Congregation Beth El

There’s a Jewish tradition of dedicating learning to someone. In that spirit, as we begin to learn this evening, I’d like to dedicate this talk and our gathering to Rabbi David Novak, and his continued healing.

The rabbis used to ask: what is more important, torah study or action? Torah study, because it leads to action. The prayer is that in learning, in exchanging words of Torah in the broadest sense, that we orient ourselves and find a spark that will compel us to be active, to embody what we learn. And in the Jewish tradition, we learn with another, with others. In a way, the medium is the message – when we sit down together to learn, we enter relationship. And when we enter relationship authentically, this leads to healing and clarity and action. So, in the Jewish imagination, it is never just words.

Every year in January, when we are marking the birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Jewish torah-reading cycle, we also find ourselves within the narrative of Exodus. Fittingly, Dr. King was born as synagogues everywhere were reading about Moses beginning to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. And these twin messages of the journey to freedom are often recounted, compared, and analyzed in this season. I want to find our way into this conversation by beginning somewhere else, however – with the release of Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming album in 1979.

This was Dylan’s first album since becoming a born-again Christian. Most of the chatter then and even now when people recount the album and this period in Dylan’s life centers around the experience of his conversion – is he Christian, is he Jewish, etc. But I think overlooked in that is probably an even more controversial stand that Dylan, who has always gone against the grain, took. That is - the last thing fans of his wanted to hear or imagined hearing in the late 70s, which probably had the worst of the 70s and the 80s combined into one year – the age of excess meets the beginning of the ‘me’ decade, was the best-known single on the album, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” There was resistance from the fanbase: what do you mean, gotta serve somebody? Forget that – we want freedom to do whatever we want, we don’t have to serve any authority figure. Why don’t you go back to singing songs like ‘the times they are a changin’? John Lennon, supposedly in response, wrote a song called: “Serve Yourself.” Whatever one thinks about this period in Dylan’s recording life (and personally, I think it is an overlooked period that some great gospel music came out of), something about this song, at least, has stuck. Blues artists continue to cover it and it remains well-known, while other lesser songs on the album like “Man gave names to all the animals” have kind of fallen by the wayside.

What’s Dylan saying in this song? Like any piece of Torah, there are multiple levels and interpretations, but I would say at the heart of this song – “It might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you know you gotta serve somebody” - we find Dr. King and the story of Exodus. We find the message to serve. Freedom does not exist for its own sake. The story of the Exodus plays this out. We all remember, “Let my people go,” Shlach Ami, and we forget the second half of the verse, “in order that they may serve me,” v’ya’avduni. Freedom is not an end in itself. Freedom is a state by which we can learn to serve and to be of service – consciously, and without coercion. Gd isn’t saying let my people go in order that they have endless choices of ringtones, and Subway sandwich options. Gd is saying, let my people go so that they can serve me instead of Pharoah. So that they can be of deeper, more conscious, more holy service.

The story of the Exodus in a nutshell involves three parts. First, it begins with the reality of the condition of slavery, with the people being forced to serve a false master. The middle piece involves the people being liberated from that condition and given a choice in the matter. And the story continues with the third part, the part all of us are still enmeshed with today, the going out of Egypt, the long journey in the desert towards learning and coming to know what it is we are ready to commit to serving.

What does it mean to serve Gd? For many of us, that is a phrase that we’re not necessarily comfortable with. But let’s translate it. Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi says we no longer can employ the vertical metaphor, Gd as outside us and above us, a transcendent external commanding force. Rabbi Schechter-Shalomi says, in fact, that the whole idea of an external commander does not make sense anymore. Instead, we find an inside model: Serve what most presses upon you from your inner core, the locus of divinity that you find when you go down to your deepest, truest place. Learn how to listen to that voice, and trust that voice. When we are in correct relationship to that voice, we intuitively know that we need to serve others. Serving others means being in relationship to suffering – both our own and other people’s. When we are in relationship to this sort of listening, we know that our life, whatever we spend our life doing, will be a life in service of others and in service of something greater.

What Dylan is saying is that we are always in the act of serving. If we don’t choose, it is still a choice be default. Reb Shmuel Simenowitz has taught that we are all born under a particular mazal, a star/planet, that gives us a gift that we have when we come into the world. To use an extreme example, the shochet is born under the same mazal as the murderer. The gift is a gift – but we can choose where we turn with that gift, who or what it serves. We all have a relationship to call, to some measure of understanding that we were put here to be part of something larger than ourselves.

Obviously, we know Dr. King was a religious man. But we secularize his message sometimes, which I think blunts it. He was a Christian, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of preachers. He got into this work because of Gd. We can look at other human rights movements and other visionaries, indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history like Dr. King, and see people who were motivated by their faith, and see the role religion has played – and can play - in who we are as a nation and a world. Our faith teaches us that we gotta serve somebody.

I want to read an excerpt from Dr. King’s famous letter from a Birmingham jail.
“But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love; was not Amos an extremist for justice; was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel; was not Martin Luther an extremist; and John Bunyan; and Abraham Lincoln; and Thomas Jefferson? So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. We we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?…Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

Dr. King is saying this is how we serve Gd: by being a creative extremist for love and justice.

I think we in the Jewish tradition have coasted too long on that iconic image of Dr. King marching with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. We point at that proudly and talk about our ongoing pursuit of justice, and being true to the words of Dr. King. And Lord knows there were many courageous rabbis and Jews (as well as religious clergy and lay leaders of all different faiths) who took up his call and took those stands. But we must ask ourselves: what would it look like, what would it feel like – today – to be a creative extremist for love?

There’s an old story of a rabbi who was heckled by a man standing in the back of the synagogue, interrupting his sermons by yelling, “Whom do you serve?” Instead of having the man arrested, or at the very least, kicked out, or silenced somehow, the rabbi hired him to follow him around repeating his question: “whom do you serve?” all day long.
Dr. King also knew what is repeated in this week’s portion, too: Lo neda ma na’avod et adonai ad boeynu shama. We will not know how to worship the Lord until we arrive there. Dr. King asks us to really listen to where we are right now, today, and how we can authentically serve from that place, in a way that reflects the longings of our deepest selves.

May we heed Dylan’s call to serve, to be conscious and aware of what we are truly in service of; may we heed Dr. King’s call to be a creative extremist for love; and may we see ourselves still in that third part of the Exodus narrative, going out of Egypt, learning how we can commit and how best we can serve.

This winter season, fans of the 67 year old ‘original American Idol’, Bob Dylan, are being treated to a new Dylan album unlike any that has come before: a Christmas album. This news is being heralded as stunning and bizarre by Jewish and Christian Dylan fans alike, who despite their differences in religion, are united in their confusion about this recent album from the old poet/prophet. Some loved it, some hated it. Reviews range from “mind-crunchingly wrong” to “brilliant” to “downright weird.”

Dylan, who is Jewish but had a high-profile born-again Christian phase in the 1980s, has always been sly and evasive about his religious leanings, and has succeeded in cultivating a mystery around his spirituality of choice (as well as around pretty much everything else). After the album came out, when a British paper asked him about his current faith, he replied only, “I am a true believer” (one can imagine him winking as he said it).

The thing is that, upon actually listening to the album, one hears a lot of joy in it. Dylan is clearly having fun, celebrating the genre, and at the same time saying, perhaps, to not take ourselves, or our differences, too seriously this holiday season.

I think of Dylan when I hear the wonderful story about Jews and Christians arguing about who the messiah is: the Jews are insisting that the messiah has never come, and the Christians are insisting that he has come once before. When the messiah finally arrives, both groups crowd around and shout, alternatingly, “Isn’t it true that you’ve never come before?” and “You’ve been here once before already, right?” The messiah responds softly, “My friends I have been here many, many times, but you have been so busy arguing with one another that you have not noticed.”

Tellingly, Dylan called the Christmas songs he heard growing up in Minnesota, “folk songs.” For many Jews in America, Christmas songs are folk songs. In our family, I grew up with Mitch Miller’s Christmas album “Sing Along with Mitch” on the stereo (he was also Jewish, by the way). Even as my family lit the hannukiah and celebrated eight nights of Hanukkah, “Sing Along with Mitch” reminded me that I was also part of a larger fabric. The songs comforted me somehow. As a parallel, I’m sure many Christian kids connect to Woody Guthrie’s Hanukkah songs, which celebrate religious freedom and courage in the face of intolerance, both themes of Hanukkah. Indeed, we draw from each other’s wells. It is one of the gifts of living in this country.

At the end of the video for “Must be Santa”, Dylan and Santa Claus (the Jewish troubadour and old Saint Nick himself) stand outside on the porch of a home that is having a raucous Christmas party and give each other a look that almost says, “Hey, you’re alright.”

In the end, Dylan succeeds in keeping the mystery of his faith intact, while proving, as one reviewer put it, that “his roots are everywhere.” On a song recorded a few years ago, he sings, “I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned / ain’t no alters on this long and winding road.” Jewish or Christian, Dylan is clearly winking at us.

We have a built-in sensitivity to place. The secular and religious alike among us seek out sacred places: places with historic significance, places of natural beauty and awe, places where we feel a ‘charge’ of some sort. Mircea Eliade famously said that such sites serve as an axis between sky and earth. When we are in these places, we experience what we might call revelation - in that something is revealed. We are affected. Jacob woke up from his dream of the ladder and said, “God was in this place, and I, I did not know.”

In a few weeks, we will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates the seminal moment of revelation in Judaism – the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. It is not surprising that the site for this revelation is a mountain, which literally occupies that rare air between heaven and earth, and requires effort to climb and endure. The revelation stories in many cultures take place on mountains. In our specific example in Exodus, thunder and lightning fill the sky; there is smoke, fire, and trembling. The people take their places at the foot of the mountain and prepare to receive best they can. A major distinction in Judaism is that the moment of revelation, which in most traditions is given to a particular prophet who then relays it to the people, is something that the entire people share at Sinai. Granted, the people cannot endure this axis moment for long, and need to retreat – but the attempt is there.

For some of us, the mountaineers among us perhaps, the mountain is the most intuitive setting for this kind of holy encounter. I’m not someone who climbs a lot of mountains (or even does well with heights), but years ago, when I climbed the mountain in the Sinai peninsula known by the Bedouin as Jabal Musa (the mountain of Moses), I knew that even if this spot may not have been the actual mountain, it was clearly a place to go to get down to brass tacks with G-d. We watched the purple sunrise over Saudi Arabia after hiking all night to the summit, and the revelation was wordless and profound.

Yet I wonder about the mountain when I compare it to other axis sites, particularly labyrinths. A labyrinth is a sort of maze – but one in which there is only one path that winds and branches and leads to a center. It appears in the stories of many cultures, particularly in Greek mythology. Judaism does not have much evidence of physical labyrinths, though it was said that when a pilgrim in the middle ages couldn’t afford to go to Jerusalem, he or she would walk a labyrinth to simulate the experience of being in the holy city. Prayer has often been described as entering into a labyrinth of the spirit.

I am drawn to this model because it is not a model of G-d ‘up there,’ but instead a model where we find G-d by tunneling within. Early on, as children in this culture, we learn to locate G-d above. Art Green has written that it may be time for a new metaphor. “Let us think of the journey to G-d as a journey inward, where the goal is an ultimately deep level within the self rather than the top of a mountain,” he writes, “Spiritual growth, in this metaphor, is a matter of uncovering new depths rather than attaining new heights. Perhaps we could even try to think of Torah itself as having been given at the deepest level of inner encounter, rather than from the top of the highest mountain, the mountain serving as a vertical metaphor for an inward event.”

Maybe we also don’t have to work as hard to climb, at least in the ‘up by the bootstraps’ sense, to reach this axis. Scott Carrino, who teaches Tai Ji in Cambridge, New York, often instructs his students who are in the midst of movement to ask themselves “how could this be easier?” I always love this instruction, as I usually am striving or forcing something. Sometimes revelation comes when we stop trying so hard.

The labyrinth teaches us that the path to revelation is itself revelation. Each place is potentially an axis mundi. Jacob’s story of the ladder teaches us that we never know when we will stumble upon such a place. The Mount Sinai moment – that we get ready to commemorate on Shavuot – teaches us that whether we climb up or in, we have to keep searching for a language of shared revelation. It is said that every person at the foot of Mount Sinai heard something different, and that every testimony was necessary.

It’s probably a safe bet to say that most of us take ourselves too seriously, and that our religious communities don’t help us in this regard too much. After all, stakes are high in this world of ours. We hold tightly to our identities and affiliations because we need ways to navigate a life that can be, at times, brutal and indifferent. All spiritual traditions agree that life brings us suffering. We see fascinating differences in our traditions however, by how we respond to this suffering: how we face it, how we make meaning of it. It is said that while there are many ways to G-d, the most tried and true of these come when we suffer, when we are wounded – because they can awaken us by reminding us powerfully of our mortality, our limited time, and the gift that life is. I think this is true. What are the other ways, though? Do we spend enough time learning these routes to G-d? As hard as it is to come to terms with pain and the wounds that each of us carry, in some respects, it can be even harder to come to terms with joy, to learn to trust joy, to find a spiritual path through joy.

In regards to taking ourselves too seriously, Judaism is no different than the rest. But there is one exception to this, a holiday that comes once a year and pulls the carpet out from underneath our serious posturing, and that is Purim. On Purim, we read the beguiling story of Esther from the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Esther is a strange choice to be included in the canon, as not only does it read more as a Brothers Grimm tale, complete with heroes (Mordechai) and villains (Haman), but it is full of sexual innuendo, and G-d’s name doesn’t appear once in the story – one of only two books in the Bible where this is the case! To add to this craziness, it is customary on Purim to dress up in costume, and to celebrate so much that one does not know the difference anymore between Mordechai and Haman! What is going on here? Judaism, like any religion, is built by defining clear boundaries, and giving clear instruction as to proper behavior. G-d is supposed to be central in this work. How could there by a holiday where there is no G-d, where good and evil seem interchangeable, and everything is topsy-turvy? Put differently, it is amazing that there would be a holiday that seems to undermine the entire tradition that is built into the tradition itself.

Perhaps G-d is absent in the story because G-d appears to be absent much of the time in our lives, at least in dramatic, peak-experience type ways. It is up to us to find G-d hidden in the world, in places where we might least expect to look. Actually, Purim teaches, holiness is everywhere, but it is our task as humans to manifest it through righteous and just acts. The Hasidic commentator the Sfat Emet writes that what Purim is trying to teach when it says you shouldn’t know the difference between Haman and Mordechai, is that one can learn to see the divine presence in all things. Normally, he writes, we come to do the work of repentance through suffering and affliction, but on Purim we do this work through joy. Another commentator, the Aish Kodesh, takes it one step further: “The simcha (joy) of Purim is required: not only if a person is naturally in simcha or is in a situation where it is possible for him to rejoice, but rather, he has to be happy! Even if he is feeling wretched and broken hearted, his mind and spirit trampled, it is required of him to find even a little spark of simcha to bring into his heart.” The Aish Kodesh was the rabbi of the Warsaw ghetto, so these are not idle words.

What does this mean? Is it possible or desirable to force yourself to be happy? Purim brings us this challenge. Perhaps we are not being asked to force happiness where it doesn’t fit; rather, we are being forcibly reminded that joy can be as transformative as pain, that joy can be a path towards truth and holiness, and indeed, must be. Perhaps we are being reminded that in the absence of a felt presence of G-d, that we are called to uncover this presence, to find G-d in hiding, through living lives that bring holiness to the least likely places.

In the end, Purim turns out to be as serious as it gets.

We are here as a community – different faiths, different backgrounds – to celebrate the launching of what I think is a monumental achievement for Bennington – the birth of a free medical clinic – where those adults in our community who need health care but don’t have the means to receive health care – can come here to First Baptist on Thursday evenings and actually receive health care. This is a case of the people taking matters into their own hands and saying, you know, a civilized nation is a nation where health care is thought of as a human right. Let’s make this a civilized nation, or in our case, let’s try to make this a civilized corner of southwestern Vermont. In the midst of an extraordinarily difficult time, with economic recession, layoffs, when many of us are suffering in a variety of ways – in the midst of such a time we have had a successful and unprecedented year raising money for the Food and Fuel Fund, and now we are opening this free clinic. Our community should be proud of itself. This is what community is about, this is what community action is about. Of course, the opening is literally the beginning – the work is literally just beginning, but we should stop and celebrate the work that went into making this happen.

First and foremost I think we should thank two people whose vision and tireless work have translated directly into the opening of the clinic: Dr. Richard Dundas, and our Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, Sue Andrews. The other person who has guided us to this point and who deserves our great thanks is Reverend Jerrod Hugenot – and – First Baptist Church, their Board of Trustees, and their entire congregation, for their decision to open the doors of their facility to community initiatives like this one. It is much easier to say, well, that would be complicated, or, let them put the clinic somewhere else, etc. We should thank the entire Interfaith Council of Bennington, whose month in and month out practices faith-based community organizing. And in that spirit, we should extend our gratitude in the direction of Greensboro, North Carolina to Rabbi Howard Cohen, whose 13 years of work on behalf of the Council and of the community, among other things, paved the way for tonight’s opening.
We want to thank VCCU (Vermont Coalition of Clinics of the Uninsured), VIM (Volunteers in Medicine). Also, thanks to the following foundations for their substantial contributions: the Stratton Foundation, the Vermont Community Foundation, Merchants Bank Community Foundation and the Ben and Jerry’s Foundation.

In Judaism we celebrate and remember someone’s life on the occasion of the anniversary of their death, their yahrzeit.
Today is the yahrzeit of the great rabbi, teacher, and civil rights activist, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Among other things, Heschel used to say, “A human is a messenger who forgot the message.” It’s a great definition for what a human is. And of course it raises the question: what is the message? How do we remember the message? In our tradition, when we have a question such as this, we try to say, well, there might be a clue in the weekly Torah portion. Maybe.

This is the week we read the account of Moses and the burning bush. It’s an arresting image: Moses stopped still in front of a bush that is on fire, but is not being burnt up. Someone would have to stop for a while to notice that, right? You would actually have to wait to see that the bush wasn’t being destroyed. There’s a teaching that actually, the bush is always burning, it just takes someone special like Moses to turn aside and see it. In a similar vein, our neighbor, the other next to us, is always in need – we are just not always able to turn and see. We are not always able to ask the question that Moses does, how is it that this is happening? And then to find the sense of personal call in relationship to the experience: what can I do? This is what Sue Andrews and Dick Dundas and First Baptist and the Interfaith Council and all of you have done. This is a burning bush moment. Stopping to notice the needs of our neighbors, to ask why those needs exist, and to feel personally called to respond.

Grant Schnerr asks, why a burning bush – why that particular symbolism? What is it that burns but does not destroy? He answers, love. Love – is that which burns but does not consume. Love is that which burns but does not destroy.

So maybe this is the message that we have forgotten and that occasionally we remember: look, love, burn with justice. Rabbi Israel Salanter says we must remember that the other’s physical needs are our spiritual needs.

So may we continue to stop and notice, may we continue to feel the miracle of our interconnection, may we continue to be moved to action. Thank you.

The Western Wall in the old city of Jerusalem is one of the holiest sites in Judaism. It is a retaining wall left over from Herod’s Temple, which was built over 2,000 years ago, and is essentially all we have left of the Temple, the ancient edifice where God’s Presence was said to dwell all those years ago. As such, the Wall is a place of pilgrimage. One can go there anytime of day or night and find people with their foreheads resting against the stone - praying, crying, longing, remembering.

The site itself feels like a sea that many rivers run into. There is a heightened energy, and the prayers from the Muslim worshippers at the Dome of the Rock on the rise above spill over into the courtyard and intermingle with the Hebrew. Caper bushes grow out from the cracks in the wall. One feels simultaneously very exposed in the expanse of the open courtyard, and also strangely safe.

I remember one of the first experiences I had at the Wall many years ago, where I worked my way through the crowd and found a place where I could touch the Wall and rest against it. I remember praying from a very deep, intentioned place, and beginning to lose myself in the prayer and the energy of the site. At that moment, I felt a tap on my shoulder, which I ignored. Whoever it was didn’t give up, though – and the tap grew more insistent. Finally I turned around, and there was a man holding out his hand for spare change. A beggar. I felt a rush of anger, spoke sharply to him – I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m sure it was some version of: I’m praying! I’m involved in something holy here where it’s not appropriate to interrupt someone!

When I later relayed this story to a teacher of mine, he gave me a gentle rebuking. Actually, he said, this is exactly the time that the beggar should be asking you for money, and exactly the time that you should be giving him money. Our spiritual life should be intimately intertwined with our work in the world, and with our work helping others. In fact, what is our spiritual life if not the act of reaching out to the one in need next to you? This is the highest form of prayer.

I felt properly rebuked, and his words stayed with me, and come back to me especially at this time of year. In the Hebrew calendar, we are now in the month of Elul, the month preceding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - the High Holy Days. The High Holy Days deal with the themes of forgiveness, repentance, and return. The month of Elul is set aside as a time of soul-searching, a time to do the inner and outer work we need to do to bring ourselves best we can to this awesome season. And so my memory of the beggar at the Wall is a reminder to me – that the inner and outer work of Elul not only inform and enrich each other, but really make the other possible.

Please consider a donation to the Food and Fuel Fund as part of your practice this fall, whatever your religious tradition. Checks can be sent to Food and Fuel Fund c/o Congregation Beth El at 107 Adams Street, Bennington, VT 05201. May consciousness of our interdependence continue to expand and help guide our work and our prayers as we enter this autumn, into these days of awe.

Sometimes I think the place where Judaism and Christianity most overlap is in the Book of Psalms. Tradition has it that the Psalms were written by that old poet/shepherd/king himself, David. And even if modern scholarship would suggest otherwise (the psalms were probably composed over six centuries beginning as early as the 10th century BCE), if we imagine that David is the author, we have an unprecedented glimpse into the inner life of one of our ancestors. The psalms, while obviously not devoid of potential theologies that could be grafted onto them, are a collection of poems that turns us inward, as poetry does. At the center of each psalm we find the rocky and mysterious relationship between the psalmist and God. This is why, perhaps more than in any other book the two religions share, we can all find ourselves reflected in the psalms, in their representation of the whole gamut of human emotions from rage to joy to fear to love to abandonment to fragile hope.

The psalms remind us, in the words of Nachman of Braslav, that God desires a broken heart. One interpretation of this is that true prayer is simply giving voice to whatever is welling up in us, without dressing it up or being either strategic or shameful with our words. The broken heart is perhaps the genesis of prayer in that it is a breaking open of something once rigid that allows us new access to that which is hidden or blockaded, be it painful or joyous. The psalms teach us that we don’t have to smile in synagogue / church, unless we want to. They teach us that praise is a large and multifarious term.

Kathleen Norris, the poet and Benedictine nun once wrote, “A writer, whose name I have forgotten, once said that the true religions of America are optimism and denial. The psalms demand that we recognize that praise does not spring from a delusion that things are better than they are, but rather from the human capacity for joy. Only when we see this can we understand that both lamentation and exultation can be forms of praise.”

In an interview this past week on VPR, the writer Michael Ondaatje, said that his novels are more like poems in that they don’t adhere to traditional narrative structures and that they try to give space to the reader to participate. This is what poetry does: it creates the possibility of participation. We read a poem and we begin the work of finding ourselves in that poem. Then we turn towards each other and ask, what did you find? This is why, I think, the book of Psalms - as prayer, as poetry - is so well-geared to interfaith dialogue. The psalms are prayers, but they are also responses to the condition of exile; that is, to the condition of being separated from something that feels like a home, or a source, and then: the music we make out of that separation.

We have just begun a four session class at Congregation Beth El on the history of Jewish poetry (each Thursday in July at 4pm) that begins with the book of Psalms and ends with a look at the work of the late Israeli poet laureate, Yehuda Amichai. All in the larger Bennington community are welcome.

When Jim Wallis published God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It three years ago, he sounded a call to “take back faith” – from the agendas of the far right (which defined issues of faith as almost exclusively in the realm of abortion or gay marriage) and the far left (which tended to be dismissive about any role that faith could play in a democratic political system). Wallis wrote about faith’s role in challenging both the right and the left from a consistently moral ground. And he has continued to speak about developing an agenda across party lines in support of giving real attention to core faith-based issues, such as health care for all, the obligation to treat the stranger with compassion and respect, worker’s rights, the problem of poverty, and the fact that the earth does not belong to us, that we are among its caretakers.

In this primary season, there is much excitement around the possibility of, if not greater unity, at least less fractiousness and divisiveness in this country. The key, I think, is in imagining not a watered-down middle ground, where every issue feels compromised, but a legitimate collection of voices that are primarily and fundamentally concerned with social justice issues. This image of a collective body responding to the call to respect and work for real human rights is the prophetic voice in action. Wallis wrote that moral values can either be wedges that drive us further apart, or can be precisely that which unites us and leads us to higher ground. “Family values” has too often become a vague ideological term, when it should be about the day to day work of protecting families, working to ensure a living wage, working to feed the hungry. Says Wallis: “Family values are about human beings, not ideologies.”

Religion doesn’t need progressive as an adjective. Religion is progressive when practiced deeply, with a whole and open heart. Rather than being part of the problem, religion (when it is practiced like this) can be the fertile ground from which we might prospect for solutions. The image of America divided into Red and Blue states is not as bandied about as it was four years ago, and I think there is authentic hope that unity can be more than just a campaign slogan if it emerges organically and rallies around a re-appropriated “faith-based” agenda.

Nicholas Kristof just wrote a piece in the Times that says the age of the religious right is passing and that issues of social justice are again taking precedence in evangelical communities. Wallis is quoted as saying that half the white evangelical vote is up for grabs this election season, and that evangelicals are voting more on issues like poverty, which a CBS News poll found was at the top of the list as to what informed their voting choices.

Illinois Senator Barak Obama gave an address a couple of years ago that has stayed with me, in which he talks about why religion is dangerous to democracy and why it is also essential. He argued that, as non-fundamentalists we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse: “when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends. Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause…[But] democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values.”

There is an unmistakable energy this primary season, which I think is reflecting one of those moments in time when the possibility for real change is apparent. It is a movement away from a politics of cynicism, fear, or scarcity, and towards abundance, towards the possibility of real alliance. When faith enters the realm of the political, it only works when it reminds us that what we are ultimately serving is not our own parochial agendas, or party ends, or more power, but something larger than ourselves that we are included in. It is possible that Wallis’ call to action has not fallen on deaf ears.

It’s not quite mud season here in Vermont – we have a couple of months to go, hopefully. But you can never start getting ready for mud season too soon. There’s a wonderful Robert Frost poem, “Two Tramps at Mudtime,” which describes two tramps happening upon the poet as he is chopping wood, and requesting that they be hired to do his task because they are in need of pay. He is reluctant to give it up, but comes to see that their desire – to work because of genuine need - is greater than his, which is to work because of love: And he longs for his work, and perhaps work in general, to be driven from a place of need and love.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

The Torah is perhaps the place where, at least ideally, our avocation and our vocation come together, our love and our work, and this past week we read about the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, the giving of the Ten Commandments. Now, it says in many places that the whole world was created for the sake of the Torah; that, in other words, everything that had previously transpired in the history of humankind was only to bring us to this place where there could be an intimate encounter between God and humanity, represented here by Israel. But it took a while to get to this point, right? To go back to the story of Noah, God regretted ever making humanity; God looked down and saw muddiness, the messiness of being human – being hurt, hurting others, otherwise behaving badly - and sent a flood to wipe it all out. It wasn’t worth it – having to endure this muddiness to get to a place of intimacy in the future. But after the flood, to keep using this imagery, God probably looked down and saw even more muddiness, literally and metaphorically. Humans couldn’t really change, but God saw that they tried hard – so God’s heart opened and God said, I’ll never destroy again. Despite the perpetual muddiness. In fact maybe seeing the muddiness again taught God that it wasn’t the muddiness that was the problem, it was God’s response to the muddiness.

So what does all this mud have to do with the giving of Torah this past week? There’s a wonderful midrash from a verse in Shir HaShirim that describes Israel as a lily among thorns. The midrash plays with this verse a bit, and says that even many generations after the flood, God again looked down on humanity and saw – and this is a wonderful image - “muddy water within muddy water.” God again wanted to order the world destroyed, but then God caught sight of Israel, a lily growing up out of the mud, and God breathed it’s fragrance, and decided not only to spare the world, but to give the Ten Commandments, to give the Torah. To reach out in what we talk about as the greatest act of intimacy in the Jewish imagination – the giving of the Torah.

A meditation teacher of mine, Reb Anderson, once said that this is our work: to live in the mud, and to live skillfully. If we embrace mud season best we can, if we live this way, where our heart is opened by the muddiness of the human condition and not moved to anger and destruction, then a lily can grow out of this mud. Not in spite of the mud but because of it. The lily – Israel – doesn’t grow in spite of the mud, but out of it. And when this happened in our Torah portion this week, God smelled the fragrance, and was pleased, and gave the gift of intimacy, of the Torah. So this teaches us to not try to escape the mud, but to go towards it, to go further into this world, because that is where the lilies are. And our spiritual traditions, in Judaism, the Torah, help us to cultivate lilies in the midst of the mud. And when we are really living a life of Torah, to return to the Frost poem, maybe we are living a life where love and need are one. Where our work is our love and our love is our work. Something that we sometimes only realize in mud season, even if mud season is still a few months away.

We are all familiar with the opening creation story in Genesis. God says, let there be light, and there was light. But eleven verses later on the fourth day, the text says that God created lights in the sky - the sun and the moon - to tell time by. When we stop to consider this, we might ask: if the sun and moon were created later, then what was that first light? One tradition in Judaism says that first light created is the ‘hidden light:’ light that is stored up for us and that we can find only in those darkest moments of our lives. There are many verses in Psalms and the books of the Prophets about light rising out of the darkness, or about those who are walking in the darkness and come across a great light. The tradition says that this light is the first light in the creation story, and that strangely enough, it is only visible in times of great darkness.

Hanukah and Christmas are descendents of the winter solstice, the celebration that marked the longest night of the year (and the fact that each day afterwards there would be a little more light). As the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer, humans have banded together from time immemorial to celebrate light, and to pray for its return. Essentially, all the winter holidays are about this work: finding, creating, and recognizing light in the darkness. In our different faith traditions, we call this light by different names.

On Hanukah, which begins on the evening of December 4th, we light the menorah for eight nights, each night adding another candle, each night witnessing more radiance. The Hasidic teacher, the Sfat Emet, writes that the light that the Hanukah candles give off is precisely the hidden light from the first day of creation, the light that shines only from within the great darkness, when we need it most.

The Jewish tradition has long argued about what the true miracle on Hanukah actually was: the oil lasting eight nights when it was supposed to only last for one, or the Maccabees and their successful revolution against their Syrian-Greek occupiers. Perhaps another way of describing the miracle of Hanukah is like this: when one candle lights another, the light from that first candle is not diminished - there is simply more light. My teacher, Norman Fischer, has said that we are in the candle-lighting business; meaning that we are put here to give light to each other. When we give to another, it does not diminish our light, but makes the overall light more brilliant.

This holiday season, one way of being in the candle-lighting business is supporting the Interfaith Council’s Food and Fuel Fund, which provides basic support to those in our Bennington community who most need it. You can send a donation to the Fund c/o Congregation Beth El on 107 Adams Street – and you can also go to hear Rabbi and Stand-up comedian Bob Alpert perform a benefit for the Food and Fuel Fund on Sunday, December 16th at the Mack Performing Arts Center at the Arlington Memorial High School. And finally, we are having our annual Hanukah party at Congregation Beth El on Friday, December 7th at 6pm featuring the Wholesale Klezmer Band, which the whole Bennington community is invited to.