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Erev Rosh HaShanah 5768 Rabbi Benjamin Sharff, Temple Emanu-El of Tucson, AZ
As a way of celebrating my ordination a few years back, Joy and I took a car trip to the Hocking Hills region of Southeastern Ohio. This beautiful area contains several state and national parks. Hocking Hills also has waterfalls, horseback riding, and even a few caves with such classic names as Old Man’s cave and Tar Hollow. For Joy and me, it was the perfect escape from the industrial sprawl of Cincinnati. Rather than just take a day trip, Joy and I decided to stay at a local bed and breakfast. This was a first for us. Usually when traveling we like to stay at hotels or at the homes of relatives. Much to our surprise, when we checked in, we learned that the breakfast and dinner hall only had communal seating for meals. We would not be dining alone. Undaunted and a little tired, we went to sit at the restaurant locals had assured us was the best in the county. To set the scene: there we were, sitting with two other couples, both slightly older than us, and both regulars to this particular bed and breakfast.
While waiting for our appetizer salads, the conversation inevitably turned towards the question of employment. We found out that one of the gentleman sitting with us worked for a nuclear power plant not to far away. I of course excitedly had to ask if he was a nuclear safety technician and if his name was Homer. He just stared at me blankly.
Eventually when they were done talking about themselves, the line of questioning turned towards us. Now I should mention we have a general ambivalence about telling strangers what we do. As we were to soon find out, this was for good cause. When pressed Joy said she was in training, and I mentioned that I had just completed graduate studies. Of course that was not good enough. So when pushed a little bit more, we admitted that Joy was in her residency at Cincinnati Children’s, and I was … a rabbi.
Then it started. The rest of the dinner was all about the worst doctor and minister stories one could possibly conjure up. It was as if, Joy and I were single handedly responsible for all of their negative experiences with their doctors and ministers, and somehow, we should be the ones to fix them, or at least have to hear about how shabbily they were treated.
Joy and I resolved that from this point on, whenever we are on vacation, to tell people that she is a lawyer, and I that work for the IRS, that way, we will hear fewer complaints about the wrongs incurred upon society by our fellow professionals.
When I am not on vacation, and I do happen mention that I am a rabbi, I have found there are a few general principles that apply. The first is yes, we do almost universally love really bad jokes. As a matter of fact, the art of punning goes all the way back to the Talmud. I hate to tell you, but the worse the pun, the more likely it is in line with rabbinic tradition.
The second is we rabbis do thoroughly enjoy talking, whether we have something to say or not. So for those of you who enjoy this sermon, I am glad. For others of you who do not, sorry, I can’t help myself, it’s what I do.
And third, is, we rabbis enjoy collecting and reading books. I sometimes think I have single handedly kept Amazon.com in business, but that is a story for another sermon.
My love affair with books actually came fairly late in life. I really did not get into reading until Middle School when I discovered that great Jewish writer Stephen Kingberg. I read far too many of his books way too late at night. I cannot possibly even begin to count the number of hours I spent lying awake petrified under my covers because of that man. Eventually though, my appetites changed, when I learned about a book that has changed my life: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Hitchhiker’s Guide, written by the late great Douglas Adams, really gets to the heart of all the absurdities surrounding basically life, the universe, and everything. It is a profoundly silly book that still makes me smile. In this book, I was first introduced to both rational and irrational concepts of physics. The book describes the amazing, if incomprehensible improbability drive. It also mentions the art of flying, which interestingly enough is only made possible first by falling, and then secondly by failing to miss the ground. But most importantly Hitchhiker’s Guide introduced me in simple terms to the vastness of the universe. “The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination. Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between stars.”
Ever since reading this line, I have been fascinated with physics and space. As a liberal arts major, I was required to take my fair share of science classes almost all of which were courses in astronomy. For example, I now know that a gas giant has nothing to do with Texas chili. But what I did not come to appreciate until recently was how this whole notion of attempting to understand the universe through questioning all of its underlying assumptions, is profoundly Jewish at its core. But more on that in a moment. This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of what many have termed the greatest thought in the 20th century. In 1905, a young patent examiner wrote his friend Conrad Habicht a letter promising four papers. The first of the four outlined how it would deal with radiation and the energy properties of light. The second concerned the true size of atoms, which was fascinating in part, because there was still dispute about their existence at that time. The third dealt with the motion of microscopic particles in a liquid, now known as Brownian motion. And in the words of Bill Bryson in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, the fourth paper “merely changed the world.” It was this fourth paper that would ultimately lead to the discovery of the Special Theory of Relativity. Up until recently, I assumed the special theory of relativity, had to do with the notion of how time always seems especially slow the longer relatives visit. Upon further research, I discovered I was half right. The special theory of relativity discusses light moving in an unimpeded state, sort of like what happens when a train is traveling down a straight track. The special theory of relativity, as described in Bryson’s book quoting the words of C.P. Snow, “if Einstein hadn’t thought of it when he did someone else would have, probably within five years; it was an idea waiting to happen. But the general theory of relativity was something else altogether. “Without it” wrote Snow in 1979, “it is likely that we should still be waiting for the theory today.” The general theory of relativity brings gravity into the picture, and it asks what would happen to the motion of light if it encountered gravity. This is kind of like when a toddler sees a cookie, the two are just inexorably attracted to one another. It was this general theory of relativity established by Einstein that revolutionized the study of cosmology. From it we get the profound idea that time is interconnected with gravity and the speed of light. All this from a man sitting in a patent office watching the trains go by in clockwork fashion. Ultimately Einstein’s theories would help to lay the groundwork for quantum physics. So not only did he radically transform our understanding of the macro universe, but he also helped to transform our understanding of the micro-universe as well. Leave it to a little Jewish man with wild hair to transform our perceptions of life, the universe and everything. What is even more fascinating is that Einstein was not the first Jew to transform our understandings of existence. We gain this tradition from Jacob, who the Torah tells us, was renamed Israel because “he wrestled with beings divine and prevailed.” Jacob was not merely wrestling with an angel, or even with God, but with his fundamental perceptions of reality. For it was it not Jacob who proclaimed, “God was in this place and I did not know it”! Ever since Jacob, we as Jews have had a long-standing tradition of challenging underlying assumptions and preconceived notions. So much so that Walter Isaacson in his book Einstein argues, only a Jew could have so deftly overthrown Newton’s laws because it takes an outsider with a tradition of challenging authority to engage in such a radical act. When people discuss the gift of the Jews to the world, this truly is one of our central missions in life if you will. Not only are we the inheritors of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we are also the keepers of the legacy of Einstein as well. Because of this, we have an obligation to always challenge established wisdom. But even more than that, like Einstein and Jacob we also have an obligation to challenge our own underlying assumptions as well. One was we can do this is by taking on the incredibly theologically troubling issue of theodicy, the existence of evil in the world. Or as it has been described so aptly “why do bad things happen to good people.” This is demonstrated in the following passage from Deuteronomy: “If you carefully heed My commandments which I command you this day, loving the Eternal your God and serving Him with all your heart, then I will grant you rain in your land at its proper time … I will place grass in your fields … (But if you do not obey) the Eternal’s anger will blaze out against you. He will close up the skies and there will be no rain. The earth will not yield its produce and you will quickly perish from off of the good land which the Eternal is giving you” (Deut. 11:13-17).
As we see from this text, the language from Deuteronomy is particularly covenantal in nature. If we the Israelites keep the brit, the covenant, by obeying the mitzvoth, God will reward us. But if we fail to keep the mitzvoth, we are in essence in violation of the contract, resulting in God punishing us.
Alas, the theology of the early Israelites seems primitive to our ears. We know of righteous people who seem to be punished with one catastrophe after another, while many engaged in wicked acts always seem to prosper. The rabbis dealt with this issue primarily by establishing the concept of the world-to-come. They stated that our rewards will be granted us not in this life, but in the next. Nonetheless, many of us are still left scratching our heads. It just appears to be too simple a solution. Or in the words of Rabbi Nelson author of Judaism, Physics, and God argues, “…many skeptics find the entire answer of just rewards coming not in this life but in the next just a bit too convenient” (pg 97).
So why then does evil exist? If neither of the previous answers are compelling, then why have a sacred tradition at all? Why not just simply move beyond it because what can Judaism really teach me? To put it another way, why is our tradition so incompatible with our perceptions of reality? However if we learn anything from Einstein and Jacob it is that maybe it is not our tradition that is incongruous with reality, but instead it is our perceptions of our tradition that stymie us. So maybe instead of throwing out all of tradition, we can instead look deeper into the world of science to help us see our own faith as it really is.
An approach Nelson argues in his book is for us to look to the world of chaos theory. Chaos theory was first made famous in Jurassic Park, and is based on the notion that subtle actions can have a profound and immeasurable impact upon the world. The most famous example is of how a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a hurricane in the Atlantic. It is not that we cannot predict potential outcomes; it is just that we cannot do it with any type of certainty. This is why the potential paths of hurricanes gets wider and wider the further away they are. This is because Chaos theory is based on the notion that we cannot possibly account for all of the variables. This is what makes predicting the weather so difficult. It is not that we cannot measure the temperature or air pressure, it is just we cannot measure it accurately enough. If this is true of large weather patterns, how much the more so it is also true of our actions as well. We cannot know how every gesture, every smile, every frown; every spoken word impacts the world around us. There are simply too many variables to account for. Nonetheless it is our tradition that teaches us each of these acts impacts not just those around us, but also how they have the potential to change the entire world as well. We find this in the words of Pirkei Avot: “humanity was originally created as a single individual to teach that whoever destroys a single human life, scripture accounts it to him as if he had destroyed an entire world, and whoever saves a single human life, scripture accounts it to him as if he had saved an entire world” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5). According to this understanding of tradition, a simple accidental act has the potential to profoundly alter the world as we know it either for good or for bad. Every choice we make can have a significant impact in ways never intended or even thought of. The result of this is that there is tremendous amount of uncertainty and indeterminacy in the world around us. In essence there is goodness and wickedness in the world more often due to a ripple effect of our own choices. As our tradition teaches, we are all partners in creation. So if we want to understand why evil exists, the first question we should ask ourselves is: what are we personally doing to either sustain or thwart it? For does evil emanate from God or from the souls of humanity? But this is merely one question, one approach to reconciling our perceptions of tradition with the world around us. How are we then to approach living our lives if we are supposed to transform not only our own understandings but also the world? Fortunately there are underlying principles to help guide us through life. It is our tradition that brings us back to the notion that every single act we do is not only something we are accountable for, but also represents the opportunity to either bring holiness into the world, or remove it.
In the end, in a very real way, as explained by tradition and re-imagined by Einstein, we live in a world of our own creation. So on this Rosh Hashanah, we look to the source of creativity to help inspire us to help make it more of a world of goodness, hope, and justice. For every little action, every word spoken can have an impact whose effects we cannot possibly foresee or anticipate, but nonetheless may very well help to revolutionize our perceptions and understandings of life, the universe, and everything. May your new year be one of radical ideas and profound insights for as we learn from tradition, there is an Einstein in all of us waiting to revolutionize the world. Shana Tova!
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