Rabbi Sim Glaser
Yom Kippur 5762
September 26, 2001
Last year here at Temple, we celebrated the B’nai Mitzvah of some 68 teens.
This year we will witness close to 61 adolescents magically become young
adults in the Jewish tradition. How do we do so many, you ask? It is a very
simple technique. We employ a secret potion called Teen-Be-Gone. With
only a shpritz, our young people pass from the difficult years of adolescence
into the maturity of adulthood. The day after they are called to the Torah
and given that little shpritz, they no longer see themselves as the center
of the world. They become menschy, they ache for the ills of society. They
recognize that everything their parents have ever taught them is true. The
law of God is instantaneously absorbed into their being and remains a constant
part of who they are for the rest of their lives. And let me tell you,
we would have this formula patented… if only it really existed. The truth
is, nobody passes from adolescence into adulthood with ease, including humanity,
which for the last several thousand years has been caught in a sustained
adolescence.
But there is hope for us.
Several months ago I was working with a young man preparing for his Bar Mitzvah
and together we encountered the verse in Deuteronomy that speaks of Moses
as the only person ever to have seen God ‘face to face’ panim el painim’.
“How can that be?” He asked, “if God doesn’t have a face?” Struggling for
an answer, I replied with the classic rabbinic response, “well now Andrew,
you tell me…” And he did. “Well” he said, “I think it just means that
Moses was more sure than anyone who ever lived… that there is a God.”
I thought to myself: “Now why can’t I think up stuff like that?!” And
right then and there I promised young Andrew that I would some day rip him
off and use his very words in my own sermon, and he said “That’s Ok with
me, rabbi.” And here we are.
Look, some of my best friends are adolescents. Three young people of close
biological relation to me whom I love deeply are adolescents. There are 35
wonderful adolescents downstairs singing, reading Torah, leading worship
and timing the rabbi’s sermon. There are wonderful kids in our na’aseh
v’nishmah program who go all over our community doing mitzvot. So forgive
me if I use adolescence as a metaphor for the state of humanity.
We have only recently emerged from the bloodiest century in human history.
And here our hopes and dreams and wishes for a more dignified, humane and
moral new millennium were only getting fired up when our world came crashing
down at the foot of Manhattan and in Washington, and we seem thrust into
a sensibility bourn more of the dark ages than that of a growing human morality.
Yet, on this Yom Kippur day, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, I am
feeling optimistic. I am hopeful that after thousands of years of what
might be termed ‘human adolescence’, we are progressing toward the beginnings
of real adulthood, for which we have longed yearned. I cannot view what happened
two weeks ago as a step backward in the human propensity for Godliness, but
rather as a reminder that Godliness will always be tested. A lot of people
came through with flying colors. It is incumbent upon the rest of civilization
to rise to that challenge.
But anyone who even distantly recalls puberty will remember and recognize
that moving from adolescence to adulthood is no mean feat.
Part of Yom Kippur requires hazkara – remembrance. So let us recall how it
all began. Humanity commenced its life’s journey with childhood in the “Kinder-garden”
of Eden. God breathes the divine spirit into Adam and Eve with all the wishes
and desires of a new parent that the sweet things will be holy and act divinely.
After all, is it not written: “let us create them in our own image… betzelem
Elohim? Of course we are not long out of the nursery before we turn out to
be troublesome little shmendriks, and so the rules, the commandments have
to begin – get out there and multiply, take responsibility, garden, ah-ah-ah!
Don’t eat that, it’s not good for you!
You read any part of Genesis and you’ll see humankind’s display of classic
childish behavior, requiring the active and continuous presence of a parent,
closely watching as we make numerous mistakes… snacking inappropriately between
meals; beating up on our little brother, denying we did it, and then saying:
What am I, his baby sitter?? Taking everything too literally because we were
too naïve to contemplate nuance. “Good heavens, Abraham, put down
that knife! I didn’t mean literally kill him, just send him to rabbinical
school or something…”
Joseph shows off his latest fashion statement, a totally inappropriate gift
of favoritism from his immature father who never understood the concept of
sharing. Jacob with his lifetime of deceptions, Rebecca’s eagerness to please
as well as her cunning. Rachel and Leah trying to outdo each other bearing
children to gain political power. And all the time, God is watching, thinking,
I can’t leave this creature alone for a minute, I can’t even find good day-care.
That is, until Exodus, which chronicles humanity’s shift into adolescence.
As any parent of a teenager will understand, God by sheer necessity becomes
further removed, pushed away over and again by the rebellious teens. One
of the more developed among them is invested with authority, a fellow name
of Moses, with the hope that he will teach the children to integrate holy
values into themselves. See them, still kvetching about what’s for
dinner. “Manna again?!” The care-taker prophet goes mountain climbing
for a few days, and returns to find a party in the living room, a terrible
mess, dancing and a false god forged of gold in the center of the living
room.
Yet a generation later the “children of Israel” still cry for water, and
an amazing thing happens worthy of any teenager… Moses defies his parent!
He has been told to speak to the rock and get water for the recalcitrant
Israelites, and in anger cries out: “Shall WE get water for you from this
rock?!” Forgetting for a critical moment that he himself is not God, he is
not the center of the universe, he disobediently strikes the rock.
This reminded me of the other day when my daughter saw me consulting this
book - God, a Biography for this sermon and she piped up: “Ha, I’m
going to write a book called God, the Autobiography!” Yes.
Now if you know your Torah, you’ll recall the water flowed from the rock
anyway, proving that Adonai was well aware of the number one rule of dealing
with adolescents – never, ever embarrass teenagers in front of their peers.
And so Moses was actually allowed to display a miracle of his own devising.
Later, however, it was time for consequences. Moses would be denied entry
into the promised land. Basically, Moses was grounded. And it is there on
that mountain that Moses gives the greatest sermon ever preached – revealing
to the Israelites that God has been raising humankind with a progressive
release. God, the parent, is pulling back and will continue to do so throughout
history. Beginning with a crude slave people, nurturing us to awareness
in order that the divine voice will become our voice, the very same way the
parental voice becomes part of the child’s own voice over time. In
essence, is adulthood, an adulthood humanity requires, but has not to this
day achieved.
True religious maturity comes to us when we absorb the teachings and live
by them! You cannot do that when some authoritative figure is shouting at
you to perform mitzvot. Only when the divine part of us that is the living
breathing presence of our maker becomes visible to us, will we, in essence,
grow up.
There are those who believe that the child never truly becomes an adult until
his or her own parents are gone. Those who will attend the Yizkor service
this afternoon remembering a beloved parent, know what that’s all about.
That voice that use to berate, challenge, admonish, cajole, hurt, help, love,
assist, and praise you is no longer heard in physical space – but that voice
is still there, isn’t it? That voice is a part of you.
Does this mean that God needs to die in order for us to have the voice incorporated
in our essence? No, but religious hypocrisy needs to die, and immature
fundamentalist views of God must cease, and the constant idolatry of material
objects and fame and fortune has to end.
In his wonderful book The Hidden Face of God, Richard Elliot Friedman looks
back to our ancient Biblical past, and points out that the closer the generation
was to God, the more they rebelled. The more distant they were, the
better they behaved. Sound familiar? Growing up meant slowly separating from
authority, but also incorporating adult responsibility into their core. Hence
the establishment of Prophets, (Psst… let him talk to God); and the ordination
of Priests – (we’ll send our sin-offering COD – “Coheyn Obligatory Delivery”
so we don’t have to listen to the nagging of this God whom we so annoyingly
resemble, and who makes all these fekakdeh rules and who leads us around
by way of a cloud, and for some reason doesn’t think we can do this by ourselves.)
Get out of my life! But first take me and Chava to the Mall!
All of Jewish history has found us very much in the throes of adolescence.
Our very name hints at this – Yisrael – God wrestler - which Jacob was named
as he grappled with his heavenly parent for the keys to the Jeep Cherokee,
not letting go until he received that blessing. We are a species with a divine
Parent who left us an Ethical Will few of us have ever thoroughly understood,
and thus we have endlessly struggled with the difficulties of growing up.
The horrific events of two weeks ago sent us whirling into multiple dimensions
of thought. The perpetrators of the tragedy of two weeks ago do not
represent the current soul of humanity, but a horrible corruption of the
religious ideal. Any sane Muslim, Christian or Jew in this world will tell
you that no true religious vision makes hatred a holy thing. The tremendous
heroism of firefighters and police was a holy thing. The registered shock
and tears of the civilized world are holy things. The pledge to bring the
world to a higher plateau of behavior is a holy thing.
I have heard it said numerous times that our national trauma has caused America,
and perhaps the world to grow up. America has lost its innocence; its childhood
is over - never again will we be sanguine, self directed, irresponsible,
negligent and juvenile. I don’t buy it. I don’t believe that any singular
event no matter how tremendous could accomplish this kind of sea-change in
human behavior. Consider, for example, that even the Nazi Holocaust did not
awaken a sleeping world to the evils consequences of incessant bigotry and
xenophobia.
As we begin to emerge from the long adolescence of human moral development,
what is the Jewish role? Well, we are, and have been for thousands
of years, among the world’s greatest teachers. The Levitical code of holiness?
Ours. The commandment system? Ours. The prophets who spoke with such
assurance that God’s voice was inside of them. Our prophets. The great
ethical monotheistic tradition? Ours, particularly ours as Reform Jews.
What we learned two weeks ago was that we must remove the depraved bully
from the classroom in order for anyone to learn anything. In a world that
threatens to become irrational, we must be purveyors of reason.
On the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, it is ours to consider why it
is that God has been hiding. We invented Prophets, priests, and Kings to
distance ourselves. Then governments and public servants and religious
leaders to make God’s work someone else’s business. A temple president in
one of my former synagogues once told me he believed the congregational rabbi
must be not only the standard bearer or exemplar of morality, but that he
must behave that way on behalf of his congregants who are not doing so.
Uh, wrong.
It begins with each of us. Yom Kippur is the growing up holiday. A
day to consider what it is that makes one a bigger person. Each time we behave
morally we tip the world-wide scales of human goodness a bit more in the
right direction. If you were paying attention to Isaiah a few minutes ago
you heard him say that we fast in order to be empathetic toward the hungry,
not to offer our suffering on the altar as though that were truly important
to God.
You may not be aware that some time ago our reform movement replaced the
Yom Kippur afternoon Torah reading from Leviticus, the one regarding various
animal sacrifices, with the far more evolved religious responses of the holiness
code, calling upon us to share grain, to not deal deceitfully with one another,
to not rob, to pay your laborer what you owe them on time; to avoid idolatry,
and to not hate your brothers and sisters in your heart. We read the Holiness
code as an ethical will left to us by a parent who believes we are now too
old to have our hands held, but too young to have entirely integrated the
divine message into our souls. In other words, we still need the cliff notes.
The Torah, folks, is the Cliff Notes.
On this day we come to our synagogues to reconnect with the ancient parent
who guided our ancestors physically and with stern regulations to affirm
that we have grown into a nation that no longer needs visible miracles in
order to believe – we need to perform them!!
As if a disappearing God weren’t trouble enough, Mr. Fred Rogers just retired
from his long, gentle TV career. Clearly it is now up to us to ensure it
will be a beautiful day in the neighborhood. We’re on our own. And the sublime
Mr. Rogers once said: “Discovering the truth about ourselves is the work
of a lifetime, but it’s worth the effort.”
You can’t go back in time. We will never be children again – we will never
bask in the glow of our parents’ loving tenderness again the way we once
did. We will never journey through the trials of adolescence again… thank
God, for we have grown up. It is now time for the child created in God’s
image to assume the role of the parent who no longer commands externally,
but internally.
Webster calls adolescence “the state or process of growing up.” It’s really
not an age range at all. Thus, for some of us adolescence can last a lifetime
– know anybody like that? And similarly, growing up comes to some of our
young people early on.
The most moving headline I read in our local paper this year, the one that
stopped me cold in my tracks was not the falling towers or a call to arms.
No, my favorite was this fellow here (show paper) who celebrated his 13th
birthday, by throwing a party for 300 inner city kids most of whom he had
never met.
The Friedman book I alluded to earlier was originally entitled The Disappearance
of God. The author changed it, for perhaps obvious reasons to The Hidden
Face of God. A much better title. Today I think I understand where to find
the Hidden Face of God. I believe I am looking at it.
