Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 29, 2019 19:06:07 GMT
It has been most revealing to me that there were times while I was writing my High Holy Day sermons when I would often feel self-conscious talking about prayer as the central theme. Society around the world is falling apart, nationalism, racism, homophobia and anti-semitism are all on the rise, the planet continues to be plundered at an obviously unsustainable rate that literally threatens the future existence of human society, and yet here I am talking about prayer, as though that’s an important response to those things. But what I have learned this year, and what I started to share on Erev Rosh Hashanah, is that I genuinely now believe that prayer is not only an important response to lifting the world out of the darkness, it’s an essential part of any response. On Erev Rosh Hashanah, I spoke of how prayer and social justice are just two sides of the same coin, that prayer must not be reading words on a page but must be self-reflection that changes us and leads us to action which, in turn, changes the world. On the morning of Rosh Hashanah, I spoke of keva and kavannah, of fixed prayer and of spontaneous prayer, of the need for prayer to be based not on exact words but on general themes around which we all create our own unique prayer jazz. On Shabbat Shuvah, I spoke of prayer as an act of rebellion, an act of deliberately naming the parts of ourselves and of the world that are still in need of repair so that we are motivated to change them. Clearly, prayer as self-reflection, as intentionally setting that way we want to live our lives, as openly voicing the vision of the world we want to bring about… clearly that is an essential part of making the world a better place.
But if that’s the case, why do I still get pangs of self-doubt when talking about prayer publicly? Why, as I wrote these sermons, did I sit worrying that people hearing them might think, “Thanks for the Talmudic quotations and the God-talk, Rabbi, now if you don’t mind we’re actually going to go and make the world and better place while you sit with your books and talk to God”? In part, for sure, it’s because a very small number of people in our community have all but said exactly that to me! And I find it odd that for such a deeply spiritual place as Santa Fe, spirituality, especially God-talk, is clearly embarrassing for so many members of a Temple, as though spirituality were some primitive thing that we enlightened Jews have thankfully moved beyond. There were even times in my Rabbinic career where even I considered such a thing, embarrassed at being paid to lead people in prayer instead of going out into the world to act. How did we get to a point in our society at which the approach to divinity, the search for holiness – which has and always will be at the core of being a Jew – became embarrassing?
For sure, Judaism is first and foremost about action, specifically about mitzvah. Torah enjoins us “tzedek, tzedek tirdof – justice, justice you shall pursue.” Reform Judaism often focuses on that kind of active religious practice, specifically focusing its members on prophetic Judaism, while failing to mention that an absolutely essential part of the life of all the Biblical prophets was a connection with God. We became embarrassed by the search for holiness. At its formation, Reform Judaism expunged prayers relating to sacrifice, to the Messiah, to the concept of resurrection, and much more because it was embarrassed by how primitive and unmodern Jewish expressions of the search for holiness had become. Creating new liturgy became essential but that, too, was embarrassing because of fears of inauthenticity. I feel that Reform Judaism may have focused on helping Jews create an authentic modern Jewish lifestyle because it has been embarrassed to help Jews create an authentic modern Jewish spirituality. It has found talking about the search for a better world far easier than it has the search for God. The modern demand for efficiency and for certainty has rendered public expressions of prayer, contemplation and doubt embarrassing. Old simplistic theological metaphors, dripping particularly with patriarchy and superstition, that seemed fine when we were children become embarrassing when we repeat them as adults. And who has time to read through many hundreds of pages each of Spinoza, Kaplan, Buber, Heschel and other contemporary theologians to try to understand how we might reframe the search for holiness today? As a result of this, social justice became a replacement for spirituality, instead of an important expression of spirituality. Reform Jews would often quote Heschel who said that he was “praying with his feet” while he marched with Martin Luther King as though social justice is all one needs to do to pray. But that was absolutely not Heschel’s perspective on prayer. The regular misquotation of Heschel’s “praying with my feet” has become for many Jews today a subconscious way to legitimize a Jewish life absent of any meaningful spiritual search. What should have been taken as meaning “This is prayer in action” became “This is all that is needed for prayer.”
Differing societies view the notion of progress differently, and the form of progress that our Western society took upon itself, which was often deeply connected to perceived racial and gender superiority, involved a rejection of the past, usually as primitive. As we became more dependent on technology in our society [said the Rabbi into the microphone], we began to truly separate ourselves from the world around us and the language of our prayers needed to be viewed as primitive for us to successfully remove ourselves from nature, something we are now learning too late was never possible. As our society moved more rapidly towards instant gratification, the long-term attitude of our prayers – l’dor vador, from generation to generation – became seen as old-fashioned and inefficient. And as our society started its tortuously slow journey toward egalitarianism, the abandonment or rewriting of problematic prayers without a profound change in theological metaphors rendered them irrelevant to an increasing number of Jews. These, and similar factors, made liturgically-based prayer itself embarrassing. The search for holiness, the backbone of the Jewish community for millennia, became embarrassing to the modern mind. Slowly, though, more and more people are starting to see what Judaism always knew – that some ancient wisdom is worth listening to, that only generational thinking can preserve humanity, and that speaking aloud language that honestly helps us consider our connection to that which is outside ourselves – or real prayer with kavannah – is essential for our personal and communal well-being. Instead of being embarrassing because it contradicts the message of our society, prayer should be empowering and exciting specifically because it will always be a conscious act of rebellion against the negative elements of our society, as we saw on Shabbat Shuvah. Why should we ever be embarrassed to take stock, to reassess, to consider, to form a vision, and then to act… in other words, to pray?
So, the act of prayer itself should not be embarrassing, but within the act of prayer we should find ourselves embarrassed. A genuine spiritual search involves stripping away the layers of pretense that we have built up around ourselves. It forces us to shed the lies that we tell others and particularly the lies that we tell ourselves. It leaves us vulnerable, uncomfortable, knowing that we need to change. The encounter with God is the encounter with that which is totally Other, that which is beyond words, beyond expression and beyond our being – the place where we meet God is the end of the Self. That encounter with the liminality of existence is embarrassing, how could it not be? Embarrassment need not be expressed as guilt or shame, although, of course, it could be. Rather, the healthiest spiritual expression of embarrassment is humility, which is essential for genuine prayer. Heschel said that prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of being. That’s real humility before the rest of creation.
Why do I wear a kittel on Yom Kippur? For me, this is not a garment that signifies purity by being white, although that is often a reason people give for wearing it. For me, it is simply the garment that I am going to be buried in. When I stand in my kittel, I stand totally confronted by the future liminal moment of my own existence, just like during the encounter with God. And although that clearly sometimes makes others uncomfortable, I am not embarrassed to be embarrassed. Here I am, this is me, this is all there is to me. I am not nearly as good a person as some people think I am, and I am only as good a person as others think I am. And one day I will no longer be and only by living in that awareness can I be embarrassed enough to atone. I am, to quote Abraham in the presence of God, but dust and ashes.
I feel that we should be embarrassed as a result of the practice of spirituality and not by the idea of spirituality, embarrassed through prayer and not because of it, embarrassed through the search for and encounter with holiness and not because of it. We should not feel embarrassed that the human need to sit, reflect, and improve still remains an essential element of human existence even as society changes. Indeed, it almost certainly has become an increasingly essential element in our lives today due to the larger social narrative of doing being more important than being.
The encounter with holiness forces us to ask two core questions – “How did I get here…” (which is the question of embarrassment) and then the follow-up question “Where do I go from here?” (which is the question of action). If you’re embarrassed and uncomfortable reading the liturgy, instead ask yourself those two questions – how did I get here and where do I go from here? - and try to find an appropriate place of embarrassment and discomfort on your own terms to help a genuine search for teshuvah, for atonement.
This Yom Kippur, let us in the presence of holiness truly face the liminality of existence and be embarrassed and humbled by our lives until now. Let us not be embarrassed to be embarrassed as a result of the encounter with the divine. Let us not be so filled with hubris that we abandon what is essential to healthy human existence. Let our prayers be real, genuine, embarrassing and let us grow as a result of such prayers. Let us learn from our own fragility, embrace it and not hide from it. And let us say, Amen.
But if that’s the case, why do I still get pangs of self-doubt when talking about prayer publicly? Why, as I wrote these sermons, did I sit worrying that people hearing them might think, “Thanks for the Talmudic quotations and the God-talk, Rabbi, now if you don’t mind we’re actually going to go and make the world and better place while you sit with your books and talk to God”? In part, for sure, it’s because a very small number of people in our community have all but said exactly that to me! And I find it odd that for such a deeply spiritual place as Santa Fe, spirituality, especially God-talk, is clearly embarrassing for so many members of a Temple, as though spirituality were some primitive thing that we enlightened Jews have thankfully moved beyond. There were even times in my Rabbinic career where even I considered such a thing, embarrassed at being paid to lead people in prayer instead of going out into the world to act. How did we get to a point in our society at which the approach to divinity, the search for holiness – which has and always will be at the core of being a Jew – became embarrassing?
For sure, Judaism is first and foremost about action, specifically about mitzvah. Torah enjoins us “tzedek, tzedek tirdof – justice, justice you shall pursue.” Reform Judaism often focuses on that kind of active religious practice, specifically focusing its members on prophetic Judaism, while failing to mention that an absolutely essential part of the life of all the Biblical prophets was a connection with God. We became embarrassed by the search for holiness. At its formation, Reform Judaism expunged prayers relating to sacrifice, to the Messiah, to the concept of resurrection, and much more because it was embarrassed by how primitive and unmodern Jewish expressions of the search for holiness had become. Creating new liturgy became essential but that, too, was embarrassing because of fears of inauthenticity. I feel that Reform Judaism may have focused on helping Jews create an authentic modern Jewish lifestyle because it has been embarrassed to help Jews create an authentic modern Jewish spirituality. It has found talking about the search for a better world far easier than it has the search for God. The modern demand for efficiency and for certainty has rendered public expressions of prayer, contemplation and doubt embarrassing. Old simplistic theological metaphors, dripping particularly with patriarchy and superstition, that seemed fine when we were children become embarrassing when we repeat them as adults. And who has time to read through many hundreds of pages each of Spinoza, Kaplan, Buber, Heschel and other contemporary theologians to try to understand how we might reframe the search for holiness today? As a result of this, social justice became a replacement for spirituality, instead of an important expression of spirituality. Reform Jews would often quote Heschel who said that he was “praying with his feet” while he marched with Martin Luther King as though social justice is all one needs to do to pray. But that was absolutely not Heschel’s perspective on prayer. The regular misquotation of Heschel’s “praying with my feet” has become for many Jews today a subconscious way to legitimize a Jewish life absent of any meaningful spiritual search. What should have been taken as meaning “This is prayer in action” became “This is all that is needed for prayer.”
Differing societies view the notion of progress differently, and the form of progress that our Western society took upon itself, which was often deeply connected to perceived racial and gender superiority, involved a rejection of the past, usually as primitive. As we became more dependent on technology in our society [said the Rabbi into the microphone], we began to truly separate ourselves from the world around us and the language of our prayers needed to be viewed as primitive for us to successfully remove ourselves from nature, something we are now learning too late was never possible. As our society moved more rapidly towards instant gratification, the long-term attitude of our prayers – l’dor vador, from generation to generation – became seen as old-fashioned and inefficient. And as our society started its tortuously slow journey toward egalitarianism, the abandonment or rewriting of problematic prayers without a profound change in theological metaphors rendered them irrelevant to an increasing number of Jews. These, and similar factors, made liturgically-based prayer itself embarrassing. The search for holiness, the backbone of the Jewish community for millennia, became embarrassing to the modern mind. Slowly, though, more and more people are starting to see what Judaism always knew – that some ancient wisdom is worth listening to, that only generational thinking can preserve humanity, and that speaking aloud language that honestly helps us consider our connection to that which is outside ourselves – or real prayer with kavannah – is essential for our personal and communal well-being. Instead of being embarrassing because it contradicts the message of our society, prayer should be empowering and exciting specifically because it will always be a conscious act of rebellion against the negative elements of our society, as we saw on Shabbat Shuvah. Why should we ever be embarrassed to take stock, to reassess, to consider, to form a vision, and then to act… in other words, to pray?
So, the act of prayer itself should not be embarrassing, but within the act of prayer we should find ourselves embarrassed. A genuine spiritual search involves stripping away the layers of pretense that we have built up around ourselves. It forces us to shed the lies that we tell others and particularly the lies that we tell ourselves. It leaves us vulnerable, uncomfortable, knowing that we need to change. The encounter with God is the encounter with that which is totally Other, that which is beyond words, beyond expression and beyond our being – the place where we meet God is the end of the Self. That encounter with the liminality of existence is embarrassing, how could it not be? Embarrassment need not be expressed as guilt or shame, although, of course, it could be. Rather, the healthiest spiritual expression of embarrassment is humility, which is essential for genuine prayer. Heschel said that prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of being. That’s real humility before the rest of creation.
Why do I wear a kittel on Yom Kippur? For me, this is not a garment that signifies purity by being white, although that is often a reason people give for wearing it. For me, it is simply the garment that I am going to be buried in. When I stand in my kittel, I stand totally confronted by the future liminal moment of my own existence, just like during the encounter with God. And although that clearly sometimes makes others uncomfortable, I am not embarrassed to be embarrassed. Here I am, this is me, this is all there is to me. I am not nearly as good a person as some people think I am, and I am only as good a person as others think I am. And one day I will no longer be and only by living in that awareness can I be embarrassed enough to atone. I am, to quote Abraham in the presence of God, but dust and ashes.
I feel that we should be embarrassed as a result of the practice of spirituality and not by the idea of spirituality, embarrassed through prayer and not because of it, embarrassed through the search for and encounter with holiness and not because of it. We should not feel embarrassed that the human need to sit, reflect, and improve still remains an essential element of human existence even as society changes. Indeed, it almost certainly has become an increasingly essential element in our lives today due to the larger social narrative of doing being more important than being.
The encounter with holiness forces us to ask two core questions – “How did I get here…” (which is the question of embarrassment) and then the follow-up question “Where do I go from here?” (which is the question of action). If you’re embarrassed and uncomfortable reading the liturgy, instead ask yourself those two questions – how did I get here and where do I go from here? - and try to find an appropriate place of embarrassment and discomfort on your own terms to help a genuine search for teshuvah, for atonement.
This Yom Kippur, let us in the presence of holiness truly face the liminality of existence and be embarrassed and humbled by our lives until now. Let us not be embarrassed to be embarrassed as a result of the encounter with the divine. Let us not be so filled with hubris that we abandon what is essential to healthy human existence. Let our prayers be real, genuine, embarrassing and let us grow as a result of such prayers. Let us learn from our own fragility, embrace it and not hide from it. And let us say, Amen.