Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 18, 2018 17:52:07 GMT
Delivered Yom Kippur 5779
I used to love astronomy. Even as a child, I would spend hours outside looking at celestial phenomena. I once calculated the distance to the Moon using a lunar eclipse. I wrapped up in a sleeping bag while trying to find Halley’s Comet with binoculars. I would count the number of meteors during a meteor shower. I was really into astronomy. Despite struggling with Maths (and Physics if I’m honest), it was still obvious that I would go to university to study something related to astronomy. It was there that my love for astronomy was slowly sapped away to the point that it took more than ten years to take any kind of interest in it again. Why did this happen, and why is it relevant for us today?
At the end of my Astrophysics degree, I remember during the viva, the oral examination regarding my project, one of my examiners spontaneously asked me a question - how many photons come off the Sun every second? This wasn’t something we had learned, he just wanted to see if I could work it out. There was certainly a clever answer to the question using equations that I probably should have known but didn’t. So, I gave an honest answer – “I don’t know.” My lecturers were clearly uncomfortable, darting not very subtle looks at each other, clearly troubled by my not even attempting to answer it because I clearly didn’t know how. I didn’t answer because, as I realized later, my answer hadn’t been fully honest. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know, it was that I didn’t care. Here I was, sitting around people who spent their lives in a classroom calculating how many photons came off the Sun every second, eyes glued to the blackboard and chalk (as it was then) and missing the big picture – the splendor of the Sun. In their defence, the splendor of the Sun to them was probably in the numbers, in the extraordinary way that the Sun works and keeps working. To them, knowing that around 1 x 1045 photons coming off the Sun every second was probably a beautiful thing, and yes, I totally Googled that information for this sermon! Seeing the Sun broken down into regular, functional mathematical formulae was probably to them a beautiful sight, but not for me. For me, it is in the real, living relationship that one has with the Sun in its immediate presence. Not everything can be reduced to formulae. The spontaneous connection, the moment of awe when you see something extraordinary in nature… no formula can ever capture that. Yes, there is beauty in mathematics and in science, but that’s not the same beauty as that which lifts our heart when we experience something real, when we witness it and are fully present ourselves. It is the fleeting moment of wonder, the indescribable moment of humility, that moves us in a way that we are always different for having been present in it. The formula may be impressive, it may explain a lot, but it does not create a lasting connection.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s the same with Jewish liturgy. I sometimes wonder if I could replace the siddurim or machzorim with my text books from university, and lead a similar service to the ones I regularly lead? I wonder if, with the help of Aaron, Meredith, Fred, Andre and others, we could work out moving or even exciting sing-along tunes to some of the finest text books on Astrophysics that there are? I could even hand out readings to members, who could share the wonders of the universe from fundamental particles to galactic structures. Instead of incomprehensible Hebrew, we could have incomprehensible scientific formulae that we could chant, just to increase the dramatic effect of each one.
There are two obvious problems with this. The first is that Astrophysics asks nothing of us, it just seeks to explain, to which my response would be to ask how often do we read the liturgy as an explanation and how often as a question? The second problem is that there’s no tradition in reading scientific formulae where there is in our liturgy, to which I would reply that that rather misses the point because we’re not meant to pray because it’s traditional, we’re meant to pray because it moves us. This, then, leads me to my fifth and final question of this series of High Holy Day sermons – “What if prayer were the central focus of our Judaism?”
That might be an uncomfortable question for some, who might ask, why would we possibly want prayer to be the central focus on our Judaism? Why not mitzvah, why not good deeds? To answer this, we have to ask what prayer really is. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel clearly despaired of the formal prayer services that he saw. He asked, “How do people pray? They recite the prayer book as if it were last week’s newspaper. They ensconce in anonymity – as if prayer were an impersonal exercise – as if worship were an act that came automatically.” Heschel was all too aware that people think that prayer is the recitation of traditionally sacred words, but in fact it is something totally different – it is something deeply personal. He went further, and asked, “Has the temple becomes the graveyard where prayer is buried?” In other words, have we become so involved in the keva, the fixed prayers, that we’ve buried kavanah, the spontaneous outpouring of the soul? In Pirke Avot, Rabbi Shimon implores us, “Do not make your prayer a form of routine…” but it’s not very easy when our traditional prayers contain so many fixed elements, like the morning blessings, Sh’ma, T’fillah, Aleinu and when the services are at set times! Over a thousand years later, we find a story of the Baal Shem Tov who once refused to enter a certain synagogue because it was too full of insincere prayer. He said that because the prayers were insincere they could not rise to the heavenly throne and therefore stayed on earth, filling up the synagogue. But then his followers decided to go all-in when it came to kavannah, the spontaneous prayers. It was said of early Chasidim that they would dance and make strange motions and gestures, to the extent that a document of 1772 trying to ban them from the Jewish community mentions that “they behave like the Vision of the Wheels, upside down and bottom up!” Nobody wants that. Nobody wants the person they’re sitting next to in services to suddenly jump up and start doing cartwheels or standing on their head to remove pride. That’s kavvanah gone mad. When that happens, prayer services become chaotic. Truth be told, the early Chasidim probably did that because they were openly rebelling against the formality of the services by those who became known as the Mitnagdim, the Opponents, the Jewish establishment who said that God was encountered through study of Torah and Talmud. The Mitnagdim said that before prayer you must empty your mind of all distracting thoughts. To them prayer was about the correct recitation of the words of the tradition, but the Chasidim knew otherwise. They knew that prayer is an outpouring of the soul, that there are no distracting thoughts because every thought can be elevated in prayer since it is a real part of the self. After all, if we have to remove ourselves from prayer, then how could we possibly be praying?
Heschel said that “to Judaism the purpose of prayer is not to satisfy an emotional need. Prayer is not a need but an ontological necessity, an act that constitutes the very essence of man. He who has never prayed is not fully human. Ontology, not psychology or sociology, explains prayer.” To Heschel, prayer is what makes us human. But then what about those who don’t believe in God? What about those who just want to go out and do good deeds, as our tradition clearly demands. Even to such a person, Heschel has an answer, when he asks, “What is a mitzvah, a sacred act? [It is] A prayer in the form of a deed. This is why Heschel could so authentically say that marching with Martin Luther King was praying with his feet. Prayer isn’t an expression of words, it’s an expression of the heart. To be fair, Heschel does warn against temples just becoming social centers with minimal prayer, saying that “Our soul withers without prayer. A synagogue in which men no longer aspire to prayer is not a compromise but a defeat; a perversion, not a concession. To pray with kavanah (inner devotion) may be difficult; to pray without it is ludicrous.” In other words, good deeds are essential for a Jewish community, but the foundation of the community still needs to be prayer, even if that is ultimately expressed as good deeds for some members.
I think one of the biggest obstructions to prayer until now has been its limited theology. As we saw on Rosh Hashanah and also last night, though, there’s a lot more to Jewish theology than we may have appreciated in the past and our liturgy only represents a fraction of it. Prayer isn’t a ‘phone conversation to a guy in the clouds who always has his handset on mute. Prayer is about the authentic expression of self. Prayer is not reading the words in a prayer book - it’s answering them. Prayer in Hebrew is a reflexive verb – l’hitpalel – meaning to judge oneself. Prayer is not about God, it is about us in the presence of something greater than ourselves, which our tradition names as God in its set prayers. Prayer is what we all need, all the time. Further, Heschel also said, “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehood. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, and the vision.” Now, I get that there are a lot of Jews in this community for whom prayer is embarrassing, agitating and antiquated. My point today is that it should not be, and that those perspectives are likely to come from a belief that prayer and liturgy are synonymous. Prayer should be world-changing because it should be that which profoundly changes us. Prayer is the reflection and awareness that we all must engage in to ensure that when we act we’re doing the right thing for the right reason. Real prayer strips away our pretensions and demands a change in us before we can change the world. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are a way of showing that ethics and prayer cannot be separated. Prayer without ethics is selfish and hypocritical, ethics without prayer is unreflective and baseless. Prayer should be at the center of Jewish practice, ethics should be the practical response, the prayers in action. Rabbi Larry Hoffman put this best, when he wrote that “social justice is part of the synagogue’s “foreign affairs;” spirituality is its “domestic policy.” Taking seriously their covenant with God, members look for the spiritual and the just, which together constitute the sacred.”
These last five sermons, starting on Erev Rosh Hashanah, have tried to open doors to a differing understanding of Judaism. Instead of Judaism that calls itself authentic only if it is based on anachronistic, patriarchal and superstitious models of Jewish theology, society and practice, I’ve suggested a forward-thinking model of Judaism that speaks to our contemporary understanding of the world, that is fully inclusive, forward-looking, not based in supernaturalism, and that has prayer or self-reflection, as the basis of its practice. I genuinely believe that our community is uniquely placed to explore that kind of model of Judaism together, slowly, deliberately, carefully, cooperatively. To paraphrase Martin Buber, theology is talking about sacredness, religion is experiencing it. It’s the difference between reading a menu and having dinner. This year, let’s collectively start working towards prayer not being like reading an astrophysics textbook, last week’s newspaper or reading a menu. Let’s not be embarrassed to pray. Not to beg for help from an invisible superman in the clouds, but to reflect personally so that we might grow. Let us pray with our hearts, our mouths and with our hands and feet. Let us not be embarrassed to pray, instead let it be the central focus of our Judaism in differing forms. Let us be bold and revolutionary so that we might inspire coming generations of Jews by creating a community that is not embarrassed by modernity or Judaism. And let us say, Amen.
I used to love astronomy. Even as a child, I would spend hours outside looking at celestial phenomena. I once calculated the distance to the Moon using a lunar eclipse. I wrapped up in a sleeping bag while trying to find Halley’s Comet with binoculars. I would count the number of meteors during a meteor shower. I was really into astronomy. Despite struggling with Maths (and Physics if I’m honest), it was still obvious that I would go to university to study something related to astronomy. It was there that my love for astronomy was slowly sapped away to the point that it took more than ten years to take any kind of interest in it again. Why did this happen, and why is it relevant for us today?
At the end of my Astrophysics degree, I remember during the viva, the oral examination regarding my project, one of my examiners spontaneously asked me a question - how many photons come off the Sun every second? This wasn’t something we had learned, he just wanted to see if I could work it out. There was certainly a clever answer to the question using equations that I probably should have known but didn’t. So, I gave an honest answer – “I don’t know.” My lecturers were clearly uncomfortable, darting not very subtle looks at each other, clearly troubled by my not even attempting to answer it because I clearly didn’t know how. I didn’t answer because, as I realized later, my answer hadn’t been fully honest. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know, it was that I didn’t care. Here I was, sitting around people who spent their lives in a classroom calculating how many photons came off the Sun every second, eyes glued to the blackboard and chalk (as it was then) and missing the big picture – the splendor of the Sun. In their defence, the splendor of the Sun to them was probably in the numbers, in the extraordinary way that the Sun works and keeps working. To them, knowing that around 1 x 1045 photons coming off the Sun every second was probably a beautiful thing, and yes, I totally Googled that information for this sermon! Seeing the Sun broken down into regular, functional mathematical formulae was probably to them a beautiful sight, but not for me. For me, it is in the real, living relationship that one has with the Sun in its immediate presence. Not everything can be reduced to formulae. The spontaneous connection, the moment of awe when you see something extraordinary in nature… no formula can ever capture that. Yes, there is beauty in mathematics and in science, but that’s not the same beauty as that which lifts our heart when we experience something real, when we witness it and are fully present ourselves. It is the fleeting moment of wonder, the indescribable moment of humility, that moves us in a way that we are always different for having been present in it. The formula may be impressive, it may explain a lot, but it does not create a lasting connection.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s the same with Jewish liturgy. I sometimes wonder if I could replace the siddurim or machzorim with my text books from university, and lead a similar service to the ones I regularly lead? I wonder if, with the help of Aaron, Meredith, Fred, Andre and others, we could work out moving or even exciting sing-along tunes to some of the finest text books on Astrophysics that there are? I could even hand out readings to members, who could share the wonders of the universe from fundamental particles to galactic structures. Instead of incomprehensible Hebrew, we could have incomprehensible scientific formulae that we could chant, just to increase the dramatic effect of each one.
There are two obvious problems with this. The first is that Astrophysics asks nothing of us, it just seeks to explain, to which my response would be to ask how often do we read the liturgy as an explanation and how often as a question? The second problem is that there’s no tradition in reading scientific formulae where there is in our liturgy, to which I would reply that that rather misses the point because we’re not meant to pray because it’s traditional, we’re meant to pray because it moves us. This, then, leads me to my fifth and final question of this series of High Holy Day sermons – “What if prayer were the central focus of our Judaism?”
That might be an uncomfortable question for some, who might ask, why would we possibly want prayer to be the central focus on our Judaism? Why not mitzvah, why not good deeds? To answer this, we have to ask what prayer really is. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel clearly despaired of the formal prayer services that he saw. He asked, “How do people pray? They recite the prayer book as if it were last week’s newspaper. They ensconce in anonymity – as if prayer were an impersonal exercise – as if worship were an act that came automatically.” Heschel was all too aware that people think that prayer is the recitation of traditionally sacred words, but in fact it is something totally different – it is something deeply personal. He went further, and asked, “Has the temple becomes the graveyard where prayer is buried?” In other words, have we become so involved in the keva, the fixed prayers, that we’ve buried kavanah, the spontaneous outpouring of the soul? In Pirke Avot, Rabbi Shimon implores us, “Do not make your prayer a form of routine…” but it’s not very easy when our traditional prayers contain so many fixed elements, like the morning blessings, Sh’ma, T’fillah, Aleinu and when the services are at set times! Over a thousand years later, we find a story of the Baal Shem Tov who once refused to enter a certain synagogue because it was too full of insincere prayer. He said that because the prayers were insincere they could not rise to the heavenly throne and therefore stayed on earth, filling up the synagogue. But then his followers decided to go all-in when it came to kavannah, the spontaneous prayers. It was said of early Chasidim that they would dance and make strange motions and gestures, to the extent that a document of 1772 trying to ban them from the Jewish community mentions that “they behave like the Vision of the Wheels, upside down and bottom up!” Nobody wants that. Nobody wants the person they’re sitting next to in services to suddenly jump up and start doing cartwheels or standing on their head to remove pride. That’s kavvanah gone mad. When that happens, prayer services become chaotic. Truth be told, the early Chasidim probably did that because they were openly rebelling against the formality of the services by those who became known as the Mitnagdim, the Opponents, the Jewish establishment who said that God was encountered through study of Torah and Talmud. The Mitnagdim said that before prayer you must empty your mind of all distracting thoughts. To them prayer was about the correct recitation of the words of the tradition, but the Chasidim knew otherwise. They knew that prayer is an outpouring of the soul, that there are no distracting thoughts because every thought can be elevated in prayer since it is a real part of the self. After all, if we have to remove ourselves from prayer, then how could we possibly be praying?
Heschel said that “to Judaism the purpose of prayer is not to satisfy an emotional need. Prayer is not a need but an ontological necessity, an act that constitutes the very essence of man. He who has never prayed is not fully human. Ontology, not psychology or sociology, explains prayer.” To Heschel, prayer is what makes us human. But then what about those who don’t believe in God? What about those who just want to go out and do good deeds, as our tradition clearly demands. Even to such a person, Heschel has an answer, when he asks, “What is a mitzvah, a sacred act? [It is] A prayer in the form of a deed. This is why Heschel could so authentically say that marching with Martin Luther King was praying with his feet. Prayer isn’t an expression of words, it’s an expression of the heart. To be fair, Heschel does warn against temples just becoming social centers with minimal prayer, saying that “Our soul withers without prayer. A synagogue in which men no longer aspire to prayer is not a compromise but a defeat; a perversion, not a concession. To pray with kavanah (inner devotion) may be difficult; to pray without it is ludicrous.” In other words, good deeds are essential for a Jewish community, but the foundation of the community still needs to be prayer, even if that is ultimately expressed as good deeds for some members.
I think one of the biggest obstructions to prayer until now has been its limited theology. As we saw on Rosh Hashanah and also last night, though, there’s a lot more to Jewish theology than we may have appreciated in the past and our liturgy only represents a fraction of it. Prayer isn’t a ‘phone conversation to a guy in the clouds who always has his handset on mute. Prayer is about the authentic expression of self. Prayer is not reading the words in a prayer book - it’s answering them. Prayer in Hebrew is a reflexive verb – l’hitpalel – meaning to judge oneself. Prayer is not about God, it is about us in the presence of something greater than ourselves, which our tradition names as God in its set prayers. Prayer is what we all need, all the time. Further, Heschel also said, “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehood. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, and the vision.” Now, I get that there are a lot of Jews in this community for whom prayer is embarrassing, agitating and antiquated. My point today is that it should not be, and that those perspectives are likely to come from a belief that prayer and liturgy are synonymous. Prayer should be world-changing because it should be that which profoundly changes us. Prayer is the reflection and awareness that we all must engage in to ensure that when we act we’re doing the right thing for the right reason. Real prayer strips away our pretensions and demands a change in us before we can change the world. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are a way of showing that ethics and prayer cannot be separated. Prayer without ethics is selfish and hypocritical, ethics without prayer is unreflective and baseless. Prayer should be at the center of Jewish practice, ethics should be the practical response, the prayers in action. Rabbi Larry Hoffman put this best, when he wrote that “social justice is part of the synagogue’s “foreign affairs;” spirituality is its “domestic policy.” Taking seriously their covenant with God, members look for the spiritual and the just, which together constitute the sacred.”
These last five sermons, starting on Erev Rosh Hashanah, have tried to open doors to a differing understanding of Judaism. Instead of Judaism that calls itself authentic only if it is based on anachronistic, patriarchal and superstitious models of Jewish theology, society and practice, I’ve suggested a forward-thinking model of Judaism that speaks to our contemporary understanding of the world, that is fully inclusive, forward-looking, not based in supernaturalism, and that has prayer or self-reflection, as the basis of its practice. I genuinely believe that our community is uniquely placed to explore that kind of model of Judaism together, slowly, deliberately, carefully, cooperatively. To paraphrase Martin Buber, theology is talking about sacredness, religion is experiencing it. It’s the difference between reading a menu and having dinner. This year, let’s collectively start working towards prayer not being like reading an astrophysics textbook, last week’s newspaper or reading a menu. Let’s not be embarrassed to pray. Not to beg for help from an invisible superman in the clouds, but to reflect personally so that we might grow. Let us pray with our hearts, our mouths and with our hands and feet. Let us not be embarrassed to pray, instead let it be the central focus of our Judaism in differing forms. Let us be bold and revolutionary so that we might inspire coming generations of Jews by creating a community that is not embarrassed by modernity or Judaism. And let us say, Amen.