When Nothing Whispers

Rosh Hashanah 5768

by Rabbi Sim Glaser

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Three weeks ago I realized the HHDs were in three weeks, and I had absolutely nothing for a Rosh Hashanah sermon. I said to Barb, you know, maybe I should get up there and say nothing, which, for a rabbi, would really be something! She didn’t think that was such a good idea. “You can’t talk about nothing,” she said. “You wouldn’t be saying anything.” I had nothing to say to that… except for the fact that I have heard preachers talk for hours and say nothing. But that’s different.

It’s true, nothing isn’t really something to talk about unless you’re Jerry Seinfeld. And I was about to give up on the idea when I picked up the Star Tribune that very morning and was greeted with the front page news that one of our own Temple Israel flock, Astronomer - Professor Lawrence Rudnick, known to many of us as the husband of the wonderful Muffy Rudnick, had discovered, in the deepest reaches of space, nothing- and it turns out to be bigger than anything we have ever encountered.

My first thoughts upon hearing this took me back to 7th grade when my teacher Mr. Peterson once told me that if I didn’t start behaving I’d grow up to be a big nothing. Yes! In your face Mr. Peterson! There is nothing bigger than a big nothing!

But my next move was to call up Larry Rudnick and ask if he’d be willing to spend a little time with me and answer some questions.

“Sure,” he said. “It so happens I have nothing on my calendar this afternoon!”

We got together and I asked what this was all about. Larry said: “Well, we have identified the largest emptiness in the universe. Dark energy representing about 20% of all energy. It is bigger than anything we have ever seen. It is something that scientists cannot describe, because there is no “anything” there, but it gives us an idea of what might have existed before the big bang, which we have always imagined as the beginning of everything.

But Larry, I barked incredulously, “how can you discover complete nothingness? If it’s really nothing, how then can you possibly know it’s there?”

Larry responded: “Well, though we cannot label it or see it, we can see that it has been doing something. Nothingness, as it turns out, has been whispering to us. For billions of years.”

“Nothing whispers?” I asked.

“Yes, we have pictures, diagrams of the universe in its very earliest stages – there are fluctuations, ripples in the nothingness that may be hinting at the creation of something.”

“So, let me get this right, even in nothingness there is the potential for something?”

“There has to be. Otherwise how could anything ever have happened in the first place?”

I still didn’t get it. I asked how one could even begin to know how to search for nothing. Professor Rudnick said: “Listen, usually we search for things by looking for what is there. The new question is: “what can be learned from places that appear to have nothing?”

When I first read of the discovery I could not help but think: We’ve discovered the eyn sof, the mysterious endless, unknowable, indescribable, unfathomable essence of God that Kabbalah talks about, and it is as far as we will ever get. It could be perceived as “nothing”. At least nothing we can describe, but obviously if it is there, it must be something. But then I remembered – wait – the eyn sof, so we are taught, cannot be discovered…

Kabbalah teaches that this eyn sof, which we mortals cannot possibly understand sends us signals all the time about things in ways we can understand. Each level coming from nothingness to somethingness is increasingly knowable, visible, audible, sensible. Kabbalah means “receiving” so really it is a matter of how attuned your antenna is. Or in the case of space, I guess, how powerful your telescope is.

But the bottom line is this: nothingness is whispering to us all the time! When we think we are encountering “nothing” it may actually be the start of something big.

My first confession of this new year is that I read some naughty books over my Sabbatical break – books on Atheism – books with titles like The End of Faith, The God Delusion, god (small ‘g’) is not great. Each of the authors proclaiming loudly that religion is a lot of hooey. A history of myth, superstition and fear. People sitting in large rooms singing and talking to nothing and getting zero response. Any scientist would tell you that if you can’t prove the existence of something, it ain’t there. If you can’t see it, don’t believe it. These God-denial Atheist books are topping the best seller lists. The worst part? I couldn’t put ‘em down. They’re real page turners.

Maybe one of the reasons these books appealed to me so much was because I’m Jewish. I can’t get over the statistic I recently read last month that 76% of Protestants are sure there is a God, 64% of Catholics are positive, Evangelicals 93% but what would you expect? But only 30% of all Jews are certain there is a God.

Why do Jews have such a problem with God?

They say you can always tell a Jewish Atheist from other atheists because he is yelling the loudest about the God he doesn’t believe in. Can you imagine anyone or anything angrier than a Jew whose prayer isn’t answered. Anyone more stubborn than a Jew who demands proof!? Who says “this I absolutely believe, this other? Feh!” Like the Jewish man shipwrecked on the island, discovered ten years later and he has built two synagogues, the one he attends and the other he would never set foot in! The only thing more important to him than his own shul is the one he vigorously rejects!

Rosh Hashanah is a good time of year to remember that Jews have a natural affinity for theism, for God belief. Look at the story we just read. Some people think that Abraham believed so strongly in God on Mt. Moriah that day, that his DNA was actually transformed so that no matter how much his descendants , and all those who chose to be the sons and daughters of Avraham and Sarah, would struggle with our theology for the next several thousands of years, we would have God-belief running in our blood. And that, say some, is why Jewish atheists are the loudest and most abundant per capita atheists on earth – we scream about our disavowal of God. Elie Wiesel said it best: a Jew can hate God, a Jew can love God, but a Jew cannot ignore God.

Even when we look out and see a vast emptiness – we still inquire.
The scientist looked at nothingness and listened even harder, discovering potential. Behold, fluctuations, movement coming from deep within nothingness. Judaism says: when you confront nothing – search harder! Pray louder! Demand a response! Nothing is whispering. Listen!

Look at the most important, famous, big time prayer in our religion - The Shema. The command is to LISTEN! It even quiets us with Sssshhhh…, asks us to close our eyes to examine eternity with greater concentration and ask: mah? What?

But in your silence I hear you asking: Does nothing really whisper?

Consider these few examples:

Teenagers, which is louder, the obnoxious ring of the cell phone you forgot to turn off in class? Or the blaring silence when you are staring at it and it isn’t ringing because the person you are dying to return your call isn’t calling you back? Nothing is on the phone!

The empty screen of your computer the night before your essay is due. Nothing stares at you boldly!

Kids, which is emptier? A cleared space on your shelf, or the empty place where you used to lay your favorite baseball glove you just lost.

More profoundly, the which is emptier, the chair in your grandmother always used to sit or the other empty chairs in the room? The whisper of her absence is as real as she was.

For those of you who are fasting next week on Yom Kippur. The food that will not be in your stomach will whisper to you. Perhaps even growl, transmitting to you the daily physical strivings of another. Someone else’s hunger is whispering through you!

My mother passed away this year on the third night of Hanukah. On the second night of Hanukkah she was literally singing the brachot over the candles along with us from her bed, by the third night she was gone. Can you guess on which night her voice was more present? On that third night of Hanukkah, in the glow of the candles nothing was whispering to us this message: always sing those melodies I taught you as children; make Pesach festive and fun; don’t forget the stories I told you of my childhood.

And yes, nothing was whispering to Barb and me last week when our dog of 13 years died. This’ll sound strange but when we sang the motzi, Sophie the dog would go crazy because she loved challah. Our kids, who have long been off at school would laugh and say how the dog honored the Sabbath with more joy than anyone else in the family. Now our backyard seems enormous. Each blade of grass seems to call out into the void for big clumsy Labrador paws to mash them down.

Now we are really empty nesters. Ask an empty nester sometime whether or not nothing whispers in a home newly vacated by their youngest high school senior. It does. If we listen closely nothing is speaking volumes, telling us to begin new adventures, whispering endless possibilities.

I received an email a few weeks ago from a member of our congregation whose sister, a young woman with a loving husband and children, is dying. He wanted to meet and talk and vent and ask: “why her?” He wanted to protest the unfairness of it all, but he thought I should be forewarned.

He said: After all I have been through with illness and death in my family, and now this with my sister, I have lost my faith in God. I’m done. I cannot imagine sitting in Temple and praying to a God who has consistently answered my prayers with a resounding nothing. My sister’s book of life this year? It should be a full one rewarding her for the wonderful devoted wife and mother she has been. What is it going to contain? Nothing.

I did not know exactly how to respond, until I read further in his note where he described his son’s Bar Mitzvah celebration several months earlier, with his pride in the young man’s accomplishment, the beauty of the service, the dancing, singing and rejoicing that went on late into the evening, and how each aspect of the weekend was glorious and how the room was filled with, well, everything.

As I read this I thought, if he is really confronting emptiness by giving up, why is he coming to talk to me, to argue with me, to question life and religion? Why not just hang it up like those best selling atheist authors and say that when you can’t prove God’s existence with cold hard physical evidence the game is over!

I could only suppose that the DNA of theism, of belief runs through his veins, as it runs through yours and mine. When nothing whispered, he was listening. He got angry and he did battle.

Professor Rudnick and I wondered together whether there might be, out there, a universe that really contains absolute nothingness. That’d be a hard one to prove, but I do think there is such a thing as nothingness, right here – indifference is nothingness, turning a deaf ear on a grieving friend, entirely forgetting a loved one when they are gone, the tragic loss of one’s entire memory, gazing at a gorgeous world consistently evolving and displaying its seasonal splendor and feeling no emotion. This is nothingness.

But the silence that greets our prayers? The empty space when there is no longer someone there who was once with us?

In college I was big into Sigmund Freud, but his anti-religious feelings always bugged me. They’ve been rethinking Freud. Once considered a die hard Atheist, as Freud was suffering a hard death he began to understand that bringing an invisible unknowable God into our minds vastly improves our capacity for abstraction. In other words it gives us bigger and bolder imaginations! Yes, what we can see with our eyes, hear with our ears, taste and touch – eh, easy stuff. But when we can train ourselves so that nothing whispers to us? That’s spectacular.

Freud began to understand that if we can worship what is not physically there or what cannot be drawn or painted, we can also feel and “see” and be touched by things that are not actually there. Your goal that you have not yet achieved – you can taste it. The story you are about to make up – there it is! The mathematical theorem - Right in front of you. The painting of an imagined landscape appears in our mind’s eye, the totally original melody you pulled out of thin air that wasn’t a song ten minutes ago but now is sung or played.

Perhaps most importantly, Freud said that someone who can contemplate an invisible God is in a strong position to take seriously another something that is invisible but very real, your own soul; the dynamic of your inner life. After all, we cannot see our souls, can we? In one persons view, the soul means nothing because it cannot be physically exhibited. But our souls are constantly whispering to us.

If you had to pick one 20th century figure you were certain was guided in her work by the undeniable presence of God you might well pick Mother Teresa. She’s an icon, a virtual symbol of devotion and mission. We read about Saints, Christian and Jewish, who do not go 15 minutes without a clear and present image of God right there before them.

Imagine the shock to learn, as many will at the publication of her journals and letters this month had serious doubts about God’s existence from 1959 until her death in 1997. The last time “something” spoke to her was in 1957 when she began her work with the poor. She then descended into what she called her “dark night” a complete abandonment from God in which she prayed and nothing answered. And so it remained for 40 years.

When Mother Teresa gazed into the nothingness for those decades of her greatest, most profound and healing, Nobel prize winning work with the poor of the world she said, in her own words, she imagined the abandonment that the poor face daily. She used the apparent spiritual void she was experiencing to enter the “dark holes” of the lives of the people with whom she worked. Paradoxically, Mother Teresa’s doubt contributed to the success of one of the most notable faith based initiatives of the entire last century. Out of nothingness emerged something absolutely spectacular.

There’s no avoiding nothingness. It is everywhere in our world, in our life. It must be our way to confront nothingness and still hear the whisper to be wrestled with, loved, hated, argued, dueled with, spoken too, yelled at, created from, inspired by. The nothing that gives us breathing room to know our hidden selves better.

If someone asks you: “what did the rabbi talk about downstairs on Rosh Hashanah?” the answer is simple: Nothing.

So this year, when we pray and nothing answers… when we are sitting alone in the absence of friends or family who are no longer with us physically, when we are experiencing a dark night, when it seems like there is nothing worth living for, consider the possibility that within nothingness lies the potential for everything.

Indeed at one point in time, billions and billions of years ago, nothingness did give way to everything that would ever be. The astronomers see now that nothingness has been signaling us for all this time, and we can too. When Jews look at nothingness and apparent emptiness, we should not see the end of anything. Rather, we should see the beginning of everything that is to come.

And if that explanation doesn’t work for you, then try this…