Rosh Hashana, Day 1 1 Tishrei 5768 / September 13, 2007

This tiny device that I hold in my hand is a Garmin 350, a Global Positioning System, GPS for short. It is an amazing bit of technology. It is supposed to replace maps and even Mapquest. Sarrae bought it for me because she was concerned about my attempting to navigate while either reading a printout from Mapquest or trying to decipher a map and doing so while driving. And to do this at night while looking for street signs: Oy! Not an exactly a safe practice. So if I go somewhere new, the Garmin comes along for the ride.

Now, of course the system is imperfect. When in Santa Fe, when we inputted Trader Joe’s, which we had passed in our travels, it came up with Scottsdale, Arizona. Somehow the system didn’t know that the store had been in town for 2 years. Up in Los Alamos it had us turning two different times where we couldn’t: in one case the road had been reconfigured; another it was an one-way street. And then there was the time when it told us to proceed 1.5 miles on a given street and part way along the route, it said “re-calculating” and as part of correcting its own error proceeded to send us on a series of unpaved roads. And of course, just recently it sent me to Camp Ramah and had me drive up to a back entrance which is closed—and without a nearby cell tower I had to drive 3 miles back to a spot where I could call the camp and be guided in. And I really love it when it tells me to proceed on Powmia [pronounced Pow-Meeah] highway, that is the POW-MIA highway, better known as Sunrise Highway, or it tells me to continue to the Tree Boro Branch, which is its strange pronunciation for the Tri-Boro Bridge.

Okay, these devices have their quirks, and despite an occasional glitch really are invaluable and most of the time get you there without your having to have piles and piles of maps or print-outs of directions.

The very first question on the menu is Where To? And that is my question for this Rosh HaShanah: Where to? Where are we going?

To know where we are going, we must start with another question. From where are we coming? In the Haftorah for the afternoon of Yom Kippur, we read about Jonah, a man with a mission, but also a man who decided to flee his divine responsibility. You know the story; he gets on a ship and attempts to go to the other end of the earth; to sail westward from the land of Israel, when his mission was off in ancient Assyria, to the east. Before he ends up in the belly of the fish, his ship encounters a storm and as the ship founders, Jonah who is viewed as the probable Jonah, the jinx, the albatross around the neck of the crew of this ship, is asked a series of questions by the crew, now scared for their lives: “Tell us, you have who have brought this misfortune upon us, Mah M’lacht’chach, what is your business, Umay’ayin Tavoh, where have you come from? Mah Artzechah, what is your country, V’ayzeh Am Attah, and of what people are you?”

Seemingly, Jonah doesn’t answer all of their questions. He replies: “Ivri Anochi, I am a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of Heaven who made both sea and land.” Is his statement any different from Daniel Pearl’s dying proclamation that he is a Jew? Is it an affirmation of identity in the face of certain death? Or is it a statement that answers the questions the sailors ask: to be a Hebrew means to come from a people with a certain mission?

In the 19^th century, Hebrew as a designation for a Jew resurfaced. We still have the Reform Seminary called Hebrew Union College---the congregation arm only changed its name recently, going from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to the URJ, the Union of Reform Judaism. Israelite was also popular as was to be a citizen of Mosaic persuasion. And so whether one proclaims oneself a Hebrew or an Israelite or a Jew, what is one stating?

Only a few weeks ago, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger died. The son of Jews in France, whose mother died in Auschwitz, had converted as a teen during the war---after the war, his father tried in vain to have the conversion annulled, as a conversion undertaken for the sake of survival. Lustiger, who firmly believed that “the New Testament was hidden within the Old and the Old Testament came to light in the New,” continued to maintain his Jewish identity to his dying day. The unease that this generated for French Jews is palpable.

Often, as Jews we are eager to embrace those who have sterling achievements as our own. Look at how we claim half Jews, quarter Jews, non-practicing Jews as exemplars of Jewish excellence. And yet, Lustiger’s repeated assertion left us puzzled and irritated. He refused to recognize that for most of us to assert that one is a faithful member of another religion is to leave behind one’s Jewish identity; for that identity is not merely an ethnic identity, but a religious one, as well.

So where are we coming from? Lustiger had a grandfather who was a rabbi, though his parents were secular and sadly provided no Jewish content to his life. Are we any better? How many people can claim a learned Jewish parent or grandparent or perhaps now great-grandparent as part of one’s heritage? So what? What does it mean to have this yichus if your life is devoid of the content for which that rabbi or hazzan or whatever committed his life? What does it mean for us to join with Jonah and proclaim “I am a Hebrew?” We shall return to the rest of his answer later in my remarks, his statement about worshipping God. But for the moment the question is: where are we coming from as Jews?

Second question: where are we going? In this morning’s reading we read about Hagar. She and her son Ishmael are forced away by Sarah, concerned about Isaac, and they are reluctantly sent forth by Abraham who is pained by what may yet befall his eldest son. In this morning’s reading we see that she cries out in despair, but interestingly the text says that God’s angel responds not directly to her cry, but the unheard cry of her son Ishmael. (However, there is an intriguing midrash that asserts that there are three people whose cries were heard in Heaven: one is King Hezekiah, but the other two are those cast as outsiders, namely Esau and Hagar.) But a few chapters earlier, when she is pregnant with Ishmael, Hagar flees her mistress Sarah, who apparently was abusive. There the angel asks her: “Ay MeZeh Vahtah V’anah Taylaychee, from where are you coming and to where are you going?” And her reply is penetrating: “Mipnay Saray Givartee Anochee Borachat, because of my mistress Sari, I am fleeing.” Here, too, seemingly only part of an answer to multiple questions. But the heart of Hagar’s response says it all: she is fleeing. She doesn’t know where she is going; she is just attempting to get away.

What are we fleeing? Do we have any direction in our lives? Do we know where we want to go? How many of us have changed direction? I had a classmate in college who wanted to be pre-med. He was given a barely passing grade by his biology professor on the condition that he never enter the biology building again: end of his pre-med days. I think he ended up as a political science major and applied to rabbinical school. After a time as a dry-cleaner, so I heard, he is working for Smith Barney. The Protestant ministry is now filled with second career ministers: indeed the average age of those recently ordained is somewhere close to 40. (By contrast, although the rabbinate has its share of second-career people, it remains a youthful first or first and a half career for most.)

What are we fleeing? Are we fleeing our Jewish heritage? Yes, give yourselves a gold star: you’re members of a congregation and you are in shule on Rosh HaShanah. In that sense you are better than many others. In Nashville, I was told by the wife of the Reform rabbi—she works for the local Federation—that membership is over 100%, as some families belong to two or more of the local congregations, for they believe that all of the congregations, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox, deserve support. These Jews are not fleeing from their identity in the Bible Belt. Contrast that with New Mexico. The Conservative rabbi has estimated that under a 1/3 of the Jewish population is affiliated; and though Albuquerque is growing by leaps and bounds, the connected Jewish population remains stable. Clearly, many a Jew is moving there and fleeing her/his Jewish identity.

What have we given up in our march to success in suburbia? Towards the end of summer, I went up to the USY and Kadimah encampments where I had the opportunity to teach in both camps. I was to teach Shabbat to the Kadimahniks. Here are some of the more active and interested kids and barely half of them had Shabbat at home on Friday evening. Yes, even the ones who didn’t have Shabbat, knew most of the traditional practices: but they weren’t part of their families’ lives. If I did a survey here and now, how many of you could say honestly that you had some semblance of a Shabbat dinner on Friday night. (I know how many of you actually come to services on Shabbat, so no point in asking that question.) How many of you light candles? How about making Kiddush and HaMotzi? Do you have a Shabbat dinner together as a family or is it catch as catch can? From what are you fleeing and to where are you going?

And finally, let us look at one last Biblical figure, at Abraham. Initially he didn’t know where he was going: he followed God’s directions to the land that he would be shown. But now, at the end of his days he again hears the call of the Divine to follow the Divine GPS to the mountain that God will show him and his son Isaac. (In case you don’t know, this is tomorrow’s Torah reading.) As they approach the mountain, on the third day the text proclaims, “Vah’yah’arh et HamaKom MeRachok, he saw the place from afar.” There is a midrash, a rabbinic expansion of the story, which answers the question: what did he see? And it says: Abraham saw a cloud enveloping the mountain and concluded that must be the place where he had to go with his son. Isaac, also saw the Holy spot. But the lads who traveled with them did not. And so Abraham said to them, “Since you do not see it, you stay here with the donkey, because you are like the donkey; it can’t see anything either.” As Rabbi Sandy Sasso comments in her new book God’s Echo, while the father and son and the companions all stood in the same place, they saw different things: Why? “Abraham and Isaac are atuned to the holy; their eyes are open to the sacred. The companions’ eyes are closed; they see only the commonplace.” Are our eyes atuned to the holy?

Is our journey taking us to a holy place? Are we fashioning holy lives? Do we see the godly in our lives?

This is not an idyll question to be asked on Rosh HaShanah. With Christopher Hitchens book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything on the best seller list and on display even in the midst of the Bible Belt, as I saw at the Nashville airport, though there the book was surrounded by lots of books by evangelical and fundamentalist preachers, and with the op ed piece that appeared in the New York Times only a couple of weeks ago that revealed that even Mother Teresa had extended periods of theological darkness, of doubting of God, how can we not confess to our own doubts? Hitchens is right, and Rabbi Gilbert Rosenthal in his own book, What Can a Modern Jew Believe? agrees: a lot of terrible things have been done and are being done in God’s name. God has a lousy reputation. And certainly, for all of our prayers and devotions, how many times have we been disappointed? The Divine vending machine hasn’t provided our wishes, though we have inserted what we thought was the proper coinage.

Can we assert with Jonah, “I worship God, the Creator of Heaven and earth?” Do we see a world without the Divine hand—after all how many of us are creationists; don’t we believe in evolution?--, or can we nonetheless perceive the presence of the Almighty? Albert Einstein, the focus of a massive new biography by Walter Isaacson, has oft been quoted about God. One passage declares: “A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.” Not that Einstein was religiously observant in a traditional Jewish sense; but we can nonetheless be inspired by the fact that one of the greatest minds of our age recognized the divine in the universe. So, can we, even with our doubts, still affirm that there can be holiness in this universe and that we can strive to reach that holy place?

May’ayin Tavoh, where are you coming from? L’ahnah Taylaychee, to where are you going? Mah Ahtah Ro’eh, and what vision do you see?

These are the three questions are our own personal GPS’ ask this day and every day. May we arrive safely in a holy destination.

Shanah tovah.