Rabbi Noah Farkas Sermons

My house is full of kids. With four children - the oldest topping out at age seven - our house is just like summer camp.  It’s always loud, messy, the kids are always eating, and there are splatters of paint everywhere.  One of my kid’s favorite games to play is hide and seek.  Once earlier this summer, my second child, Shaya, he’s five, ran off to find the perfect hiding spot.  He crouched down low behind a rocking chair and threw a blanket over his body for good measure.  Shaya had found the perfect hiding spot.  After a few minutes his siblings just couldn’t find him.  Getting bored, his brother and sister went on to other activities.  Now as time passed Shaya sat there under the covers wondering what happened to the others playing the game.  He started making peeping noises and then louder calls in the hope that someone would find him.   After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, he began to cry loudly.  I heard him from my room and came down the hallway where I found him under the blanket.  He was angry and sad that no one found him.  Because, you see, despite his desire to play hide and seek perfectly, to find the perfect hiding spot, what he really wanted - was to be found. 

Take this seriously for a moment.  At this moment in a child’s game there are truly amazing religious, philosophical, and theological points.  The goal of the game is to hide so successfully that he would remain hidden even from the most earnest of searchers. Yet, there isn’t a child in the world, probably not a person in the world, who would at some point undermine the very goal of the game in order not to feel alone.  Imagine him at that turning point between wanting to hide and wanting to be found - between rising and sitting, between feeling proud and ashamed, between laughing and crying.  Imagine that amazing moment of change where success no longer means meeting your goal or knowing that you’ve played it perfectly, but being connected to those around you.   Truly profound.

It’s this sacred moment that I want to focus on this morning.  There is theology in this moment of hide and seek.  A moment when everything shifts from the pursuit of a goal like knowing God’s perfection to simply wanting to have a connection.  When do we cast out old categories of understanding about God because being found and giving up is more important than being right and remaining hidden?

There are two needs each of us has in our spiritual life, both exemplified by this hide and seek moment. The first is a drive for knowledge. We want to learn, to know that perfection exists. Our natural desire for knowledge leads each of us to probe the depths of the world to learn its secrets.  We’ve gone to the bottom of the ocean and top of the stratosphere, in the pursuit of knowledge.   We’ve asked daring questions like: how does a tree grow?  Why does the apple fall downward?  How does the pendulum work?  Why do the stars move the way they do?  What happens when we split an atom? To try to know the world is to try to attain perfect knowledge of how and why the world is the way it is. 

Aristotle said, “Man by nature desires to know.” Maimonides rings the same bell when he names the first book of Jewish law, sefer mada, or the Book of Knowing.  The very first mitzvah in this book, states “The very foundation of all foundations, the pillar of wisdom is to know that there is a first cause that has created all that is.” The quest for knowledge about the world is a spiritual/mystical drive that has inspired science and art for generations.  To know perfect morality is to know a God who is perfectly moral.  To know the perfections of ontology is to know a God who is the perfection of being.  To know the perfections of the intellect is to know a God who perfects the intellect.

In the midrash, we find this to be true as well.  When God created the world there were two trees in the garden that were forbidden to Adam and Eve.  The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.  In the midrash, these trees were but one tree with different names.  For when the serpent convinced Eve to eat of the tree in order to be like God, it was not eternal life that pulled on her ego, but the chance for unending knowledge. As Maimonides writes, “in every being that has consciousness, life and wisdom are the same thing.” The drive to know God’s perfection is the drive to know our own existence. Cognito ergo sum “I know therefore I am” is Decartes’ rallying cry that knowledge and life are two sides of the same existential coin.   

But there is a cost for this cognitive drive for perfection.  It has been seventy years since the smoke stacks of Auschwitz have stopped sullying the sky with our ashes in the name of perfection.  Yet hardly a conversation passes about God that doesn’t accuse God of abandoning us, or “letting the holocaust happen.”  Rabbi Schulweis in his very first book “Evil and the Morality of God” makes the case that striving for God’s metaphysical perfection has left us in the moral lurch.  Rabbi Schulweis understood that the primary drive of theology in the western mind is that of the cognitive drive for perfection and the pursuit of perfection.  Rabbi Schulweis also knew that if the goal is attaining Divine perfection, one can easily justify any means to achieve that end.  It tries to bend our beliefs into a shape that we no longer recognize.  Any cause whose goal is perfection leaves those who are imperfect dead in its wake.  So in the shadow of the greatest of evils perpetuated in the name of perfection, one can justly and rightly abandon a God of perfection who has abandoned us.

This is the cost of perfection.  When we think that God is perfect, we think of God’s attributes which are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, unchangeable, perfectly good, perfectly beautiful, and perfectly just.  For millennia Western philosophers sought this God of perfection.  To me, this God of perfection sounds more like the kind of JDate profile you’d want to set your daughter up with than a God that actually lives with us in the world.   All that’s left is to add that he’s in finance and we can find that it’s a perfect match.

The truth is that the God of the Bible is not perfect.  God is not all-knowing in the Torah.  God does not know what Abraham will do on Mt. Moriah with his son Isaac bound to the altar.  After the akedah, God says, “v’ata yadati,” “for now I know.” God did not know whether Abraham would go through with the child sacrifice.  Later in the Torah, God is surprised that the people turned from Mt. Sinai to pray to statue of the Golden Calf.  God is surprised again by the intransience of the people in the desert.

The God of the Torah isn’t all powerful either.  God cannot prevent the people from mingling with other tribes, from sin, from moral depravity.  When Moses stood on the craggy shore of the Red Sea and saw Pharaoh’s army bearing down on the huddled masses of freed slaves, he called on God to save the people and God said “No!  You go down.”  When Moses heard the ruckus at the base of Mt. Sinai of the people praying before the Golden Calf, God called on Moses to go down to address the community.  The God of the Torah is not always the actor in our most important events.  This is not a God of sheer coercion and power. 

The drive to know - to know of God’s perfection, to strive for God’s perfection has placed the sense of the sacred over the horizon of human experience.  This is what I alluded to on Rosh Hashanah.  It is easy to be an atheist when one sees how imperfect the world is compared to God’s perfection.

When one sees suffering when compared to God’s perfect goodness. 

When one sees the ubiquitous injustice in the world when we compare it to God’s perfect justice.  Part of atheism’s justification is a response to the chasm between the way the world is and the way the world should be under a perfect God.

Let’s give up on a perfect God. Perfection has always cost too much. Instead of solely using our cognitive drive to “know God” let us shift to another equally sacred need as spiritual people. Let us play this hide and seek game differently with God.   I would like to focus on the need to be found, not the goal of finding the perfect hiding spot.

Instead of a drive to know, what this theological moment calls for is a drive to be known.  

Instead of cognition, we need recognition.

Instead of understanding, we need connection.

Each one of us wants to be known, to feel connected to each other.  That’s what Shaya wanted when he cried out.    Dr. Brene Brown defines this drive for connection saying “it is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued.”  Connection is the energy between people when they feel that they matter. 

Last year I spoke of Dr. Brown’s work on shame.  Shame is something that keeps us from being connected. Shame is the force that pulls us away from each other.  Shame is what keeps us from achieving our highest success and most blessed life.  The prophet Jeremiah described shame as the turned back and the fallen face when he described the destruction of the Temple and the exile of Israel.  Connection, on the other hand, is depicted as panim el panim, face-to-face.  Connection is the drive to be known, to be valued, to be found.  Connection is the drive to be in relationship.  Connection is covenant.  Connection is the meeting place, the makom,  the name of God, and it is at the center of Judaism both physically and philosophically.

Today is Yom Kippur when the High Priest walks slowly with trepidation into the center of the holiest place on earth, the kodesh kodeshim, the Holy of Holies.  When he enters the chamber with his head bowed, he first prays for himself, and then his family, and then all of Israel and then the entire world.  His eyes would then gaze upon the angels that topped the Holy Ark which houses the Torah, the Book of Life, the Ten Commandments, and he smiles.  Atop the ark, Bezalel fashioned the angels of God.  Yet these angels who form the seat of God in the world carried no sword.  These angels carried no shield.  These angels stand not as sentries on the watch, facing outwards towards the entrance of this holy space. The wings of these angels spread not upward towards the heavens pointing at the perfection and transcendence of God.  No. 

The Kohen Gadol smiled as his eyes gazed upon these guilded angels with eyes locked in an eternal gaze, panim el panim, face-to-face with each other -connected to each other.  Their golden wings spread reaching towards each other in an eternal embrace of love. 

At the center of the religious universe is not a God that wants us to marvel at God’s perfection but a God that wants to be known through connection and relationship with each other.  God’s throne is connection, not perfection.  It is as the liturgy of the Unetantokef says, “Until the day of one’s death, does God wait for us.”  Echoing the psalmist who wrote, “For it is on your behalf, my heart says Seek my Face.”  Connect with me. 

For in the cognitive drive the opposite of Perfection is imperfection. 

For in the cognitive drive the opposite of belief is disbelief.

For in the cognitive drive, the opposite of theism, is atheism.

But in the drive to be known, the relational drive, the opposite of belief is not disbelief.  The opposite of theism is not atheism, it is indifference.

Indifference to the world.  Indifference to each other.

Belief in God only animates half of us as Jews.  The latest study says that only 50% of Jews “believe in God.”

Apathy, by definition, motivates no one. 

Our tradition does not expect you to be perfect because life is not perfect, it is messy and hard.  Our tradition on the other hand expects you not to wallow in your disconnectedness.  It is not a sin not to believe in a God whose perfection is unfathomable.  

It is a sin to hear the cry, the woe; the need for connection and to do nothing but yawn.  

At any moment where we disconnect from each other, that is where we hear God saying “ayeka” “Where are you?”

The voice of God, “ayeka” can be heard in the mother who says “you never call me anymore” It’s true.  And yes mom, I’ll call you after the holiday.

The voice of God, “ayeka” can be heard in the child who says, “Daddy, can you stay home tonight and read me a story instead of going back to work?”

The voice of God can be heard in the friend who says, “my boyfriend broke up with me.”

Ayeka - Where are you.  The voice of God is heard in the cries of the sick who say, “Don’t let me die alone.” 

The voice of God can be heard in voice of a homeless man who says, “You got a dollar to spare?”

The voice of God can be heard in the nearly 11 million refugees who have left their homes because of the war in Syria, who are saying, “Can I live with you?”    

The voice of God was heard through Eric Garner whose last words uttered under an illegal choke hold were “I can’t Breathe.”

All injustices, all social maladies stem from our disconnection with each other.  Anytime we feel a disconnection from others, God’s voice rises in response.  This is the shuttering pathos captured by the words of the prophets:  The calling for connection and our indictment on this Yom Kippur for disconnecting from each other. In the words of Amos:

Listen to this, you who devour the needy, annihilating the poor of the land, saying ‘If only the new moon were over, so that we could sell grain; the Sabbath, so that we could offer wheat for sale, using an ephah that is too small and shekel that is too big, tilting a dishonest scale, and selling grain refuse as grain! We will buy the poor for silver, the need for a pair for sandals. The LORD swears by the pride of Jacob, ‘I will never forget any of their doings” Shall not the earth shake for this?..” 

We disconnect from each other and let the poor suffer, we let the displaced remain homeless, we let our families fall apart, our marriages fail, our communities dissolve , and then the voice of the prophet calls out us.  And the world shakes.

The drive to know and the drive to be known. The cognitive drive and the relational drive. Two categories of human need.  Two categories of philosophical desire.  Rabbi Schulweis understood this innately.  For thousands of years we have used our cognitive drive to know God and bend our Jewish lives into the Western mind of Greek philosophy.   What this moment calls for, is the turning from our goals of perfection to the crying out in connection.   Our central book of wisdom, our philosophy has been called by many names, Torah meaning teaching, Chochma – meaning wisdom.  Sefer Chayim  the Book of Life.  There are two other names, however, that this hide and seek moment calls for.  There are two other names that describe our central understanding of how to be in the world, what God really wants from us, and how we find the meaning of existence.

The first is Rachmana – meaning compassion.  The rabbis use this term to refer to the Torah when they quote its verses.  In Judaism, our Torah is our guidebook for connection, and compassion. Not of perfection.  The Rachmana is the source of life that draws us together.

The second name is Mikra – meaning the calling. It is used by the rabbis to quote verses of authority to outline the mitzvot, the deeds of our lives.  The Mikra is the teaching that is not just for teaching’s sake. It is the Torah that calls for a response.  It calls us to be better, more just, and more loving. It calls us to covenant, it calls us to connection.

It’s time to give up on a perfect God. Instead of perfection let’s try for connection. Instead of falling into the polarity of theism and atheism, let’s pull ourselves out of apathy.  Only then, can we know what it means to grow spiritually, to live more ethically, to love each other more, to care more, to be more Jewish and indeed to be more human.  For it is the most human thing in the world to not only hide, but to want to be found.

Gmar Hatima Tova.