a sermon by Rabbi Gary M. Bretton-Granatoor
Congregation Shirat HaYam, Nantucket
Kol Nidre 5785
My dear friend, Rabbi Stuart Geller, tells the following story. There once was a confirmed atheist. All his life, he denied religion and denied the possibility of God. Upon his death, friends came from all around for one last viewing of the deceased. Resplendent in his finest clothes and laid out in a beautiful coffin, one by one his companions marched by the coffin to say their final good-byes. Finally, his best friend, and verbal sparring partner on the subject of religion walked up to the bier and said loudly enough for all to hear, “Look at you, all dressed up with nowhere to go!”
I sometimes wonder if most of us are also all dressed up with nowhere to go. In this modern age, we worry about the externals of our religious practice. We study the liturgy, learn about the holidays, discuss the meaning of biblical statements, contribute to just charities, and support politically correct causes. But what of the substance of our faith — the core issue for the life of the Jew — reaching out for God? We seem to lose in the battle for the life of the spirit, even when we win the battle for righteousness.
One of the themes that I try to raise is the search for the spiritual dimension. I do this not only for you but for me as well. It is hard to talk about God — harder still to talk to God. And yet, if we ignore this central task, we are no better than the atheist at the funeral — all dressed up with nowhere to go. We are clothed in the fine garments of faith, but without the driving force behind that faith.
Some have suggested the that search for God in our lives begins with speculation about the nature of the universe. Still others suggest that we begin with understanding ourselves. And others look for God with the eyes of the mystics, chanting incantations, hyper-ventilating during meditation or staring into crystals.
And yet, perhaps we have made to task too hard, and we shrink for fear of the enormity of the task of searching for God. Maybe it is so scary to try and fail that we abandon the task altogether. And maybe, when trying to discuss this search with those around us, we fear that we will sound foolish as we describe to another person what we have done to try to find God in our lives. We Jews try to sound so rational that we cut off the possibility to discuss the prime theme of our Jewish life.
In the traditional Torah reading for Rosh HaShana, the one that we skip over in order to discuss the story of the binding of Isaac, we read of Hagar — Abraham’s other wife. Banished from her home with her child Ishmael by Sara, the two wander off into the desert. When their water supply is finished, Hagar gives up and walks away from Ishmael so that she will not have to watch him die from thirst. But then her eyes are opened by God, and she sees a well and runs to give the boy drink. The rabbinic commentators point out that the well of water was there the whole time, but that Hagar was so consumed by her troubles that she could not see what was before her eyes all along! We are often like Hagar — so troubled by the search for God, that we cannot see what is immediately before us.
Perhaps the search for God is like looking for lost keys — a problem that I have more and more often. Every search begins in the same way — the horrible sinking feeling that we get when we recognize that the thing that we need is lost. I know that feeling when I lose my keys and I know that feeling when I lose sight of God — it is that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, calling out that the ensuing search is not going to be easy.
After we cope with the sinking feeling, our minds jump into gear, and we begin to think back over all the places we had been in the recent past. We back-track, retrace every step we have taken, go back to the places where we have been. This is the laborious part of the search — here too, the search for God is no different than the search for the lost keys. We must look over the past and ask ourselves, where was God during all these moments: wasn’t God there at the birth of my child, or the death of my friend, or my moment of despair, or my moment of joy? We must re-trace our steps through life and find where God was, and where we lost sight of God, just like our keys: Did I leave my keys on the dresser or in my bag or my office or the car, or the store — or did not take with me in the first place? In the search for God, we must do the same — we ask: did I lose sight of God when my friend died, or in college (when exposed to Nietzsche), or in high-school (when I failed the test that I swore if God let me pass I would be better), or as a child, or did I not ever have a notion of God at all?
Almost always the thing we lost turns up — not where we think we lost it, and not necessarily when we need to find it. So, too, with God. God turns up, not where we expected to find God and not necessarily when we expected to find God. But it happens if we search — and sometimes it happens after we have given up on the search.
I remember when there was an invention on the market for those of you like me, people who lost their keys. It was a little black box that clipped on to your keychain. If you lost your keys, all you had to do was clap your hands twice loudly and it started to beep. If the keys were within ear-shot or clap-shot, you could locate the lost keys by this audible signal. This was fine, as long as the keys were nearby. If they were not, you still had to back-track, this time clapping in every place you had been over the last day. (Recently Apple created the AirTag, you don’t need to clap anymore).
Yet, the device often worked. Actually, we have a similar device for those of you on the search for God. It’s not a little black box, but a book. It is the prayerbook, filled with words, like signposts, meant to keep us on our path in the search for the divine.
A wise person once told me how to stop losing my keys: “Develop a routine — when you get up in the morning, make sure everything is in the right place, and when you get home at night, make sure everything gets put back into place. During the day, have a place for everything, and you will always find what you think you lost.” This is the purpose of the prayerbook, when it comes to the search for God. The prayers are there to remind us of the places to look for God — the structure of the service helps: we search for God in the creation of the new day or the evening lights, in the love that God has bestowed upon us, in the moments of our redemption, in reflection upon our ancestors, and so on. The service helps us to chart our search, and the words of the prayer help us to look in all the right places.
In one our most important prayers, we say the words: “And these words which I command you this day shall be on your heart.” Why doesn’t it say: “In your heart?” Because most of the time the heart of a person is tightly closed, and the words of God are unable to enter. But every so often, there is a rare, precious moment, a moment of joy or awe or insight when the heart opens a little bit, and if we pray regularly, then when the heart opens, the words are there, and they can enter.
But what if we never really pray, then when that rare moment comes, there are no words available to express what we feel.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel used to tell the story of the Rizhiner; about a small Jewish town, far off the main roads of the land. It had all the necessary municipal institutions: a bathhouse, a cemetery, a hospital and law courts and all sorts of craftspeople — tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, masons. One trade, however, was lacking: there was no watchmaker. Over many years, most of the clocks became inaccurate and their owners decided just to let them run down and ignore them altogether, since there was no one available to fix them. There were others, however, who maintained that as long as the clocks ran, they should not be abandoned. So, they wound their clocks every day, even though they were not accurate.
One day the news spread that a watchmaker had arrived in town. Everyone rushed to him with their clocks. But the only ones he could repair were those that had been kept running — the abandoned clocks had become too rusty!
And this is why we need to pray every day — so that the words may be on the heart, available, able to enter, if and when the heart ever opens. (Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner)
And Rabbi Heschel, in a 1958 lecture on prayer, said, “It takes two things for prayer to come to pass – a person and a word. Prayer involves a right relationship between those two things. But we have lost that relationship…. We do not think about words, although few things are as important for the life of the spirit as the right relationship to words…. Words have become cliches, objects of absolute abuse. They have ceased to be commitments. We forget that many of our moral relationships are based upon a sense of the sacredness of certain words…. The true motivation for prayer is… the sense of not being at home in the universe. Is there a sensitive heart that could stand indifferent and feel at home in the sight of so much evil and suffering, in the face of countless failures to live up to the will of God? … That experience gains intensity in the amazing awareness that God is not at home in the universe. God is not at home in a universe where {the Divine} will is defied and where {God’s reign} is denied. God is in exile; the world is corrupt. The universe itself is not at home. To pray means to bring God back into the world, to establish {God’s reign} for a second at least. (cited by Dr. Shira Billet in Torah from JTS “Sacred Words in Liturgy and Life”)
So now, here we sit, at the dawn of a new year. This new year brings us much cause for hope. We hope that we can find friends that we have lost, loves that we have lost, goals that we have lost, causes that we have lost, and God who we have lost. This new year might find us back-tracking and going over the places that we have been — but all for the sake of finding God and in that search finding a new direction.
We recite our prayers again, using them as guideposts on a difficult but fruitful search.
And look at us, all decked out in our New Year’s finery. Beautiful in our new clothes for our new year. Look at us, all dressed up with somewhere to go!
Kayn yehee ratzon, May it be God’s will to find us, too!