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Rosh Hashanah Morning 2007
Rosh Hashanah Morning Service Sermon – 2007
Rabbi Fred Guttman
A recent article in Moment magazine asked the question, “Is Joshua Bell the last great Jewish violinist?” Who is Joshua Bell? Joshua Bell is a violinist in his thirties who was a child prodigy. He is considered today to be the greatest living violinist in the world and he is Jewish! He plays with a passion in his body and in his hands that is unparalleled by virtually any other living violinist. Bell is extraordinarily handsome. One reviewer remarked that at a Bell concert, the women in the first few rows were swooning over his music and his persona. In other words, he’s HOT! And for all of the single women here, in case I haven’t mentioned it, HE’S SINGLE!
This past year, Joshua Bell, as part of an experiment about human nature, put on blue jeans, a flannel shirt and a baseball cap and took his violin to the Washington DC subway. He stood in L’Enfant Plaza subway station, opened up his violin case and took out his five million dollar Stradivarius violin. He stood behind his case and began to play. He played from his heart for more than a half an hour.
Picture this -- The world’s greatest violinist playing in a subway station where several thousand people will pass by on their way to Capitol Hill and elsewhere for work. During this half hour, less than ten people actually stopped to listen to his music. No one recognized him because of his casual dress and the context. At the end of the half an hour, he had slightly more than thirteen dollars in his case and yet, the music that he played, by his own admission, was the most spectacular in his repertoire. Bell’s music is an incredible testimony to his God given talent. It was a gift of God to those people who were on their way to work that morning, and yet virtually all of them did not have the awareness necessary to hear the music. They were too busy to see not only the beauty of the music, but the manifestation of the divine that Joshua Bell’s playing represents.
Consider as well the following. A friend of mine who is a Rabbi tells the following story: A very heavy set man came to his office one day with a complaint about his young son. It seems that when he got home from work the day before, he found posted on the refrigerator a picture that his son had drawn at school. The picture was of an enormously fat and ugly man. But what was the most depressing to the father was that the enormously fat and ugly man happened to be green.
He complained to the rabbi, “I know I am over weight. I know I need to lose weight. It is just very difficult for me. I might not be the best looking person in the world, but am I really that ugly? And for sure rabbi, I know that I am not green. Why would my son paint me green?”
The rabbi responded, “You apparently are very hurt about this picture. Did you talk to your son and ask him why he did this? The father responded, “No. I did not. I did not want to embarrass my son, but as you can understand rabbi, I am really quite upset about this.
The rabbi responded, “But how do you know that it is really you that he painted?”
The father responded, “I am sure that it is me, who else could it be? “
To which the rabbi responded, go home and ask your son who it is because I also have a young son and I believe that your son has painted a comic book character who is enormous, who is ugly and who is green and that character is called the Incredible Hulk!
Sure enough, the man went home and found out that his son had painted a picture of the Incredible Hulk and hung it on the refrigerator door for all to see.
The message in this is how can the man possibly be aware of what his son was doing, of the gift of art his son was giving to the family, if everything was about his own personal ego, needs, desires and insecurities.
Like the people who passed Joshua Bell in that subway station, he too had something that prevented him of being aware of the great gifts of God that are around us.
In today’s Torah portion, after leaving the servant behind, Isaac asked his father, “Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” 8And Abraham said, “God will see to the sheep for His burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them walked on together.[1][1] They come to a place wherein Abraham builds an altar, arranges the wood and binds Isaac. At the last minute, an angel calls to Abraham: “Abraham! Abraham!” And he answered, “Here I am.” 12 And he said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.”
But listen closely, the text then says” “When Abraham looked up, his eye fell upon a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in place of his son.”
The Rabbis have pointed out a contradiction here. Abraham says that God will provide for the ram, for the sacrifice, and yet when they get up to the top of the mountain, Abraham is so consumed by what he thinks he ought to be doing, that he does not even stop to look around. Had he done so, he would have seen that ram caught by its thorns in the thicket. He then could have turned to Isaac and said: ”I told you that God would provide us with the sacrifice.” For sure, the entire story would have been different. It would have become a story whose central message is that God provides for us that which we need at every single moment at our lives.
In today’s reading, the great Abraham is no better than the people who passed by Joshua Bell. Our father, Abraham, is exactly like the father who did not see the picture of the Hulk. All of them were not sufficiently aware of the gifts of God at a critical moment in their lives. It was only God’s mercy that prevented Abraham from doing something terribly tragic to his son. In this case, as great as Abraham was, in terms of awareness, he could not hold a candle to Moses. Why do I say that?
These stories stand in contrast to a very famous biblical story whose artistic interpretation is to be found in the stained glass window behind me. If you look over there, you will see a depiction of the burning bush. Many of you know the story of the burning bush. Moses encounters a bush that is burning, but is not being consumed.
About four years ago in an act of vandalism, someone set fire to a box elm that borders our property on Jefferson Road. I wondered at that time how many people must have driven by that smoldering tree and seen it and never stopped to look at it. Maybe someone picked up the phone and called 911, but basically if we passed by a tree or shrub that was burning, we would keep on going.
The rabbinic sages recognized this was well. They taught that what made Moses truly great was not that he saw a burning bush, but that he took the time to stop and look at it closely. In so doing, he became aware that although the bush was burning, it was not being consumed.
Therefore the greatness of Moses is that he was not the sort of person to have thought that his son was drawing him when he was really drawing the Incredible Hulk. Nor would Moses have passed by Joshua Bell in that subway station on that morning.
In Jewish mystical tradition, there are two concepts. They are called mochin de ketanut and mochin de gadlut. The first, mochin de ketanut means limited thinking or awareness. Mochin de gadlut is its opposite. It is spacious thinking and awareness. What the kabbalists are trying to teach us is that the presence of God is to be found throughout the universe. And yet, most of the time, our own ego is too big to connect to the greater ego of God.
The Kotzker Rebbe in a very famous story was once asked, “Where is God to be found?” The answer that the Kotzker gave was, “Wherever we let God in.” Imagine a glass filled with water. If you try to put more water in it, the water will spill out. Imagine that this cup is your soul and that the water represents your ego. If you are so full of yourself that nothing of God’s presence can be poured into you, then you will never be aware of the presence of God.
On this particular Rosh Hashanah, I am convinced that awareness of God’s gifts and the presence of God in our world is one of the keys of Jewish living and finding true meaning in our lives. Once we are aware of God’s presence, we become grateful to God for our gifts. On Rosh Hashanah, where therefore can we see the presence of God? How can we become aware of God’s presence in our world?
First, we need to see it today in ourselves. We have tried to do the best we could during the past year and yet there have been times when we have failed. There have been times when we have missed the mark, when we are not sufficiently sensitive to others, or we did not hear the pleas of attention of those that we love and those that love us the most. We are imperfect human beings and yet we are nothing less than a breathing manifestation of the Divine presence.
Second, let us see the divine in every other human being. According to the Jewish mystics, there is a spark of the divine in each of us. Some of the times, it is easy to see.
I recently visited parents with their first born child at the hospital. We blessed the baby together. The presence of God was in that room, not only in the eyes of the baby, but in the incredible love the mother and the father had for the baby, and I would say the incredible love and gratitude the father had towards the mother for 26 hours of labor! The result of which was an incredibly beautiful girl.
We can see God’s presence in each other when true lovers and spouses look at one another. We see God’s presence in each other when brothers and sisters come together to greet one another. And so often, we see God’s presence in brothers and sisters who have come together as caretakers for a terminally ill parent.
We see God’s presence in the many activities at Temple when we reach out to others to provide them with extended family. We see God’s presence in every act of kindness, every act of giving, that human beings do for one another.
Today, let us try to be more aware of the Godliness not only the people who love us, but also those that may aggravate us. Let us be aware that all are living and breathing expressions of the divine.
Let us also increase our awareness of God’s presence in nature. Whenever Jews see a rainbow, we say a blessing. We see God’s presence standing on the top of a mountain or visiting a glacier. We can see God’s presence in the disorderly waves of the sea. Here, we see God’s presence every fall when the leaves change their colors to bright oranges, yellows and reds.
On this Rosh Hashanah, our goal should be to increase our mochin de gadlut, our spacious thinking, in order to see the presence of God in our world and to be grateful for it. Let us not be like the people who passed by Joshua Bell! Let us not be the father that saw himself, instead of the Incredible Hulk, because he was too filled with his own insecurities and ego. Let us not even be like Abraham who was so involved in what he thought he ought to do that he cannot see the obvious gift that is around him.
Rather today, let us be today like Moses, who stops to see that something unusual is happening, that a bush is burning but is not being consumed and that is a great manifestation of the Divine.
This year, may it be God’s will, as it should be our prayer, that we should be more aware of the Godliness in ourselves, in others and in nature.
This year, let us become more aware of the presence of God, more aware of how that presence is to be found everywhere and at all times; how it is to be found in the lovers sigh and the mourners cry.
All we need to is sharpen our ability to hear, see and listen.
All we need is to slow down.Then maybe we will become aware of the blessing our lives truly are.
May we all be inscribed for a blessing in the Book of Life. Amen.
[1][1]Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures, (Philadelphia, Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society) 1985.
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