Drashot for Rosh Hashanah 5773

With All Your Heart

A Drash for Rosh Hashanah Evening 2012

Rabbi Don Levy

The High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are of course not an everyday occurrence; they happen only once a year. (I know, I know, my grasp of the obvious is nothing short of remarkable.  But this is why you pay me the Big Bucks!)  Like other events that happen only once a year, we look forward to these Days of Awe with great anticipation.  When they come around, they are like old friends, back for a periodic visit.

            The specific readings, the music, the chance to catch up with friends whom you haven’t seen in a while.  We rabbis of course emphasise the spiritual aspects of these days.  But there’s much more to these holy days than just the spiritual.  Everything about them is important.  But I do want to emphasise the spiritual for you tonight.  I mean, that is my job, after all!

            The services for these days are not too dissimilar from our services every Shabbat, although there are specific parts that are unique to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  For example, the prayer Avinu Malkeinu.  Our Father, our King.  On Rosh Hashanah our language of addressing G-d becomes very personal, and yet very grand.  When we hear the familiar strains of the Avinu Malkeinu prayer, the cadences of its words and the unique melody to which we sing it, it evokes memories of the many times we have heard it in the past.  Now if we should suddenly change the melody, it would probably be jarring rather than comforting.  Let’s try it and see… (Sing Avinu Malkeinu to the tune of Rock Around the Clock.)

            So the familiar is comforting.  But sometimes it is important to really look at the familiar parts of the service.  It’s good to remind ourselves – or perhaps, to discover for the first time! – what the words say.  These prayers and songs obviously have a message for us in their words; otherwise they wouldn’t be there!  And we might disagree with the thoughts they present, or wrestle with them, but that is part of the point.  Just because they are stated in the prayer book, doesn’t mean that we are compelled to subscribe to them.  Over the years, I have struggled with a number of passages and concepts in the liturgy.  Prayer is meant to be a conversation, not a rote recitation.  It’s a conversation with a basic script, but room to ad-lib.

            I therefore wish to return to a very familiar text that we read at every service here, not just during this time of the year.  It is known by its first word, Ve’ahav’ta.  You all know that it follows the Shema, and is in fact part of the Shema. 

The declaration of the Shema, or Kri’at Shema as the Rabbis call it, is really the central declaration in our liturgical prayer.  It is so key to everything else in the service that the one line of text spreads across two pages in our new siddur, Mishkan Tefilla.  It is a statement from Moses’ first discourse to the Israelite people, in the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, in Parashat Ve’ethanan.  Although we’re told that Moses suffered from a speech impediment, he must have been an incredible orator despite that.  Several of the declarations he made to the people Israel, preserved for all time in the Torah, are very powerful prose.  And none more than this line.  Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.  Hear, O Israel!  Adonai is your G-d.  Adonai is One.  One.  Not two.  Not three.  Not a great pantheon of gods.  Another way to understand the last sentence:  Adonai alone.  Only Adonai.  Not Adonai and Zeus.  Not Adonai and Jupiter.  Not Adonai and Moloch.

            It’s about as powerful a statement as is possible, and in the ancient world it by necessity separated the Israelites from all the other peoples.

            Immediately after Kriat Shema there is a statement added by the Rabbis:  Baruch shem kavod malchuto le’olam va’ed.    Blessed is His Glorious Name for ever.  We say it in an undertone, to separate it from the statement that precedes it.  Because Baruch shem is not quoted from the Torah, it is added to further elevate the ineffable name we have just recited.  Or not recited, because we’ve said Adonai, which is really a euphemism for G-d’s personal name.

            And then we sit down and we chant two paragraphs of Torah text.  The Kriat Shema we sing, but then we chant what follows.  Of course, if you’re following closely you can hear that it’s the same chant I use when reading the Torah portion.  That’s because the Ve’ahav’ta is another direct citation from the Torah, from the verses of Deuteronomy immediately following the Kriat Shema.  It consists of chapter six, verses five through nine.

            This is obviously another very central and familiar part of our service.  Obviously, because when we reach it, I can hear people’s voices chanting along.  And not just chanting – chanting with spirit, with confidence.  So the passage, or at least the way we ‘do’ it, resonates.  But do we really think about its words, and what they mean?  For me, very seldom.  And I’m guessing that for you, too, if you reflect upon the words and their meaning it is a rare occurrence.  We get caught up in the act of chanting it, and chanting it correctly.

            Tonight then, and tomorrow morning and on Yom Kippur, I’d like to revisit some of the words that we chant whenever we’re together for communal worship.  Since we’ve already chanted the words tonight, let’s actually look at them and contemplate their meaning.

            The Ve’ahav’ta begins with an imperative statement.  You shall love Adonai your G-d with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your abundance.  So we’re being commanded to love G-d.  But wait a minute, Rabbi!  How can one be commanded to love!  Isn’t ‘love’ an emotion?  How can one be commanded to feel something?

            All good questions.  And I know I’ve spoken about this before, but it bears repeating.  The ‘love’ being spoken about here, is not Love, The Emotion.  It is Love, The Devotion.  Be devoted to G-d.

            In a marriage it’s Love, The Emotion that often causes us to pick our partner.  (One would hope…)  The one who makes our heart race, is the one with whom we choose to spend the rest of our life.  But it’s not the emotion love that enables us to succeed in living according to the promises we made under the chuppah.  It’s Love, The Devotion.  The loyalty.  The commitment.  And that’s the commitment we’re being commanded here.  Love, The Emotion is great.  But Love, The Commitment is what lasts.

            So we’re being commanded to commit ourselves to G-d.  How?  Bechol levav’cha, bechol nafshecha, u’vechol me’odecha.  With all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your abundance. 

            In popular culture, the heart is usually associated with the emotions.  But in Hebrew, ‘with all your heart’ means something more.  The heart is understood to be a euphemism for all everything that’s inside us but not organic, all the intellect and reason.

            In the secular world, the intellect is often seen as diametrically opposed to the religious impulse.  Religion in general is even seen as anti-intellectual.  All intellectual pursuit is seen as being in tension with religious teachings.  I think of this as a Big Lie.

            The simple religion of unexplained faith, the religion of the cheder of your youth, is anti-intellectual.  That’s by design.  Cheder is meant to be affective, not simply for the passing of knowledge.  So we do not emphasise the intellectual aspects in cheder.  I can tell you from experience, that you cannot engage children under 13 on a level that emphasises the intellectual.  It simply doesn’t work.  Not in cheder, and not in day school.  That’s why teaching children and teaching adults are two completely different competencies.  So I’m not going to apologise for the fact that you were taught as a child in cheder.  You were a child.  And I’m going to be direct with you.  Do you today, however many years later this is for you, do you still think of religion – of Jewish religion – as anti-intellectual?  If so, that’s because you closed your ears, or just stopped coming after your bar mitzvah.  Instead of reaching for a Judaism of maturity as you matured, for whatever reason you remained stuck in the Judaism of the child.  Then, since you were developing intellectually, you doubtless rejected it.  As is only reasonable.

            I suppose that we rabbis share some of the blame.  But in all honesty, that’s a hard pill for me to swallow.  If you attend and listen to my sermons on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, you know that I don’t give sermons aimed at children.  Sometimes, as I’m speaking, if I see children in front of me I wonder if I’m going over their heads.  Sometimes I hope I’m going over their heads, if you know what I mean!  But I’m seldom accused of infantilising those in attendance.  You may not agree with everything I say.  Some of the things I say may challenge you, and at the end of the day you’ll disagree.  And that’s perfectly all right with me, because when I speak from this pulpit I’m not aiming my words at children.

            That’s why it’s ludicrous to allow a child to stop attending shul after their bar mitzvah.  Just when they’re starting to enter the realm of mature, rational thought, we let them go out to the movies, or whatever it is that teens to on Friday nights.  As they develop intellectually, we let them remain with a Judaism that is infantile.  No wonder young adults are difficult to engage!

            So what we’re being commanded in the statement bechol levavcha, is to engage our intellect for the study of Judaism.  To get out of ‘Bible Stories’ and learn Mishnah.  And philosophy.  And mussar, ethics.  And more.  We express our devotion to G-d with all our intellect and we engage as an adult.  And if such an inquiry is going to kill religion for you for all time, I’m willing to live with that possibility.  Because it is far better to reject a mature faith, than to dismiss a child’s faith.

            Look around you.  This is not an Orthodox shul.  This is a Progressive shul.  We do not ask our members to put their thoughts in line with certain dogmas.  We just want you to engage with the Tradition and to wrestle with it.  And share the experience with this, your community.  And please, no criticism of Orthodox Judaism intended!  If Orthodoxy resonates with you, I will not be offended to see you go and join Gold Coast Hebrew Congregation.  And unless I miss my guess by a mile, they won’t expect you to adopt a child’s Judaism either.  Even though Orthodox and Progressive Judaism are in some ways different animals, each is characterised by its own form intellectual vigour.

            Love Adonai your G-d with all your heart.  I know that it’s novel to realise that this means ‘with all your intellect.’  But now that you know what it means, are you willing to consider loving Adonai on that level?  Think about it.  Shana Tova.

With All Your Soul

A Drash for Rosh Hashanah Morning 2012

Rabbi Don Levy

As I pointed out last night, the High Holy Days – these days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – sometimes seem like old friends whom you haven’t seen in a while.  In a year, to be exact.  And then they come upon us early each spring, and we think:  How good to have time to visit with my old friend!  Of course, I’m talking about the readings, the melodies, the sound of the Shofar, and the presence of others whom you perhaps haven’t seen in a while.

            (You know I’m becoming acclimatised to life in Australia when, contrary to a lifetime of conditioning, I can say that the holidays come in early spring, right?  No worries, Mate!)

            Do you have friends or associates whom you see only rarely?  Having spent a career in the military, I’ve got many friends like that.  I can go without seeing them for years:  not by choice, but simply because we’re at opposite ends of the world.  Perhaps we’ll exchange e-mails, or hook up on Facebook occasionally.  But when I do get to spend time with them, it’s definitely spending time with an old friend – not a new acquaintance.  I savour every moment that I get to be with that person, because I know it might be a year, or longer, until I see them again.  Maybe the circumstances of your lives may have caused you to have such friendships also.  When you see them you don’t waste time, because you know it will be awhile before you see them again.

            These Days of Awe are like that.  Rarely savoured, but intensely familiar and satisfying when you get the chance.

            But what about the friends whom you get to see more often?  Sometimes, regrettably, we take them for granted.  We squander opportunities to spend time with them, because we feel safe that they’re always within reach.  Not only do we miss out on opportunities to spend time with them; we take them for granted in other ways.  We allow important facets of their personalities to remain mysterious, because we feel we’ll have plenty of time to get to know all their quirks.  So sometimes, we don’t really know our friends who are in close proximity, as well as we know our friends who live distant from us.

            One such friend who lives around the corner, so to speak, is the Shema.  It is, of course the central declaration, the cornerstone of every Jewish worship service.  Not just on these High Holy Days, but every Shabbat – evening and morning – when we gather for prayer.  On the rare occasions when we hold a weekday service here, then too the Shema is there in her rightful place.  Because we get to be with this ‘old friend’ as often as we wish, we have a tendency to say her words without dwelling too deeply on them.

            Last night I spoke about how the first sentence in the paragraph that we know as Ve’ahav’ta begins with the command:  Ve’ahav’ta et Adonai Eloheicha; bechol levav’cha u’vechol nafshecha, u’vechol me’odecha.  You shall love Adonai your G-d with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your abundance.  I explained that with all your heart really means ‘with all your intellect’ and challenged you to commit to engaging G-d in that way.  It isn’t easy.  We are used to the idea – I call it a lie because it is – that religious faith qua definitione is opposed to the intellect.  I think that’s because we’re stuck in the religion of cheder, the Judaism taught to children.  Just as we began to enter the age of intellectual inquiry, we pushed Judaism to the background of our lives, or disengaged completely.  And that’s unfortunate on a number of levels.  For one thing, a mature faith of reason is a very satisfying faith.

            And then we are commanded to love G-d bechol nafshecha, with all one’s soul.  The nefesh, the soul, means in Hebrew, the life force within, but independent of the physicality.  In other words, the emotions.  So despite what you heard me say last night, the emotions count.

            But the placement of nafshecha BEHIND levav’cha teaches us that the intellect and reason come first.  By apprehending G-d and relating to Him intellectually, we build a religion that is intellectually satisfying and sustaining.  But unless we also invest our emotions in it, it will ultimately be neither.

            We have a tendency to respond to stimuli emotionally first.  It’s human, but it’s dangerous.  Everybody, myself included, has had such an episode – probably many episodes!   We responded to some situation emotionally and as a result we bruised someone else’s feelings.  Perhaps we even wrecked a relationship beyond repair by so doing.  If we were lucky, when emotions cooled we managed to repair the damage.

            Emotions are not bad.  Without them, we are not human!  But they can easily get out of control.  And we all know this.  Therefore when we respond to a situation, it is usually good to step back, take a deep breath, and allow ourselves an intellectual response.  This is called, in Stephen Covey’s phrase, ‘being proactive.’  It was one of his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  In fact, it was the very first habit!  Be proactive, respond rationally, through your values.  As opposed to being reactive, which means responding emotionally.  Although Covey published this back in 1989, it’s still fresh and relevant, and rings true.

            Intellect before emotion, but not to the latter’s exclusion.  Good advice in business.  So, too with religion.

            And certainly not emotion to the exclusion of intellect.  Look, I obviously think of religion as a force for Good in the world.  Judaism, for sure, but other religions as well.  Let’s give our neighbours some credit also!  But it’s good religion that serves as a force for Good.  And to me, that means religion that engages us emotionally and intellectually.  That’s because the emotions can run wild, and they need the intellect to set limits, to keep excesses in check.  It’s religion that depends upon an exclusively emotional response that produces cult-like religion, that produces people committing terrible acts in the name of G-d.

            In Judaism, we do emphasise the rational side.  Sometimes to the exclusion of the emotional.  And that’s not good, either.

            Rodger Kamenetz wrote a delightful book called Stalking Elijah. It’s about his quest, as an educated layman on the Progressive side of Judaism, to get into the world of Jewish mysticism.  His premise was that the mystical – the emotional side of Judaism – is a valid and important component of the Jewish tradition.  But it is de-emphasised in our shuls today:  sometimes left outside, the door slammed shut in its face!  And that does not help us to engage generations of Jews for whom it is not ‘natural’ to make a commitment to something that does not first grab them in the kishkas.  So Kamenetz set off on a personal journey to find out what is happening in the world of Jewish mysticism today and who is making it happen.  His intent was to provide a ‘traveller’s guide’ for other seekers of an emotionally satisfying Judaism.

            Today, in modern and Progressive shuls all over the Jewish world, something exciting is happening.  We are borrowing from the mystical strains of our tradition and injecting an emotional element into our Judaism.  Mostly we borrow from the strain known as Hasidism.  I can see that it has happened here, well before my own arrival.  When it did, it might have been somewhat discomforting to some.  Closing one’s eyes and meditating, or chanting in mono-syllables, or some such can take the rationalist out of his comfort zone very quickly.  But such practices as enable the individual worshipper to engage in worship on a more emotional level, help to make the experience more real.  So we borrow from the Hassidic side of our tradition.  This might on a certain level seem inauthentic outside of Orthodox Judaism.  But we’ll risk that, because it is important to touch the emotions as well as the intellect.

            Some of us operate under the mistaken notion that the intellect and the emotions are diametrically opposed.  I would argue that this isn’t true.  The rational and the mystical are, rather, two sides of the same coin.  Just as a coin would not be a coin without both heads and tails, so too religion is not religion without both the rational and the mystical.  That’s true of religion in general, and it’s certainly true of Jewish religion.

            So love Adonai.  That is, commit yourself to the G-d of Israel.  Bechol levav’cha.  With all your heart.  That is, with all your intellect, with all your reason.  And also, bechol nafshecha.  With all your soul.  That is, with all your personality.  With all your emotions.  With the totality of the very life-force within you.  As we enter the new Jewish year, it is something to think about.  And something to experience.