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"The March of the Penguins"Devarim 5765 Sermon, August 12, 2005Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon I was at work the other day when I got a call from home,
and each of my children needed to tell me that Rhody, had just taken them to
see the movie The March of the Penguin—and they loved it.
“Dad,” our 9 year old, Boaz said, “It was so cool.
They march 70 miles back and forth to the sea in Antarctica, and they
all show up at the same time, and it’s amazingly cold, and the dads sit on
the eggs, and they pass the egg and if it drops on the ground for two minutes
it freezes, and a bird ate one of the babies but most of them survive.
I love you; is it OK if Gabe wants to talk to you now?” And our six year old, Gabriel said, “Dad they feed the babies fish that they throw up, and it’s really cold, and one of the babies got eaten, but mostly they swam in the ocean. I really liked it. I love you. Can Cece talk to you now?” And Cipora, our four year old, said “Daddy it was really good, the penguins are so cute, and there were seals, but a lot of the babies were OK. Bye, daddy.” And then I returned from emperor penguins to meeting with a bat mitzvah girl… who was giggling uncontrollably for some reason. Well, I don’t know how many of you have seen the film The March of the Penguin but the idea is that these remarkable flightless birds manage to mate and raise young in the single most forbidding climate in the world, and they do so through a variety of nearly unfathomably complex arrangements. Although their normal habitat is the ocean, they walk 70 miles from the sea, and decide their mates, and breed, and the mom loses 1/3 of her body weight giving birth, and then the dad takes the egg and the mom waddles back to the sea to eat. And the dads then huddle together against these amazing Antarctic storms—the coldest weather on earth—and protect the vulnerable eggs for four months without eating, and the mother penguins have to arrive back within one day of the birth of the baby to feed it, and then the dads march 70 miles to the sea to eat, and there is much, much more—most of it improbable, fantastic, really—and all of it accurate, and essential, to the survival of this remarkable species. The simple fact that these penguins know that the 70 miles of ice they traverse will break up by the next summer when the chicks will be fledglings, and they know just how far inland to go, and at the right time, and how to each nurture the egg—it’s all pretty amazing. If you haven’t seen the movie, you should; first of all, of course, penguins are incredibly cute, and watching them waddle towards each other and the female pass the egg to the male for safe-keeping is both highly entertaining and deeply touching. And you should see the movie— I do not get a percentage of the gate, by the way—not least because it’s so amazing to see processes and events take place that show the complexity of nature, the spectacular way in which life finds a way to flourish in the most magnificently unlikely conditions. But the film also, in an implicit way, highlights the fact that things happen in our world that ought never to work, yet are so exquisitely nuanced that their very existence testifies to a kind of unseen presence in the universe, an exquisite intelligence of design and implementation that defy skepticism. There is a fundamental subtlety of arrangement that is simply, heartbreakingly, beautiful—and even our children can see it. But sometimes we can’t. The amazing patterns of nature, and their remarkable changes and transitions, the ways they seem to be the result of a connected intelligence—well, most of us tend to see these as no more than the result of chance and evolution. And yet, that such things can exist, that the phenomenal complexity of a learned system of behavior that allows life to flourish in the most impossible of conditions and in ways that don’t lend themselves to simple interpretations—these we often fail to see as evidence of something greater that is present in the design of our world. In taking this for granted we miss the presence of an intelligence that is more profound than our own. In the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah there is a belief that God is present in everything in the universe, and that the divine element is a kind of implicit intelligence, a presence, a consciousness that seeds the development of such remarkable, and remarkably beautiful, processes and patterns. God is immanent, present everywhere; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are aware of it. The skill that we learn to develop in Jewish mysticism is simply awareness— an ability to recognize the sparks of God’s influence in the amazing arrangements of our own world. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake developed the idea of morphological resonance—a complicated term that comes down, at heart, to the idea that nature, as a whole, learns, and that even natural laws are really just habits that can change. He cites many examples that may be familiar to us: the way that members of an entire species will somehow suddenly know something that only one individual has actually had the opportunity to learn. For example, when mice in a research facility in London were taught to improve their maze-running skills, "unschooled" mice in a Paris lab began navigating their mazes better as well. On a South Pacific island, a gourmet monkey discovered that washing the dirt off his raw potato was healthy and made it taste better. Shortly thereafter, on islands throughout the archipelago with no obvious form of communication with that isle, monkeys simultaneously began washing their potatoes. This, Sheldrake says, means the truism that ideas are "just in the air" has validity. Or, we might say, these extraordinary, not quite rational truths demonstrate a higher presence, a kind of vital intelligence that somehow is communicated across seemingly impassable barriers. But not all of us can sense these connections, or see the higher presence. In fact, most of us simply miss it. As a Chasidic saying puts it, God creates miracles everywhere, yet we take our little hands and put them over our little eyes and see nothing. All of which is a long
introduction to the fact that the existence of the miraculous has long been a
controversial subject in Judaism, and that certainly is reflected in our Torah
portion of Devarim, Deuteronomy. This week we begin the great
final book of the Torah, which is also known as Mishnah Torah.
The people of Israel have arrived at the very borders of the Promised
Land, and our great leader Moses begins a long sermon—three, actually—that
will carry us forward through the entire book of Deuteronomy.
If you thought some rabbi’s sermons were on the long-winded side, try
this: Moses first speech in Deuteronomy starts this Shabbat and doesn’t
conclude until next week—and that’s by far the shortest of his sermons in
Devarim. Nowadays, most rabbis
wouldn’t dream of delivering a sermon that lasted for several weeks…
Perhaps not only nature as a whole but even rabbis have the capacity to
learn from their predecessors… Devarim means words, and Moses
words flow from the start. Moses begins by employing that most Jewish of
devices: guilt. God has led this
people, our people, to the very borders of the Promised Land, taken care of
all of the Israelites’ physical needs, worked wonders and miracles for
them—and yet, they have repeatedly failed to keep faith with God. You know the story—after all
these are the children of Israel: they don’t call, they don’t
write, they don’t send birthday cards...
In spite of all the love lavished on the Israelites they never really
accepted God’s presence. In
spite of everything God has done, from miraculous salvation on the shores of
the Sea of Reeds to the great revelation at Sinai, the 40 years of manna in
the wilderness, in spite of it all, they remain ungrateful and unaware.
And now, they are at the very gateway to the Promised Land—and they
still don’t get it. It’s as though the penguin
flocks had marched the 70 frigid miles, each way, and never quite figured out
that they were supposed to have children and carry on the species.
Apparently, penguins are
smarter than Jews. [Better
dressed, too, come to think of it.] To correct this problem, or at
least to attempt to do so, in our portion of Devarim this week Moses begins to
lay out the Deuteronomic covenant. It forms the core of his last, best effort
to convince our people that they should recognize God’s presence and keep
the faith. Remember, he
says repeatedly; listen; hear my words. Pay attention. God
is with you. God cares.
Have faith. In next
week’s portion of Ve’etchanan Moses will reach true brevity and eloquence,
in a perfect phrase you know that makes it all astonishingly clear: Hear,
people of Israel: Adonai is our God, and God is one.
Shema—listen, hear. And what is “hearing”,
really, but the auditory awareness of the presence, the voice, of another?
What is our task but learning how to listen for God’s whisper in the
world? You know, the covenant that we
are given in Deuteronomy has a bad reputation these days. It’s a simple formula, really: if we believe in God, and
act ethically, we’ll be rewarded; if we stray from God’s mitzvot, we’ll
be punished. This form of the Divine
covenant doesn’t play very well anymore.
It promises that good things happen to good people, while bad things
happen to bad people—which we know from our own experience isn’t always,
or even often, true. But I would
suggest that a more profound reading of Devarim teaches us that Moses’ real
message, the ikar, the heart of his
lesson, is that our fundamental failure is not doing immoral things and being
punished for them. It is,
instead, failing to become aware of God’s presence in our world. That, of course, is something
our ancestors struggled with repeatedly.
When they saw, or believed they did, great miracles enacted before
their eyes they managed to recognize God’s hand in the world.
Yet within a few days, as Moses reminds them in our portion, they
managed to forget that God had done much of anything for them at all. And as hard as it was for our
ancestors to sense God’s presence, it is perhaps an even greater challenge
today. For today we are bombarded with
information of all kinds, by all kinds of devices—television, email,
cellphones, PDA’s, ipods, and on and on.
Today it takes something extra to be able to sense God’s presence in
the world. And yet—God is here,
and no farther away than before. God
is in the intricate ways that life flourishes and changes; in the ways in
which we—and nature—learn and grow; in the blush of new love, and in the
depth of life-long devotion. In a
child’s laugh, in a bubbie’s hug, in a teen’s first kiss, in the expanse
of the universe and in the small, magical beauty of an unfolding blossom…
even in the waddle of a penguin. In the 12th century
the poet and Torah commentator Ibn Ezra wrote of God: I see You in the starry sky I see You in the field of rye In every leaf In every flower Is witness of Your matchless
power We fancy You remain concealed But in all Your work You are
revealed… And yet we can so easily
walk—or run—through this world of wonder and miss God’s presence. So what are we to do?
What can Devarim teach us about listening to these words, and taking
them to heart? Listening is an underutilized
talent, as any of you who have ever had children know well—especially
teenagers. But we can
learn to listen better—and so, come to sense God’s presence. Next week, in the second
portion of this magnificent book of Deuteronomy, we will chant the Shema.
Rabbis Jack Riemer and Harold Kushner wrote a poem about what Shema,
hear, is all about. Listen to it now: Judaism begins with the
commandment: Hear, Israel, but what does it really mean to hear? The woman who attends a concert
with her mind on business, hears- but does not really hear. The man who listens to the
words of his friend, or his spouse or his children and does not catch the note
of urgency: “Notice me, help me, care about me,” hears- but does not
really hear. The person who listens to the
news and thinks only of how it will affect the stock market, hears- but does
not really hear. The one who stifles the sound
of conscience and tells himself he has done enough already, hears- but does
not really hear. The people who listen to the
rabbi’s sermon and think that someone else is being addressed, hear- but do
not really hear. God, strengthen our ability to
hear. May we hear the music of the
world, the infant’s cry, and the lover’s sigh. May we hear the call for help
of the lonely soul, and the sound of the breaking heart. May we hear the words of our
friends, and also their unspoken pleas and dreams. May we hear within ourselves
the yearnings that are struggling for expression. May we hear You, God—for only
if we hear you do we have the right to hope that You will hear us. For when we really hear, when
we listen, we can—and will— find the holiness, and the divine
beauty, in our world. When we
begin to pay attention we will come to sense God’s presence.
And when we sense that Presence, how can we fail to act well, to be
moral, to follow ethical ways? For, my friends, when we learn
to listen, to sense God’s presence, to pay attention to the ways in which
holiness is around us everywhere, when we can find the sacred in the midst of
the ordinary—well, then, as Moses would have wished, we will truly enter the
Promised Land. May we learn to see and hear
God in our world and in our lives, and to learn from the words of Devarim how
to fill our days with holiness. Ken Yehi Ratson—May this be God’s will; and our own. Shabbat Shalom.
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