Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
Those of us who are here early enough on these two mornings of Rosh HaShanah are treated to stories from the Torah that parallel each other in some interesting ways. The reading this morning tells of how Hagar, Abraham's concubine, was sent away with her young son Ishmael because Abraham and Sarah were afraid that Ishmael was having a bad influence on Isaac. They lose their way in the desert, they are out of food and water and the boy is about to die of thirst when an angel appears and points Hagar to a nearby well. Their lives are saved and Hagar names the well Be'er L'Hai Ro'I, the well of the living God who sees me, or as I would interpret it, "at the bottom of the well, at the lowest point of my life, when I felt helpless and abandoned, I met God and learned that God cares about me."
Then tomorrow we read that story that defies all understanding: God commands Abraham to take his beloved son Isaac, born to him after years of yearning, and offer him as a sacrifice on a nearby mountain. Abraham is about to comply when, at the last moment, an angel intervenes and tells him to stop and not harm the child. God tells Abraham that because he has shown such faith, he and his descendants will play an important role in the religious history of the world. Abraham calls the place where that happened Bahar Adonai Yera'eh, the mountain where God is seen, or as I would interpret it, "at the high point of my life, the day when my child was returned to me safe and unharmed and I learned that I would be successful in my dream of changing the world, I felt I had seen the face of God."
Why did the Sages of two thousand years ago ordain those particular stories to be read year after year on Rosh HaShanah? Maybe they did it because they understood something about why people come to today's service.
Why do we come? Why are these the services for which we set out six hundred extra seats and set up a tent in the parking lot? Some of us come, I'm sure, because these prayers mean a lot to us. The words, the music, the memories, the experience of being in a large throng of Jews gathered for worship, -- that reaches us at a deep part of our souls.
Some of us come out of a lingering sense of obligation, a feeling that this is something we ought to do whether we enjoy it or not, what my teacher Mordecai Kaplan described as "observing the yahrzeit of our parents' religion."
Some people, I suspect, come because they are afraid that something bad will happen to them if they don't come. Let me explain that I mean by that. I would hope that no member of this congregation literally thinks that if you are marked absent on Rosh HaShanah, you won't be inscribed in the Book of Life and as a result, something terrible will befall you during the year. I hope you don't believe that
But for some people, being Jewish is a marginal part of their daily identity. It doesn't really flavor their lives that much, but they understand that if they went to the office on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, they would be making a statement to themselves and to the people around them about the utter insignificance of being Jewish, that they are not prepared to make. So they come.
But all those reasons cover only a part of the congregation. There is another reason why many of us come year after year. We come because we are hoping to meet God here. We want to meet God the way Hagar and Abraham met God. We want something to happen during these hours that will convince us that God is real beyond any doubt and that God cares about us.
Sometimes, every now and then, it happens and we walk out inspired. But most of the time we go home kind of disappointed. The service was fine, the rabbi and cantor did their tasks well, but where was God? I met my neighbors, I met the leaders of the congregation, but I'm not sure I met God. Why not? For one thing, Hagar and Abraham met God at the high points and low points of their lives, days when their children were in danger, days when their most desperate prayers were suddenly answered. At times like that, it's not hard to believe that God is real and cares about you. In much the same way, it's not that hard to sense the holiness, the religious dimension of a wedding, a birth, even of a funeral when religion works to heal even people who are not religious. But most of us don't live on mountaintops or at the bottom of wells in the desert. Most of us live most of our days at sea level, and our lives are marked by few triumphs and few dangers. We never seem to run into God there, and so we come to shul on these High Holy Days hoping something extraordinary will happen and we'll be able to walk out of the synagogue seeing the world differently than we did when we walked in.
It's not a new story. People have always longed to come face to face with God, to banish all doubts that God was real and not just something the authorities made up, like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, to make us behave. Four months after the Israelites left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea, forty days after God gave our ancestors the Ten Commandments, the Israelites felt a desperate need to see God, to have tangible proof that God was still with them and had not abandoned them after leading them into the desert. Remember, these were people who had spent every day of their lives in Egypt, a highly visual, highly materialistic culture, with its pyramids and treasure houses. In Egypt, if something was real, you could see it. Dead people weren't simply remembered; they were kept around as mummies. The branch of mathematics in which Egypt excelled was not algebra or calculus or quadratic equations but geometry, the measurement of real things. No wonder the Israelites had trouble absorbing the idea that something can be real but you can't see it.
As long as Moses was around, they could look at Moses as an embodiment, an incarnation of God. For them, Moses was God in human form. He told them what God expected of them. He worked miracles, the Ten Plagues, splitting the Sea. But Moses was gone. He was on Mt. Sinai getting the details of the Torah beyond the Ten Commandments. So you remember what the Israelites did. They fashioned a Golden Calf to represent the power and the glory of God. God was no longer an intellectual abstraction. Now they could see the God they were praying to. They could see that God was present in their midst.
God gets angry at them for turning Him into a thing, an idol. Moses is so upset that he breaks the tablets of the Law. These people don't deserve the revelation, one of whose commandments was not to fashion an image of God. And Moses has to plead with God to give them a second chance, reminding God that they had been raised in Egypt where representations of the gods were all around.
About twelve hundred years after that, there was another case of people feeling they needed to see God in order to believe that God was real and that God cared. When I was about eleven years old, I asked my Hebrew teacher at the Brooklyn Jewish Center "If our religion is true, how come there are so many more Christians in the world than Jews?" He answered, "Because it's a lot easier to be a Christian. You don't have to keep kosher, you don't have to keep Shabbos, you don't have to eat matzo on Pesach. And people like to take the easy way." Only years later did I realize what a bad answer that was. First, I think it's a mistake to describe Judaism primarily in terms of how hard it is, how much you have to give up. Secondly, I'm not sure that when it comes to religion, people want to take the easy way. Often people are attracted by a religion that takes itself seriously enough to make demands on them. But mostly, I can appreciate that, as an orthodox Jew, he didn't understand the appeal of Christianity. He could only see it in Jewish terms. Christianity is spiritually attractive to a lot of people because it lets you see God. Christianity began at a time of great turmoil, a time when hope and faith were in short supply. Like the Jews enslaved in Egypt, people of the first century suffered the cruelties of the Roman Empire at its worst. It was hard for them to believe that God was anywhere in their world. So Christianity offered to show them God in human form. You're not sure that God exists? Here is God come down to earth in the form of this young man. You want to know what this God looks like that you're praying to? Here's what He looks like.
The trouble is, that approach solves some problems but raises others. I once heard a lecture by a Roman Catholic nun who was a psychotherapist, about the spiritual problems of religious women. One thing she said was that, if you picture God as a man, as Christianity does, it becomes nearly impossible for a woman to pray without bringing into her prayer life all the baggage of her relationships with powerful men. Trying to pray, she will be suspicious, flirtatious, resentful, anything but reverent.
Picture if you will a fifty-year-old man, a Roman Catholic computer programmer, who has just lost his job. His company has let him go and replaced him with a thirty-year-old Jewish man, wearing jeans and sporting a beard, who can do his job better and cheaper. The man is distraught. How will he pay his bills? How will he send his kids to college? On the way home, he stops off at his church looking for solace. He tries to pray, looks up at the altar and there he sees God portrayed as a thirty year old Jewish man with a beard. How can he believe that God is on his side?
So, if God is not a thing, if God has no form or shape, not male or female, not young or old, not white or black or yellow, how can we see God? And if we can't see God, how can we know that God is real? Right after the incident of the Golden Calf, Moses confronts God with that problem. He says to God, in effect: I've got a bunch of people down there who are having trouble believing that You are real because they can't see You and they don't know how to believe in something they can't see. If it would prevent future Golden Calf incidents, could we just have a tiny peek at what You look like?
God answers, "You don't get it. The reason you can't see Me is not that I'm hiding, and it's not that you're obtuse. You can't see Me because I have no form or shape. I'm not a thing." But then, rather than send Moses away empty-handed, God utters what may be the strangest, most puzzling verse in the entire Torah. He says, "Wait here in this cave while I pass by, and then look. You won't be able to see My face, but you'll see My back."
How can that be? God has just insisted that He has no form or shape. God has just severely punished the Israelites for portraying Him in physical form. And now He tells Moses "You can see My back!" Let me suggest that what it means is this: we can't see God but we can see God's after-effects. That's what the reference to seeing His back implies. All we can see of God is the difference that God makes as He passes through our lives, just as you can't see wind; you can only see things being blown around by the wind. Hagar didn't see God. She saw a well that saved her life, she found the world sustaining her when everyone else had rejected her, and that was enough to persuade her that God was real. Abraham didn't see anything on that mountaintop. He got the message that it was wrong to sacrifice his child on the altar of his beliefs, and he understood, the way a person will say "Oh, I see", - he understood what it meant to follow God's ways. And the Israelites in Egypt didn't see God either. They saw God's impact. They saw the gates of freedom swing open, and they knew that God was at work.
In a way, we ought to be able to understand this concept better than previous generations could, because of advances that have been made in subatomic particle physics. No scientist has ever seen an electron. No physicist has ever actually seen a quark. But they are absolutely convinced that quarks and electrons exist, because when they look through their microscopes, they see things happening that could only happen if quarks and electrons were real. And that's what I'm saying, and that's what the Torah is saying, about God. You and I can't see God, but we see things happening that could only be happening because God is at work.
When a doctor saves a life through surgery or cures an illness with antibiotics, he is entitled to feel that he has seen the hand of God at work. When a person is ashamed of herself for something she has done and is afraid that people will shun her but she discovers that there is forgiveness in the world, or when she finds the power within herself to love people close to her who have disappointed her, she can feel that she has met God in her life, not God's face but God's back. Working invisibly, imperceptibly, God has made something happen, because forgiveness doesn't come naturally to people. We can forgive and we can love only when God stirs our souls. When a person finds himself alone, through bereavement or through rejection, and feels utterly abandoned, the way Hagar did in the desert, and friends rally to his or her side, that is God in action, God making things happen.
Seven years ago, some of you may remember that I went to Oklahoma City to conduct a workshop for clergy and psychologists who were dealing with families who had lost loved ones in the bombing of the Federal Building. After the workshop, I met the bereaved families. I said to them, "It's been a month since that tragedy. What one thing more than anything else has helped you deal with your loss?" And remarkably they all gave me the same answer, using the same word: community. Neighbors, strangers coming up to them to hug them, to express sympathy, to bring them food to fill the emptiness inside them. And I realized that they were giving me a profoundly religious answer. A 19th Century Hassidic rabbi, Menahem Mendel of Rymanov, once said "human beings are God's language." That is, when you cry out to God, God responds to your cry by sending you people. I would paraphrase that sentence to say that human beings, reaching out to others in need, doing good things when they don't have to do them, are as close as we will ever come to seeing the face of God. And it happens all the time.
Any time we find ourselves stirred to be more generous, more courageous, more self-disciplined, more grateful, we may not have seen God face- to-face but we will have caught a glimpse of God's back and seen the difference God can make in our lives.
Any time a Jew does something that calls for a blessing, we are asserting that God is present. Can you see the difference between saying "Praised are You O Lord our God who brings forth food from the earth" and saying "Praised is God who brings forth food from the earth"? To say "You" in a prayer is to claim that God is there with you. God is not in the place; God is in the moment, in the spark of gratitude for food expressed in a Jewish religious idiom. When you light the Shabbat candles, when you say Kiddush over the wine, and you say "Barukh Attah Adonai", you are recognizing the invisible presence of God in your home at that moment. You are saying, I am doing this because God is real and God is stirring me. God is teaching me to create a moment of holiness.
Three thousand years ago, a band of Israelites yearned to see God so desperately that they fashioned a Golden Calf and told themselves "That's what God looks like." And God got very upset with them and said to them "You don't get it. I'm not an object. I'm not a thing you can draw a picture of, or make a statue of. I am the Power that liberated you and guided you for the last few months and will continue to liberate and guide you, even if you can't see Me as I do it."
Two thousand years ago, some people felt they needed to see God, so they came to believe that a young Jew from Nazareth was God in human form. And God said "No, I'm not incarnate in one person any more than I am incarnate in every person, young and old, black and white, male and female, plain and attractive. They are all My image."
And we today yearn to see God. We come to services on Rosh HaShanah and we virtually challenge God: Reveal Yourself! Make something happen so I'll know that You're there. And God says to us "Forget about it. You're not going to see Me. Nobody can see Me. I'm not a person and I'm not a thing. I'm not a calf and I'm not a carpenter's son. You want to see Me? Go out and do godly things. Help the poor and comfort the grieving, make your community a better place, and then go home and look in the mirror. That's as close as you will come to seeing what God looks like. Watch the things you say and control you behavior, and you will feel Me as a living presence in your life. Write a check to tzedakah and you will feel God guiding your hand as you sign it. Light the Shabbat candles, make your table an altar and your home a sanctuary, and you will feel My presence so strongly that you will say "Barukh Attah Adonai Eloheynu Melekh HaOlam Asher Kidshanu B'mitzvotav...", Praised are You, O Lord, who by Your presence has shown me how to bring holiness into my home and into my life. AMEN