To watch a recording of the one of the (three!) deliveries of this sermon on Rosh HaShanah day, click here. The sermon starts around 1:24.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBN2MbmdLws&t=5775s
Shanah tovah. I want to begin by thanking all of you again for pivoting with us online and in person. This is not what we expected a few months ago, but with this and with everything in life at this moment, we all continue to strive to find the blessings amidst all this uncertainty. I know uncertainty is what I am feeling most keenly right now and through my conversations with so many of you, I know I am not alone. Whatever control we thought we had over our lives, we don’t: like that trip we were planning or the holy days we expected to be in our sanctuary or far more important and poignant, the moments with our loved ones now taken because our loved ones whom we expected to be here are no longer.
The pandemic has amplified what was already true and which this holy day season comes to remind us of every year: that if we ever, perhaps arrogantly believed we were in charge, we are not. That if we ever had what we thought was certainty, it was really more like what the ancient wielder of words, Kohelet called hevel, a fleeting, passing mist. The human tension has always been between our own power and our powerlessness, what is in our hands and what is not. How do we manage this radical uncertainty, and when this particular period of time ends - for it will, we just don’t know when – when it ends, will we have learned its lessons?
We sense we could handle this time of tremendous unknown if only we knew when it would end, but the goalposts – they keep moving on us, don’t they? Endings become beginnings again. Perhaps the only certainty we have is that we are not the first in time to be radically unsure.
Let us go back to the beginning. We just heard Torah beautifully chanted and we find that as our story continues, creation transforms into a garden – and that garden has a name: Eden. And there are human beings in Eden, Adam and Eve who at their first straying from God, eating the forbidden fruit, choose to hide in their shame.
God then asks the first recorded question in time. God asks, Ayeka, where are you?
Ayeka is not a question about their location for surely God already knows. And the question like all questions in Torah was not only addressed to those first human beings. The question, lest we are confused, is addressed to us as well. Ayeka, where are you, where are we? When we, too, stray, when we want to hide, will we harken to God’s voice?
Let’s fast forward millennia to the Olympics this past summer. Remember that moment when Simone Biles was is in midair coming off the vault… but her eyes – her eyes are off to the side. She lands, but barely. She later pulls herself out of most of the rest of the competition and shares with the world that she is suffering from what gymnasts call the twisties, where in the words of Biles, she “literally cannot tell up from down.”
I’ve pondered her description a lot in these precious weeks leading up to the holy days. What it means to be so disorientated that you cannot discern in space and time exactly where you are. There is a lot to unpack in the entirety of her story, many extraordinary lessons to pull from, but if I may, I want to stay with that image of being in midair, unsure if the ground is above or below you. I am not a gymnast and I’d wager to say most of us are not gymnasts either, but I bet most of us can relate to that feeling Simone Biles described, especially at some point over these last, long eighteen months. We, too, have the twisties. Our souls, it seems, are spinning.
Deuteronomy poetically describes one of the worst curses we can experience is having no safe place for our feet to land and rest. The feeling is one of spiritual dislocation.
Spiritual dislocation was understood by the Zohar, that mystical compendium of Kabbalah as spiritual exile from God, sometimes manifesting as real exile, our people wandering across lands far away from Israel. Spiritual dislocation can also be internal; it is when our bodies feel disconnected from our souls. Radical uncertainty can do that to us, shake us, spin us so much that we feel exiled from ourselves.
God called to Adam and Eve in the garden: Ayeka, where are you? And when they eventually crawled out of the shadows where they had been hiding from God, they refused to take responsibility for any part of what led up to that moment and I can’t help but wonder, have we? They passed the blame onto the next convenient target as humans are apt to do, and as a result, they ended up on the other side of the garden walls, exiled from Eden, physically and spiritually dislocated. And we’ve been wandering ever since.
One tradition places the garden of Eden in the land of Israel and even in Jerusalem itself. That longing our people have had for the Promised Land – it didn’t begin with our wandering in the wilderness after having been freed from Egypt. Or even after our exiles after the first and second Temples fell. No, we have been longing for return ever since that very first primordial day when we couldn’t muster the courage to truthfully answer God’s question.
Rav Kook taught that the first real sin wasn’t Adam and Eve taking the forbidden fruit; it was their false response to God’s question, the hemming and the hawing and the shifting of blame. They had forgotten who they really were, they no longer recognized their own souls and in so doing, they exiled themselves from God and from Eden. We all make mistakes, we all sin, but when we withhold our truth from God, we withhold it from ourselves – and that’s how we start to spin. God asks, where are you? We ask in response, how do we return?
Unlike our forebears who couldn’t bring themselves to tell the truth, our first step to return, to finding our footing again on sacred, solid ground needs to begin with honesty. When God says, where are you, do not lie. Do not lie to yourself. God is not expecting us to put on a brave face and keep going when our bodies are simply depleted, our hearts are achingly broken, our mental and spiritual wellness is compromised. God expects you to be you, me to be me no more, no less. God wants our truth. And God will sit beside us when we are in pain.
Where are we? Tell the truth… Well, if we are honest, God, we are in mid-air. If we are honest, God, we are having a lot of trouble these days telling which way is up and which way is down.
And you know… an extraordinary thing happens when we start down the path of being honest with ourselves and with God: we discover that we have the power to unlock even more brave and bold parts of ourselves.
Radical truth-telling leads us to the most courageous thing we can possibly do: which is to invite in uncertainty. Going to war against the uncertainty of this moment or any moment will only lead us to greater disappointment and despair. We must invite uncertainty in, offer her a seat at the table for she lingers at our doors whether invited or not. It is better for us to just get on with it, to get up close and personal with uncertainty and accept her rather than to live in fear of when she will come unexpectedly barreling through the doors into our lives.
Accepting uncertainty can free us. It can free us. When we let go of the illusion of control, we give ourselves the permission for those times and situations in our lives when we need to step back and say, this is not ours to hold today. We can let go of the anxiety that accompanies our need to control that which is not ours to control. Like Simone Biles, it is okay and crucial even to acknowledge when a situation is simply beyond ourselves in a particular moment. It is okay. It is! It is okay to step back when we need to. Do not render yourself a failure for being human.
Here’s the thing. We aren’t in this alone. We – here, everywhere! - are a community. None of us are individually able to take on all the world’s problems. Or even all the problems sitting in our own personal laps right now. We must lean on one another, accept responsibility for our corner of the universe, yes, and expect others to hold theirs. However, for those times when we are up in the air, spinning, and unable to find our bearings, we need to pause and let others help and hold us. Taking care of ourselves is holy work, too.
When we daringly tell our truth and audaciously accept uncertainty, we are ready then to lean into the power we do have. Accepting uncertainty doesn’t get us off the hook. This moment is about honing in on what is in our hands and what is not. In our Torah reading in ten days on Yom Kippur, we will hear God’s words, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life!” …Who will live and who will die? All of us - sooner or later! None of us knows how long we will have on this earth, but if we can be certain of anything, it is this: that we have the tremendous power to choose life and that we choose life best when we love big and give back.
Much like Alfred Nobel did. We’ve all heard about the Nobel Prize. What you might not know is the story that led to the prize’s creation. Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. When his brother died, a mistake occurred and the obituary of Alfred who was still very much alive appeared in the papers instead. Alfred read his legacy in black-and-white. The obituary called him the Merchant of Death and it read: “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” This experience profoundly changed him, and he decided to dedicate his life and wealth to making the world a world of peace. God’s Ayeka got a response from Alfred Nobel that day. Reading his own obituary forced Nobel to reflect honestly on his life and return to who he was and perhaps who he was meant to be.
We shouldn’t have to read our own obituaries to make our lives more meaningful. Nor should we have to weather a pandemic to reacquaint ourselves with purpose. Yet sometimes, obituaries are mistakenly printed early, and sometimes pandemics arrive in our lifetimes. Choosing life means not letting the struggle go by without wrestling from it whatever blessings we can.
Holocaust survivor and philosopher Viktor Frankl taught: When we can no longer change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
There is a lot out there that is beyond my personal power – and yours, too. But what do you have power over? Your honesty, your giving, your prayer, your kindness, how you interact with your children, your parents. How you treat the stranger, how you treat your neighbor. How you hold yourself accountable. How you honor your vulnerability. How you responsibly count yourself in the community by getting vaccinated. How you put this moment in perspective, understanding it amidst the horrors of yesterday – like the horrors our people endured, exiles, pogroms, the Shoah - and the horrors playing out all around the globe this very instant. Let us think of the Afghani girls and women. Let us think of the Uyghurs in China. Let us think of all those in the path of climate-change fueled fires and storms.
Our people have wandered the wilderness before, and we can glean strength from those who have walked before us. This is one moment in the grandness of this story. The question – remember the question? – is still out there. If and how you answer the question and what you choose to do with that response determines what happens next.
I like to think Ayeka has been floating through time ever since it was first uttered, waiting to be heard, waiting to be answered. When we pay attention and hear it, we get drawn in… drawn in like Moshe rabbeinu, Moses our great teacher was drawn in that day he first found himself face to face with un-consuming flames. Moses could have missed the moment with the burning bush, walked right by, but he was aware, he was present, he noticed what was around him - and Ayeka was in the wind.
God tells Moses: Take off your shoes for you are standing on holy ground. And isn’t that what we’ve been craving all along? A safe place for our feet to land? After spinning and searching, here, now, finally: sacred, solid ground.
That moment was then, but it’s also now, don’t you see? That moment, standing on holy ground with God, and what it represents as the start of our people’s revolution exemplifies that anything is possible.
After all, that moment, our story taught us that a Hebrew baby slated for slaughter can become a prince. And a prince can become a fugitive. And a fugitive can become a shepherd. And a shepherd can become a prophet of God. Anything is possible. Tyrants can be resisted, and an enslaved people can become free and find home again. Anything is possible, the bad, yes, even the very, very bad, but also the very, very good. It’s true today, too, even in the midst of a pandemic. God revealed that day and is revealing to us every day that anything is possible - redemption is possible. Therefore, we can have hope.
And Moses, knowing he would need to relay this revelation to the people asks, Who shall I say sent me? And God answers Ehyeh asher Ehyeh and nothing feels more profound. Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I’ll translate as Whatever I become is whatever I become. In perhaps the ultimate lesson in accepting uncertainty, God refuses to be a noun. Ehyeh is a verb in the imperfect tense meaning it is a verb whose action is incomplete. God, too, is incomplete. God is Becoming whatever I am becoming.
And so are we.
If God’s future is seemingly unwritten, why should we expect anything different for us?
God, we have been waiting outside the walls; we have been spinning in the air for so long. We have been dying for some sense of certainty. But your name, meant to inspire a sea of slaves to become a free people, reminds us to humbly hold on for the future is not yet written, but holy, holy ground is here when we need to rest our feet.
Some say that the day that Adam and Eve stray from God is of all days Rosh HaShanah. It was on that day that God asked, Ayeka, Where are you? Adam and Eve stumbled at first response, but if God is still speaking to us today (and God is!) then we have the opportunity for cosmic teshuvah across time. We have the opportunity even in these most uncertain of days to not only hear God’s call, but the chance to respond this time from a place of honesty and authenticity and hope.
In a moment, we will rise once more to hear the call of the shofar. Perhaps in the calls, you will hear God's grounding voice. If you are spinning, this call is for you, calling you back to holy ground. If you feel outside the walls, are yearning for belonging and home, this call is for you, calling to let you know you are not alone. God is here, and we… we are here to sit beside you to ride out this storm. Listen closely for Ayeka is there, humming within the call. The question now is: How will you respond?
Please rise for
the calls of the shofar. We are on page 284. (Shofar calls)
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