Rabbi Noah Farkas Sermons

I’ll never forget the day I proposed to Sarah. I’d been planning it for weeks. We went on a long road and hiking trip with friends across the West. I bought a cheap plastic ring that was orange in the shape of a small flower for 50 cents, so I wouldn’t lose the real one in my pack. Still, I was worried. What if she finds it? What if it falls out?  

We hiked the North rim of the Grand Canyon, and for the next few days, and I kept thinking, what a beautiful view, maybe I’ll propose to her here. Then some other hiker came along, or the weather would turn sour, or I lost the courage, and I kept putting it off.

A few days later we were in Zion National Park. Now, we only had one day in Zion, and I said this has to be it. Tomorrow we’re driving to Vegas and I’m not cliché’ enough to propose to her there!   Sarah and I hiked out a bit on our own and found a lovely Juniper tree. We sat down, and like so many young men before me, I was at a total loss for words. I fumbled along all nervous like, with that 50 cent ring burning a hole in my pocket.

The world was vibrating for me on a different level. We spoke about life together and what it would be like. And the next thing I know, Sarah asked me, “Wait, are you asking me to marry you?” “Well yes, I suppose I am,” I said. I’m glad she could glean all that from our small talk. I pulled out the little plastic ring and gave it to her, we returned to the car with our friends already there singing mazel tov.  

But how could it be, that simple words, like our dreams of the future, can mean one thing one day, and something the next? That what begins as small talk is no longer a dream, but a proposal? As Humpty Dumpty says in Alice in Wonderland, “who is the master” is the question -the words or those saying them?

Words signify the importance of things. For God at the moment of creation, words meant the birthing of a new world. For me and Sarah, a few dreams of the future meant the birthing of a new world of a different sort. Together through this holiday season, you’ll hear me give three different sermons, but they all have the same message.   We must reclaim our words, to be masters of them, in order to regain control over our spiritual, communal, and national lives.  

Today I’ll speak about the words we pray, and how to reclaim prayer as person and as a community. Tomorrow, I’ll speak about the words we share with each other in this political season. And on Kol Nidre, I’ll speak about Zionism, and the words we use to speak about Israel.

When people come up to me and ask me about prayer and praying, there are usually three major objections. Either they say, “Rabbi, I don’t understand the words, so why should I pray?” Or they say, “Rabbi, I don’t believe in the God that is described in our prayers, why do it?” Or they say, “Rabbi, praying is silly, it doesn’t change anything.”

All three of these questions come from the same place. There’s a sense of linguistical distancing, a sense of theological alienation, a sense of experiential compartmentalization like placing everything spiritual in a religious box and hiding it under the bed. Inside this special box, we keep our prayers and the audacity to pray, our religious emotions, and the permission for transcendence. This box has a lock whose combination we forgot – or worse someone has thrown away the key.

Coming out of the shtetl, Jews of all stripes cast off what they saw as backwards superstitions. By the early 20^th century with rational modernity in full swing, the very whiff of anything that we would call spiritual today was expunged from the domains of religious life-even in the esteemed homes of Jewish thinkers. In 1908, for example, Martin Buber’s father said, “I would be happy with you if you were to give up this Chasidic…stuff…for [it] could have only a mentally debasing and pernicious effect.” Around the same time, it is said that in the childhood home of professor Gershom Scholem, Gershom and his mother would try to say the prayer over Shabbat candles, but his father would pull out a cigar light it with the Sabbath lights, and make a mocking Hebrew benediction over his tobacco.[1] In these homes of even the most spiritually alive Jews, the spirit was put in a lock box. Prayer was silly joke and a backwards superstition.

Then came the dark days of the Shoah. 6,000,000 Jews murdered in the name of enlightened progress, and not a family in Jewish Europe left unscathed by this storm. Theologically, the Shoah took the wind out of the Jewish sails. It robbed us of our spirit, and our song. Like the time my cousin Joe, a survivor, told me that many of his friends would spit on the ground when they would hear of “God-talk.” Or they would stand with their back’s to the ark during mourner’s kaddish. Prayer wasn’t only silly, it was blaspheme itself.

These one-two punches of so-called rational enlightenment and the Holocaust, left the generation traumatized, hollow, and in a spiritual wasteland . You can’t blame them, an entire generation of Jews who carried a spiritual type of post traumatic stress disorder. How could they pray? What emotion besides anger and fear could they express?  As Psalmist says, “How could we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?”[2]

They turned their backs on God, and for good reason. Instead, they turned towards each other to find the sacred. But communal prayer became devoid of its energy. Services were more of a communal gathering than a religious experience - like a Jewish town hall meeting or a graduation ceremony. The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described these prayer services as “[sic] smooth…Everything was present, decorum, voice, ceremony, But one thing was missing: life. One knows in advance what will ensue. There will be no surprise, no adventure of the soul; there will be no sudden burst of devotion….Our motto is monotony..There is nothing new in the synagogue…Yes. The edifices are growing. Yet worship is decaying.”[3]

But as the memory of the Shoah fades into history, and the hubris of 20th century rationalism is proven false at every turn, a new generation is growing up. Like many youngsters, they are exploring the taboos of their parents while seeking for first principles that give meaning and direction to their lives. In a recent article in Commentary magazine Dr. Jack Wertheimer codified this search for foundations as the “10 Commandments of American Jews.” Wertheimer decried young Jews as too free of judgments, too celebratory, and too universalistic.[4] All things that every younger Jew wears as a banner of their identity.  

These younger Jews are chary of a Judaism based on anger, fear, and cynicism. Young Jews crave joy, celebration, and spiritual expression.   It’s like they found that special lockbox hiding under the bed and pulled it out wondering, “how do I get inside?”

The Maggid of Mezrich taught “Every lock has its key which is fitted to it and opens it. But there are strong thieves who know how to open without keys. They break the lock. So every mystery in the world can be solved by the particular kind of meditation fitted to it. But God loves the thief who breaks the lock open.”[5]

It is time to reclaim our spiritual lives by making prayer at the center of what we do and not just the periphery. But what are the keys? Or better, how do we break the locks open?

For starters we need to change the context. The word “prayer” doesn’t begin to capture the entirety of the Jewish religious experience. What we Jews do when we are in the midst of spiritual moments is not prayer, its davening.

To pray is to read a poem in English. To daven is to sing with our heart song.

To pray is claim to say, “oh that’s nice.” To daven is to say, Oy! That’s true!

To pray is sit still and listen. To daven is to shuckle and sway.

To pray is to worry about what others think. To daven is worry about what God thinks.  

We pray with periods. We daven with exclamation marks!

There are times in each of our lives that we have let go, when we break open the locked up part of ourselves by forgetting for a moment our own self imposed dignities and allow something else to flow. At a baseball game, for example, when that human wave comes around our way. We feel the awe as the wave moves around the chasm of the field. We feel the anticipation when it begins to near, and we never think about what other people will say about us when it’s our turn.   We just stand up and say, “whoa!” And when it’s over, we never worry about the quality of our cheer.   Is that not a moment in time when something inside of us is unlocks a bit?

Or the story from the Midrash: Once there was a man who made a will saying that his son should inherit nothing until he became a fool. A few Rabbis including Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi went to Rabbi Joshua ben Karha to ask the meaning of the instructions in the will. They saw him outside his house, and noticed that he was crawling on his hands and feet with a reed in his mouth, and following after his son, and mooing like an ox. The rabbis were astonished to see a fellow colleague stoop to such a level. To which Rabbi Joshua retorted, “You’ve learned nothing, any man that lives to have children, he acts like a fool!”[6] If you have kids, you know this to be true. Who can say no to their kids in that way? If you can capture the spirit of those moments, you can begin to turn the tumble stones of your heart open.

For some, the language is the lock. It’s like the story of the old woodcutter, who upon the high holidays would wander into the forest and recite the alphabet and then say, “It’s beyond me, God; You combine these letters into the right words and sentences, for You know what I want to say.”[7] Hebrew school never really taught us Hebrew. But you don’t have to know the words to begin to daven. All you need is to open up, and find a little uplift, a little meaning, God knows what you mean; God can work out the words in your heart.

For some, God is the lock.   How can I pray to a God I don’t believe in? I say that to pray for peace is not the same as to say that peace comes only from God. To ask for success is not to say that success is only in the hands of God.   Younger Jews don’t ascribe God to the role of scapegoat for human catastrophe. To do so would, as Rabbi Schulweis teaches, abdicate our own moral responsibility. We cannot outsource to God our responsibility to create peace and goodness. For, as Schulweis says, “Human beings are the language of God.”

But untimely we are the lock. We daven not to change God, but change ourselves. We are not theurgists. We cannot change God.   Rather our prayers direct us towards our sacred values that are worth our devotion.   Is not love powerful enough to arouse our passions? Is not peace in all its informs worthy of our pursuit? Is not goodness inherently sacred? And above it all, to realize that these values are coherent and unified in an integrated understanding of what is true and right? Is that unity not worth devoting all of heart, all of our might, and all of our soul: Shema Israel Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad?

There is more than a practical reason that the tefillin have two boxes. The law says you cannot have a teffillin shel yad without a teffilin shel rosh. But you can have a teffilin shel rosh without a teffilin shel yad?   Why? Because it is not enough to be reminded that the actions we take in the world are merely reflected in our values, but those values are important in themselves and worth our time and our devotion. It is the importance of the sacred itself that gives true moral direction to our actions.

Davening is the time when we meditate on what is sacred to us, as we seek to change ourselves. A time when we bind our values both as a sign upon our hands and as a frontlet between our eyes. Because ultimately, we need both.

That’s why I’m comfortable saying that prayer changes the world. Because through prayer we change ourselves. And in partnership with God we can change the world.

Language, God, ourselves- each of us has locks and each of us has keys to those locks. But as the Maggid teaches, God does not want locksmiths, God wants thieves. To break the lock open, to uncover the lost spiritually of Judaism, is to create a community that takes prayer as seriously as it takes its learning and its sense of togetherness. That means hearing each other and lifting each other up in prayer. That means, being open to surprise in services, praying as if your life truly depends on it – because it does. That means going up that mountain to the spiritual heights where truth can be boldly said, where davening is real, and where we can model the type of community we so urgently wish for each other.

This is what we are trying to do in this space, with this group of folks. It takes discipline and commitment- a prayerful community is not organic. It is the product of a decision that says this is more important than other opportunities, because this is more real and meaningful. Join us. Bring your family, and let us break the locks open together.

There is an old custom, on Shabbat Shira, when we read the song of that Moses and the people of Israel sung after crossing the sea. The custom states that on this week, we should give a little extra feed to birds on the eve of the Shabbat.[8] The source for this custom is the teaching that when we were enslaved in Egypt, all the music went out from the world. We lost our voice, and didn’t know how to sing praises. All joy and hope had vanished. After generations of fear and shadow, all we had were our cries of anguish. And then the Exodus happened and we walked through the narrow places, through the sea with water on the left and the right. We arrived to the other side, a land wide open and full of light. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to sing praises, for we had lost our song. Then the wind blew, and a flock of birds came and taught Israel how to sing again. Beautiful songs filled with wonder and amazement. The birds brought joy back to the nation -back into Jewish life. The birds taught us to pray again.  

And so Miriam, the first to learn the song of the birds, took up her timbrel, and she began to sing and she began to dance, and the nation soon followed. She reclaimed joy for the first time in their generation. It is time for us to find our song, our spirit again, and learn the songs of praise, love, and joy.

Shanah Tovah

[1]http://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+tale+of+two+families%3A+Franz+Rosenzweig,+Gershom+Scholem+and+the...-a014234292

[2] Psalm 137:4

[3] R. A.J. Heschel Quest for God, p.50

[4] http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-ten-commandments-of-americas-jews/#ref1

[5] Buber, Martin, Tales of the Hasidim p.104

[6] Midrash Tehillim 92:15

[7] Judah Goldin in S.Y. Agnon’s Days of Awe p.xxxiii

[8] Mishna Shabbat (24:3 = fol. 155b):