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Kol Nidre 5766
By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Congregation B’nai Israel
Toledo, OH
A story is told of a Beverly Hills tycoon who was dismayed by his son’s
decision to study in a yeshiva instead of joining the family business.
After several years the son returned home to his father’s sardonic question:
So what have you got to show for your years of study? “I know that there is
a God” replied the young man. Angrily the father leapt to his feet and
pointed out the window at the elderly gardener patiently mowing the vast
lawns. “He also knows there is a God” shouted the older man. “No father” the
boy quietly responded. “He believes there is a God, I know.”
You may be wondering, what’s the difference between believing in God and
knowing there is a God?
The difference is huge. Many people who believe in God, believe in God as an
abstract concept. Sort of the way they believe that E = MC squared, or the
way they believe the theory of evolution. Lots of people believe —yet it
does not have much impact on their lives. It’s not something that changes
their behavior in any discernible fashion.
Believing in God can work much the same way. For example, some people
believe in God as explained by Baruch Spinoza and Mordecai Kaplan: God is
simply the impersonal force that made the Big Bang go bang. Belief in the
God of Spinoza will bring all of the passion and commitment to your life
that believing in the Big Bang theory will bring to your life. There is
nothing personal about such a God. Simply believing in God does not make
someone a religious person—80% of all Jews say they mostly agree that there
is a God, and 56% of all Jews are quite certain that God exists—yet only 7%
of Jews describe themselves as “religious.”
But if you KNOW God exists—just as surely as you know you yourself exist—if
you have a relationship with God just like you have a relationship with your
spouse or your best friend—your life is totally transformed.
To KNOW God exists—that is to have true faith. The Slonimer rebbe tells us
that emunah, faith, is the secret of existence, it is the breath of life, it
is the life-giving breath of Torah, the mitzvot, and all of Judaism. Belief
is in your head – faith is in your heart.
Almost all Jews would agree that the one statement that sums up the essence
of Judaism is Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad, Listen up
Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One. The word shema is written in the
imperative—it’s a command, it’s insistent. The word shema contains the
Hebrew word m’ai, which is Hebrew for kishkes, or guts. The Shema is telling
us more than just listen, more than just understand, but get it into your
guts – KNOW – that Adonai is our God and She is One.
Maimonides, Rambam, wrote in the Mishneh Torah “The foundation of the entire
structure and the pillar of all wisdom is to know that there is a
Fundamental Cause (God).” Not simply to believe – but to know. To have
faith.
The Slonimer rebbe wrote that faith is the altar of love on which was
spilled the blood of millions of Jews. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews in
Europe were persecuted, and they were offered the opportunity to abandon
their faith and become Christian to avoid punishment. Millions refused,
because of their faith in God—because they KNEW the God of Israel in their
guts, not because they merely “believed” that God existed.
What if all those prayers we recite tonight are really true? What if God
really does want Jews to follow the Torah? What if all of our deeds really
are being recorded for posterity, and God cares what we do? What if God
really does decide who is going to die and who is going to live?
If you knew those things in your guts—on a deeper level than just believing
them intellectually—do you think you would act differently?
What would be different? Would you come to shul more often, give more money
to charity, go out of your way to be kinder and more thoughtful?
And more than just behaving differently—what would it feel like? Can you
imagine what it would feel like to have that kind of faith in God? Faith and
trust come together—if you have that kind of knowledge of God, you will also
have a great sense of bitachon, of trust, that whatever happens God is there
for you—somehow things will work out.
This confidence that God is there, God is real, and everything will work out
is described in a teaching of one of the great rabbis of the Talmud, Rabbi
Akiva. Rabbi Akiva taught: A person should always say: (Aramaic) Kol d’avid
rachmanah l’tav…“Everything that God does, He does for the good.”
To illustrate the point, the Talmud brings a story about Rabbi Akiva, that
he was once traveling, when he arrived in a certain town. He asked for
lodgings and was refused. R. Akiva said: “Kol d’avid rachmanah l’tav,
everything that God does, He does for the good,” and went to spend the night
in a field.
He had with him a rooster, a donkey and a lamp. A wind came and extinguished
the lamp, a cat came and ate the rooster, a lion came and ate the donkey.
Said he: “Everything that God does, He does for good.” That night, an army
came and took the entire town captive. Rabbi Akiva told his disciples:
“Didn’t I tell you that everything that God does, He does for good? If I had
a room in town, the army would have taken me. If the lamp had been lit, the
army would have seen me; if the donkey would have brayed or the rooster
would have called, the army would have come and captured me.”
What’s in many ways even more impressive is the generations of Jews who
would say kol d’avid rachmanah l’tav without necessarily seeing how it did
work out for the best. Rabbi Akiva would have still said “Everything that
God does, He does for the good” even if he had continued traveling in the
opposite direction and never heard the news that the town had been taken
captive.
Having that kind of faith and trust in God, KNOWING that God cares about
you, not only leads a person to greater piety, but it leads a person to a
great sense of inner peace and calm. Faith in God, knowing God, will give a
person strength to face the tragedies that every life eventually encounters.
It doesn’t mean that you won’t experience tragedies—it just means that when
the inevitable tragedies occur you have greater strength to deal with them.
And it will make every moment richer and more pleasant—you’re never alone if
you have a close relationship with God.
And relationship with God is what faith is about. There is no commandment to
believe in God. But there is a commandment, part of the Shema, to love God.
What’s more, the commandment is to love God with all your heart, with all
your soul, and with all your might. To have a love of God just as intense as
the love you have for your husband or wife, or the love you have for your
children.
That kind of love does not come from an intellectual belief—you don’t love
your children because you believe they are real. You love your children
because you KNOW them—because you have a very deep relationship with them.
But if you don’t have that kind of faith—if you don’t have that kind of love
for God—can it be cultivated? Or is it just some kind of gift from God, that
some people are blessed with, and others aren’t?
Thirty years ago, when I was a 19 year old enlisted man serving in the US
Army in Ft. Hood, Texas I experienced a case of “faith envy.” I was a
spiritual seeker: I read very widely in psychology, philosophy, and religion
in an attempt to figure out what the world was all about.
I took a class in philosophy at Central Texas College, and became friends
with the professor, Phil. We would sit around his living room drinking
French wine (Medoc), and while our then wives fell asleep on the couch out
of boredom we would excitedly explore the ideas of Aristotle, Kant, Hume,
and Heidigger.
Phil had spent ten years in a seminary studying to become a Roman Catholic
priest. He eventually concluded that being a priest was not the path for
him: he wanted to get married and share his life with a woman. So he left
the seminary and got married, but he didn’t leave his faith. Phil was the
first person I met whose intellect I respected who also had a deep and
sincere faith and belief in God. I felt my intellect was a huge barrier to
faith: how could someone who took science for granted, who believed in
Evolution, not the Creation story of the Bible, have faith? I envied his
faith. I saw it as a beautiful thing, to have this faith in God, the world,
and your place in it. I figured I didn’t have it because I lost the “faith
lottery.” It seemed to me then that faith was one of those things that you
are either blessed with, or not. It didn’t seem to me that there was
anything you could do to get it. Somehow some people just got tapped with
the magic wand that made them believers—the rest of us were left out.
I was struggling with the major life questions so much—I wished somehow that
magic wand could be waved for me too and would I have that faith. I felt
like the kid standing outside the closed candy store, looking in the window
and wishing I could get inside.
It seemed obvious to me at the time that you cannot decide to believe.
You can decide to act as if something is true. You can decide to
intellectually accept something if you think you see evidence for it. But if
you don’t see compelling evidence you can’t decide you are going to believe.
You can’t simply decide to have faith.
But what I’ve learned as the result of a long spiritual journey is that you
CAN decide you would like to have faith; and that decision can open the door
that leads down the path to a real relationship with God.
I’m not claiming to be some kind of tzaddik, saintly righteous person.
I’m not saying I’m the most pious person in this room tonight. I certainly
haven’t reached the level of Rabbi Akiva who could say: “Kol d’avid
rachmanah l’tav, everything that God does is for the good” in the face of a
disaster, and really, sincerely, truly believe it my guts.
But I have gone from a place of having no faith to having at least a modest
amount of faith. I’ve gone from feeling very distant from God to feeling at
least some connection with God. There are probably as many ways to find
faith as there are people seeking faith. What I want to share with you
tonight are a few things that have helped me in my journey, in the hopes
that they may help some of you.
The first step in a developing a real relationship with God is to be open to
the idea that God exists.
About six weeks ago I gave a sermon about this first step. For those of you
who were in shul that Saturday morning, or who read it when I sent it to the
shul’s email list, please pardon my repetition—but remember as the Talmud
says, one who learns something 100 times is not to be compared to the one
who learns it 101 times.
Rabbi Milton Steinberg wrote a novelized account of the life of Elisha ben
Abuya, a rabbi of the Sanhedrin who went the opposite direction of the one
we’re trying to go in—he lost his faith. As Steinberg tells the story,
Elisha grew up living in the tension between a secular father who promoted
Greek learning and a Jewishly observant uncle who banned studying Greek
books. As a young man, Elisha was sent off to study with a great rabbi, and
eventually earns the title rabbi himself along with a seat on the Sanhedrin.
But Elisha is plagued by doubt. He can’t simply accept things on faith. He
tells his friend and colleague Rabbi Akiva that he is going to embark on an
intellectual search for God that will hopefully restore his faith. Elisha
was very impressed with Euclid’s Elements of Geometry—by the “lucidity of
the reasoning and the sureness of its results.” Elisha resolves to follow a
similar approach to God: he tells Akiva “I am going to start at the
beginning, by laying aside all prejudices, all preconceived notions, all my
beliefs and affirmations.”
The next several chapters of the book tell how Elisha gives up the
rabbinate, gives up Judaism, immerses himself in an all out study of Greek
math, logic, and philosophy for several years. After years of preparation
and training, he finally struggles with the question and starts writing
furiously. And he fails miserably. At the end of the day he can’t really say
anything about God—he can’t even deny God. He’s right back where he started.
The fundamental problem the Elisha ran into is that you can’t go all the way
back to nothing. Any system of inquiry when you go back as far back as you
can go, requires you to make certain assumptions. With all the beauty and
logic of Euclid’s geometry, it rests on five postulates—five ideas that are
taken to be true without proof. All other proofs are built on those
postulates. Remove the postulates—remove the underlying assumptions—and you
can’t prove a thing.
The primary postulate for monotheists is found in the Torah in Deuteronomy
chapter 4 verse 39: Hu Elohim bashamayim mima’al v’al ha’aretz mitachat, ein
od, He is God in the heavens above and the earth below, there is no other.
So the first step is to “postulate God.” To accept the idea that God exists.
Note that at this point there is lots of room for doubt and questions. Even
accepting Spinoza’s God, God as the watchmaker, God who made the Big Bang go
BOOM, is enough to open the door.
And that’s all it does is open the door. If surveys are correct, over 80% of
us here tonight would claim we believe in God. But how many of us KNOW God
exists, how many of us have emunah shleimah, complete faith, and bitachon,
trust, that God cares about us?
Once I accepted the intellectual possibility that God exists, I was in a
position to go looking for proof that God exists. A book that I found very
helpful in my quest for God is Rabbi Elliot Dorff’s “Knowing God:
Jewish Journeys to the Unknowable.” Rabbi Dorff brings a lot of useful ideas
in his book, but there are two in particular I found helpful—the Invisible
Gardener parable, and the concept of non-hypothetical discovery.
John Wisdom’s Invisible Gardener parable goes as follows: “Two people return
to their long neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old
plants surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, “It must be that a
gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants.”
Upon inquiry, they find that no neighbor has ever seen anyone at work in
their garden. The first man says to the other, “He must have worked while
people slept.” The other says, “No, someone would have heard him, and
besides, anybody who cared about plants would have kept down these weeds.”
The first man says, “Look at the way these are arranged. There is purpose
and a feeling for beauty here. I believe someone comes, someone invisible to
mortal eyes. I believe the more carefully we look, the more we shall find
confirmation of this.”
While you can’t decide to believe in God, you can decide to look at the
world through God-colored lenses. If you go looking for evidence that God
exists, you will find plenty. When we lived in Vancouver we would sit on our
deck and watch the sun setting over Vancouver Island across the water—and
even our kids would see evidence that God exists, praising God for doing
good work.
The other idea from Rabbi Dorff’s book that impressed me is the idea of the
non-hypothetical discovery. Most people approach their search for God they
way they learned to approach inquiry in science class in school.
Hypothesis: God exists. They then go looking for evidence to support or
disprove that hypothesis. But there is a completely different kind of
knowledge—non-hypothetical knowledge, knowledge that does not rest on
formulating a hypothesis. When we fall in love, most of us don’t formulate a
hypothesis and weigh the evidence whether or not we love someone. We just
know it in our hearts.
And that’s really our goal—not to know God in our heads, the way we would
know a scientific fact, but to know God in our hearts, the way we know we
love someone.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches us that the path to knowing God in our
hearts is through the ability to feel awe or wonder at the world around us.
One of the great disservices of our secular education system is that all too
often we take away the sense of awe a child can feel at the world and
replace it with rational explanations. Something important is lost when we
lose the sense of awe.
Heschel says “Ultimate meaning and ultimate wisdom are not found within the
world, but in God, and the only way to wisdom is through our relationship to
God. That relationship is awe. Awe, in this sense, is more than an emotion;
it is a way of understanding. Awe is itself an act of insight into a meaning
greater than ourselves.” As Heschel describes it, “Awe is a way of being in
rapport with the mystery of all reality.”
Being able to feel awe does not mean you have to hide yourself from science.
One of my hobbies is teaching people how to fly. As such, I teach people all
about the aerodynamics involved in flight, about how the four forces of
thrust, drag, lift, and gravity effect the aircraft. I know this stuff so
well when I go flying I can look at the window and practically visualize the
big “H” for high pressure below the wing and the big “L” for low pressure
above the wing—yet I can still feel a sense of awe and wonder that I’m
cruising around thousands of feet above the ground.
Postulating God, recovering a sense of wonder at the world around us, and
being open to a non-hypothetical discovery of God—being open to “falling in
love with God,” if you will—prepares our hearts for the Jewish path to
cultivating a relationship with God: Torah and the mitzvot, the
commandments.
Like anything worthwhile, cultivating a relationship with God takes time and
effort. If you have a friend you talk to two or three times a year, you are
not going to be as close him as a friend you talk to three times a day. It
works the same way with God: if you only talk to God twice a year, on Rosh
Hashanah and Yom Kippur, you’re probably not going to have a very close
relationship. Which is why the Jewish tradition calls on us to pray three
times a day—to check in with God three times a day, just as you might check
in with a person you love deeply several times during the day.
Our liturgy throws an amazing amount of stuff at us—some of the words we
read in our prayers are beautiful poetry, other words may be things that our
minds rebel at or have trouble with. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov teaches that
the path to faith is in your prayers you should focus on the things that
resonate with you as true. Don’t spend so much time on the things that
challenge your faith or trouble you—save that for study. But let your
prayers be a time to focus on the words that harmonize with your soul, that
you find beautiful, that confirm your faith in God.
Another teaching of Rebbe Nachman’s that I found helpful was to practice
hitbodedut, which is a kind of Jewish meditation where you set aside a fixed
time—say 15 or 20 minutes to start—to talk to God the way you talk to a
friend. To pour your heart out to God the way you would pour your heart out
to your most intimate trusted confidant. This sounds like something simple,
but I have actually found it to be a very profound spiritual practice. Most
of us don’t spend enough time just talking to God.
Any relationship should be a two-way street, and our relationship with God
is no exception. If praying is the way we talk to God, how does God talk to
us? For Jews the answer is through studying the Torah. Just as we set aside
time every day to talk to God, we set aside time every day to allow God to
talk to us. Studying Torah does not have to mean just picking up the Bible
and reading it—there are many Jewish books you can read where you can hear
the word of God coming through to you.
Ultimately, not just study and prayer, but obeying any of the commandments
can become a vehicle for strengthening your faith in and your relationship
with God. Observing the Sabbath becomes a way to make the time needed to
reflect on God and the universe. Observing the dietary laws becomes a way to
bring an awareness of God to mind multiple times throughout the day.
Giving charity can be not just a “good deed,” but a way to serve God, and
therefore strengthen your bond with God.
And that, I believe, is really the purpose of all of those rules we have in
Judaism—done with the proper kavvanah, the proper intentions, we can
continually find ourselves with opportunities to raise our
God-consciousness, to raise our awareness of God’s presence in the world, in
the most mundane of activities. My favorite is example is literally the most
mundane of activities—there is a blessing to say after using the bathroom,
which emphasizes how miraculously our bodies are created with all of these
intricate openings that have to function just so. Anyone who has ever
suffered from constipation—or from a heart attack—can certainly appreciate
how miraculous it is that everything works so well so much of the time.
It is a miracle that our bodies work so well so much of the time. By saying
a prayer, we remind ourselves of that miracle, and we remind ourselves of
God’s presence behind that miracle. As Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi puts
it “God is real. That’s what escaped us in Hebrew school and in books we
read.”
God is real. Knowing that—not just believing it, but really knowing
it—absolutely can change your life for the better.
Today is Yom Kippur, the day the tradition says we are at our closest in our
relationship with God. We stand before God purified and forgiven for our
sins. We imitate the angels, not eating, drinking, or thinking of other
physical needs.
In the Ashrei prayer we say karov Adonai l’chol kor’av, l’chol asher
yikraoohoo b’emet, God is near to all who call, to all who call out to Him
in truth.
God is waiting to draw near to us—but nothing happens until we call out to
God first.
May God open our hearts to the Divine that is all around us, especially in
our fellow human beings, and may God help us live lives that emulate God’s
traits of kindness and compassion,
Amen
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