We don’t talk a lot about Moses on the High Holidays. Have you noticed that? As prominent as he is throughout our Jewish tradition, he’s kind of more of a Passover-guy, to be honest. Though also Shavuot, where we celebrate receiving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai; he had something to do with that story too, I’m quite sure… But Rosh Hashanah? Not so much. However, when I sat down to write this sermon, I found myself thinking a lot about Moses. This time of year, when we read from the Torah at morning minyan and on Saturdays, we are in the Book of Deuteronomy, and indeed right at the very end of the entire Torah. In just another couple of weeks, we’ll get to the holiday of Simchat Torah, where we conclude and then restart the whole Torah.
So, with just a couple of weekly readings left, at this point, Moses already knows he won’t be leading the people forever, and specifically won’t get to enter the Promised Land. His speeches to them start to take on an urgency and even a desperate pleading; he knows he only has a short time left to get them ready for the daunting, nation-building task ahead. He knows they’re prone to complaining and rebelling against God, and they have this nasty habit of being lured away by various idolatrous practices.
Moses wants them to know that he has led them for a long time now, and really given everything of himself to this endeavor, and he hopes they will remember him and continue to learn from his teachings. But to be honest with you, he doesn’t exactly make it easy for them. At one point he states: “And now, O Israel, what does Adonai, Your God, demand of you? Only this: To fear Adonai, Your God, to walk in all of God’s Ways, to love God, and to serve God with all your heart and soul, keeping all of God’s commandments and statutes, which I command you this day.” (Deut. 10:12-13)
Pretty easy, right? God doesn’t ask much. Just to love and revere and serve God with all of our heart and soul… oh, and just keep every single commandment too. It’s so simple, really, isn’t it? Um, no, it isn’t. That’s actually quite a lot.
Phrasing it like low-hanging fruit that anyone can do and observe, doesn’t make it any easier. Instead, I think it just makes people feel bad because they can’t possibly rise to that level. It’s an example of good Jewish-guilt, even in Biblical times! I guess that means we’re all failing God.
Well, that’s not how I feel about things, as I’m sure many of you already know about me. That’s not how I approach Judaism, the Torah, God, or my work with the congregants here at Ohev Shalom. Setting impossible standards doesn’t motivate, it intimidates. People very often apologize to me for falling short of some imagined standard of Jewish observance or religiosity, and that’s just not something I subscribe to or endorse.
Of course, you might then ask: What are we all doing here then, and what might we hope to get out of these High Holiday services? If we can’t be perfect, and therefore reject the expectation of perfection, why try at all? I have been thinking about this a lot, especially as I end my tenure here at Ohev, and I would like to suggest an approach. It is, in fact, my theme for this year’s High Holiday sermons:
We aspire. We strive to be better and to keep improving, and that, ultimately, is the goal. Not the achievement itself, but the aspiration! Otherwise, we either tell ourselves we’re constantly failing, or we reject the notion that we need to work on ourselves at all. Both are unfortunate extremes, and neither is a good response to the task at hand. Instead, I encourage us all to let go of perfection and abandon our unobtainable, lofty goals. BUT we shouldn’t therefore have NO goals and NO aspirations. We still need to keep striving.
One of my very favorite rabbinic quotes comes from Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of Our Sages, Chapter 2, teaching number 16: Rabbi Tarfon said, (Hebrew first) “You are not required to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.” In other words, you don’t have to get straight A’s, hit a home run every time, score every touchdown, and always finish first. (Or insert your own metaphor for perfection here that you personally prefer.) You don’t have to be PERFECT! Let go of that myth and that expectation.
We sometimes tell ourselves, “yeah, but it motivates me. It makes me work harder and shoot for the stars.” But it can also harm us if we’re setting unrealistic and impossible standards for ourselves, because I think everyone here in this sanctuary knows that we are often our own worst critics. We speak harsher to ourselves than we would ever let anyone speak to us. So let’s not set ourselves up for failure before we even begin. It is not our responsibility to finish every task or to see everything through to the end.
BUT, the second part of Rabbi Tarfon’s quote is essential too! We are still not free to just give up on it. We have to keep trying and aspiring. Now look, that IS a tough balance. I am fully aware of that. We have to both aspire and accept. Be kind to ourselves for not being flawless, but also push ourselves to be better each and every day. I can’t tell you where that perfect balance is for you, or for anyone else, but to me, *this* is the goal: To figure out how to challenge ourselves AND accept ourselves, all at the same time.
Of course, you might want to respond back: “But that’s not what Moses said. He was pretty clear that God expects, demands even, that we fulfill all the commandments, love God with everything we’ve got, and never stray from the path.” Furthermore, our High Holiday liturgy today, tomorrow, and throughout Yom Kippur, definitely seems to support that Biblical viewpoint, rather than the one I’m putting forward. Our prayers repeatedly talk about God writing our names in the Book of Life, judging our behavior and our decisions, and having high expectations for all of us. Pretty hard to get around all of that, wouldn’t you say?
I’ll admit, it’s true; it’s hard to ignore God’s judgment and expectations, as articulated in the Bible and in our liturgy. But what if that’s only one way to understand God? What if we aren’t required to understand God in this very limiting and almost transactional relationship of Worshiped Divine Being and Worshipping Lowly Mortals? Is there room for us to change and shift how we interact with God? I think there is. And I am tremendously grateful to my colleague and friend, Rabbi Kelilah Miller, for introducing me to Rabbi Toba Spitzer’s book, “God is Here.”
Rabbi Spitzer’s book really helped me articulate something I’ve been ruminating on for a long time, and gave me some wonderful tools for teaching this concept to all of you. The basic idea is: The way we think of God is actually just through metaphor.
What Rabbi Spitzer means is, when we talk about God, what we really mean is our desire and attempts to connect to something greater than ourselves. We look at the vastness of the ocean, the endless expanse of space, and the incredible intricacies of the cells and molecules in our bodies, and we feel something. We may, perhaps, feel that there is Something or Someone “out there,” beyond our understanding. But here’s the critical part: The way we try and imagine that Thing is through metaphor.
For some reason, we often think of metaphors as insufficient or inadequate; as if we use them only when we can’t accurately or fully describe something. But Rabbi Spitzer doesn’t think of metaphor that way. She writes, “metaphors provide the framework for how we understand and talk about much of what makes us human.” She points out how we use metaphors constantly, often without even realizing it. She gives examples like “kicking a bad habit.” There’s very little physical kicking involved, right? But we all get what it’s trying to say. We envision kicking something away from ourselves, definitively. So the idea still comes across. Another example is when we say we’re feeling “low” or “down.” It doesn’t mean low to the ground, right? Physically, tangibly down on the floor. It’s a metaphor that resonates in our very human brains.
Many things in this world can be measured and quantified and fact-checked… but what about concepts like love and elation, jealousy and hate. That’s where metaphors are especially essential, because they’re often all we’ve got to go on! These “intangibles” are very real issues that affect us every day, but are not “things” that we can literally - and metaphorically - put our finger on. What if, says Rabbi Spitzer, the Bible works much the same way, and indeed our understanding of God does as well? What if it is all metaphor; intended to help us envision and grasp the teachings of the Torah… but not meant to be literal descriptions of factual things?
Spitzer writes: “Our ancestors expressed their experiences of the realm of the sacred in fairly concrete ways, in stories about divine beings - or a Being - that metaphorically resembled humans and other living creatures. These stories were attempts to understand how the world came to be as it is, and how we can best navigate the world and the various forces that operate within it.”
The Bible, says Rabbi Spitzer, is about relationship. And The Bible, says Rabbi Jeremy Gerber, is most definitely about relationship! This is not a text that is trying to explain the literal formation of the universe, or how many years it takes to traverse a desert, or how miracles could “actually” have occurred. That was never the point of any of the books; they are about the human desire - the aspiration - to be in relationship with something both outside of ourselves and within us as well. Something that created everything we see around us - and things we can’t see, whether out there or in here.
For our ancient ancestors, and for many of the Jewish authorities throughout the ages, the best way to understand that Something was through descriptions of God. God’s attributes, God’s commandments, God’s expectations of us. Describing God as a King, a Savior, an Avenger, and a Consoling Parent were some of the helpful ways for them to feel close to God. In the end, that’s really what so much of humanity has always been searching for; to feel close to Something vast and meaningful, spiritual and mysterious. Even the word for “sacrifice” in Hebrew - Korban - comes from the root, karov, to be close. The sacrifices expressed our deep, visceral need to feel part of something vast and meaningful; to draw close to God.
The problem is, what if you reject that image of God as Big Person who controls and decides everything? What if that feels offensive when innocent people die, whether in a pandemic or a Holocaust? So many people read the High Holiday liturgy of Un’tane Tokef, declaring that God decides who will live and who will die, and they hate it. They reject it completely. To that I say, I get it… but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, metaphorically speaking. What if, instead, we can change the metaphors, to envision a Divine force that isn’t A Big Person deciding our fate? That’s tough to do, I know. Whether you’re 30, 60, or 90 years old, God has likely always been depicted as a King or Father, in Jewish contexts as well as throughout society. That, again, is why we need to strive to shift that perception. Because in the end, everything you’ve been taught is ALSO metaphor! We don’t “know” - in the factual, scientific, provable sense - Who or What God is; none of us do! So we form metaphors and images that help us aspire to feel close and connected to something bigger and more meaningful than just our own lives.
Ok, so that is my main message throughout these High Holidays; the message I want to leave you with, in a sense, before my tenure has concluded… though hopefully not as definitively as Moses (who dies at the end of the Torah…). What I would like to do over the course of our holidays together is to examine some of Rabbi Spitzer’s proposed new metaphors for the Divine, and demonstrate how each can help us work on ourselves, aspiring to improve and become better people, while actually also still accepting and loving ourselves for who we are. It’s a very challenging balance to strike… but I think we’re up to the task!
So, if we’re going to imagine God, not as a Ruler, Judge, Parent, Creator, Commander, and all the other Big Person depictions, what then? The first new metaphor that Rabbi Spitzer offers in her book is God as water. Well, what the heck does that mean? For each of these new metaphors, I want to look at 1) textual examples from the Torah to support the concept, 2) how we might then envision this Divine Force, and then, most critically, 3) how our relationship with God can indeed shift dramatically, based on this new image.
Water has a lot of prooftexts. Starting with the story of Creation - appropriate today, since Rosh Hashanah does indeed celebrate the birth of the world (metaphorically speaking…) - we read at the very, very beginning of Genesis that water existed BEFORE creation. As God prepares to create, verse two of the entire Torah tells us that a “Ruach Elohim,” a spirit of the Divine, hovered over the face of the water. Rabbi Spitzer explains and interprets this verse, writing: “The divine here appears to be surrounded by water, or perhaps It [God] is part of the primordial waters, emerging from the Deep.” A paragraph later, she adds: “God is of the waters, over the waters, active in and through the waters.”
She goes on to give examples from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy as well, and then, later, Spitzer references a verse from the Prophet Isaiah, which even if you haven’t heard before in English, you likely would recognize in Hebrew: “ושאבתם מים בששון ממעיני הישועה” - “Joyfully you shall draw water from the Well of Liberation.” (Is. 12:3) Then she also adds a verse from the Prophet Jeremiah, describing God as “מקור מים חיים” - “The Fount of Living Waters” (Je. 2:13). While I don’t want to spend too much time on the verses themselves, I do want to share Rabbi Spitzer’s wonderful ability to take those metaphors and bring them to life for us. In thinking about God as a Well of Liberation or a Fount of Living Waters, Spitzer writes, “Water does not command or judge - it flows and irrigates, nourishes and sustains. God as Water invites us to identify when and how we become spiritually ‘dry,’ and what it might mean to feel spiritually nourished.”
If we can all challenge ourselves - strive, in fact - to replace the image of God as Judge and Punisher, and instead envision a force that nourishes and sustains, how different does the High Holiday experience become?? She also talks about how God then no longer is out there, up in the heavens, but rather intimately close and connected to every one of us. When we say we’re made “בצלם אלוקים - in the Image of God” we could both understand that as referencing how the human body is made up of 70 percent water, and also how we are meant to nourish and sustain others around us, as well as the planet, rather than command and lord over one another.
I’m not saying this is our new image of God, or that we’re all now going to start worshiping water. This is about making our theology limber and - water-pun intended - fluid. This is actually quite critical, because when our understanding of God becomes stale and outdated, it doesn’t just atrophy, but it can actually become really harmful. Religious wars have almost always been about insisting that God is One Way - MY WAY - and nothing else could be true!! Rigid theology can quickly become angry and violent theology… And when people’s theologies become immutable and unkind, they do things like revoke abortion rights and attack the LGBTQ community. The stakes are high here.
I want to also add that all of Rabbi Spitzer’s suggested new metaphors come with challenges and difficulties. This is NOT about simplifying our understanding of God, or turning it into something more pleasant and sweet and palatable. She goes on, in this chapter on water, to point out: “Water is life - and yet sometimes it is also That which threatens me, overwhelms me, drowns me.” It is important to remember that you have to respect the power of water. We see how dangerous too much water can be on the news almost every night! We ignore it at our own peril… which is also true of the power of theology. Our relationship with God sometimes can indeed harm us, shame us, make us feel laden with guilt, and leave us scarred for life… yet it can also fill our lives with meaning and purpose, a sense of connectedness to one another and to the vastness of the universe, and make us more kind and compassionate.
So I think our goal for this High Holiday season is to aspire to cultivate an evolving, dynamic relationship with God and with religion. That may sound like a tall order, but please don’t forget Rabbi Tarfon’s immortal words: You don’t have to finish the task, but you are also not free to desist from it. You don’t need to reach the mountain top, but you can’t stop climbing. The climb is the goal; the effort, the commitment, the aspiration to improve and grow, AND all the while we need to still love and accept ourselves.
Speaking of reaching mountain tops, that is indeed where Moses’ story ends. As he prepares to die, we might wonder if he achieved all his goals in life, or if he fell short, and was left with regrets. Surely he was disappointed and saddened that he never got to set foot in the Promised Land, but he also helped free a nation from slavery, bring a Pharaoh to his knees, lead the people through the wilderness for 40 years, gave them God’s Commandments and Torah, and set us on a course to become…
The Jewish People who continue to thrive 4,000 years later. But at the end, I’m sure he was also upset that he never got into the land. Nobody is perfect.
No one gets *everything* they wanted, even Moses. I think the real lesson is that perfection isn’t the goal, or the prize at the end of our lives. It isn’t to check every box, fulfill every dream, and leave this earth with nothing left to accomplish. No, the goal is to keep aspiring. Keep growing and evolving and flowing through life, nourishing the people around us and striving to lead a life of meaning, purpose, and compassion.
As I finish this sermon (but I’ll be back again tomorrow!), I invite us all to hold on to the metaphor of the Fount of Living Waters. Each of us can aspire to be like a flowing fountain, watering our families, communities, and the whole planet with goodness, kindness, and purpose. In that way, we will truly be living our lives b’Tzelem Elohim, in the Image of God.
Shanah Tovah!
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