My Family's Ushpizin

Inviting Ushpizin (guests in Aramaic) into your sukkah is a wonderful tradition. There is a Kabbalistic ritual of inviting Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David like we invite Elijah to our Seders. If you are ever in an ultra-Orthodox sukkah, you might see other "guests" in the form of pictures of great rebbes. So, in this vain, in my family sukkah, we invite every year great Liberal rebbes, men and women who have shaped non-Orthodox Judaism. Here are our Ushpizin:

Abraham Geiger

 

Isaac Mayer Wise

Leo Baeck

Stephen S. Wise

Mordecai Kaplan

Regina Jonas

Abraham Joshua Heschel

And one Rabbi that is still very much alive:

Sally Priesand

Who would you invite to your Sukkah for next year?

My Rosh Hashanah Sermon

Here is my Rosh Hashanah sermon on my personal experiences of God. Sorry it is late.

Rosh Hashanah 5774

Back in the summer of 2001, the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I was a unit head at the Reform Movement Camp Newman in Santa Rosa. One Shabbat, the camp was visited by Rabbi Richard Levy, at that time the director of the rabbinical program at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. I had recently decided that I was going to apply for rabbinical school, and HUC required a pre-interview with someone from the college before they would send you an application. So, I got to sit down for a chat with Rabbi Levy while he was at camp. I figured he would just ask me a few questions: Where are you from, what do you major in, how’s your Hebrew, etc. The first question was “Where are you from?” But, then, next question, it seemed to me to be out of nowhere, “What is your concept of God?”

            I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I think it was kind of academic. I was a Judaic studies major at Tulane. I had just spent my junior year studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem pouring over classical Jewish texts and learning from some of the world authorities on the academic study of Judaism. I could tell you the difference between Yehudah HaLevi’s conception of God and Maimonides’ conception. I could talk about transcendence and immanence, mystical and philosophical. I think I did, in a rambling way. Rabbi Levy just nodded his head and said, “OK,” and moved on.

            When camp was over that summer I set out to absorb the great modern works on Jewish theology, books by Jewish thinkers on God. I wanted to be able to answer Richard Levy’s question more eloquently. This quest continued when I got into rabbinical school and continues until now. But, as I reminisce about this encounter twelve years ago, I was going about Levy’s question in the wrong way. Reading works of theology has been, and is, rewarding and meaningful for me, but Rabbi Levy was asking about me, my belief, not what others say. I needed to formulate my own theology based not only on books and tradition, but based on my own experiences, based on how I encounter the divine in the real world. And so, tonight I offer you all something that I have never done formally. I am going to formulate through some autobiographical sketches, my experiences of God—times in my life that, as I reminisce on them, I have come to realize that I greatly felt the Divine presence. I hope this very personal sermon can relate to others and is not only about me, but uses my life as an example of ways others might experience God.

            I am now going to stop using the “G” word. You know, G-O-D.  For me, and for many of us, I suspect, it congers up images of an old man in the sky with a James Earl Jones voice, but this is not what I experience in life, so I will try to use metaphors to explain what I have felt. Because when we try to describe an experience of the ineffable, we need to resort to figurative language.

            And so it is with great humility that I will be the first of your clergy this year to address how I view faith during these High Holy Days. The other two rabbis will also be speaking on the subject in these coming days. As the writer and minister Frederick Buechner writes, “All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography.” So, here is part of my story.   

            I began my first days of college, and it was very hot, hot outside because it was New Orleans in August, but I also always felt hot inside air-conditiioned buildings. I was always sweating, constantly. Moving away from home and meeting new people is hard in and of itself, but I was finding that it was something that made me very nervous. I couldn’t concentrate in class, I couldn’t sleep well, I was losing a lot of weight, I was irritable, and my hands were beginning to shake periodically. I thought that I was having a nervous breakdown. When I returned home for Thanksgiving break my parents sent me to the doctor. He took one look at me and diagnosed me with Graves’ disease. It is a thyroid disorder. There was too much thyroid hormone in my body, and it caused the somewhat harmonious system of my body to be out of balance.

            Once I started the treatment for my body’s disorder, I set about reestablishing order and balance in my life. Hillel, the Jewish student organization, had a huge role in that. I began attending Shabbat services. The consistency of the prayers, the ritual, the order, became comforting. It wasn’t necessarily the words of the prayers, it was the action of doing them that helped bring healing to my unbalanced life. Prayer and praying is something that became very important to me, and it is something I continued as I entered rabbinical school, trying to attend not just Shabbat but daily services. The task of following our ancient order of prayers, with its rituals and ritual garb, marking the holiness of the moment, centered me every day, helped give my life direction.

            My disease, my thyroid disorder, was just that--something that disordered my universe. It’s amazing how one bio-chemical (I know that I am simplifying the biology of this) can disrupt our whole being. We humans seek and crave order. The opening chapter of our Torah is about creation being the ordering of the chaos. Religion, Judaism, helps us realize and create the systems of order in our chaotic world. We try to bring cosmos to chaos. My encounter with my hormonal disease resulted in, to paraphrase a title of one of my favorite movies: “How I learned to stop worrying and to love to pray.”

            When I strive for order and experience it, through acts of prayer and ritual, I give thanks. B’rucha Achdut haOlam. Blessed is the Unity of the Universe that unites all of us. Blessed is our search for order.

            As I mentioned before, I spent my junior year of college in Jerusalem at Hebrew University. It was the school year of 2000-2001, the first year of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian revolt against Israeli rule. It was a very tense time in Israel. Israelis took to calling the time “hamatzav—the situation.” There were constant terrorist attacks, security guards at restaurant and on buses, and here I was living in a dorm in eastern Jerusalem in eyeshot and earshot of the hostilities. Many of the students in the dorms were also American students in Jerusalem to experience Israeli culture, learn Hebrew, many there to explore their Jewish identity. Like any good college dorm, students would hang out late into the night discussing deep topics (among other things). Maybe it was because of the “matzav,” the tense and often dangerous situation around us, but I felt that my conversations with others that year created a special kind of bond. Whether we were talking about Israel, or Judaism, or great music, I let myself get fully immersed in the relationship. Have you ever had a conversation or an encounter with another and it felt as if time stood still—felt as if you were part of the infinity of the universe? It could have been falling in love or looking at your beloved under the chuppah, or learning with someone, or cradling your newborn, or holding someone’s hand in a hospital bed. As the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber writes, “With every Thou (every true encounter with another) we are stirred with a breath of the Thou (the Eternal One), that is, eternal life.”

            It is through our relationships that we experience the great connector of the universe—the source of our web of connection to each other and the world. Baruch M’chaber haOlam. Blessed is the Eternal Connector of our relationships.

            My spiritual biography goes from order to connection to a little shul in New Iberia, Louisiana. During rabbinical school in Cincinnati the students get the pleasure of serving small synagogues throughout the Midwest and South that cannot support a full-time rabbi. My first student pulpit was Congregation Gates of Prayer in New Iberia, in Southwest Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country. My first time in New Iberia was Rosh Hashanah and I stayed through Yom Kippur. I was leading services, giving sermons, visiting congregants, teaching children, and all along I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I was worrying about the logistics of the service, and my presence on the bima, and the congregants’ impression of me—it was stressful. I probably came across on the bima as very nervous. But, at the end of Yom Kippur, towards the metaphoric closing of the gates, something hit me. I was standing in front of the open ark, the president of the congregation on one side of me and the vice-president on the other side. An overwhelming sense of awe struck me. The disorientating nature of my visit became ordered and clear, and I felt a connection with the congregation and the whole Jewish people, past and present, standing in front of the arks all over the world. I think what   I felt was a transcendent sense of purpose. This is where I was supposed to be, and this is what I was supposed to be doing. I was a part of something greater than myself. I felt humbled and upright at the same time. Order, connectedness, and transcendent purpose all together for that brief holy moment. It may have been something like what Abraham Joshua Heschel said about the feeling he had when he participated on the March from Selma with MLK, he said, “my feet were praying.” For me, my whole being was praying. I have heard of people having similar experiences on the top of a mountain or in doing acts of justice—a sense of transcendent purpose.

            B’rucha haElyonut—Blessed is the Transcendence that gives our lives purpose and meaning.

            It is hard for many of us contemporary Jews to talk openly about our belief in the Divine. I’m not sure I even know what “belief” means when it comes to this. But, I think, many of us have had encounters and experiences similar to the one I describe. I am not trying to prove that God (there is the G word again) exists in the form that our ancestors believed, but I do know that I have felt times in my life that I have been suffused with something that is within myself and that is also beyond myself—something that gives order, connection, and meaning to my life. As we pray, contemplate, and meditate during these High Holy Days, let us explore and ask ourselves about our experiences and encounters that ground our lives and create a sense of Ultimate worth.