the same boat. Interfaith work in this respect isn’t a luxury, but a necessity; and the faith of not-knowing - that none of us knows for sure what the answers are - helps us to listen to one another’s religious traditions with an open mind.

March 3, 2007

Purim Tetsaveh Sermon

Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith, has been grabbing headlines these past few years by saying that, not only is there nothing worth salvaging about religion, but that it is irresponsible, intellectually dishonest, a colossal waste of time, and contributes to much of society’s problems today.

“Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago.”

And he goes after Judaism in particular -

“Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.”

Well, it’s obvious to me that Mr. Harris has not spent any time with this past week’s Torah portion, or he might want to rethink some of his views about the irrelevance of Judaism and religion in general. Oh, Judaism has nothing to teach our young minds today, does it Mr. Harris? Nothing to offer the world by way of solutions and a way out of our cultural malaise? I give you Exodus 29, verses 10-14, which, as luck would have it, I just happen to have with me here tonight. Listen, gentle readers, for what Judaism in action, and faith in action can truly look like. Tremble, Mr. Harris, in the face of truth that you cannot refute!

“Slaughter the bull before the Lord, at the entrance to the tent of meeting, and take some of the bull’s blood and put it on the horns of the altar with your finger; then pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar. Take all the fat that covers the entrails, the protuberance on the liver, and the two kidneys with the fat on them, and turn them into smoke upon the altar. The rest of the flesh of the bull, its hide, and its dung shall be put to the fire outside the camp; it is a sin offering.”

I could go on, but do I really need to? I mean, how clearly do they have to say it? They’re talking to us! The Bible is talking to us! These words ring as true today as when they were first written, and frankly, if this isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is.

First of all, this text is deeply personal for me, it’s almost autobiographical, if you will, kind of a soundtrack of my life. Just hearing these first words, “slaughter the bull before the Lord” instantly transports me back to my boyhood summers on the shores of Lake Champlain, and fills me with the first stirrings in my heart towards God. I can almost taste my Mother’s cornbread. When I hear, “take some of the bull’s blood, and put it on the horns of the altar” I remember first knowing that I wanted to work with orphans in the subcontinent, and I remember during a particularly dark period of my life, when I’d lost all bearing and direction as a disillusioned 23 year old, working as an artificial inseminator at a turkey plant in Des Moines, hearing that same verse again and remembering who I was, and I left the next week to go to Israel and help Palestinian single mothers with glaucoma bake marijuana brownies. I mean, have you ever heard a song and felt, that song was written for me? Well, that’s what Exodus 29 does for me: it pierces my armor and looks straight into my soul. And, on an even more personal note, I remember meeting Vanessa when we were both yeshiva students in Jerusalem, and first catching each other’s eye across the crowded house of study, just as the rosh yeshiva read, “the rest of the flesh of the bull, its hide, and its dung.” Our eyes locked and it was as if the room was flooded with light. At that moment, I knew that she was the woman for me.

But, lest you think this is purely a personal text - it’s not. Oh no. This is a text of universal import. One cannot stay silent in the face of this text.

The kidneys? They are the strangers who we shall not oppress. And the fat on these kidneys? This is the oppression that the strangers find themselves being oppressed in. A fatty oppression. A trans-fatty oppression. And so, to quote another verse from Exodus, “we should not boil them in their mother’s milk!” People, this is a song of freedom and human dignity. De-fat the kidneys! Demons be gone! Curdle your loins! Love the stranger! Wash his entrails and legs!

But what about the protuberance on the liver, you might ask? The aforementioned protuberance is the threat of rap music, the latest pox on our great land.

No. No - I don’t think that’s it.

Uh, the protuberance on the liver is the state of Israel, like a lily growing among thorns, a lily which will lead the other lilies to the light, a lily that is a light to the nations. A strong Israel, a lily growing from swarthy mud, a swamp lily! Up the revolution! Free Leona Helmsley! A flush toilet in every home, a turkey in every pot!

No, I, er, I think I must have gotten off track back there somewhere.

In any case, Mr. Harris, ignore this passage at your own peril. Judaism is as relevant as it ever was. Post no bills, deer crossing, keep America beautiful. Shabbat shalom.

February 14, 2007 Valentine’s Day Edition / Parashat Mishpatim

Valentine’s Day was never a big holiday when I was growing up. I have an early thwarted romance memory in seventh grade of giving Jacqueline Newton a box of chocolates, which I kept in my locker for two days, and which subsequently froze, causing her to injure a tooth when she first bit into it. My brother’s girlfriend enjoys Valentine’s Day, but he confided in me recently that he can’t shake the notion that the holiday is simply a big ploy by Hallmark to get us to empty our wallets.

The Bible has its share of romantic tales: witness the stories of Boaz and Ruth, and Isaac and Rebecca. But one of the most abiding love stories is the one between the Jewish people and God. One of the chief metaphors to describe this relationship has been marriage - and the moment of revelation at Mount Sinai is the consummate moment in this respect. There is a midrash (B. Shab 88a) that says God picked Mount Sinai up and held it over the people, threatening to drop it if they didn’t accept the Torah. This is obviously a difficult metaphor for marriage, and indeed the whole enterprise feels suspect: it’s coercive, one partner seems to have much more power than the other, etc. In other places, like the book of Hosea, Israel is portrayed as the unfaithful wife, and this seems to justify her abusive treatment. As a metaphor for describing Divine-human relations, it understandably does not work for many contemporary Jews.

We ask, what does this metaphor suggest about our relationships, what does it suggest about our spiritual lives? Is marriage a salvageable model to describe our relationship with the Divine? Can we take anything from the Sinai story in particular that we can bring to our earthly loves?

Maybe the mountain being held above the heads of the people doesn’t have to be seen as representing coercion and a lack of choice. It can also be seen as a chuppah, and what happens under a chuppah is much more mysterious. We circle one another; in the traditional language of the vows, we set each other aside. We choose, though we don’t necessarily know what to expect, even if we do our best to imagine and project.

The relationship between people and God in Judaism is covenantal - we are co-partners in creation - and perhaps this is why it is so often compared to human marriage. Despite all of the commandments and intentions named on Sinai, we commit to the path of being a Jew ultimately not knowing what to expect. Covenant - whether it is describing our relationship with God or with our partner is the great mystery. It is conditional in that both partners make the commitment to being shomrim, or guardians, of the other. Exodus 19:5 asks the people to be shomrim of the covenant. In turn, they will be treasured and guarded themselves.

And then history begins. And we flail around, trying to figure out what it means to guard the other. Jewish history, with its emphasis on this-worldly relationship, is a continuous adventure in confusing capital B Beloved with lower-case b beloved. Ultimately, we guard God through learning to guard each other. And though we do both imperfectly, this is our attempt.

The Torah is accepted b’yom hazeh, on this day. It’s acceptance is not a one-time event, but something, like any relationship, that we practice and learn to accept each day.

Enjoy the snow, and don’t keep your chocolates in your locker.