Sermons

Shabbat Shalom

We are about halfway through the part of the Torah that drags us through the weeds of Judaism. How to build a Mishkan, building a Mishkan, and now, in Parshat Vayikra and the next two parshiyot, what we are supposed to DO in a Mishkan. The action-packed stories of Genesis and the story of the Exodus have ended and now we have the murky details about how this relationship with God, a relationship born at the foot of Mount Sinai with all the thunder and lightning, is going to work. Going through the weeds is not the fun part of the Torah but if we are to really be in a relationship with God, then we need to know all the complicated details that come with it.

What we are told to do in the Mishkan is to offer sacrifices. We are to choose animals from our flocks and herds and bring them to the Mishkan where the professional priests will slaughter the animal and burn some or all of it on the altar as a way of feeling closer to God. In the pagan world, sacrifices were required from all people because the meat was the food for the gods. If you wanted the gods to do things for you, you had to make sure that you kept them well fed and happy. In all these weeds of how to prepare a sacrifice for our God, nowhere does it say that God derives any benefit from the sacrifice at all. It may be a sweet smell to God, but we are not offering to God anything that God needs.

I want to be really clear here, from the very beginning of this lesson. God does not need anything from us human beings. God is our creator. God is the one who gave us all that we have. God is the creator of the universe; there is nothing in our universe that God needs in any way at all. There can be no give and take between God and human beings. God has given us the world and we have nothing that God needs at all to give back to our Creator. We can look at the entire sacrificial system of the next three parshiyot and find that while God is very particular about how we are to sacrifice animals, the laws have nothing to do with God’s wants or needs. I can carry this even further. We can look at all the Mitzvot that we are commanded to perform and our doing them or not doing them makes no difference to God at all. What words we pray or do not pray will not change one thing from God’s point of view. The Rabbis go so far as to assert that the amount of money we will receive this year is determined on Rosh Hashana and nothing we can do can change the amount that God has granted. As human beings, we often try and anthropomorphize God. We try to envision an old man with a long beard sitting on a throne in heaven, looking down on us and judging our every action. Like our divine mother-in-law, we can never fully satisfy God because God is perfect, and we are not. But this conception of God is just a figment of our human imagination. Rambam, Maimonides, teaches that we can actually know nothing about God; all we can do is poke around at the edges of where the divine meets the mortal and try to infer what is beyond.

God is not a “being” rather, God is “being” itself. God’s very name is a verb – something your elementary school English teacher told you was something impossible.

So, is it all useless? Why do we sacrifice, do mitzvot, and pray? Is it all an exercise in futility?

The fact that God does not need us does not mean that God does not CARE about us. God loves us and, like any parent, wants to see God’s children be successful in the world. The Torah is all about God’s instructions about how to be successful in living, not just with money, but in all manner of relationships. God does not leave us to our own devices without rules for living. Not having rules is not a sign that God loves us. The rules themselves are the sign that God cares very much about us and gave us this Torah, weeds and all, to help us live better lives.

In fact, there is one thing that we can give to God that God does not already have. We can show our appreciation for God. We can show appreciation in two ways. One is by following the instructions that God has given us, and the other is by finding the places in the world where the world is incomplete, and doing what we can to finish the rough edges. The very reason that God created us is to help finish the work of creation. Our actions may not change God, but we can change the world by what we think, do, and say.

When I would teach B’nai Mitzvah students, I would often ask them “What does it mean to be an adult? What are they looking forward to as they take on the mantle of maturity?” Even at age 13, these students know the advantages of being an adult is being able to do whatever they want. What they don’t know is that each of the advantages comes with responsibilities. If they knew all about the responsibilities, they would never want to grow up at all. It is much easier to be a child and not responsible for anything than to be a full-grown adult with all the responsibilities that come with it.

Rober Fulgham, the author and Unitarian Minister wrote a book called, “Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned in Kindergarten.” The first essay showed that all the really important lessons of life are the first lessons we learn in school. In his second book, he has an essay on what adults really have to do. He imagines talking to a high school graduating class and asking them who wants to be “an adult, an independent, on your own, citizen?” and when they all raise their hands, he will tell them exactly what adults have to do. Things like “clean the sink strainer” after dinner dishes are done, plunge toilets, clean up diapers after babies and clean the floor after spit up dinner, wipe runny noses, clean ovens, grease traps and roasting pans, clean out the kitty litter and after the dog, take out the garbage and a few other things he can print in his book but would not be a good sermon before lunch. Fulghum believed that after hearing the list, they may not want to be adults anymore.

But we know better. If the world is to improve, we have to do the dirty work of making it better. We have a blueprint of what we need to do. It is called the Torah. It does not list the same items that Rober Fulghum lists but it does list a lot of other important things: Honor your parents, don’t bear false witness, don’t covet other people’s possessions, care for the sick, the orphan, the widow, and the poor. Help poor brides have a joyful wedding and poor people who die to have an honorable funeral. Torah teaches us that Tzedakah is not charity but making the world a more just place and that Justice is what we must pursue. Torah teaches us that if we want good things to happen to us, we must be prepared to sacrifice something of our own. The Torah teaches us that we don’t get a free ride in life.

And most of all, it teaches us that we must love each other.

I heard a lecture this week by Elana Stein Hain on the loopholes in Jewish law. She talked about how Jewish law is so important that we must be committed to following its directives. But sometimes we just know, inside our very being, that in some cases, just following the law will lead us to hurt others and cause them to hate Judaism and the law. So, we look for loopholes, not because we are trying to get away with something but because we are trying to balance what we know is right for the world but might not be right in this one instance or in this general category. Jewish law is a living legacy, and sometimes, as life evolves, we need to balance the tradition we receive with what we know should be the right thing to do.

What would God have us do?

The Torah teaches us that lending money to someone else is a mitzvah and therefore one should never, under any circumstance, charge interest on the loan. Loan people the money and they will pay you back and we don’t have to make money on the backs of people who can’t afford it. It is a basic law of the Torah that we should not loan money and charge interest.

But by the middle ages the Rabbis created a loophole. It was called a Heter Iska – a business agreement that basically allowed Jews to charge interest. It is a complicated loophole (most of them are) but the end result is money is loaned and interest is charged. Why would the medieval Rabbis allow something the Torah forbids? Because, in the ancient world, the economy was based on agrarian values. Crops failed; families had no means of support. A loan was an act of Hesed, of loving kindness to help them until they could get back on their feet.

When our people were exiled and found that in Europe, during the Middle Ages, farming, and many of the trades in Europe were forbidden to Jews. They could only operate small shops or become moneylenders. If they were not allowed to charge interest, they would starve. So, a loophole was created so the Torah could be observed, and the needs of the people were addressed. Being able to charge interest was an act of Hese; it allowed Jews to earn a living in a difficult time in our history.

These are the ways we can improve the world. We can make it possible for people to be true to Torah, to God’s law, and still love each other. We can follow the instructions that God has given us and use them to clean up the messiness of life. We show our appreciation to God for all that God has done not by giving a sacrifice to God but by sacrificing something on behalf of others, so we can bring more love into the world and thus make this world a better, less broken place.

We no longer need to bring animals from our flocks and herds to show our appreciation to God for all that God has done for us. We can pay it forward. We can help others, we can make this world a better place, a place of Justice, a place of peace, a world full of love. We show our love for God by loving others, even if it means being a bit put out, even if it means sacrificing something we have or deserve.

God doesn’t need our sacrifices, but others do, and when we give of ourselves to others, we bring more love to each other and more love to God.

May we each find our way to bring more justice, peace, and love into the world and through our actions draw nearer to God as we say …. Amen and Shabbat Shalom