Sermons

What? The Devil?
Rosh Hashanah 5769
by Rabbi Sim Glaser

Every so often somebody asks: Do rabbis perform conversions? I say “yes, well, it depends” – do you want to convert into Judaism or out of Judaism? Cause we sort of lean to the former.

Conversion is an interesting process. My work with a Jew to be - Angela - some years back, for example. For two years we had studied and Angela was thoroughly committed to and excited about becoming Jewish. Then, on the eve of her mikveh and conversion ceremony she calmly asked: Oh Rabbi, one more thing…now that I’ll be Jewish tomorrow, does that mean when I die I’ll roast by Satan’s hand in the eternal damnation of hell-fire?

Well, you know me. I couldn’t resist and said: “why yes, Angela, you’re going straight to hell! She did not think this was funny. Yes, you can take the Christian out of Christianity, you cannot always remove Christianity from the Christian. You can certainly help a person become Jewish, but it isn’t always as easy to scare the devil out of them. Not even with gefilte fish and horseradish. (prop?)

It is not uncommon for converts to ask if the Jew believes in the devil and if not, why not? Well, I’ve been rethinking this and decided I’d like to talk to you about Satan this morning. I had my doubts. Is it appropriate? Sure I thought. Why the devil not? What the hell!

Thus, I am here to tell you sinners just ten days before repentance time that Satan indeed plays a role in our tradition and is very much a part of our Jewish lives. Yes, the devil is most certainly there, but our conception of him is quite different from anything you might have imagined. He is not an independent agent. He is not the personification of evil. He does he make little hors d’oeuvres out of eggs. (Deviled eggs?) He does not wear red spandex and carry a crimson pitchfork, nor does the Devil wear Prada. Rabbi Zimmerman wears Prada. And she is the anti-Satan.

Who then is the devil? Here’s what I think. The Devil is the force that lures us away at every opportunity from our essence which is pure and good, and who convinces us to live outside our only real moment, which is right now.

Judaism does not embrace the doctrine of original sin. Consider these words that begin the traditional morning service: Elohai, Neshama she’natata bi, tehora hi. The soul, O God that you have given me is pure! Given that our souls are pure, and God resides within them, the Devil’s work is to keep us distanced from our authentic selves.

How does Satan accomplish this? Through the voices in our head that are telling us the painful story of our past. Look at the circumstances of my life that made me who I am! What my parents did to me; how I’ve been cheated in business; or unlucky in love and I don’t trust anybody anymore! What my sister said to me 24 years ago - I’ll show her by never speaking to her again! How my children never call enough. From this we convince ourselves we aren’t good enough; that we are victims, we are unlovable.

This is the voice that tells us all our happiness and contentment lies in the future; that we will need to achieve a certain level of fame or wealth in order to be anybody significant. The voice that will not let us simply “be” in the present, but forces us to dwell in the past filled with pain and a future of fear and insecurity.

The devil delights in this type of thinking because as long as you are engaged in it, you forsake the very moment you are in – the hineini “here I am moment” – The present is your real life, contains the real you, and, most significantly, is where God dwells. Satan does want any of us to live in the moment.

Judaism teaches that all of life is made up of present moments. Our lives are not made up of things or even accomplishments; not of pasts and futures, but a collection of present moments, of actions and feelings in the here and now. Our holidays are designed to be celebrated in the moment. Shabbat is a deliberate attempt to take us off of “clock time” on a weekly basis.

But rabbi, aren’t Jews supposed to celebrate and honor the past, and pray and hope for a better future? Absolutely, but honoring and remembering the past are the not the same thing as being stuck in the past. And hoping for a better tomorrow is different from living solely for tomorrow. Hillel said it best: If not now, when? And in the words of the late great post Talmudic pop-sage John Lennon: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Satan appears at biblical dawn of human history. Day 6. Humanity comes on the scene, eats from some nasty tree learns of its separateness from God, that its unfortunate origin is dirt, leaps outside the moment and sees it is naked, guilty and fault-ridden. Satan, loving every second of this, jumps in, in the form of a serpent, we are told, tempting them to move away from their own goodness, to learn shame, to feel naughty, to develop egos, to blame each other, to say shoulda – coulda - woulda, to want things they don’t really need or aren’t supposed to have. And ever since that moment we have been telling ourselves similar stories with that same devilish narrative. We are dirt. We need. We want. We gotta be this, we gotta have that.

All lies.

Satan was just getting started. Consider this wildly unpleasant story we heard chanted from the Torah this morning. Who do you think really got Abraham to sacrifice his only son? Isaac was the key to the future of the Jewish people as promised by God! Why would Abraham do such a thing?

A Midrash reports it was none other than Satan who insists upon planting the notion in Abraham’s head that to prove his absolute faith in God he has to take his son up the mountain as a sacrifice.

Each time God calls to him Abraham says: hineini. Here I am! Right here! In the moment! I am rooted with You, Adonai.

All the way up the mountain Satan has Abraham, almost to the point of slaughter. Then, as he lifts the knife Abraham says: Wait, I know who’s behind this! This is not my heart, and most definitely not God’s will. Another voice has me in its grasp. Yes, I believe Abraham was an obsessive neurotic. He was, after all the first Jew ever.

If that Satanic tale doesn’t grab you, the second most disturbing story in the Bible, the tale of Job, surely will. Again it is hasatan, Satan, who pressures God to test this devoted man by throwing at him every horrible thing imaginable. In what we can only hope is a morality tale, Job is stripped of all he has: His children, his property, his health, until he is broken and destitute.

I believe the binding of Isaac and Job are extreme demonstrations in our scripture of the power of our obsessions and imaginations to pull us away from our pure center. Satan, by the rabbis’ estimation, personifies that force. Both are paralyzing What if? What if this were to happen? stories.

Satan loves our preoccupation with the future and our paralysis from the sting and pain of the past. Whatever calls us away from living life fully in the moment – where the only reality is – is the devil’s territory. So many of us live with constant sorrow about the past and the unceasing fear about the future, constantly dissatisfied with what we have. Satan knows that tension and despair only exist in a future illusion we create, and that guilt and endless sadness are yoked to the past. Satan doesn’t want us to be alive in the moment. He’ll dissolve as instantly even as God becomes increasingly present.

We even have a prayer that mentions Satan. The Hashkiveinu says “cause us to lie down oh God and awaken us to life renewed,” and then goes on: hasser Satan me’aleinu – “keep Satan from our midst”, because Satan’s banishment is our only chance for peace and closeness to God. What greater enemy of our inner peace is there but the ravages and turbulent storms of our own violent dishonest inaccurate voice?

The voice that hurries us to move away from appreciating the absolute splendor of our surroundings, the immense blessing of family and friendships; the astounding miracle of being alive in a functioning body. The voice that keeps us from being entirely present when someone is speaking to us in earnest.

You know, we sometimes refer to children as “little devils” but they are further from Satan’s grasp than are we. Children scare the hell out of Satan. Their song is still pure. They still reside in the now. They don’t have our lengthy histories of listening to the internal voices of criticism. They have not yet repeated the endless statements of self doubt and mistrust. They still follow the dictates of their little souls mercifully unaware of the complex world that awaits them.

Satan appears in the stories of Yisrael ben Eliezer, the Ba’al Shem Tov. When he was a young man Yisrael’s job was to help the schoolmaster get the children to school each morning without event. The children sang as they walked along – a pure song from the pure heart each and every one of us had as a child, and it is very hard to be blue while you are singing, unless, of course, you are singing the blues! The children’s song reached the heavens with its purity of content and its pristine melody. And their song pleased God very much.

The story goes that Satan assumed the shape of a large wolf designed to scare the children. Yisrael, the young troop leader, being one of the enlightened ones, took his lantern, climbed up the furry front of the beast, into his mouth, down his throat, and took hold of his evil glowing heart. Now it should be noted that Yisrael ben Eliezer did not slay the beast. He simply observed that the dark heart he held in his hand was the essence of all that would steer him and the children away from their song. Within seconds the beast shuddered and crumbled to the ground, defeated.

From this the Ba’al Shem Tov was reminded of the simple yet profound lesson: If people carry their own lanterns they need not fear the darkness. If the dark heart beats somewhere inside us, shall we not identify it at the moment of its beating? Shall we not stifle the inaccurate disturbing voices until they dissolve?

We talk about this book of life on Rosh Hashanah. The book is none other than our true selves, and the inscriber is us! The only real chapter is the one we are in.

Regrettably, our egos, our desires, our self loathing and our self promoting are scribbled all over those pages by you know who. This is our week to banish Satan from our midst so that we might explore the true nature of our souls by being entirely present.

Atonement can only happen if you are fully present. Prayer can only truly happen if we are present in the moment. The book of life can only be perused and edited if we are fully aware in the moment. And yet, this is the hardest thing for us to do. While the “now” must be our friend, the adversary is strong and quick witted. Self examination and presence are Satan’s mortal enemies.

This is not a simple project. Past regrets will pull at you. Thursday is a business day and future tasks will tempt you to figure them out and seek to control them even though there is nothing you can really do from your pews at that moment. Family issues will nip at you as you sit trying to seize a strangely elusive moment of prayer. Your BlackBerrys should be silenced and dark. Push the on button in your soul that triggers mindfulness.

This is not a simple process. We are a month away from one of the most significant political elections in our nation’s history. Our thoughts and feelings about the leadership and fragile condition of our nation are immeasurably tugged here and there by voices that are not ours. They belong to others and they seek to devilishly convince. Where will we find true guidance? It isn’t in the campaign posters and the attack ads. It lies in that place you infrequently visit.

In the recent play Wellstone, the Senator’s father speaks to him from beyond the grave on the eve of a crucial Senate vote on Iraq years ago. His father says: Do the right thing, Paul - that's all you can do. Paul responds: A lot of people say the right thing to do is to support the President. And his father says: People in Minnesota, in America, Iraq - they all want you to do what you think is right. You do that, your soul will rest. Your soul will rest, Paul.

A couple of months ago I was studying with a young woman working toward conversion. Well, speak of the devil, we began to talk about old Satan. She was eager to leave behind the teachings of her youth, but her curiosity about the Jewish view required satisfaction, so we researched. There, amidst the various vague and sporadic Devil references throughout Jewish literature was hasatan – the devil – and the gemmatria, the numerical equivalent of his name – and I am one sucker for a saucy gemmatria… revealed a secret that intrigued us both. Hasatan, you see, the hey -5, shin - 300, tet -9, and nun-50 equal, totaled 364!

364. One day short of a year. And the Talmudic sages leapt upon this discovery, declaring: hasatan rules 364 days a year. There has to be one day a year that this great misleader is not with us. His name, his ability, his influence is restricted from one day a year. What other day could that be but Yom Kippur? The day that we are one with ourselves, that day on which we know who we are, the day our souls are pure and the voices that conjure up lies about ourselves are silenced!

Yom Kippur is the day where we can focus ourselves on our source, our purpose. The day where we might see clearly the path toward true fulfillment which lies in the quiet moment of the present. We abstain from the acts which nourish and empower the physical in order to encounter the spiritual.

While every other day of the year we struggle internally, sensing a deep dichotomy between the vying forces within us, battling our own inner Satan, on Yom Kippur, we experience a transcendence of all separations, and thus all negativity and self-deprecation. Outside the sanctuary where we put our coats there will be a sign saying hang your egos here – they will have no place on this holy day.

Banish the devil I tell you! In the 10 brief days before Yom Kippur – the only day of the year in which Satan can not appear because we will be present.

All we have is this very moment. To forfeit the now for the future is to give in to an unsacred impulse. To remain tethered to a past which has been and which is gone removes us from the God that wants us to say hineini – here I am. Now. Present. Alive!

One Hasidic story tells of three demons coming together to compare results in their efforts to corrupt human beings. The first one says: I tell people there is no God. But it doesn’t work. People are too smart. They see the wonders and blessings in the world they don’t believe me! The second demon says: I inform the people that there is a God but I tell them God did not give them the Torah. It doesn’t work. They’ve read the Torah and see the wisdom and affirmation of life it contains. They don’t believe me. The third demon says: Really? I tell them there is a God and there is a Torah, but then I ask them: what’s the rush? There’s always tomorrow. It never fails.

The simple truth is that we don’t have tomorrow and yesterday is past. We have only this moment. Elohai neshama she natata bi, tehora hi – My God, the soul you have given me is pure. If I can quiet my mind long enough, and live in the moment, I will see that, and there will I find you.

The devil didn’t even bother requesting a ticket for Kol Nidre.

But you did.