Living Fire:

 Judaism in the Light

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By the Reverend Hilary Landau Krivchenia

December 12, 2004

Readings

Rabbi Michael Lerner:

The miracle of Chanukah is that so many people were able to stay loyal to a vision of a world based on generosity, love of stranger, and loyalty to an invisible God who promised that life could be based on justice and peace. It was these "little guys," the powerless, who managed to sustain a vision of hope that inspired them to fight against overwhelming odds. When this kind of energy, what religious people call "the Spirit of God," becomes an ingredient in the consciousness of ordinary people, miracles ensue. It is this same radical hope, whether rooted in religion or secularist belief systems, that remains the foundation for all who continue to struggle for a world of peace and social justice. It is that radical hope that is celebrated this Chanukah by the Tikkun Community.  Michael Lerner

How Do We Know? retold by Doug Lipman

Some students of the Baal Shem Tov came to him one day with a question. "Every year we travel here to learn from you. Nothing could make us stop doing that. But we have learned of a man in our own town who claims to be a tzaddik, a righteous one. If he is genuine, we would love to profit from his wisdom. But how will we know if he is a fake?"

The Baal Shem Tov looked at his earnest hasidim. "You must test him by asking him a question." He paused. "You have had difficulty with stray thoughts during prayer?"

"Yes!" The hasidim answered eagerly. "We try to think only of our holy intentions as we pray, but other thoughts come into our minds. We have tried many methods not to be troubled by them."

"Good," said the Baal Shem Tov. "Ask him the way to stop such thoughts from entering your minds." The Baal Shem Tov smiled. "If he has an answer, he is a fake."

Sermon

For Chanukah, the Rabbis developed a story that when the Maccabees retook Jerusalem in 165 BCE and purified and rededicated the Temple there was only enough oil for the eternal flame to burn for one full day and yet the flame burned for 8 days – enough time for the faithful to return with more oil for the lamp.  It is, indeed, a wonder and miracle that a tenacious people won back their temple.  It was even more a wonder that their tradition and faith continued to live and to evolve over the thousands of years since then.  When the Candles are lit for Hanukah, three blessings are recited.  One of them – intended for the first day is this:

Baruch atah Adonai,

Eloheynu Melech ha’olam,

shehechiyanu, vikee-manu,

vihegiyanu, lazman hazeh.

(Blessed are you, the Force that rules the universe, who has kept us in life, made us flourish, and made it possible for us to reach this happy occasion.)

Great force at the heart of history, blessed are we to have survived to this time to be able to celebrate on this day.  When I hear those words – which are recited at most Jewish holidays I feel the weight of history with me and in me.  I feel the lineage of my ancestors and of all those people – who, against the odds of history, have reached the occasion of the present.  It wasn’t once so easy for me to connect with them.  As many of you may know, I came from a very secular Jewish family.  In spite of this upbringing – I found myself some 6-7 years ago barreling down the Interstate on the way to Georgia, listening to Bill Moyer’s Genesis series on tape.  That was weird enough – but what was even stranger was that I was yelling back at the tape and offering my insights as though the participants in the recorded discussion could hear them.  The Genesis series takes the key stories of the first book of the Torah and debates their meanings between a roundtable of scholars.  The discussion was so vibrant and it just seemed natural to join in and to argue back.  I have looked back at that strange and exhilarating drive and found new layers of meaning in it each time. 

            What has come clear to me, over the years of slowly dawning recognition, was that that long drive in the car – with my heart and the engine racing – was a reclaiming of a history that I had held in my cellular memory but never held in my life.  It was the history and tradition of Midrash and of Rabbinic Debate.  The history of another Living Tradition.

            Growing up, Judaism was anything but a living tradition.  It was a relic, something from my parents’ ancient and rejected past.  Later it became the religion that came before Christianity and over which Christianity had built.  It was an Old Testament. 

The holiday which we are in the midst of now, Chanukah, was a strange curiosity to me.  The little menorah lit each night – with its servant candle, the shamash, – was a an artifact.  Lit in memory of an ancient story, it was to me a symbol of a people hungering for a long lost past.  Distant and disinherited.  But it is not simply my memory and tradition – it is a complex tradition that, in some ways, belongs to each and all of us. And from which we have all been disinherited.

I got a sense of this again yesterday.  Now I want to make an important disclaimer and even a blatant advertisement for the Lafayette Urban Ministries Jubilee Christmas project.  So many people in this congregation throw themselves into this extraordinary event.  Families in need from throughout the area gather in a number of churches and receive Christmas gifts, blankets, food, and warmth from people whose faces radiate love and not charity – but something even deeper – compassion -- and a human bond.  The space at Blessed Sacrament Church is filled with real holiday spirit, lots of presents, and eager volunteers who help carry gifts, wrap them.  I got to watch Beth Misner rush to get refreshments for her new family and then glowingly hold their two week old baby boy – Aden -- who was – by a strange coincidence – named after one of our Universalist forebears Adin Ballou – the founder of a Utopian community in Massachusetts.  The atmosphere of Jubilee Christmas is rather Utopian with so many joyous faces and generous hearts.  I encourage any and all of you to participate in this great event next year.

At the same time – there’s a moment that I’ve come to dread.  It’s when the very good hearted Pastor of the church gives his few words of blessing.  He reads from the book of Leviticus and describes the practice of Jubilee, which was a Hebrew tradition. There were many such traditions – each year every one was to leave the corners of their fields un harvested so that poor passersby could cull some harvest for themselves, they were to give to every person who asked of them, they were to take care of the widow and the orphan, to forgive debts every seven years, to let land lie fallow, to give a portion of all they received to the poor.  And every fifty years there was to be a great jubilee in which even more generous acts were required.  These were the laws by which the Hebrew abided and which they kept – often under terrible oppression.  The good Father wrapped up his reading of Leviticus with the words: “at some point these laws were neglected, but then Jesus came with his message.”  Then the priest elaborated on this.  For a moment I felt like a stranger in a strange land – I looked around to see if anyone else could hear this idea of the new and improved faith that this rebel Jew had brought.  I knew that Jesus was a man of the people, a man of intelligence and faith, a man to whom the prophets were inspiration and law and that he spoke angrily not to the Hebrews as a whole – but to those who were living in the cities and centers of power and making compromise with the Roman occupiers for their own survival.  Not to abolish the law but to fulfill the spirit.

            In the larger world, Judaism has become a sort of concrete foundation over which the detailed and elaborate cathedral of Christianity was built.  In theological school I learned that the scholars call this supercessionism, which, literally, means to set over, to sit upon, or on top.  You could see the little outcropping of that foundation, faint and gray as paving stones. 

In my first year of theological school I sat at my dining room table across from another student who told me that Jesus had come to reform Judaism.  And that that was his gift.  A gift which the Jews had rejected.  I didn’t have sufficient words at the time – I knew this felt wrong – but the weight of 2000 years of history tied my tongue. 

I still, myself, carried a very primitive snapshot of Judaism.  The memory, the oppression through centuries, and then there was the Old Testament.  As opposed to the New Testament.  It was an eye opener to learn – later in school – that my historic people didn’t refer to their sacred text as an Old Testament – it was the only Testament.

So, it became the Hebrew Bible – the Torah.  And the Torah was the first 5 books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers.  I’ve found myself electrified by these books – fascinated with the blindness’s of God and the weakness of humanity – they make me want to shout and argue!  To reach through history.  I’ve said before that the Hebrew Bible is not the portrait of an ideal God and a perfect people or perfect prophets – but a picture of the real world, the almighty power of life and death, and the history of struggling and flawed people in a terrifying and deeply flawed world.

The snapshot filled in a little more as I encountered the richness of the rest of the Hebrew Bible: the Nevi’im, which are the Prophets and the Ketuvim, which are the Writings – such as Lamentations, Ruth, Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Psalms and more.   These books, finally pulled together by the Scribe Ezra, perhaps just decades after the destruction of the first Temple in 586 B.C, were a collection of growing wisdom and understanding.  Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim – TNK -- Tanakh – but still, to Jews they are really Torah – the written Torah and the oral tradition that followed it.  They are ordered differently than they are if you look in a volume that holds both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scripture.  In the Hebrew Bible the books end with Chronicles – not with the prophets – they do not prefigure anything other than the hope of the Jewish people for their own constant renewal and living covenant with their God. 

Judaism was certainly a foundation for Christianity – it was the home and ground for Jesus, who had come to fulfill the law of his fathers – the law of the Torah and the prophets.  But, it was also thriving, deepening, evolving long before Jesus, through his time, and long after.  It was the very nature of Judaism that encouraged and allowed the sort of foment that Jesus brought with him.  It was the same spirit that had struggled to reclaim Judaism against the Selucid – Syrian – Empire of Antiochus IV – in the fight of the Maccabees.  It was the same spirit that had kept rural Jewish communities keeping their covenant of hospitality and community even in the face of occupying forces. 

As soon as Ezra began to collect and write down the books of the Torah – the scholars – the learned men of the Torah – began to comment on the layers of meanings.  There were schools of study in many area of the early Diaspora and in these places different ideas arose and were written down and passed around and debated.  Later this evolved into a rich Rabbinic Tradition.

As the pressures of occupation deepened – both after the destruction of the first temple and of the second – the rabbinic tradition evolved.  In the city of Javne the Rabbis gathered to keep the knowledge base alive.  And even there, to keep the knowledge alive meant keeping the difference interpretations alive.  In the first century before the common era, two of the teachers were Shammai with his hard edge and great temper and Hillel with his patience and gentleness.  One famous story about the two is that a Greek man came to Shammai wanting conversion to Judaism he asked Shammai to briefly share the kernel of the law of Moses.  Shammai beat him with a stick and the man ran away and went to Hillel who then told him that the heart of the Torah was “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is commentary".  It was this doctrine of love that Paul, or Saul, studied with a later teacher named Gamaliel who was the grandson of Hillel.  After that time the Rabbinic tradition expanded,

            I have come to learn, to feel, and to see so much more since that November drive to Georgia.  A recent piece fell into place when I was studying the work of Barry Holtz for the thinking Scripture class that we enjoy here at the church and I ran across this passage: “The learner joins in the discussions, voices his opinion, is defended or refuted by the legendary teachers and students of other ages and takes his place in the continuum of the tradition.”  I realized that, shouting at that tape player years ago, I was trying to take my place in a living continuum.  Not in place of my Unitarian Universalist faith – but as part of that faith. 

I love these words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (a radical 20^th century teacher): “Faith is not the clinging to a shrine, but then endless, tameless pilgrimage of hearts.” 

            It was over lunch a little over a year ago when I sat with Rabbi Audrey Pollack at Panera and asked for her to explain a few terms for me.  And there – on a sheet of paper she drew a picture that looked like a fabulous design for a complex tapestry. 

            First there was the written Torah – and even though that means the first five books of the bible it includes all the rest of the written book through Chronicles.  Then there was the Midrash – which is all of the discussion, exploration, wrestling with the text of the Torah.  If you look at the page the Torah portion is in the center.  On one side you would find the Mishna – which is a collection of the Rabbinic commentary on the laws and also Rabbinic commentary on the stories. This is considered Oral Torah – even though it is now written down… On the other side of the page there is the Gemarra – which is the commentary on the Commentary.  We Unitarian Universalists should love this.  You remember the old joke about Unitarians in heaven.  A man gets to heaven and he sees two signs one says Heaven and there the gate is ready to swing open to welcome the virtuous souls.  On the other side the sign says Discussion on Heaven and there is a long line of people streaming in the door to a conference room.  He looks at Saint Peter and asks – what’s all this?  And Peter answers: those are Unitarians.  To me the notion of a table where the discussion is deep – something – I suppose – like our Forum – seems more like heaven to me – a place where the meanings of the day get wrestled through day after day.

            And back on the page above the text you would find the teaching of Rabbi Hillel and below the text you would find the teachings of other great Rabbis some spanning hundreds of years.  Altogether you would find the Talmud – that great roll of text they unwind in Jewish congregations around the world and study a bit at a time.  A living, evolving faith based upon human comment on a sacred text. 

            It is said that a faithful Jewish life is about study – about reading the Talmud – but, as Barry Holtz says, reading in this context is a good deal more active than we think of it.  As Holtz says: “One studies to become part of the Jewish people itself.”  Rather than a solitary activity it is engaged in groups, or at the very least pairs, where the passage is read aloud and then the discussion begins.  Rather like the Bible study classes here at UUCL – where two to six people may gather and begin with the text then rove far and wide in an attempt to shed our own new light upon it.  So – the way the text appears on the page of the Talmud – which I had never seen – embodies the interactive, ever vibrant, living Torah – another living tradition.

            In every age the Jewish people have continued to transform their faith – from the mystical Kabala of the middle ages – the tradition that was also flourishing at the same time as the Sufi Tradition that we visited last week.  And then later the Chasidic tradition was created by the Baal Shem Tov in the late 17^th century.  One famous story connected to him is this one:

In the time of the Baal Shem Tov, there lived a very poor family in a small town near Medzibush.  Finally, the wife, Malka, said, “Moshe, when you go to the Baal Shem Tov for your spiritual guidance, please, ask him for a blessing.”

The next week, when Moshe was with the Holy Baal Shem Tov, he told of his family’s poverty. “Please give us your blessing, Rebbe," he asked.

The Baal Shem Tov looked directly into Moshe’s eyes and said, “Go to the bridge on the road over the Bog river.  Underneath the bridge there’s a buried treasure.

 “Oh thank you Rebbe,” Moshe rushed to the bridge and began to dig. He was sweating when he heard a voice, “Hey Moshe, what are you doing down here?”

He looked up on the bridge and saw an old acquaintance, Yankel.

After they spoke awhile, Moshe finally told him, “Yankel, I just left the Baal Shem Tov and he told me that if I dug here, under the bridge, I’d find a treasure."

Now Yankel, not a great believer in the Baal Shem Tov, replied, "Now that’s interesting because just last week I had a dream where a man who looked quite a bit like the Baal Shem Tov told me there is a treasure buried under a stove in the house of a Moshe -- in your town. But you don’t think I’m going to find this Moshe’s house and start digging under his oven? Moshe, I really think you should go home.”

Moshe feigned a laugh and said, “You’re right Yankel, I think I’ll go on home.” As

soon as he was out of sight, Moshe started running home. When he got there, he rushed to the oven and started digging.

Malka looked at him, out of breath and digging like a crazy man. “Moshe, what are you doing? What happened when you were with the Baal Shem Tov?

Just then, Moshe struck an object with his shovel. He unearthed a chest filled with gold and silver coins. Moshe and Malka didn’t tell anyone of their treasure. No one knew of their changed circumstances.

As the months passed, Moshe's started to feel more and more guilty and couldn’t stop thinking, “I’m living a comfortable life because of what Yankel told me. At least some of my treasure belongs to him.” So Moshe put a tenth of his fortune into a sack and went to give the money to Yankel. After a day of travel, who should he see but Yankel.  They rushed to each other and said at the same time, "What a coincidence seeing you here.”

Then Yankel blurted out, "I want to tell you what happened. Do you remember that you told me that the Baal Shem Tov told you to dig under the bridge for your treasure? I decided to look myself. I dug for a few minutes and I hit something. It turned out to be a chest full of gold and silver coins. I took the treasure home and hid it. Ever since, we’ve been living modestly. However, I’ve felt guilty that I found the money because of you and yet I haven’t shared anything with you. So I’ve put a tenth into a sack and brought it to give to you. I really can’t believe what a coincidence that I just met you. So here it is,” Yankel said as he gave the money sack to Moshe, “and thank you very much.”

When Yankel finished, Moshe was speechless. Then he said, “My dear friend, I can’t take this money.”

“Why Moshe, are you angry with me? You think I should give you more?” said Yankel.

“Oh no,” answered Moshe, “I’m just in shock.” Then he told Yankel everything that had transpired and showed him the sack with one tenth of his fortune that he intended for him. Moshe continued, “It just became clear to me that every person has their own lot in life and they can’t take something that belongs to another. I found my fortune when you told me to look under my oven. At the same time, you found your fortune under the bridge where I was told to look. The biggest miracle is that we both decided to share our fortune with each other and we met here at the crossroad.”

            This is surely the story of a living tradition, in which new revelations come to all of us – no matter how humble or exalted – in which the truth is a product of what we all do together.  It is a story of the treasure we have that is enriched by our sharing – sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident.  It is a story – from a rich period of Judaism in the 17^th century.

Judaism has continued to build upon itself and to construct an organic – a living edifice able to withstand centuries without petrification.  The tradition of Midrash – of Rabbinic debate, explication, exploration, imagination, and study has remained a strong one.  Hundreds of years of Midrash are written and preserved for study – Rabbi Pollack said she doubted anyone could read the whole of it in a lifetime -- made of many lifetimes itself.  Judaism remains a living tradition – in times of hardship – even today as Jews debate their task and place in the world and what the prophets and Rabbis offer to us in the present. 

            One of my favorite Rabbis is Zalman Schachter Shalomi – the man who wrote the book Age-ing and Sage-ing.  He traveled with a diverse group of Jewish scholars, Rabbis, journalists, and seekers to visit the Dalai Lama in 1990.  He said: “I don’t believe that anyone has the exclusive franchise on the truth. What we Jews have is a good approximation, for Jews, of how to get there. Ultimately, each person creates a way that fits his own situation.  When it comes to what I call the ‘heart stuff,’ all approaches overlap.” 

            The story of Chanukah is the story of resilience – one of my favorite words—it is the story of a people whose temple was destroyed but who rebuilt again and then evolved their faith toward a new center as times changed.  More than the miracle of oil the miracle of Chanukah is the miracle of human light – of human persistence and creativity – the creativity that enables us to survive and even to thrive amidst the world’s challenges.

            We come together from many living paths – all manner of heart-stuff – some ancient and tested by time, some untried and fresh – but we share the path here.  It is good to be together to search out our heart stuff and head stuff and all the stuff in between.  It is a relief to find a universal church that works to embrace a multiplicity of paths and to draw out the best in the beloved community.  Our tradition together is living in each on of us.  It is growing in every one of us.  It will live in all that we do together, in all the brilliance we bring to our common endeavor.  It is a miracle.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, First Chief Rabbi of Israel

There is one who sings the song of his soul,
discovering in his soul everything -- utter spiritual fulfillment.

There is one who sings the song of his people.
Emerging from the private circle of his soul -- not expansive enough,
not yet tranquil -- he strives for fierce heights…

Then there is one whose soul expands
until it extends beyond the border of Israel,
singing the song of humanity... his spirit spreads,
aspiring to the goal of humankind, envisioning its consummation...

Then there is one who expands even further
until he unites with all existence, with all creatures, with all worlds,
singing a song with them all.

There is one who ascends with all these songs
in unison -- the song of the soul, the song of the nation, the song of humanity,
the song of the cosmos -- resounding together, blending in harmony,
circulating the sap of life,
the sound of holy joy.