Sermon for 8th Pentecost
V'etchanan
By Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels -
Hello. Shalom. Happy Sunday. Let me introduce myself if we haven’t yet met in person or virtually. I’m Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels, and I am the Rabbi-in-Residence at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church. There’s a line from the play and film “Fiddler on the Roof” that I would like to borrow for this occasion. Actually, it’s the very first line of the play. The hero of the story, Tevya, a milkman in a Jewish shtetl in Russia in the late 19th century, points to a fiddler playing on a nearby roof and says to the audience, “A fiddler on the roof! Sounds crazy, no?!” Likewise, it’s appropriate for us to ask, “A rabbi at a church! Sounds crazy, no?!” Not crazy, but certainly unusual. I am here because your pastor, Eric Shafer, and I struck up a beautiful professional and personal friendship over the past few years. You already know that Pastor Shafer is an innovative and passionate leader. Rabbi-in-Residence is one of his innovations and I am privileged to be the person he requested to help bring his vision to fruition. We’re not exactly sure what it means in its entirety, but I will be speaking with you from the virtual and someday actual pulpit once each month as well as teaching an introduction to Judaism called “Holidays and Holy Days.” More will be coming.
The Jewish people have a weekly Torah portion, the Torah being the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The portion for this week comes from the book of Deuteronomy. Every Jewish congregation in the world will be reading the very same portion of the Torah this week. Reading the same portion is one of the ribbons we use to maintain our Jewish peoplehood, no matter the difficulties and uncertainties that history throws our way and no matter how widespread our Diaspora. This week’s portion, in Hebrew parashah, includes so many texts that are central to Jewish custom and ceremony that it’s difficult to choose just one subject for a sermon. I decided to focus on something that Jews don’t talk about very much – belief. What do Jews believe?
Well, like most things involving Jews, it depends upon who you ask. The common saying, “Two Jews – three opinions,” couldn’t be more accurate. This week’s Torah portion gives us insight into one of the countless ways Jews approach God. The portion is called, Va’etchanan, because that is the first significant word in the portion. It begins with Moses acquiescing to the judgement of God that he, Moses, will not enter Canaan, Israel, the Promised Land. Moses, instead of looking to his own needs and desires, as he has done for the first couple of chapters in Deuteronomy, now turns his attention to the task at hand, concluding his role as leader of the Jewish people after a forty-year sojourn in the Sinai wilderness by offering what amounts to his last will and testament. His opening statement is curious given to whom he was speaking. Moses says:
“But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live. And make them known to your children and to your children’s children.”
Moses continues and admonishes those before him:
“’…do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes…The day you stood before the Eternal Oneness at Horeb (also known as Mt. Sinai), when the Eternal Oneness said, ‘Gather the people to Me, that I may let them hear My words.’
As is made clear in a later verse, this is about the revelation of the Ten Commandments (and the way rabbinic Judaism sees it, the entire Torah). However, these Jews to whom Moses is speaking didn’t witness anything at Mt. Sinai. They could not possibly have heard God’s words spoken there in what a vision of Elijah refers to as a soft, murmuring sound, a still, small voice. After all, this was forty years after the Jewish people were freed from slavery in Egypt. These were the sons and daughters of the people who were standing at Sinai. These people were hardly even born at the time of the events at Mt. Sinai! How could they have “heard” the still, small voice? Jewish tradition has a solution for this: not only was that voice heard by every Jew at the bottom of Mt. Sinai, even the youngest child, but by all Jews, in every generation, for all time.
This tradition of hearing and listening is old and consistent in Jewish history. It begins with Abraham “hearing” a voice telling him to continue the journey begun by his father and venture forth to an unknown destination. Abraham’s listening was completely overwhelmed by the ways in which Moses heard. After all, Moses begins by listening to a bush, a strange bush, aflame but not consumed. He hears the Voice-of-Everything coming from the bush telling him to return to Egypt and singlehandedly free his people. Moses is the hearer and the listener, par excellence!
In fact, hearing and listening are the reference points he uses when he speaks to the people in this week’s Torah portion. He says:
The Eternal spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape—nothing but a voice.
“You heard the sound of words but perceived no shape—nothing but a voice”. It is not surprising that Jewish mysticism at a later time, would refer to God in similarly amorphous ways as, “haMakom”, the place, and the “Ein Sof”, that which has no end.
Referencing God as “a voice” is a beautiful and powerful message for Jews and for all people. It infers that the voice of God, which is the voice of Everything, is always speaking. We, unfortunately, are often oblivious to the voice and it’s mandates, expressed in a soft murmur, still and small. We are involved with our day-to-day concerns, especially during these pandemic times when our worlds are so turned inward. Still, even now it is sometimes easy to hear the voice of Everything, the Place, the Unending-and-Always-Beginning in the voice of a young child, the buzz of a bee, the soft breeze of summer. It is more challenging to hear The Voice in the frustration of Americans reacting to the stinging racism of statues and Confederate flags that honor a part of our history that should be relegated to museums. It is hard to hear the still-small-voice within the anger and fear of Black and Brown Americans who are disproportionately the victims of police violence and the population in our jails and prisons. It is hard to hear in the long-suffering of Native People whose proud history has been relegated to caricature and who, even now, live a nearly Third World existence in the richest nation on earth. It is hard to hear the voice of God in the isolation and suffocation of those who are ill with or dying from Covid-19. It is hard to hear the broken hearts of families who have lost a loved one to this disease.
Yet, it is no more difficult to hear the One Voice in all these contexts and from all these people than it was to hear it from a burning bush or amidst the thunder, lightening and trembling ground of a revelatory moment at a mountain in the middle of a wilderness. We must hear that voice. We must hear it calling to us and we must answer. We must help each other listen because all of us are spiritually deaf sometimes. That is true for all of us, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu and more. In these days, I hear the Voice rising beyond its soft murmuring beginnings. It is yelling. It is screaming. It is wailing. It is pleading with us to listen and then to act upon what we’ve heard. What we hear is the same straightforward message it has always been to anyone from any spiritual calling who has ever heard it: “Love, now and always.”
We, and all there is, reflect the same image, the same voice speaks from us all.
Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels
Rabbi-in-Residence - Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Santa Monica, California
Sermon for:
July 26, 2020
