Voice of Silence

Yom Kippur begins tomorrow night at sundown. We will end Yom Kippur on Saturday night by hearing a long piercing blast of the shofar (ram's horn).

Here is a brief meditation by Rabbi Stephan Parnes:

The ancient voice calls:
Awake- and know fear!
Choose! Decide!
Which road will you travel this year?
But today- Shabbat-
the Shofar's voice is not heard.

In this silence, in this stillness,
Where is God?
Is silence God's absence?
Or is it a call to respond?

Shema Israel- Hear now O Israel-
The sound of silence-
The sound that pierces the strongest armor.

The voice of the shofar
Helped bring down Jericho's walls,
But silence can shatter
the strongest walls
The walls we build around ourselves.

Shema Israel- Hear now O Israel-
the sound of silence
The crushing, deafening, sound of silence-
And choose life.

Choosing Life

Deut 30:15-20

In our Torah reading today we have the words, “See, I set before you today, life and death. Choose life.”

The Hebrew word for impurity in the Bible is “tumah”. The Torah defines for us various states that are considered impure. When a woman is in her menstrual cycle she is considered to be impure. She must go through a mikveh after it is over to purify herself. A man having an seminal emission is also impure. The Torah also has many laws around tzarat, sometimes translated as leprosy, but really more like dead patches of skin. These people are unclean and are not to live within the community of Israel until they have been rid of the disease and made atonement for it. Coming into contact with a dead body also makes one tumah. Cohens, priests, are not even allowed to enter a cemetery except under special conditions.

What all of these things have in common, is that they speak of death. Menstration is caused by the loss of an ovum that could have been a life. The same with a man with a seminal discharge, the seed that could have fertilized the egg is lost. Tzarat is a disease, and diseases lead to death.

So why this obsession with uncleanness in the Torah? The reason for this is that Israel, created by Hashem to be this place that is halfway between heaven and earth, is meant to be an archetype of life. God created Life. He created beautiful sunsets, soft warm rain, good friends, and cooing babies. Death is the antithesis of Life. Death is illness, disease, hatred, and violence. Nothing that represented death was to be in Israel, this “in-between” land. And so we have these commandments that seek to eradicate these things from the Holy Land. Death contaminates the land. Death requires expiation and atonement.

Life is so important, it is held in such high regard, that we are allowed to break all of the commandments to save one, with the exception of three; idolatry, murder, sexual immorality.

The Torah itself is called a “tree of life”. We sing this in our liturgy. Those who hold it fast are called happy.

When we think about life and death, we tend to think in terms of issues foremost in our minds today. Issues like abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty. We also question whether we should be doing genetic engineering to create modified forms of life.

While all of these issues are important and should be addressed, I think what the Torah has in mind is something much deeper. It is clear from the Scriptures that God created us to live life to the fullest. We are to live in peace and joy and gladness. It is only because things went awry that we have less than this.

Death and Life are not just referring to something physical. They can refer to something emotional, mental, or spiritual as well. We can think of things like anxiety, hatred, fear, and bitterness as little deaths. When we are consumed with these things we are cutting ourselves off from the Source of Life, and also from one another. I think that God is laying before us in our Parsha today, to choose life. Life being joy, compassion, peace, love, hope; these are the stuff of life.

The fact that life and death mean something more than just physical is borne out in the teachings of our Sages. They say that embarrassing someone publicly is tantamount to killing them.

This also is taught by Yeshua Rabbenu. He said that looking down on someone was like killing them and lusting in our hearts was like adultery. These are choices of death.

I would like to discuss three ways in which we can choose between life and death.

First of all, we can choose between life and death for ourselves.

We choose death when we succumb to low self-esteem, addictions, anger, bitterness, and the like. Recent studies have clearly shown that we not only do damage to ourselves psychically but also physically. If we have a lot of negative emotions and pack them down and don’t deal with them they will come out in our bodies. People sometimes develop ulcers from excessive worry. A few years ago I met a man who did healing prayer over people. He said that his experience has been that 80% of his clients’ illnesses were emotional and/or spiritual in nature. Even cancer can be brought on by extreme emotional duress. I had a co-worker some years ago who came down with and ultimately died of cancer. She told me that studies have shown that many people who develop cancer have had some major trauma in their lives about 5-7 years prior to the onset of symptoms. In her case it was her husband being unfaithful.

We all struggle with these things from time to time; some of us more, some less. I have had to accept the reality lately that I have bouts of depression, more often than I would like to admit. I get caught up in feeling like I am not doing anything significant or meaningful with my life. I just get sad and don’t feel like doing anything. When I do this, though, I am choosing death.

Rabbi Abraham Twerski is a psychiatrist who runs a clinic for addictions. He says in his book, The Spiritual Self, that “Many people are indeed incapable of tolerating themselves because they harbor self-directed feelings of negativity… this sorry state of affairs is the result of a distortion of the self-concept. In other words, these people who are in actuality fine, competent, and likable people. The problem is that they are unaware of this reality. Instead of seeing themselves as they really are, they somehow develop a distorted image of themselves, and it is this distorted image which they assume to be the real image…”

He goes on to say that because of this, many people use addictions as ways of not facing themselves. Addictions may be to drugs and alcohol, but also to gambling, sex, affirmation, power, prestige, etc… This ultimately leads to self-destruction.

The Torah says to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Our sages point out that you have to first love yourself in order to love others. Whether we choose death or life for ourselves, these choices have a rippling effect out into the lives of others. If we choose death, then we will spew forth death to others, but if we choose life then we will be, in the words of Yeshua, “founts of living water”. Which leads into my second point.

Secondly, we can choose between life and death for others.

Moving beyond the obvious that we don’t choose to murder someone, we can look at the deeper layers of meaning. We are moving from the p’shat to the remez and drash levels. We choose death for others when we act in ways that tear them down. We already mentioned that Yeshua taught that treating a person with contempt was like murder and the rabbis said that embarrassing someone was also like murder. We can also choose death for others when we are consumed with bitterness, hatred, bigotry, and the like. In addition, if we are some consumed with our own anxieties, fears, low self-esteem, we are less likely to be attentive to others needs, it makes us less gracious. This is that outflowing that I mentioned a moment ago. Oftentimes because of the death we deal ourselves, we bring death to others. We hold back out of fear of rejection, we tell people what they want to hear because we want to be liked. This is called enabling behavior by psychologists. We enable people to continue in their own dysfunction because we want them to accept us or continue to be with us. And we can also just simply ignore others’ needs.

You know, when you write a sermon, if you are attentive, it preaches to you too. I was working on this talk at lunch one day. I realized that I was not looking at my waitress because she was overweight, and to be honest, kinda ugly. I really felt bad. As I meditated on this I realized that I wasn’t looking at her because of my own issues with struggling with my own weight. (Quite often we don’t like in others what we don’t like in ourselves). I thought to myself, how many times does she experience that during a day? I would imagine that she gets a lot of it. And this subtle rejection feeds into her own self-esteem. Studies have shown, for example, that cute babies tend to grow up to feel better about themselves because of all the positive attention they received. I was dealing death to this waitress because of my own issues.

But we can choose life for others. We can act out of compassion, seek to understand others’ viewpoints and needs, we can be open to new ideas, and we can treat people with respect, even if we don’t like them.

Our tradition tells us that one of the greatest life giving acts is to provide charity to others. Its best we are told when it can be done in a way that preserves a person’s dignity.

There is a Hasidic story about a man who came to a village and asked to see the rebbe. People told him that he wasn’t around. When asked where he was, they said that they didn’t know. The rumor was that the holy man went up to heaven every Friday morning and came back for Shabbat. Skeptical of this explanation, the visitor resolved that next week he would watch and see what happened. So early the next Friday morning, before dawn, he got up and watched the rebbe’s house. Sure enough, the rebbe came out of his house, but he was dressed in rags! The man followed the rebbe out into the woods where the rebbe cut some wood and then took it to a widow’s cottage. The rebbe asked the widow if she would like to buy some wood for the old beggar. She said that she couldn’t afford it. He said, “That’s ok. You can pay some other time.” Then the woman said that she couldn’t make a fire anyway, she was too old. The rebbe said, “That’s ok. I will make it for you.” And he proceeded to make the stack the wood and make the fire for the woman.

After this, whenever people in the village would talk about the rebbe disappearing on Friday mornings and going up to heaven, the visitor would whisper to himself, “And maybe even higher.”

Yeshua Rabbenu (Jesus, Our Great Teacher) is our example par excellance of choosing life for others. He consistently treated the down and out, the oppressed, and the rejects of society with compassion and dignity. One of the most beautiful passages in the Besorah is where a leper says to Him, “Lord, if you are willing you can heal me.” Yeshua tenderly looks into his eyes and says, “I am willing” and reaches out and touches him.

I think that one of my greatest examples of someone who chooses life for others is our esteemed rabbi. He has been a model to me of someone who always treats others with respect and always wants the best for them. I have seen him handle many situations with calm and poise and truly want the best for all parties involved.

As Jews, we need to not only choose life for individuals, but for the Jewish people as a whole. We need to fight anti-Semitism, seek to improve Yiddishkeit amongst our people, encourage them to raise their children with a Jewish identity, and do what we can to encourage them to draw closer to Hashem.

As Messianic Jews, we need to choose life for our brothers and sisters in the Church, by seeking to bring peace and understanding between the Church and Israel and helping them to understand Israel and its God-ordained role in salvation history.

Thirdly, we can choose between life and death for God.

This is an aspect that we don’t normally think about. We tend to think of God as being above and beyond all of the stuff that happens and is unaffected. He is God after all, right? But we forget that God is also intimately close to and involved in His creation. The record of Scripture is very clear on this point. In the story of the flood, God is grieved that he made humanity because of its sinfulness. He is angry that Israel continues in its idolatry. He is joyful when Israel is faithful.

In our Haftorah reading today we have the verse, "In all [Israel's] afflictions, He, too, is afflicted, and the angel of His presence redeemed them..." God suffers when His people suffer.

When we choose life for ourselves and others, we also choose life for God, and vice versa. We bring blessing to Him.

This is reflected in the kabalistic notion of the releasing the divine sparks. These sparks are hidden in everyday things. When we say a barucha over wine and bread, we are not just doing a mitzvah, but we are returning the divine sparks hidden in the wine and bread back to God. In this view, grace flows down from Hashem, but it then requires humans to complete the circuit and return His grace back to Him. Our life-giving acts have their source in Hashem, and they give life to Hashem.

After being a parent for a while, I have developed a theory that one of the reasons that God gives us children is so that we can understand Him better. When my kids treat themselves and each other like animals, it grieves me. And when they treat themselves and others lovingly it makes me proud and happy. An example of this happened last spring. Samuel and Havah went thru several days of squabbling and tensions where high between them. They were yelling at each other things like “I can’t stand you.” “I wish you weren’t my brother / sister.” “I hate you”. But then Havah had her dance recital. When she came out on stage, I looked over at Samuel and he was positively beaming. He was so proud of his sister! It really warmed my heart, especially after the previous few days.

I think that it is this way with God. Have you ever asked what is in it for God? With all of this drama and suffering in our world? I think that Hashem is blessed when His children choose life for themselves and others. This blessing must be so great that it outweighs all the tsuris.

Intertwined

Jewish mysticism tells us that all three of these are intertwined. The tradition says that while each of has a unique component to our souls, our nefesh, we also all share that spark of divinity. Each of us has a share in the existence of God. This is the neshama, the soul. So when we treat ourselves and others well, we are treating God well too!

In the Talmud it says “If you slap a person’s face, it is like slapping the face of the Shekinah”, because we are all created in His image.

Hillel taught that caring for our bodies honors that image of God and likened it to a caretaker of a stature of the King. The Torah tells us to take care of ourselves because we are all a part of God.

So when we choose life for ourselves, we are choosing life for others because we are all interconnected. And God too is given life because we are all rooted in Him. And the same when we treat others well. Its all intertwined in a great circle of life and blessing.

Conclusion

We are entering into this season of the High Holy Days, a time when we evaluate ourselves, our behavior, and our relationship with others and God. As you take stock of yourself this year ask yourself:

• Am I choosing death or life for myself? Am I succumbing to distorted self-images of who I am that is then having negative impacts on those around me?
• Am I life giving in my relationships? Where can I improve in this area?
• How can I contribute to life of the Jewish people, our movement, and to the Body of Messiah?

Also take time to celebrate the successes that you have had in this past year. Look at:

What specific incidents this past year did I act in a life-giving way?

• Where was I tempted to react negatively but caught myself?
• Where did others give me life and blessing?

Then take time to thank God for these times and feel good that you were are part of these life-giving experiences. You have truly been a partner with God.

In this New Year, may we all choose life. For ourselves. For those around us. And for God. In doing so, we will give life to Hashem as well. And we will indeed become founts of living water. L’shana Tova. And may we all be inscribed in the Book of Life. Amen.