OzTorah

There once was a man who lit a lamp at noonday and went through the market place, looking in every corner.

People said, “You must be mad! What are you doing?”

“Doing?” he said; “I’m looking for God!” (Nietzsche)

On Rosh HaShanah we too look for God.
Not in the market place but in the synagogue and prayer book.

Many complain, “It’s an empty exercise.
God ought to be there in the synagogue, but we don’t find Him.”

The Talmud can’t believe this is possible. It says,
“If anyone states, ‘I have looked and did not find what I was looking for’,
Don’t believe him.”

Nietzsche looked for God in the market place.
When he did not find Him, he said,
“God is dead. We have killed Him!”

Nietzsche asked the right question but found the wrong answer.
Isaiah says,
“Seek the Lord where He may be found”.
God is not dead. He can be found.
But where?
There are two Talmudic answers, implicit if not explicit.

One says,
“Abraham found God on a mountain.
Isaac found God in a field.
Jacob found God in a house.”

God is on a mountain – when our vision soars upward.
God is in a field – when we look at the face of the Creation.
God is in a house – when we acknowledge our fellow members of the human family.

The other text says,
“There are three keys to God –
In childbirth, in the rains, in resurrection.”

God is there in childbirth – in the miracle of bright childish joy and innocence.
God is there in the rains – in the indestructible resurgence of nature.
God is there in resurrection – in the eternity of the soul and the Divine
Presence.

God is in the synagogue too.
In the building – a sanctuary in space and time.
In the congregation – human beings who rise above the mundane for a spiritual moment.
In religion – in sacred events, sacred memories, sacred deeds.

Nietzsche misunderstood the potential of the market place.
God really is in market places.
The market place of ideas, where human minds seek the truth.
The market place of trade, where human beings struggle for honesty,
integrity and decency.

The Talmud is wiser than Nietzsche.
Nietzsche thought God was absent or dead.
The Talmud says,
Find God’s witnesses, and through them you find God.

Evidence of God is everywhere.
“Man can not see My face and live,” He says:
“But you can see Me passing by.”

You want God to march in with trumpets blazing and banners flying?
Elijah can tell you the answer:
God is not the whirlwind or the thunder.
God is the still, small voice
That speaks quietly and says,
“I am the Lord your God!”

Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, is an anthology on the art of wise living.

One of its notable sayings is a proverb of three Aramaic words – l’fum tza’ara agra, “According to the effort is the reward” or “According to the pain is the gain” (5:26).

The author was Ben Heh-Heh, a convert and disciple of Hillel. His difficult decision to leave Roman society in order to become a Jew reflected his belief that anything important requires effort but is proved worthwhile in the end.

His advice is especially pertinent in the lead-up to Rosh HaShanah, when God assesses His creation and we assess our own achievements and failures.

So often in the past year – and in every year – we have tried the easy way. We have looked for a maximum of reward for a minimum of effort. Finally of course we have sadly recognised that nothing really worthwhile was ever attained without perseverance and hard work.

Longfellow said,
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

The artist Whistler, when asked why he charged such high fees, said that he charged not for the few hours’ work of painting but for the lifetime of experience which trained him to become a skilled artist.

The Kotzker Rebbe made a similar point about the art of prayer. “Why do the prayers one utters seem so ineffective?” he was asked.

His answer was that just as a workman can take all day to prepare for the job he does (for example, a woodcutter spends hours sharpening his saw and only a short time actually cutting the wood), so prayer, too, is a craft for which one has to prepare painstakingly and carefully.

Familiar from the daily prayer book, where it concludes every service of the year, Alenu was originally composed for the Rosh HaShanah liturgy.

During Musaf, three great themes are explored – Malchiyot, God’s Sovereignty; Zichronot, Divine Remembrance of our Deeds; and Shofarot, the Messianic Redemption. The introductory hymn to Malchiyot is Alenu, attributed to Rav (3rd cent. Babylonia) but probably written earlier.

The first paragraph is nationalistic. It speaks of the special responsibility God gave to the Jewish people.

The second paragraph is universalistic, yearning for the day when all mankind will acknowledge the King of all Creation.

The prayer skilfully interweaves Biblical and rabbinic allusions, using a form of parallelism that constantly offers two ways of saying things. The first paragraph, for instance, is structured thus:

3 Parallelisms:

1. It is our duty to praise the Lord of all, to ascribe greatness to the Creator of the Beginning,
2. He made us unlike other nations on earth, with a lot unlike theirs and a destiny unlike all their multitude.
3. Original text: They bow down to vanity and emptiness, and worship a god that cannot save.

Observation:

We bow down, worship and acknowledge the supreme King of Kings, the Holy One Blessed be He;

3 Parallelisms:

1. He stretched out the heavens and established the earth;
2. His glory dwells in the heavens above, His majesty in the loftiest heights.
3. He is our God, there is no other: He is truly our King, there is none beside Him;

Observation:

It is written in His Torah, “Know this day and take to heart, that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath: there is no other” (Deut. 4:39).

The second paragraph is messianic. It prays for tikkun olam, the “repair of the world”, and yearns for mankind to be one and to call on the name of the One God who created heaven and earth (Zech. 14:9). It is not necessary for everyone to become Jewish, but all will worship the Jewish God.

Alenu has undergone immense persecution through the ages.

The reference in the first paragraph to heathens bowing down to vanity and emptiness and worshipping a god that cannot save was alleged to be an insult to Christianity. Nothing that Jews said by way of explanation could prevent attacks and murders as punishment for the alleged crime.

Yet these words actually come straight out of the Book of Isaiah (30:7, 45:20). Neither Isaiah in the 8th pre-Christian century nor Rav, who introduced Alenu to the Rosh HaShanah service, knew any Christians.

Both had idolaters in mind, but that was too obvious and logical for the antisemites to grasp, and the only way to save Alenu in some European countries was to eliminate the controversial sentence altogether, though it is still maintained in the Sephardi ritual and in many Ashkenazi communities.

We are almost at the end of the Torah. Moses’ long period of leadership is closing. The people are receptive to his final message. He commands them, “Now write this song for yourselves and teach it to the Children of Israel” (Deut. 31:9).

His command gives rise to the rule that even if a person has inherited a Sefer Torah from his ancestors, he should write one for himself.

There is a remarkable lesson here, on the eve of Rosh HaShanah, when we make resolutions for the future. Most of us have inherited a Jewish heart, soul and tradition from our parents. We look back and appreciate the example we were set, the ways in which we were trained. We are proud of our ancestry.

But remember the story of the person without lineage who was at a cocktail party where everyone else had aristocratic forebears. “Whose descendant are you?” the guest was asked. “Descendant?” came the quick reply: “I’m not a descendant – I’m an ancestor!”

The Baal Shem explained the opening words of the Amidah, “Blessed are You. Lord our God and God of our fathers”.

“‘God of our fathers'” he said, “that’s the tradition we have inherited. ‘Our God'”, he added, “that’s the God we find for ourselves.”

Whatever Judaism we have inherited, we have to make it our own, enhance it, and make sure it is good enough to hand down to our children.

When Moses taught the people there were constant grumbles.

They were happy enough to accept their freedom from slavery, but why did they have to obey so many commandments?

His answer was, “The commandment which I command you today is neither too hard for you, nor is it too far away” (Deut. 30:11).

“Too far away” means “beyond your capacity”, or in other words more fitted to angels in heaven than to human beings trying to live a life on earth.

“Too hard” might mean what it says, but the Malbim points out that the Hebrew nif’let actually means “wonderful”.

It can’t mean “wonderful” in the modern sense of amazing – but what it does mean is “based on wonders”.

The foundation of Judaism is not miracles that might at some stage of ancient history have been worked by a wonder-worker.

There are certainly miracles in the Torah, but the truth claims of Judaism do not depend on the wonder-workers.

The Torah is true because history and reason both agree that its teachings are comprehensible, reasonable and good.

The God-given miracles in the Torah only reinforce what we already knew.

There are chukkim – statutes which seem to be above or beyond the human mind.

We do not resort to blind faith but say, “God, there must be a reason behind the law; we will be patient until You reveal it to us”.