Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev once summoned all of the Jews of Berditchev to assemble in the town square the following day at noon, because he had an announcement of the utmost importance to make. He ordered that all the merchants were to close their shops, that all nursing mothers were to bring their infants, and that everyone, with no exceptions, was to be there to hear the announcement. The people wondered what the announcement could be. Was a pogrom imminent or a new tax? Was the Rabbi going to leave? Or was he perhaps seriously ill? Did he know the time when the Messiah would come and was he going to reveal it? At noon the entire community was present with no exceptions and everyone waited with baited breath to hear what the rabbi would announce. Precisely at twelve the Rabbi rose and said: “I, Levi Yitzhak, son of Sarah, have gathered you here today in order to tell you...that there is a God in the world.”
At first the people were perplexed. Was this the big announcement that they had left their homes and closed their shops to hear? Had the Rabbi convened them only to tell them something that every school child already knew? But then, as they thought about it, they began to say to themselves: “Indeed what could be more important than to know that there is a God in the world?”
Have we forgotten that there is a God in the world?
Well... yes and no. I don’t really think that the problem is that we had forgotten.
However, I do feel that many times we are more incline to remember that there is a God in the world in moments of distress. We are forced to process so much information that we jump from one issue to another at light speed.
The first two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, my e-mail box was flooded with articles trying to answer where was God when the storm stroke. But as days went by, those e-mails became less and less frequent. In the last week I hardly receive one. And that will hold true until the next tragedy hits and the circle begin again.
And that’s part of our tragedy.
I read about these two rabbis who shortly after Katrina devastated the coastal cities of the Gulf, were discussing topics to speak about on the High Holidays. They both agreed one had to talk about the hurricane. But then, one of them paused, and said, "Well, of course, Rosh Hashanah is still more than a month away."Simultaneously, they had a frightening realization--it seemed possible that in a month or two the topic would no longer be "hot." To be sure, people would still be suffering. Shattered lives would not be repaired. The shock-waves of catastrophe would roll through the souls of many thousands of people, but would the topic still be on people's minds?
The speed with which calamity fills the screen of our lives and then leaves is astonishing. Once the images no longer dominate the news, we have been there, done that.
If I say 9-11 we all know what I am refering to. How many can say with the same ease what was 12-26? How many of us remember what happened on December 26 of last year?
It has been only 9 months since the Asian tsunami destroyed several countries. Not only hundreds of thousands die, in the, but the lives of millions were changed forever. Yet who was still talking about the tsunami when the hurricane hit? It had filled our screens, moved our hearts, and then we moved on. After all, as somebody wrote, Britney was having a baby.
The Talmud in Megila 31a gives us the texts of the Torah for the days of Rosh Hashanah. After some discussion, they settle with the readings we read until today.
The first question we could ask is why don’t we read about Maase Bereshit? Story of the Creation of the World. After all this is Rosh Hashanah, right?
Well, believe it or not, “creation” is a minor theme of the High Holidays. (At least from a biblical and talmudical point of view)
Remembrance, on the other hand, is one of the primary themes of Rosh Hashanah. Actually, that’s the image the Torah uses when it speaks about this day: Iom Zichron Trua. The rabbis in the Talmud and us today when we recite Kiddush at our tables call it Iom HaZikaron “The day of remembrance.”
Now comes the fascinating part of this act of remembering that our Rabbis chose to emphasize. In the Rabbis of the Talmud minds, the one that has to remember is not us, but God. Remembrance meant, they believed, God’s visitation of God’s people for their good. God recalls us, remember God’s promises and fulfills God’s word.
That’s exactly what we read in the Torah reading today.
"God remembered Sarah and God did with Sarah what he has promised her".
The idea being that God will remember us on Rosh Hashanah for good in the same way that God remembered Sarah.
Clearly the Rabbis 2000 years ago were more worried about God remembering us than they were about us remembering God. And it is equally clear that by the time of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, in the late 1700, the opposite was true and he felt compelled to remind his community that there is a God in the world.
And it is probably a good idea for us to remember that there is a God in the world. Not only when a catastrophe hits but especially in the good times. To remember that there is a God when we wake up every morning and when we go to sleep after a productive day. When we accomplish something really good (and many times tend to assume that we did it all by ourselves) and when we really help somebody. In the big moments of our lives and in the little miracles of every day.
Let me share a story I heard from a friend some months ago.
Moishe is driving in Jerusalem. He's late for a meeting; he's looking for a parking place, and can't find one. In desperation, he turns towards heaven and says: "God, if you find me a parking space right now, I promise that I'll eat only kosher, become Shomer Shabbat, and observe all the holidays."
Miraculously, a place opens up just in front of him.
He turns his face up to heaven and says: "Never mind, I just found one.".
Let me make a suggestion. May be it is time to go back and read again the act of creation. May be the time has come for us to remember that at the end of that first week God decided to create us to be God’s partners in the amazing mission of completing God’s creation, of perfecting God’s world.
It is time for us to remember that Rosh Hashanah is in the end a celebration of our relationship with God. And the fact that that relationship is one of partners. Not equal partners clearly, but still partners.
A true partnership, however, needs for us to remember of our relationship with our Creator.
We can’t go through our lives thinking that all our success if due to our abilities and that every catastrophe that happens in the world is God’s responsibility and that we have no part in it.
In some minutes we’ll come to one of the most beautiful and most difficult prayers of the High Holidays: Unetane Tokef.
In a recent article, Rabbi David Golinkin wrote that the main challenge of this poem for a modern Jew is the theology of the climactic sentence as usually translated: “but teshuva, repentance, tefillah, prayer and tzedakah avert the severe decree”. As we all know, this is not always the case.
How many times how we prayed the Mee Shebeirakh prayer for the recovery of a loved one and gave tzedakah , yet our loved one did not recover. Tens of thousands of Israelis opposed to the disengagement from Gaza prayed to God “to cancel the decree” and gave tzedakah, yet the disengagement took place nonetheless.
Similarly, we are now witnessing the aftermath of Katrina and Rita. There must have been millions of people who prayed to God to stop the hurricane or lessen its devastation, yet their prayers do not seem to have been answered.
Rabbi Marc Saperstein, a Reform rabbi, dealt with this problem in an article published 25 years ago. He points out that Death, sickness, impoverishment, tragic as they may be, are not identical with evil. They can poison, embitter, fill us with self-pity, destroy a marriage, blind us to the needs of others, turn us away from God. But the evil consequences of even the most fearsome decree are not inévitable. If teshuva, tefila and tzedaka cannot change the external reality, they can enable us to transcend the evil of the decree.
In other words, even if repentance, prayer and tzedakah cannot annul or eliminate evil, by searching our souls through teshuvah, praying to God through tefillah and helping other people through tzedakah, namely by being true PARTNERS OF GOD, we help ourselves and others cope with evil and “make the evil of the decree pass”.
But to accomplish this we have to go back to Rabbi Levi Ytzchok of Berdichev and remember that there is a God in the world.
If there is a God in the world, then there are things we are tempted to do which we will refrain from doing. If there is a God in the world, we won't be afraid to spend our limited amount of love and compassion because we will know that God will be there to replenish us when we run out. If we really believe there is a God in this world, we will treat each other better because we will recognize the image of God in our neighbor, whatever his race, religion, ability, or earning capacity.
So let this be the first and perhaps the most important announcement that comes from this bimah today: “There is a God in this world!”.
Le Shana Tova Tikatevu v’Tichatemu
May we all be inscribed and sealed for a good and meaningful year.
At first the people were perplexed. Was this the big announcement that they had left their homes and closed their shops to hear? Had the Rabbi convened them only to tell them something that every school child already knew? But then, as they thought about it, they began to say to themselves: “Indeed what could be more important than to know that there is a God in the world?”
Have we forgotten that there is a God in the world?
Well... yes and no. I don’t really think that the problem is that we had forgotten.
However, I do feel that many times we are more incline to remember that there is a God in the world in moments of distress. We are forced to process so much information that we jump from one issue to another at light speed.
The first two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, my e-mail box was flooded with articles trying to answer where was God when the storm stroke. But as days went by, those e-mails became less and less frequent. In the last week I hardly receive one. And that will hold true until the next tragedy hits and the circle begin again.
And that’s part of our tragedy.
I read about these two rabbis who shortly after Katrina devastated the coastal cities of the Gulf, were discussing topics to speak about on the High Holidays. They both agreed one had to talk about the hurricane. But then, one of them paused, and said, "Well, of course, Rosh Hashanah is still more than a month away."Simultaneously, they had a frightening realization--it seemed possible that in a month or two the topic would no longer be "hot." To be sure, people would still be suffering. Shattered lives would not be repaired. The shock-waves of catastrophe would roll through the souls of many thousands of people, but would the topic still be on people's minds?
The speed with which calamity fills the screen of our lives and then leaves is astonishing. Once the images no longer dominate the news, we have been there, done that.
If I say 9-11 we all know what I am refering to. How many can say with the same ease what was 12-26? How many of us remember what happened on December 26 of last year?
It has been only 9 months since the Asian tsunami destroyed several countries. Not only hundreds of thousands die, in the, but the lives of millions were changed forever. Yet who was still talking about the tsunami when the hurricane hit? It had filled our screens, moved our hearts, and then we moved on. After all, as somebody wrote, Britney was having a baby.
The Talmud in Megila 31a gives us the texts of the Torah for the days of Rosh Hashanah. After some discussion, they settle with the readings we read until today.
The first question we could ask is why don’t we read about Maase Bereshit? Story of the Creation of the World. After all this is Rosh Hashanah, right?
Well, believe it or not, “creation” is a minor theme of the High Holidays. (At least from a biblical and talmudical point of view)
Remembrance, on the other hand, is one of the primary themes of Rosh Hashanah. Actually, that’s the image the Torah uses when it speaks about this day: Iom Zichron Trua. The rabbis in the Talmud and us today when we recite Kiddush at our tables call it Iom HaZikaron “The day of remembrance.”
Now comes the fascinating part of this act of remembering that our Rabbis chose to emphasize. In the Rabbis of the Talmud minds, the one that has to remember is not us, but God. Remembrance meant, they believed, God’s visitation of God’s people for their good. God recalls us, remember God’s promises and fulfills God’s word.
That’s exactly what we read in the Torah reading today.
"God remembered Sarah and God did with Sarah what he has promised her".
The idea being that God will remember us on Rosh Hashanah for good in the same way that God remembered Sarah.
Clearly the Rabbis 2000 years ago were more worried about God remembering us than they were about us remembering God. And it is equally clear that by the time of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, in the late 1700, the opposite was true and he felt compelled to remind his community that there is a God in the world.
And it is probably a good idea for us to remember that there is a God in the world. Not only when a catastrophe hits but especially in the good times. To remember that there is a God when we wake up every morning and when we go to sleep after a productive day. When we accomplish something really good (and many times tend to assume that we did it all by ourselves) and when we really help somebody. In the big moments of our lives and in the little miracles of every day.
Let me share a story I heard from a friend some months ago.
Moishe is driving in Jerusalem. He's late for a meeting; he's looking for a parking place, and can't find one. In desperation, he turns towards heaven and says: "God, if you find me a parking space right now, I promise that I'll eat only kosher, become Shomer Shabbat, and observe all the holidays."
Miraculously, a place opens up just in front of him.
He turns his face up to heaven and says: "Never mind, I just found one.".
Let me make a suggestion. May be it is time to go back and read again the act of creation. May be the time has come for us to remember that at the end of that first week God decided to create us to be God’s partners in the amazing mission of completing God’s creation, of perfecting God’s world.
It is time for us to remember that Rosh Hashanah is in the end a celebration of our relationship with God. And the fact that that relationship is one of partners. Not equal partners clearly, but still partners.
A true partnership, however, needs for us to remember of our relationship with our Creator.
We can’t go through our lives thinking that all our success if due to our abilities and that every catastrophe that happens in the world is God’s responsibility and that we have no part in it.
In some minutes we’ll come to one of the most beautiful and most difficult prayers of the High Holidays: Unetane Tokef.
In a recent article, Rabbi David Golinkin wrote that the main challenge of this poem for a modern Jew is the theology of the climactic sentence as usually translated: “but teshuva, repentance, tefillah, prayer and tzedakah avert the severe decree”. As we all know, this is not always the case.
How many times how we prayed the Mee Shebeirakh prayer for the recovery of a loved one and gave tzedakah , yet our loved one did not recover. Tens of thousands of Israelis opposed to the disengagement from Gaza prayed to God “to cancel the decree” and gave tzedakah, yet the disengagement took place nonetheless.
Similarly, we are now witnessing the aftermath of Katrina and Rita. There must have been millions of people who prayed to God to stop the hurricane or lessen its devastation, yet their prayers do not seem to have been answered.
Rabbi Marc Saperstein, a Reform rabbi, dealt with this problem in an article published 25 years ago. He points out that Death, sickness, impoverishment, tragic as they may be, are not identical with evil. They can poison, embitter, fill us with self-pity, destroy a marriage, blind us to the needs of others, turn us away from God. But the evil consequences of even the most fearsome decree are not inévitable. If teshuva, tefila and tzedaka cannot change the external reality, they can enable us to transcend the evil of the decree.
In other words, even if repentance, prayer and tzedakah cannot annul or eliminate evil, by searching our souls through teshuvah, praying to God through tefillah and helping other people through tzedakah, namely by being true PARTNERS OF GOD, we help ourselves and others cope with evil and “make the evil of the decree pass”.
But to accomplish this we have to go back to Rabbi Levi Ytzchok of Berdichev and remember that there is a God in the world.
If there is a God in the world, then there are things we are tempted to do which we will refrain from doing. If there is a God in the world, we won't be afraid to spend our limited amount of love and compassion because we will know that God will be there to replenish us when we run out. If we really believe there is a God in this world, we will treat each other better because we will recognize the image of God in our neighbor, whatever his race, religion, ability, or earning capacity.
So let this be the first and perhaps the most important announcement that comes from this bimah today: “There is a God in this world!”.
Le Shana Tova Tikatevu v’Tichatemu
May we all be inscribed and sealed for a good and meaningful year.
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