Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Rosh Hashana 1994

by Harold M. Schulweis

I live in two worlds in the Synagogue. One is in the study, the other is in the sanctuary. My study is the private domain “reshuth hayachid” into which Jews come as individuals.

The sanctuary is the public domain “reshuth harabim” where Jews come as members of the community.

They are two different worlds, the world of Private Jews and the world of Public Jews. The attitudes expressed in each are different. The questions and the answers and expectations are different. I am different in them and so are you.

There is a disparity, a dissonance between the two. The culture of the study and the culture of the sanctuary are frequently in conflict. And, because I am convinced that for the sake of renewal of Judaism, the two cultures must interact. The culture of the study must be brought to the culture of the sanctuary and the sanctuary to the study.

The culture of the sanctuary is plural. I sit as a member of the minyan. De facto I do not pray individually. Even in the silent meditation of the Amidah, I am assigned pages from the prayer book to cover. If there is no minyan I cannot recite my kaddish. By ritual law, no act of kiddusha, no act of holiness whether the public reading of the Torah or the Barchu or the public prayer of the 13 attributes of divine mercy, may be recited without the presence of a minyan.

In the congregation my voice mingles with others. Here I am other-directed by the rabbi, the cantor, the choir. The pace of my prayer, the speed with which I read, the material that I cover are other-directed. The lyrics and the melody are chosen by others.

When the services are over, I engage in the sport of the annual retrospective evaluation of the Holidays. How was it? How did the Cantor do? - did he reach the high notes? How did the choir do? - were they too loud, too soft?

How did the Rabbi do?   Too long, too short? (Never too short). How were the logistics handled, the seats, the aliyah allocations, the access to parking facilities   In this culture things are done for me and things are done to me. Did the rabbi inspire me? Did the cantor move me?

In the sanctuary, the grammar of the liturgy is overwhelmingly plural. The nouns and verbs of the prayers are dominated by the syntax that ends with the suffix “nu.” Our Father, our King, protect us, feed us, sustain us. How did the clergy do, and for that matter how did God do? Did God hear? Did He listen? Did He answer? Will He answer? Was God moved?

In all of this something essential is missing. What is missing is the petitioner, the worshipper, more specifically what is missing is the individual, the “I,” the “me,” the “mine.”

“How did I do? Did I listen? Did I answer? Did I ask for the right things? Did I change? Did I move myself? Who am I who lifts his voice in prayer? What is missing is the first person singular.

The matter is different in the world of my study. Here the petitions, the requests, the expectations are quite personal. The syntax between those who sit across from me is singular, personal, confessional...

This individual man sitting before me has lost his job. He is crushed by his past, disillusioned with his present status and uncertain of his future. “I am a failure.” He has not come to me for economic aid or economic counsel. Why does he come?

This woman has lost her child in a tragic accident. Months have past. She remains inconsolable. She is, in turn, defiant, angry, melancholy and in her agony grows mute: she sobs uncontrollably. What does she want from me?

This middle aged man has been told terrible news about the prospects of his health. The doctors have spoken frightening truth, “There is nothing more that can be done.” He lives a hundred deaths. What does he want from me?

This other man has his health, is successful in his career, has seen every movie and show in town, has traveled and engaged in all forms of entertainment. He holds a hundred channels under the thumb of his remote control. He is, as T.S. Eliot described, one of the hollow men who are, “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” He is bored. He can retire tomorrow, but whether he retires or not is unimportant. Life is flat, gray, ashen, meaningless. What does he want from me? As he closes the door of the study I think,  Oscar Wilde was right. “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.”

They come to see me as a rabbi. They come for personal faith, personal solace and personal strength, for something they call spirituality. “Teach me to believe. Teach me to feel. Teach me to pray. Make me feel Jewish.”

In turn, I speak to them of loyalty to the tradition, to the Synagogue, to the community. I speak to them of the shiver of Jewish history, of the Holocaust, of the State of Israel, the imperative for survival and continuity. I urge them to belong, to join, to affiliate, to pray, to serve, to commit.

They do not argue with me. They even nod a sad assent. But I can read it in their faces, their disappointment and sometimes a burst of anger, “Rabbi, don't tell me what I can do for Judaism. Tell me what Judaism can do for me. Don't tell me what I can do for the Synagogue. Tell me what the Synagogue can do for me. Don't tell me to pray. Tell me what prayer can do for me. For me in my loneliness, emptiness, alienation, sadness, the disharmonies of my marriage, disappointment with my children, the lightness of my career, the staleness of my life.”

“Pay attention to me.” “Pay attention to me” is the echo of the great Rabbi Akiba (Deuteronomy Rabbah, chapter 2:27). “The distress of an individual is a genuine distress. The distress of a community at large is not a genuine distress.”

I would reach out to him, to her, to the individual in the Jew? Do I chastise them because they are not comforted or inspired by history or the culture of the community or even its destiny?

How do I speak Jewishly to those who have no memories of Jewish stories told or Jewish wisdom transmitted, of Jewish piety seen? To those who come from homes listless, soundless, tasteless: no candle, no blessing, no wine, no God: Whom do I fault, them or their family or myself for my failure to inspire them?

However my love for them, my desire to help them, I know my limitations. I cannot invent nostalgia for them. I cannot invent Jewish memory. I cannot invent a zayde or a bubbah. I cannot invent Jewish sentiment for them. I cannot invent Jewish ancestry for these unknowing and uncertain heirs.

I read and am momentarily comforted by the great Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz (The Structure of Jewish History) who wrote “Judaism is not a religion for the individual, but for the community, and the promises and rewards attached to the fulfillment of commandments do not refer to the individual...but rather are apparently intended for the entire people.” Graetz may have been right.

But it is an individual, not a community I face in my study. Cry community, cry “we are one people,” cry “never again,” cry “continuity” to this young man or woman who comes to me with his private despair, for whom the Holocaust is a museum and Schindler's List a movie, for whom Emil Fackenheim's argument that survival is the six hundredth and fourteenth mitzvah, and that not to survive as a Jew is to give Hitler a posthumous victory. Neither Auschwitz, Farrakhan nor the Skinheads will scare him into Jewishness.

And Israel, for all its glory, is to him another's life. It is not his personal life. The bread they eat is not his. He cannot live off someone else's sweat, blood and tears.

I think of the father who came with his adolescent daughter who had just joined the Moonies. “What did I do wrong? We visited Israel four times, four times Rabbi.” His daughter rolls her eyes. “He doesn't get it” she says to me. “He doesn't get it.”

I listen hard in the study and I'm beginning to get it. In the study, I understand the limits of sanctuary culture. The individual has been lost sight of. Vicarious living won't do. Vicarious prayers won't do. Vicarious identity won't do.

I cannot define his Jewishness on the basis of his ancestry or his descendants. I cannot help tell spiritually by telling her “Be Jewish out of respect for Zayde or be Jewish out of regard for your children.” Proxy religion will not do –  quotational Judaism will not do. I have learned from them.

You will not live Jewishly through your ancestors or through your children. Sam Levinson once wrote, “When I was a child I used to do what my parents wanted. Now that I am a parent I do what my children want. My problem is, when do I do what I want?”

I am delighted to see some of you whom I have seen in the study are here in the sanctuary. Your presence is a challenge and a surprise. I recall what you said to me when I urged you who seek spirituality, to come to the Synagogue and pray with us. “I mean no disrespect, rabbi but the congregational prayer is irrelevant. The prayers are too repetitive, too boring. It doesn't speak to me, it doesn't bear on my life.”

Still you come to see me, and still you are here. And you said, “I am not an atheist. I'm not an agnostic. I am looking for something. How should I begin? How should I begin to pray and to whom do I pray? Where can I find God's address?”

“Begin with your own address. Begin with where you live. Begin with what is closest to you – Bible, in your mouth, heart.

It brought to mind something my teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, wrote: “Unless a person knows how to pray alone,he or she will not be able to pray with the community.” I wondered about that. When I first heard it from Heschel I thought it sounded oddly un-Jewish. I thought, we don't pray alone. When the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead wrote “Religion is what one does with one's solitariness,” I wrote in the margi,n “But in Judaism religion is what one does with one's togetherness.”

But now, face to face with you, Heschel and Whitehead were right. Isn't that the point of the 18th century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov who sought to renew Jewish piety? The Baal Shem Tov said “Look at the opening line of the silent meditative prayer, the Amidah which we recite three times every day throughout our life. It says,  “Our God and God of our fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” He asks “Why is our God recited before the God of our fathers? As far as chronology and respect, it should first read, “God of our fathers and then our God.”

And why does it say the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob? Why not simply the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? The Baal Shem Tov answered “It is to teach us that you cannot pray with your fathers' head, heart and mind. Jacob did not pray with Isaac's understanding of God, and Isaac did not pray with Abraham's understanding of God.”

The Baal Shem Tov was right. Belief in God is not inherited. It has to be earned. No spiritual plagiarism is allowed in genuine prayer. No trickle down faith in Judaism. Nothing vicarious. Do you wish to find God? Do you wish to pray? Begin with yourself. As Abraham began with the command lech lecha – Go into yourself.

Why with yourself? Because in no other tradition more than in Judaism is the self regarded as the unique and indispensable link to God. Jewish thinking is rooted in the deepest and most revolutionary verse in the Bible, one that resonates throughout Jewish thought and is based on the 27^th verse in the second chapter of Genesis. It is according to the sage Ben Azzai the most comprehensive principle in the Torah and the fountainhead of morality. “And God created the human being in His image, in the image of God created He him. Male and female created He them.” Listen to that. That is older than enlightenment, older than humanism. There is a tselem, an image of God, implanted in you. This tselem is called by many names: Ruach, Nefesh, Lev, Neshamah, spirit, soul, heart, conscience.

The image of God is found no where in the universe except in the human self in whom God breathes “Nishmath chayim” –  the divine breath of life. In you is a “neshamah,” a soul whose origin is God. Do you know who you are? Do you know who you are? Adam, says the Zohar, does not mean that which comes from Adamah, earth - but is derived from the Hebrew “Adameh,” I am like God (Adameh L'Elyon)

“Zeh Eli v'anvehu,” the verse in the Book of Exodus, is interpreted in the Talmud as “This is my God and I will be like Him” (T. Shabbat 133).

“Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: “When a man goes on his road, a troop of angels proceed in front of him and proclaim: “Make way for the image of the Holy One” (Deuteronomy Rabbah 4:4).

It is rare in world religion to find such an exaltation and elevation of the individual human being. Not in Buddhism or Hinduism or Christianity. The Christ figure in the New Testament (John 14) declares, “No man cometh to the Father except through me.” In Judaism, no one come to the Father except through the self. So begin with yourself.

The ethical, psychological and spiritual implication of the tselem is enormous. As the Talmudist, J. B. Soloveitchik (On Repentance, p. 255) wrote “The soul of the self is the true sanctuary of the Holy One. The greatest of all holy temples even more sacred than the Western Wall is man's soul.”

After the death of your loved one, I read with you Talmud (Sanhedrin 4:4) and I use it in my life. Its counsel says “You were born singly, individually in order to proclaim the greatness of the Holy One. While a human king stamps many coins with the same seal and the coins are all alike one another. But the King of Kings has stamped every individual with the seal of the first human being yet no one of them is like another. Therefore, one must say “For my sake was the world created.” You are unique. There are no clones in souls. The commentators said “The very word for human being, adam, has no plural form. You cannot say adamim. Adam is single.

What is prayer? Prayer has to do with you, not with me, her, him, them. In Hebrew -- a reflexive term, “mitpallal.” Prayer is the search for your individual neshamah. It is the search for the tselem Elohim in you. Prayer is self-discovery. And its hard. Not because it's written in Hebrew. What has language to do with heart?

In rabbinic Hebrew prayer is called “avodah” which means work. Why is it so hard? Why is it necessary to search out something that is already in you?

First, because the tselem, the neshamah in you, in the course of living becomes blotched, blurred, blackened, painted over, distorted, foggy to the point of nonrecognition. Instead of your “divine image,” society judges you by your “personality.” That's a give-away. The word personality is derived from the Latin persona. Persona through sound. The persona was the mask through which the actors delivered their lines. The persona was the social facade through which the actor performed.

We play the “personality” game: We are assigned roles by society – from family, from friends, from employers and employees. Who am I? I am a lawyer, I am a doctor, I am an engineer, I am a real estate investor, I am a husband, I am a wife, I am a son, I am a daughter and I am a mother. I am assigned roles, and I am judged by my performance, by what I achieved, by what I am worth.

How much am I worth?  How much is he worth? Ask my accountant, Dunn & Bradstreet. You are what you own. The question of life is not “to be or not to be.” The question is “to have or not to have.”

But is that who I am? Away from the ledger book: Am I my career? Am I my business? Am I my property? Am I my roles? Is my identity in the identification cards in my wallet? Is that all there is?

In real prayer I am confronted by the “image of divinity” that mirrors my inner soul. “God” -- I know that that is not me. I am more than a man who asks for more. I am more than an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing, a computer encased in flesh. I am more than I make, more than the silver and gold stars handed out to me. I am more than my height and weight and gender. I am more than my shape, my body, the contour of my nose. I am more than my anatomy. I am more than my children's success or my parents' success. I am more than an instrument of the State or society.

Prayer is work -- not because it's in Hebrew.  Learning Hebrew will not teach you to pray.  But because prayer has to be translated into your external life, obituary record, the language of your soul. Prayer is an archeological dig and in the process you may hopefully strike against an image of God and compare it with gray, graven images that have hardened your God-given image into stone.

You pray according to largeness of your belief in your self. If you have settled on a shallow self, your prayers will be proportionately shriveled: “Give me more, make me rich, make me gorgeous, make me thin, make me famous”: that's not prayer, that's panhandling, begging, shnorring, not the work of prayer.

To pray is to work on yourself. To pray is to chip away at all the false accretions that have attached themselves to your tselem.

In the study you said to me “Pay attention to me.” I say in the sanctuary “take yourself seriously.” If you can't keep up with the pace of the service -- never mind. Davening is not a speed reading contest. Look into your soul and you will find who you are and what your heart yearns for you to become.

Prayer is to help you become aware of your God-given tselem. The goal of .prayer is consciousness. I learned this from Rabbi Akiba, a first century rabbi, who in The Ethics of the Fathers (3:18) said “Beloved is the human being for he was created in the image of God. But by a special love that it was made known to him that he was created in the image of God.”

Self-consciousness is necessary because the interior image is enveloped in a fog that leads us to stumble through life. The philosopher, Albert Schweitzer, who worked in tropical central Africa called it the “sleeping sickness of the soul.” In a marvelous passage he writes about its symptoms. “As soon you notice the slightest signs of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of a certain seriousness, a loss of zest and enthusiasm” you recognize sleeping sickness of the soul. The shofar is a wordless prayer meant to rouse you from the fatal somnolence of the human spirit.

You told me in my study that you found prayer repetitive, boring, irrelevant. But, dear friend, is there anything more relevant than you? Is there anything more exciting than self revelation? Is there anything that calls for constant revisitation more than yourself?

Don't evade yourself. Don't ask whether God exists, ask whether you exist. Don't ask whether God is real, ask rather whether you are alive. Don't look for a new revised Prayer Book. Look for a new revised self.

But now you come back: “If what you say to me as an individual is correct, if I am to begin with myself, who needs the culture of community?  Who needs the culture of the sanctuary? The Prayer book? The Bible?” I answer, “Because your individual tselem, the image is not born out of nothing. You are born with a spiritual umbilical cord in your navel that connects the fetus with the maternal placenta. That placenta is the culture, ethos of your family, people, through which you are fed.”

The umbilical cord must be severed for you to move to choose, to act. But it is your life line, the source of our existence your tselem is born out of the matrix of our culture. The very idea of the tselem, the very idea of the singularity and sanctity of your tselem is a uniquely Jewish insight, derived from the collective wisdom, experience and consciousness of klal Israel –  the spiritual culture of Judaism.

The tselem is no orphan. The image of God in you grows and must be constantly refined. How? By interaction between commandments, mitzvoth, by biblical, rabbinic, liturgical texts of four millennia. You read them but not blindly, mechanically, impersonally. You have to allow the narratives of your ancestors, the patriarchs and matriarchs, the priests and sages, to pour into you. But you are not a passive receptacle. Your soul is a filter through which the culture of four millennia flows. That culture discovered an image of God, a mirror in which your interior self is reflected, an ideal self, which is the yearning of your soul. “As the Holy One is merciful and compassionate be thou merciful and compassionate.” As God clothes the naked, visits the sick, comforts the mourners, buried the dead, so do likewise.” (T. Sotah 14a)

The culture of the “we” and the culture of the “me” must be drawn together. The study and the sanctuary must meet and invigorate each other. You are not the end, but you are the beginning. No surrogate, no vicar, no guru, no rabbi, no community will substitute for you. God prays through you. The Torah speaks through you. You will not be able to recognize God until you recognize God's presence in the depth of your being. You will not be able to pray in the sanctuary of community until you are able to pray alone -- without the Rabbi, without the community. Know that wherever you are, you are not alone. Know before whom you stand -- before no alien, distant God but before the image of God embedded in you. You carry the divine image in the hospital room in the solitude of your bed, in the darkness of your despair, in the quietness of your habitation.

Begin with yourself and you will enter the sanctuary of community within you.

THE PARABLE FOR ALL THIS:

Once upon a time, when God decided to create the image of God to bestow it to Adam and Eve, the angels gathered together jealous and angry and sought to frustrate the design of God. One said “Why should this mortal human being, this frail and fragile individual receive such a blessing? Let us hide the image from them.”  One angel suggested that the image be hidden in the mountains above, another suggested that it be sunk in the oceans beneath. But the wisest and shrewdest of all the angels said 'Those hiding places are not good enough. For the human being has ambitions and capacities and talents. He will climb the highest mountains and submerge beneath the oceans to find all kinds of treasures. There is only one place that the image of God can be best hidden. Hide it in him and in her. It is the last place that he or she will look.”

It must be the first place.

The path to spirituality is self-discovery. The journey begins with you but it will not end with you. It will lead through you into the community. But not without you.

A sermon, too, must come through the self of the speaker. It is self-addressed. The search for Jewish renewal and spiritual renewal begins now. Beginning with this new year, we will direct our services, sermons, seminars to the unveiling of the tselem, to the awakening of the ethical, intellectual and spiritual in you and me.

There will be many paths to such renewal, from a Chevrah Torah, one hour before the Sabbath services, to an offering of courses. Close to you is an audio on which your Rabbis and Cantors have recorded some of the prayers and songs in preparation for Yom Kippur.

Take it with you with our blessing. Jewish spirituality is not an abstract, ethereal vapor. The soul and the body are one and each affects the other.

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