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Our Lives as Sacred Text
I’d like to begin my Rosh Hashanah reflection with two teachings from
the Chassidic tradition:
The first is a story told about the famous Chassidic rabbi Shneur Zalman
of Liadi who is most well known as the founder of the Chabad lubavitch
movement in the late 18th century. But long before he had achieved that
status, he was a bright and promising yeshiva student. He became
interested in what was then the radical revivalist movement of Hasidism
and decided to seek out its leader, Rabbi Dov Bear, the maggid of
Mezerich, who had himself been the leading disciple of Hasidism’s
founder, the Ba’al Shem Tov. One day, Shneur Zalman was challenged by a
more traditional colleague about his intention to study with the Maggid.
This colleague asked Shneur Zalman why he was not instead going to study
with Rabbi Elijah the gaon or genius of Vilna who was widely believed to
be the most illustrious Torah scholar of the generation. Shneur Zalman
responded that in Vilna, he could learn how to study Torah, but that
with the Maggid, he could actually learn how to become a Torah scroll.
The second teaching comes from another important
Hasidic master, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger, best known as the
author of the work S’fat Emet, the language of truth. He stated that,
“all the sections of the Torah that tell of the holy ancestors are there
to show how Torah was made out of their actions. The task of human
beings is to make this clear, to show how every deed takes place through
the life energy of God, for the human being is God’s partner in the act
of Creation.”
Now, what in the world do these teachings, as interesting as they may
be, have to do with the holiday of Rosh Hashanah or the Days of Awe in
general? I actually believe they have quite a lot to do with why we are
here today, and I invite you take a look with me now at how that might
be so.
Our tradition clearly teaches us that this period of the Jewish year is
a time for us to critically assess our lives, to attempt to redress any
pain we have caused others both intentionally and inadvertently, and to
reorient ourselves toward our most meaningful goals and values. But
there is a second dimension of meaning to the Days of Awe that goes
beyond this accounting of the soul and to illustrate it, I would
actually like to draw on an image from the world of business and
non-profit administration.
When managers are preparing their budgets for the upcoming fiscal year,
they are frequently asked to draw a distinction between budget items
that are primarily dedicated to the continuation of day to day
operations one on hand, and other budget items which are there for the
explicit purpose of building greater capacity within the business or
organization on the other. Each of these budgetary areas are critical in
their own way and successful organizations are careful to attend to both
of them. Similarly, during the Days of Awe, we have two parallel tasks.
The first is to maintain and refine our “day to day operations” by
correcting our missteps and mistakes and attempting to refocus on those
parts of our lives which our most important to us. But the second, and
often neglected task, is to use this time to build our spiritual
capacity, to work on reaching for a deeper level of understanding both
of our own lives and of Life with a capital L. How we go about doing
this is the big question.
I believe that the two Hasidic teachings with which we began are
important for us to hear at this time of the year precisely because they
provide us with the basis of a model for how to think about building our
spiritual capacity. Together they represent the rather radical notion
that the boundaries of Torah can expand beyond scripture and
interpretation to include the stories of our own lives. They carry the
message that each one of us is a Torah scroll in human form though we
may not necessarily recognize it. They chart a path towards a deepening
of soul that involves attending to our own our lives as we live them
from moment to moment and day to day as sacred narratives unto
themselves, imbued with every bit as much holiness as the ancient scroll
of our people.
If recognizing that our lives are sacred narratives is the first step,
the next one involves developing an approach to reading and exploring
them. Luckily we are members of a community that has thousands of years
of practice to draw on as we advance toward this challenging yet vital
task. In good Reconstructionist fashion, I’d like now to take a look at
the evolution of our people’s perspective on the nature of sacred
narrative, and in the process, to see what we might learn from each
stage of that evolution about how to mine our own narratives for the
treasures buried within them.
Therefore, we begin with the most ancient layer of our tradition which
is also our people’s core sacred narrative: What can we learn from the
Torah itself about the nature of Torah? The Torah, in contrast to almost
all Jewish literature that came after it, makes no pretense about being
straight forward, even blunt in the way it communicates its truths. A
second characteristic is its embrace of the messiness of life and its
lack of concern over smoothing out the rough edges of a story or a
personality. The biblical characters whom we were taught as children to
emulate as heroes turn out to be human and fallible with both moments of
greatness and moments of weakness.
It is the same Abraham who negotiates with God, trying to prevent the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah who also willingly sends his wife
Sarah into Pharaoh’s harem for fear of his own safety. It is the same
Rebecca who demonstrates her immense capacity for kindness and wisdom
upon meeting Abraham’s servant who also falls prey to the lures of
parental favoritism to such an extent that she initiates a plot with her
younger son Jacob to deceive the man who is her husband and his father.
What I think we can learn from these characteristics of the Torah is
that the path to a holy life does not lie in some pristine problem-free
future, but it is found right here and now within our complex,
contradictory and sometimes painful daily lives. And the goal is not to
wait until we are in some highly evolved spiritual state before we begin
to think of our lives as being infused with sacredness. We can only
begin from where we find ourselves in this moment, with our strengths
and our weaknesses, with our joys and our sorrows, but it is exactly
this moment that has holiness as an essential element. That is one thing
we can learn from the Torah.
Our next stop on the timeline of Jewish civilization is the Rabbinic
era. While the Torah itself is not smooth or tidy, it does not claim in
any way to be subtle or intricate. In fact we read just last week in the
Torah portion of Nitzavim the statement that the Torah is “not hidden
from us and not distant, neither is it in heaven, rather it is very near
to us, in our mouths and in our hearts.” The implication of these words
seems to be that whatever we understand Torah to be, it is clear and
accessible.
How differently the ancient rabbis viewed the content of the Torah. They
were, before anything else, close readers of text par excellence, and
this dedication to careful study led them to find meaning hidden within
very subtle textual nuances and patterns that someone reading purely for
the sake of content or plot development would almost certainly miss.
They also saw the Torah as a single unified document so that any one
part of it could be used to shed light on any other part even when there
is no obvious connection between them.
For example, in the Joseph story the rabbis notice that in the scene
which pictures Joseph’s brothers preparing to take his life, none of the
dialogue mentions Joseph by name. He is referred to simply as “him” on
nine occasions and once as “the dreamer.” Only Judah, when he tries to
convince the others not to go through with their plans, calls Joseph,
“our brother.”
The rabbis see even in this small a detail, a hint, built into the very
fabric of the story, about the extent to which the brothers have
distanced themselves emotionally and psychologically from Joseph. They
are also at pains to point out the links between this story and later
developments in the story of the Jewish people. They note with approval
that it is Judah, the brother who is to become the ancestor of King
David and eventually the messiah, who takes it upon himself to intervene
on Joseph’s behalf.
Similarly in our own lives there are patterns and nuances that exist and
that affect us, but to which we may be quite oblivious. Often we are
focused exclusively on the drama that moves the plot of our lives
forward, and we neglect, or forget, to pay attention to the subtle
habits of language, thought and action that course through our
experience at every moment. The rabbinic approach to sacred text teaches
us the importance of becoming close readers of our own stories. A first
step in this direction is simply to notice when in our lives we tend to
go on automatic pilot.
Making a conscious choice to pay attention to the parts of our lives
that are most habitual can yield important insights into the dynamics
that drive our personal narratives. Some of these habits may be quite
benign while others may have consistently negative impact upon us or
others to whom we’re connected. But as we become more familiar with
them, we begin to see the structure of our narrative in new and helpful
ways. We may even come to understand how seemingly disparate parts of
our lives actually cohere quite powerfully with one another. And this
awareness give us more freedom to influence the direction our story will
take as we move into the future.
Our final stop on our tour through Jewish civilization is the medieval
period and the contributions of the Jewish mystics to our understanding
of the nature of sacred text. These students of Kabbalah evolved a
perspective on the Torah which assumed that it, in its entirety, was
actually a secret code that described, for those who have eyes to see,
the hidden spiritual dynamics that underlie all of creation and that
operate within God as well.
This perspective so changed their view of Torah that they could make the
bold claim that if all the Torah is, is a collection of mere stories and
ordinary words, than they could certainly write a better one.
The meaning that the mystics uncover within the Torah is, like that of
the rabbis, not obvious to the casual reader, but the level of
hiddenness is of a completely different order. In their formulations,
our tradition reached its peak in developing the idea that there is much
more to the Torah than meets the eye. There is in fact a veritable
universe hidden within the holy letters that is every bit as mysterious
and expansive as the universe that exists outside of them.
From the mystics then also we can learn some important things about
exploring our own stories. The first point is learning to embrace the
fundamental mystery that lies at the center of each one of us. Even as
we strive to put the puzzle of our life together in the spirit of the
rabbis, we remember with humility that this is a project that can never
ultimately be completed. We can always go deeper.
A second teaching involves cultivating the awareness that everything we
say and do, and perhaps even what we think has ripple effects in the
world in ways that we are completely unable to trace. I think the
medieval mystics would have looked approvingly upon the modern
development of chaos theory and the fact that a butterfly flapping its
wings on the other side of the planet can contribute to our rainy Rosh
Hashanah weather.
And they would tell us, that if we pay attention, there are moments when
we can catch a glimpse of these subtle paths of causation. When
serendipitous events conspire to remind us of the links that exist
between our own sacred narrative and those of other individuals as well
as the great collective narratives of our people, our species and the
cosmos itself. May all of us in the coming year discover an increased
capacity to understand the complexity and the mystery that are the
building blocks of all of our lives, and may this in turn lead to a
greater degree of choice and intentionality in the positive unfolding of
our own stories and the story of our world.
Shannah tovah umutkah!
Rabbi Steve |