Kol Tikvah location map

Rabbi Janet Offel
Kol Nidre 5768
Temple Kol Tikvah

FINDING OUR OWN PATH TO GOD AND TORAH

             When I was a child in religious school, the standard text was a book entitled, Pathways Through the Bible.  Does anyone else remember that book?  I have to tell you, I detested it.  I thought it was the most tedious book in the world.  We would sit there in class, reading to ourselves for what seemed like hours on end and I was bored out of my mind.  Now, I am sure that there were classmates of mine who found the book fascinating, but I certainly did not.  Whereas in secular school, I was often the “teacher’s pet,” in Sunday school, I was more often the one who’s name the teachers couldn’t remember, and they were always incapable of pronouncing my surname anyway.  Pathways Through the Bible was nothing more than a dead end street to me.  Yes, I learned the stories of Adam and Eve, and Noah and Abraham and Sarah… but it all seemed so one-dimensional.  Rather than the Torah representing an etz chaim, a living tree, it felt like a collection of boring stories about people who were of no consequence to me and my life.

             And what were the teachings about God?  When I was in Confirmation class, our rabbi basically told us that the whole notion of God was a quaint, outmoded idea from a different era.  He told us that his parents always wanted him to be a doctor, and he became a rabbi instead, principally to go against his parents’ wishes.

             At the age of 18 when I left my home congregation, beyond celebrating holidays and lifecycle ceremonies I felt a sense of detachment from Judaism.  And I know that I wasn’t alone.  How many of you, sitting here with us tonight, have no knowledge of the richness of the teachings in our Torah or the depth of our multi-faceted understandings of God or the great beauty of our heritage’s customs?  For me, it wasn’t until I came back to Judaism as an adult that the majesty of our tradition began to open up in all its luminescence and I began to see that there was so much more to Judaism than Pathways Through the Bible seemed to offer me. 

As Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reform Judaism has noted:  “Ours is a uniquely ignorant generation, a generation truly without precedent in all of Jewish history.  And the great irony of our ignorance, of course, is that we are simultaneously the best educated generation of Jews that has ever lived.  Wonderfully educated in the ways of the world, we are abysmally ignorant in the ways of our people.”[1]

“Too many of us can name the mother of Jesus, but not the mother of Moses.  We know the author of Das Kapital, but not the author of the Guide for the Perplexed.  And when we do study, we too often have been satisfied with a kind of learning that is largely cosmetic, and which, if you were remarkably stupid, would be edifying.  But of course we are not remarkably stupid; we are remarkably smart, and hungry for the intellectual splendor and deep humanity of our heritage.”[2]

             At Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about the belief in our tradition that all the souls of Israel: past, present, future stood together at Mount Sinai.  According to our heritage, there were 600,000 Israelites who made their way out of Egypt and stood at the base of that windswept mountain.  And each one of us were among them.

             Now, I don’t want to get into an argument with those literalists tonight who I know can’t wait to rush up to me and say, come on, there were 600,000 Jews then and 13 million today—do the math, Rabbi.    That’s not what this is about.  I am asking you tonight to suspend judgment, to stop living in a 24/7 literal, rational world and allow yourself to live in a world of metaphor, a world of symbolism and imagery.

 Two things happened at that mountain: Each and every person heard the voice of God themselves, and Moses received the Torah.  Tonight I want to explore each of these notions a little further—to push you to open your minds and your hearts to these two important aspects of our tradition, to hear the voice of God, and embrace the beauty of Torah.

 Over fifteen hundred years ago it was written: Rabbi Levi said: The Holy One appeared to them as though a statue with faces on every side.  A thousand people might be looking at the statue, but it would appear to be looking at each one of them.  Rabbi Yose bar Rabbi Hanina said that the Divine Word spoke to each and every person according to his or her individual strength and capacity.  The voice of Adonai is in the strength and capacity of each and every person.  Therefore the Holy One said: Do not be misled because you hear many voices.  Know that I am Adonai your God, who is one and the same.[3]

 Our tradition is replete with multiple images of God: at the Red Sea it is said that the Holy One appeared to the Israelites as a mighty man waging war, and at Sinai as an educator teaching Torah and in the days of Daniel as an elder teaching Torah, and in the days of Solomon as a young man—each time in an image appropriate to each and every place and time.[4]

 So how is this for a midrash, a story, appropriate to our place and time with respect to an image of God:  “I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals or would sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation.  My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world.  That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”[5]  Anybody know who wrote that?  A Jew by the name of Albert Einstein.

 For too many of us, our images of God stopped with an elementary school notion of a white bearded man in the sky.  I have always believed that those who consider themselves “atheists” must have a very well defined understanding of God in order to be able to so clearly reject it.  Yet as our tradition has known for thousands of years, and as Albert Einstein reminds us in his 20^th century image, there is no one Jewish understanding of God.  Our inheritance is a rich kaleidoscope of beliefs and principles.  Our ancestors understood that each of us must find our own way into, and through, the labyrinth.

            And what of the Torah that Moses received on that isolated mountain?  Our tradition teaches that the Torah is an etz chaim, a tree of life.  Think for a moment about a stately tree.  Standing magnificently above the ground, imagine the intricate root system that anchors our tree, giving it balance, providing nourishment and replenishment to that which we see in its entire splendor.

Within the five books of Moses that comprise the Torah, and indeed within the entire Tanach or Hebrew Scriptures encompassing not only the written Torah, but the words of the Prophets and additional ancient sacred writings of our people, we find stories, traditions and teachings that speak powerfully to our own lives.

Yet as my teacher and colleague Rabbi Norman Cohen notes, “…Most of us do not take the Bible seriously.  We see it as an antiquated remnant of the Ancient Near East or we view the study and reflection upon the biblical text as a religious school exercise, relegated to the education of children.  We who never have the opportunity to grapple actively with our sacred stories have a difficult time appreciating how they can speak directly to us and to our life situations.  We do not see how they possibly can help us understand ourselves as spouses, parents, children, lovers, and friends, or shape the direction of our lives.

“Yet the power and relevance of the Bible is demonstrated by its enduring presence throughout all parts of western culture.  By confronting the biblical text, whether we see it as divinely given or the product of divinely inspired human beings, and immersing ourselves in these sacred stories, we can gain a better sense of the meaning of our own baffling dramas.  This, in turn, can affect the nature of our lives and our priorities.”[6]

With these words in mind, just listen to this medieval text:  “And this is the secret of the 600,000 roots of souls…and as an example of this there are 600,000 interpretations for the written Torah for each and every verse…for each and every soul amongst the 600,000 souls of Israel has a particular path in the entire Torah according to the underlying nature of its soul-root.”[7]

  There is a path for each of us, and no two paths into the Torah are the same.  Hafok ba, v’hafok ba, dichola va, turn it over and over for everything is within it is a famous dictum with respect to our precious teaching.  It is incumbent upon each of us to figure out which root “path” is our own, which way into the Torah is our own route.  For as Torah study nourishes, us, in return we too offer nourishment and replenishment to the Torah.  We are the only ones who can keep the magnificent etz chaim, tree of life, alive.  To quote again from Rabbi Yoffie, “Torah study is the motor which drives Jewish life, and whenever communities neglect it, they have already started on the road to decline.  Because you do not wake up one morning and say: ‘I’m not going to be Jewish anymore.’  Disengagement from Judaism is a process, and it always begins when we turn our back on the study of Torah.”[8]

We live in an amazing time in the history of our people.  There are new Torah commentaries coming out almost monthly, new translations into English of ancient and medieval Hebrew texts and a plethora of Judaic scholars right here in our own backyard of Los Angeles.  But we have to get beyond thinking that images of God and words of Torah are for children, and begin to embrace them for ourselves; to begin to see that each of us has our own path, that each of us represents a single root of the amazing tree that is our inheritance.  For if we don’t what is the future for this marvelous tree?  How will our own descendants find their way into the tradition, if we are not embracing it in all its glory ourselves?  If we see our sacred legacy as merely “kid’s stuff,” to be abandoned at the age of thirteen.

Tonight is the holiest night of the year.  It is the night on which we figuratively stand before God and are judged by our deeds in this world.  What does it mean to be a good Jew?  I spoke on Rosh Hashanah morning about the importance of social action and social justice.  And tonight, I speak about the importance of embracing our heritage in all its glory.  Don’t allow your own preconceived notions of God, of Torah and of our customs to stand in the way.  Join us tonight, tomorrow and throughout the year on this magical mystery tour that is your inheritance, too.

Our ancestors deeded to us a marvelous gift.  Yet it sits unopened and too often even unacknowledged in the contemporary lives that we live.   On this holy night of Kol Nidre, I implore you to open the gift that has been so painstakingly carried through the generations of our people, embrace the inheritance that has been given to you by your ancestors.  Keep the tree of life alive, so that you, too, may pass it on in all its glory to your descendants as well.