Post by Rabbi Neil on Sept 21, 2017 0:06:29 GMT
We are here this evening because we believe that what we do actually matters in the universe. We have no concrete evidence for that, we just believe that. Of course, we see that changes we make can matter in our society, in our nation, in our world, but this tiny little planet is an apparently insignificant speck in the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. A case could easily be made that life is essentially irrelevant in the universe. From a universal perspective, a case could very easily be made that we are irrelevant. But we are here tonight because we don’t believe that. We believe that what we do counts. That belief is at the heart of religion. When people say, as they often do, that Judaism is based on mitzvah, on good deeds and not on belief, that’s actually not strictly true. Without the underlying belief that our deeds count, we would not even engage in those deeds. At the core of Judaism, then, is the essential belief that our actions matter. In his book The Sacred Canopy, sociologist Peter Berger explains that “religion implies that human order is projected into the totality of being. Put differently, religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.” We believe that we are important to the universe and that the entire universe is important to us. We can’t prove it but we believe it. We hold that as part of the underlying narrative of our lives.
As Berger says elsewhere in his book, “religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established…. By sacred is meant here a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than [humanity] and yet related to [humanity], which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience…. The chieftain may be sacred, as may be a particular custom or institution. Space and time may be assigned the same quality, as in sacred localities or sacred seasons.”
We are here today at such a sacred season and in such a sacred institution. Of course, the world doesn’t actually have a birthday, so long as we have any sense of cosmology in our understanding of planetary development. We don’t even need cosmology to tell us that, to be fair, since the Rabbis in Talmud can’t even agree which month the world was created in! And, of course, humanity doesn’t have a birthday, so long as we have any sense of evolutionary biology in our understanding of human development. But if that is the case, how can we celebrate hayom harat olam – today is the birthday of the world? To answer this, I think of our little dog, Pym, who was found stray. It’s likely he was born stray and survived nights out in the wild just because he is jet black, so we will never know when he was born. But does he have a birthday in our house? Of course he does. He doesn’t even understand what a birthday is but that’s not the point. The point is that we have given a reason to an arbitrary choice of a day to mark it as distinct from all other days. We have constructed a moment of significance in order to add more meaning to our lives. That is what religion does, too. That distinction, perhaps even sanctification, of time, person and place helps people form and hold their identities. Religion, Judaism, helps form and hold identities, and not just for individuals, but for entire communities as well. There is a dynamic relationship with a society or community and its narrative. Our social narrative shapes us and yet through our lives we also shape it. In a similar way, Ahad Ha’am famously said that “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” Our observance of sacred space and time shapes us as human beings, and particularly as members of the Jewish community. When we gather together at sacred times, such as this evening, we not only shape Rosh Hashanah but Rosh Hashanah shapes us. It is not a calendrical event, it is an element of our development. It forms a narrative in our lives.
But what is that narrative? It is a narrative of balancing tradition and modernity. The narrative of the Jewish people has always been about anchoring ourselves to the sacred past, particularly at Sinai, of tying ourselves to a vision of the sacred future, particularly at human redemption, and of creating a viable path in between those two anchor points in sacred time. To remain static, to keep our Jewish practice just as it was in the past, would be to deny the journey that the Jewish people have always been on. It would be to tear ourselves from the narrative of a journey between sacred times and it would falsely fix us in the past. So, our observance of this sacred moment tonight, rooted in its history from Torah, has to be an authentic balance of tradition and modernity.
But what is an authentic balance? How do we identify what is an authentic response to the timeline of past and future? It cannot be to desperately cling to the ways of the past. Not only is that unhealthy, it is disingenuous to the traditional Jewish narrative of an evolving, religious community. That is a modern fiction designed to bring comfort in the face of a world that changes with increasing speed. As comfortable that might be for some, that is actually an aberration of the Jewish narrative that we have held for two thousand years. On the opposite side of that extreme is the response that tries to deny religion, to see it as outdated, to ignore it entirely. Not only is that not an authentic balance but it also ignores the narrative that the Jewish community holds and transmits to the larger world - a narrative that is strong and vibrant for anyone who accesses it. If, to quote Berger one final time, “society structures, distributes and coordinates the world-building activities of people,” then we to ensure that the Jewish narrative is world-building. And to be honest it hasn’t always been. For millennia, the Jewish narrative was about preservation of the Jewish community in order that it will one day be responsible for the supernatural overhaul of the world and the bringing about of the Messianic Days. That wasn’t world-building, though. It was self-preservation. In the modern age, though, we understand that an authentic Jewish narrative has not only to connect the Jewish past, present and future but also must be transformative personally and globally.
My sermons for these High Holidays focus on that narrative, on the authentic blend of tradition and modernity in an attempt to create something that structures, distributes and coordinates the world-building activities of the Jewish people. I believe that Reform Judaism is uniquely placed to create that narrative, but that the same unique social and religious position of Reform Judaism also provides particularly difficult challenges. Over Rosh Hashanah, Shabbat Shuvah, and Yom Kippur, we shall explore why.
We start with an obvious example – Rosh Hashanah itself. In Torah, it was mentioned simply as Zichron T'ruah (the Memorial of Sounding the Shofar) , or as Yom Teruah (the Day of Sounding the Shofar) and is described as a day of rest, a day of blowing the shofar, a Sabbath of Sabbaths, a day on which we do no work and bring an offering to God. That was it! Rabbinic Judaism turned it into Rosh Hashanah, and connected it with the creation of the world, or with the creation of human beings. It turned it into a two-day festival to avoid any doubt of observance. Most importantly, Rabbinic Judaism added the concepts of judgment and atonement to the festival. In order to justify that new narrative, the Rabbis created and then developed extensive liturgy for the festival on top of the usual daily liturgy which they had also created. They added prayers like un’taneh tokef, which talks of God choosing who will live and die in the coming year unless we atone, and they added avinu malkeinu, a prayer which speaks of us straying and sinning before our Father and King, and again begging for a year of goodness. Of course there are times when we should be humbled – indeed, a world-building narrative needs a combination of extreme chutzpah that motivates us to believe we can change the world, and extreme humility to know that in order to change the world we first need to change ourselves. But is this language still the right way to get that level of humility from us? Is this most appropriate form of the narrative? It might be, but it might not. By combining traditional and modern sources in our machzor, the Central Conference of American Rabbis has attempted to weave a new narrative that focuses not on the birthday of the world, but on the rebirth of our world. Today is the day when our world is born anew. How? By our actions based on our teshuvah, our repentance, our answer to God’s call. Where the traditional Rabbinic narrative of this season was one that humbled us through a recognition of our lack of power other than the power to change our hearts, today’s Reform movement is reshaping that narrative to one that tries to humble and also simultaneously motivate us. The tradition narrative was deeply rooted in an ancient theology of God as Lord and King, the modern narrative is rooted in a theology of being a partner of God in the restoration of the world.
After nearly fifteen years of the Rabbinate, I have come to realise that my role during the High Holy Day services is to hold the traditional narrative and to simultaneously inspire the modern one. With that in mind, I lead the traditional prayers and embellish them with modern readings. I ask you this Rosh Hashanah – do not simply copy me. The traditional idea of a minyan is that out of the ten people praying, at least one of them is actually saying the proper prayers at the proper time… it’s basically prayer failsafe. So I ask you to trust me and the other sh’lichei tzibbur, the other prayer leaders, that we will do that. We will hold the ancient narrative and will interweave a modern narrative. We encourage you to explore that modern narrative. Read the commentaries, the extra readings, the alternate prayers. Stop and contemplate and consider the meaning of the prayers and their place in your personal and communal narrative. The communal narrative of the Jewish people – the weaving together of tradition and modernity – cannot be done by Rabbis alone. It must be a narrative formed by the whole community. This year, then, if there is a moment where a prayer doesn’t move you, when you’re feeling you’re reading by rote, when you’re not moved by the service, take that moment and use it. Use it to question the prayer we’re on, to ask if it fits into the contemporary narrative of the Jewish people. Starting tonight, may we start a deliberate consideration of the narrative that holds the Jewish people between the poles of two metaphors – of revelation and of redemption. May we explore and develop the narrative that shows reverence to ancient traditions while simultaneously embracing modernity. And we may our exploration of that narrative of tradition and modernity renew us - renew our lives, renew our community and, in turn, renew the world. May such a renewal come soon, and let us say, Amen.
As Berger says elsewhere in his book, “religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established…. By sacred is meant here a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than [humanity] and yet related to [humanity], which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience…. The chieftain may be sacred, as may be a particular custom or institution. Space and time may be assigned the same quality, as in sacred localities or sacred seasons.”
We are here today at such a sacred season and in such a sacred institution. Of course, the world doesn’t actually have a birthday, so long as we have any sense of cosmology in our understanding of planetary development. We don’t even need cosmology to tell us that, to be fair, since the Rabbis in Talmud can’t even agree which month the world was created in! And, of course, humanity doesn’t have a birthday, so long as we have any sense of evolutionary biology in our understanding of human development. But if that is the case, how can we celebrate hayom harat olam – today is the birthday of the world? To answer this, I think of our little dog, Pym, who was found stray. It’s likely he was born stray and survived nights out in the wild just because he is jet black, so we will never know when he was born. But does he have a birthday in our house? Of course he does. He doesn’t even understand what a birthday is but that’s not the point. The point is that we have given a reason to an arbitrary choice of a day to mark it as distinct from all other days. We have constructed a moment of significance in order to add more meaning to our lives. That is what religion does, too. That distinction, perhaps even sanctification, of time, person and place helps people form and hold their identities. Religion, Judaism, helps form and hold identities, and not just for individuals, but for entire communities as well. There is a dynamic relationship with a society or community and its narrative. Our social narrative shapes us and yet through our lives we also shape it. In a similar way, Ahad Ha’am famously said that “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” Our observance of sacred space and time shapes us as human beings, and particularly as members of the Jewish community. When we gather together at sacred times, such as this evening, we not only shape Rosh Hashanah but Rosh Hashanah shapes us. It is not a calendrical event, it is an element of our development. It forms a narrative in our lives.
But what is that narrative? It is a narrative of balancing tradition and modernity. The narrative of the Jewish people has always been about anchoring ourselves to the sacred past, particularly at Sinai, of tying ourselves to a vision of the sacred future, particularly at human redemption, and of creating a viable path in between those two anchor points in sacred time. To remain static, to keep our Jewish practice just as it was in the past, would be to deny the journey that the Jewish people have always been on. It would be to tear ourselves from the narrative of a journey between sacred times and it would falsely fix us in the past. So, our observance of this sacred moment tonight, rooted in its history from Torah, has to be an authentic balance of tradition and modernity.
But what is an authentic balance? How do we identify what is an authentic response to the timeline of past and future? It cannot be to desperately cling to the ways of the past. Not only is that unhealthy, it is disingenuous to the traditional Jewish narrative of an evolving, religious community. That is a modern fiction designed to bring comfort in the face of a world that changes with increasing speed. As comfortable that might be for some, that is actually an aberration of the Jewish narrative that we have held for two thousand years. On the opposite side of that extreme is the response that tries to deny religion, to see it as outdated, to ignore it entirely. Not only is that not an authentic balance but it also ignores the narrative that the Jewish community holds and transmits to the larger world - a narrative that is strong and vibrant for anyone who accesses it. If, to quote Berger one final time, “society structures, distributes and coordinates the world-building activities of people,” then we to ensure that the Jewish narrative is world-building. And to be honest it hasn’t always been. For millennia, the Jewish narrative was about preservation of the Jewish community in order that it will one day be responsible for the supernatural overhaul of the world and the bringing about of the Messianic Days. That wasn’t world-building, though. It was self-preservation. In the modern age, though, we understand that an authentic Jewish narrative has not only to connect the Jewish past, present and future but also must be transformative personally and globally.
My sermons for these High Holidays focus on that narrative, on the authentic blend of tradition and modernity in an attempt to create something that structures, distributes and coordinates the world-building activities of the Jewish people. I believe that Reform Judaism is uniquely placed to create that narrative, but that the same unique social and religious position of Reform Judaism also provides particularly difficult challenges. Over Rosh Hashanah, Shabbat Shuvah, and Yom Kippur, we shall explore why.
We start with an obvious example – Rosh Hashanah itself. In Torah, it was mentioned simply as Zichron T'ruah (the Memorial of Sounding the Shofar) , or as Yom Teruah (the Day of Sounding the Shofar) and is described as a day of rest, a day of blowing the shofar, a Sabbath of Sabbaths, a day on which we do no work and bring an offering to God. That was it! Rabbinic Judaism turned it into Rosh Hashanah, and connected it with the creation of the world, or with the creation of human beings. It turned it into a two-day festival to avoid any doubt of observance. Most importantly, Rabbinic Judaism added the concepts of judgment and atonement to the festival. In order to justify that new narrative, the Rabbis created and then developed extensive liturgy for the festival on top of the usual daily liturgy which they had also created. They added prayers like un’taneh tokef, which talks of God choosing who will live and die in the coming year unless we atone, and they added avinu malkeinu, a prayer which speaks of us straying and sinning before our Father and King, and again begging for a year of goodness. Of course there are times when we should be humbled – indeed, a world-building narrative needs a combination of extreme chutzpah that motivates us to believe we can change the world, and extreme humility to know that in order to change the world we first need to change ourselves. But is this language still the right way to get that level of humility from us? Is this most appropriate form of the narrative? It might be, but it might not. By combining traditional and modern sources in our machzor, the Central Conference of American Rabbis has attempted to weave a new narrative that focuses not on the birthday of the world, but on the rebirth of our world. Today is the day when our world is born anew. How? By our actions based on our teshuvah, our repentance, our answer to God’s call. Where the traditional Rabbinic narrative of this season was one that humbled us through a recognition of our lack of power other than the power to change our hearts, today’s Reform movement is reshaping that narrative to one that tries to humble and also simultaneously motivate us. The tradition narrative was deeply rooted in an ancient theology of God as Lord and King, the modern narrative is rooted in a theology of being a partner of God in the restoration of the world.
After nearly fifteen years of the Rabbinate, I have come to realise that my role during the High Holy Day services is to hold the traditional narrative and to simultaneously inspire the modern one. With that in mind, I lead the traditional prayers and embellish them with modern readings. I ask you this Rosh Hashanah – do not simply copy me. The traditional idea of a minyan is that out of the ten people praying, at least one of them is actually saying the proper prayers at the proper time… it’s basically prayer failsafe. So I ask you to trust me and the other sh’lichei tzibbur, the other prayer leaders, that we will do that. We will hold the ancient narrative and will interweave a modern narrative. We encourage you to explore that modern narrative. Read the commentaries, the extra readings, the alternate prayers. Stop and contemplate and consider the meaning of the prayers and their place in your personal and communal narrative. The communal narrative of the Jewish people – the weaving together of tradition and modernity – cannot be done by Rabbis alone. It must be a narrative formed by the whole community. This year, then, if there is a moment where a prayer doesn’t move you, when you’re feeling you’re reading by rote, when you’re not moved by the service, take that moment and use it. Use it to question the prayer we’re on, to ask if it fits into the contemporary narrative of the Jewish people. Starting tonight, may we start a deliberate consideration of the narrative that holds the Jewish people between the poles of two metaphors – of revelation and of redemption. May we explore and develop the narrative that shows reverence to ancient traditions while simultaneously embracing modernity. And we may our exploration of that narrative of tradition and modernity renew us - renew our lives, renew our community and, in turn, renew the world. May such a renewal come soon, and let us say, Amen.