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Speaking about Faith: From “Who am I” to “Where am I”

Kol Nidre 5780 October 9, 2019

Rabbi Yoel H. Kahn L’shanah tovah!

I’m so happy to see you; there is so much we have to talk about…what’s going on inside our country and at our borders, in Israel and in the Amazon and around the world; we are encountering anti-Semitism at home and abroad, even as we wrestle to name and confront four centuries of America’s institutional racism and racial injustice. I admit, I hesitate to open the paper most mornings. Do you share this reluctance?

And alongside all of these concerns, we are all moving through our own familial and personal lives –each a mixture of joys and sorrows, challenges, setbacks triumphs, and accomplishments, new promotions and new diagnoses. What was the mixture like for you this year?

I have struggled this year – to understand my responsibilities to act; to make sense of the topsy-turvey world outside of me and my power to shape it; and I have struggled with my own personal world, too and my power to shape it.

As a hard-core rationalist, faith has always been problematic for me; faith is about belief, and if you can’t show demonstrable proof, why trust? Even Moses says, again and again, “Trust me because you have seen all this great stuff with your own eyes …. “ But faith, ultimately, is a different genre of knowing; faith is similar to what the British philosopher J. L. Austin called “a speech-act" – an action whose “performance” is realized in our act of saying it; for example, a promise is effected when I utter the words: “I promise….” (I may later break my promise, but I can only break the promise if its real, and the promise became real when I spoke it.) Faith, then, is true through our commitment to it.

For many years, I was hesitant to speak of my own faith lest I betray my father, ever the scientist; now, I have come to understand that he too was a person of deep faith, even if he did not articulate it, and, if he had talked about it, he certainly would never have used Jewish religious language.

It is through the lens of my faith that I come to speak this evening about perspective – from what vantage point do we see ourselves? In the book of Numbers, we read a story of how the first generation of Israelites, newly freed from bondage and facing determined opposition, saw themselves as small and powerless to act: “Everything was enormous… We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and surely that is how we looked to them.”1

Contrast this with the pride of the Psalmist: “You have made us little less than divine, adorned with glory and honor.”2 In my mind, I’m trying to explain how this works for me to my Dad, zichrono

1 Numbers 13:33. 2 Psalm 8:5.

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livrachah, but he just doesn’t get the beauty and resonance these biblical texts have for me. So let me instead offer an alternative text, one I know he loved:

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage… she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, … she found a little bottle...(`which certainly was not here before,' said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters.

What a curious feeling!' said Alice; `I must be shutting up like a telescope.'3

From what vantage point do we see ourselves? My older brother, Zevi, was diagnosed with ALS in 2010 and died of complications of the horrible disease in 2014. While we had been estranged for much of the prior twenty years, we were able to reconnect over the years of his illness. While previously critical, anxious and perhaps, a little neurotic, over the course of his illness my brother became accepting, calm, gracious (and, occasionally, a little neurotic). He lived each day and each moment he had with acceptance, appreciation and determination. On one visit, soon before his vocal chords became too weak for speech, he asked: “Why? Why me? What did I do to deserve this?”

Ever our father's child, I did the math. I weighed his accomplishments and failings, mitzvot and transgressions. I added it all up and understood why it was that, at 53 years of age, he had developed a miserable, degenerative, fatal disease. I explained…

“Well, Zevi,” I said, “about a million years ago there was a solar flare and a burst of energy. The intense burst of radiation in turn impacted the genes of a proto-human ancestor. That mutation has been lurking in human DNA ever since… That’s why you got ALS.”

Why do we persist in thinking that everything that happens to us is about us? While I do like to imagine that I am the center of the universe, I’m not even at the center of our solar system; and our sun – which has been sending out solar flares for 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for another 4.5 billion years (give or take a few) – is one small star in a galaxy among countless points of light. What am I and who are we in proportion?

Rabbi Moses Cordovero, a Jewish mystic living in the Land of Israel in the 16th century, grasped this:

Who am I? I am a mustard seed in the middle of the sphere of the moon, which itself is a mustard seed within the next sphere. So it is with that sphere and all it contains in relation to the next sphere. So it is with all the spheres – one inside the other – and each one of them is a mustard seed within the further expanses.4

The answer to the question "why" is not “because random stuff happens” – it is not just a coincidence! There is a logical and scientific reason why disease and disaster happen; but the scale on which they are explainable is sometimes cosmic and sometimes molecular, but never on the moral level; while we may somatize our emotional states and character traits, God does not. Illness and health, death and long life, good fortune and bad – these do not correlate to or correspond to our character. Evolution is

3 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 1 (various editions available online). 4 “Ohr Ne’erav” Moses Cordovero. In Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995.

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not finished; God’s work of creation is not completed – it’s all still unfolding! Alice becomes a telescope; she can see with the long-view and realizes how small she is; only then is she able to enter and enjoy the beautiful garden.

In the Hebrew Bible, we read the story of Job. Our hero, Job, is the victim of indescribable tragedy and loss, but he remains stoic in his assertion that he has been wronged and unjustly punished by the tragic circumstances that have befallen him. From Job’s point of view, it’s all cruelly unfair! Despite 37 chapters of polemic from his supposed friends about how he must have sinned and therefore deserves what has happened, Job refuses to curse God for the loss of his property, family and health. Ultimately, God vindicates Job, who has not done anything wrong; rather, God explains, Job is subject to forces set in motion eons before. God thunders: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation...5

Albert Einstein once declared, expressing his discomfort with the apparent unpredictability of quantum mechanics, “God does not play dice with the universe” – and, while I cannot speak to the realm of the sub-atomic particle, the world is overwhelmingly not random; the cosmos always follows the laws of chemistry and physics. The contemporary Torah commentator Sophia Alberga of King Middle School spoke of this recently, citing the Talmud’s teaching: “The world follows its natural course.” The tradeoff for our predictable, scientifically observable universe is that there are no exceptions for us – even when we deserve it! My faith is that the world does make sense, in that the laws of nature – in Jewish religious language: ma'asei bereishit, the unfolding wonders of creation – are enduring, predictable and amenable to observation and scientific discovery.6

Taught Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Peshischa: "Each person should go about with deep humility about their smallness in the order of creation. In your pocket, carry a piece of paper on which is written 'I am composed of dust and ashes'"...or, in modern parlance, about 60% water and 16% protein with some calcium, nitrogen and trace amounts of other stuff mixed in.7

Einstein, I believe, knew deep-down the truth of his own work but he was deeply distressed because he could not reconcile the rules of quantum mechanics as predicted in his own equations and the observed reality of gravity. Almost 100 years later, we still cannot. And yet, despite this contradiction, both the cosmos and science muddle along…

I take courage from Einstein – who struggled to reconcile the different things he knew had to be true and could not put them together. Because if one part of my faith is acknowledging how small and powerless we are, the second part of my faith is all about our power, our size and our responsibility to act.

Taught Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Peshischa: "Each person should go about with deep humility about their smallness in the order of creation. In your pocket, carry a piece of paper on which is written 'I am

5 Job 38:4. 6 A brief popular discussion of the Einstein quote and its significance is in Kelly Dickerson, “One of Einstein's most famous quotes is often completely misinterpreted,” Business Insider [sic!], Nov. 19, 2015. [https://www.businessinsider.com/god-does-not-play-dice-quote-meaning-2015-11]. I am grateful to the Beth El scientists who helped me understand these ideas. 7 Martin Buber. Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters. [New York: Schocken Books, 1948], pp. 249–250.

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composed of dust and ashes.'" And in your other pocket, carry a piece of paper on which is written: ‘The entire world was created for my sake…for you are the culmination of creation.’”

We learn in the Talmud:

When a human ruler mints a coin, they make a die and stamp them out, each one identical, each featuring the likeness of the sovereign – or an engraving of George Washington. But not so the Holy One, blessed be. Our Sovereign made a single master too, and from it have been stamped millions upon millions, each one a direct descendant of the original – and every single one has been made b’tzelem u’dmot – with the image and likeness of God – and each one is unique.8

God’s presence in the world –God’s action in our world – is through human agency. For our world to be ordered and scientific, God cannot intervene, even if there are times when we wish God would; and if we are going to have a world in which human choice and action are possible, then God too does not intervene directly in human history – writ large or small – except through us.

In the language of Abraham Joshua Heschel, God is forever yearning for, looking to find, and calling out for the covenant-partner to share in the work that needs to be done. Now neither you nor I always want to answer this call. Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, tries to get out of the job, asking:

לח “ ש יד ת לח נא ב י אדני ש Please, God, send someone else.”9 .ב

The story the prophets tell is of history unfolding anew in every generation, with new challenges and new needs, with God never despairing of this human project and never giving up on the world. God is forever asking: “לך־ל נו י י ח ומ ל י אש Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”10 את־מ

We will read in our Yom Kippur Torah reading:

ם” הוה אלהיכ ני י פ ם ל כ ים היום כל צב ם נ You stand here, all of you, on this very day.”11 We don’t get to .אתchoose the hours and circumstances of our lives. Each of us has talents and gifts; each of us has our challenges and foibles. And each of us is summoned by God – this is my faith – in this year, in this day, in this hour. You stand here, all of you, on this very day before the Eternal.

This very day is the 10th day of the month of Tishrei in the new Hebrew year 5780 – and the last months of 2019 on the Gregorian calendar…

It’s not 1619 in Jamestown, but we can discern the continuity between then and now, a legacy of racist ideas and institutions;

It’s not 1933 in Germany, or even 1923 – but we can hear the echoes of anti-Semitism and demonization of the other;

8 Sanhedrin 38a. 9 Exodus 4:13. 10 Isaiah 6:8. 11 Deuteronomy 29:9.

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It’s not 1939 – when the passenger ship St. Louis, filled with Jewish refugees from Germany, was not allowed to land in Cuba, the United States or Canada – but the language of our President and the actions of our government evoke the prejudices and discrimination of that time.

It’s not 1948 or 1967 in Israel – but we can still be worried about existential danger from without, and hubris within, and we can continue to ask how to bring the lofty goals of Israel’s declaration of independence to realization;

It’s not 1984 and we are not in the fictional world of George Orwell – but some of Orwell’s prophetic writings about privacy, state, and party resonate with the circumstances of our world.

This, then, is my faith. In a world urgently in need of justice, of healing, of human responsibility, God is asking you and me right now, tonight, the same question asked of the prophet Isaiah three millennia ago:

ך לנו - י יל לח ומ ש י א ת מ ”?Whom shall I send? Who will go for us א

The prophet answers: ”י נ נ י .Here I am .ה לחנ Send me.” 12 .ש

Writing from prison, in a dark place from a dark time, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel smuggled letters to his beloved wife, Olga. Later he would become the first president of the new Czech Republic, but in 1979, he was simply a prisoner:

It is I who must begin. Once I begin, once I try —here and now, right where I am, not excusing myself by saying things would be easier elsewhere, without grand speeches and ostentatious gestures, but all the more persistently — to live in harmony with the “voice of Being,” as I understand it within myself — as soon as I begin that, I suddenly discover, to my surprise, that I am neither the only one, nor the first, nor the most important one to have set out upon that road.13

These are the poles of my faith this year. I cannot integrate them anymore than Einstein could his contradictions. God does not act in the physical world, God does not act in the moral world. God is eternally present, in the stability and predictability of the physical world. God is eternally present in the human sphere, the kol d’mamah dakah, the still small voice ever returning to God’s question, addressed to the first human – created b’tzelem, in the image of God, the first human being whose direct descendent each one of us is; the enduring question:” ה כ Where are you?”14 ?אי

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do /with your one wild and precious life?”15

12 Isaiah 6:8. 13 Vaclav Havel,. Letters to Olga: June 1979-September 1982. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.”August 21, 1982” 14 Genesis 3:9. 15 Genesis 3:9; Mary Oliver. “The Summer Day” New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, 1992.