Congregation Beth El

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.

When I lived in Jerusalem years ago, I heard the story told at a Shabbat dinner, of a young Jewish couple, Sarah and David, who had taken time off from college to travel together to an ashram in India, where they lived for a year. I think the story goes that the couple broke up towards the end of the year, and Sarah left to return to the States. There she got interested in Judaism, and first visited, then later moved to Jerusalem. She and David did not keep in touch. For years, she lived in a women’s yeshiva, where the students study ancient Jewish texts, and though she went out on dates, she never met someone who felt right for her. Then one day, she found a wallet on the ground and because she learned in yeshiva, she knew that Jewish law obliges you to return a lost object, no matter what it takes. So she found an address in the wallet and set out to return it. When she walked into the apartment, she saw David there. He had also moved to Jerusalem a few years after she did. They fell back in love of course, married, and, as our host who was telling the story said, “they live right around the corner down the street! You can go there for Shabbat dinner next week…”
It’s a romantic story, but it hinges on a very practical element: the return of the lost wallet. There is a big distinction between Jewish law and common law when it comes to the issue of lost objects. Common law generally doesn’t put any duties on us to protect the property of strangers; you can see someone’s lost property and just walk right on by. The finder can do whatever she wants including keeping the object or choosing not to pick it up. By contrast, Jewish law requires that one who sees a lost object is duty-bound to pick it up and return it, and if the person they’re returning it to is not there, then they need to bring it home and care for it, and wait until the owner comes home. The origin of this law is in the Torah:
If you see your fellow’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it; you must take it back to your fellow. If your fellow does not live near you or you do not know who he is, you shall bring it home and it shall remain with you until your fellow claims it; then you shall give it back to him. You shall do the same with his ass; you shall do the same with his garment; and so too shall you do with anything that your fellow loses and you find; you must not remain indifferent (Deuteronomy 22:1–3).
Rabbi Marc Wolf teaches that the rabbis of the later eras took this commandment even farther: restoring lost property involves actively engaging ourselves in the return. He shares this ancient rabbinic teaching:
When Rabbi Pinhas ben Yair was living in city of the south, some men came there to work. They had two measures of barley they left with him which they forgot when they went away. Rabbi Pinhas ben Yair sowed the barley year after year and harvested it and stored it. After seven years the men returned and when Rabbi Pinhas ben Yair recognized them, he said to them, ‘Come take your storehouses full of grain.’ From the faithfulness of Man you can learn the faithfulness of God (Deuteronomy Rabbah 3:3).
So not only did Rabbi Pinchas keep the barley for them faithfully, he ‘invested’ it for them, and reminded them to come collect it. There are many stories about crazy rabbis running after people who tried to throw something out, trying to return it to them. People take this commandment very seriously. Jewish tradition devotes pages and pages to the fine points of returning lost things: is it just any object you see, from what point does one become a finder, what if there are no identifying marks, etc.
Rabbi Wolf connects this zealousness for returning lost objects to this time in the calendar of preparing for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the holiest time of the year in our tradition. It is in this preparatory period where we do soul-searching about how we can treat others better, and how we can get back on the right path for each of us. The Hebrew term for this is teshuvah, which is usually translated as ‘repentance,’ but literally means ‘return.’ It is this time of year that we try to return ourselves to God. We are the lost objects in question.
In Jewish law, if the owner still holds out hope of finding something, then we must return it. There is a restorative passion in Judaism: so much of the tradition talks about return, restoration, and fixing of the world. Rebbe Nachman says that Judaism devotes so much time to the laws of finding lost objects, because that’s all we do in life. To be human is to be a finder of lost objects, both literally and figuratively. In this respect, we learn that we are all on the same team, as it were, in that we’re commanded to look out for one another. To quote the Torah, we must not remain indifferent.

The Jewish festival of Shavuot, which we celebrated this past week, commemorates when Moses and the Jewish people received the Torah on Mount Sinai. One of the customs of Shavuot, is to stay up all night studying Torah, as a way of not only honoring the revelation way back when, but also to remind ourselves that revelation is ongoing. There is still thunder on the mountain, and a great spiritual task for all of us, is to remember that, as our brothers and sisters in the UCC say, “God is still speaking.”

In thinking this year of the idea of ongoing revelation, I have found myself returning to the poetry of Stanley Kunitz, the late Poet Laureate, who recently died at the age of 100. When Rabbi Ira Stone was in Bennington recently, he spoke about Torah as that which paradoxically expresses in words what words cannot express. This is how Kunitz saw poetry. For him, words and language were revelation. He describes being a child growing up loving the sounds of words, and that he was particularly fortunate to live in a home with an unabridged dictionary. “I explored it every day for new words, and then I would go out into the woods behind our house and shout my latest discovery and listen to the words reverberate. I considered it my duty to give my new words to the elements, to scatter them. Even though language is so limited, it is still our bridge between the touchable and the untouchable. If any moment where we feel close to God is impossible to adequately describe, or is ineffable, we still, in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, have no choice but to “eff” about it. If Moses came down from Mount Sinai with holy words, it makes sense that prayer could take the form of us offering the words back. Kunitz shouting words into the woods is, in this way, a wonderfully Jewish image. After all, Judaism holds that the world was created through speech, and that revelation came in the form of words of fire.

Every Shavuot, Jewish communities come together and attempt to find their way back to Sinai. This involves leaving the familiar confines of what we imagine we know, and this is one reason why revelation is hard to bear. Again, Kunitz: “If the poem moved only through the familiar, it would be so relaxed that it would have no tension, no mystery, nothing that could even approximate revelation, which is the ultimate goal of the poem.” Revelation is also hard to bear because it asks us to be partners in a covenant of life, it asks us to be responsible. Kunitz writes that there are obligations when a poet writes a poem. It must speak the truth. It must reach towards another. And it must have a social sense. And so it is with revelation. Revelation is true if it leads to truth: if it brings us closer to one another, if it has a sense of obligation, if it helps people suffer a little less.

When Kunitz was dying, he spoke often about wanting to become language, to become the words themselves. “The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue.” In my bones, I feel that this is what the Torah is also trying to do. Maybe one way of looking at what happened on Mount Sinai is that Moses entered into the realm of the unspeakable, and came back with a great poem that we call the Torah. Even though it might not adequately capture what happened, it is our best human effort. On Shavuot, we explore these words, but we also do our best to speak our own words back.