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To Believe in Things Unseen: A Sermon for First Day Rosh Hashanah 5765
To Believe in Things Unseen
A Sermon for First Day Rosh Hashanah
5765 (2004)
By Rabbi Susan Grossman
Last night I spoke about how each of us will be graded in life in the 3 B’s: believing, belonging, and behaving. This morning, I would like to speak about one aspect of believing: believing in things unseen.
We all know the saying, “Seeing is believing.” There is even a state in our union, Missouri, known as the “show me” state.
It is easier to believe in something when we can actually see it with our own eyes. But let’s think for a moment: where would we be if we only believed in things we could see? There would be no antibiotics because we never would have believed microbes cause disease. We would be sitting here without lights, microphones, or air conditioning, because we never would have believed something invisible could be harnessed for our use. We never would have developed the microchip, the cell phone or any number of other advances that have revolutionized how we live, do business and communicate because the technologies they draw on were, at one time, all unseen.
It was the ability to believe in things unseen that inspired individuals to turn their dreams into the realities that today make concrete differences in our lives.
What is true about scientific progress is also true about social progress. If not for people who believed in things unseen, Jews today would not enjoy freedom of religion or the right to vote. Woman today would not be able to become doctors, lawyers, senators, or rabbis.
As Jews, we know better than any other people the power of believing in things unseen. It is the very premise of our faith.
When every other people believed in gods they could see and touch, Abraham and Sarah believed in an unseen God at whose word they left all they knew.
We all know the story of their descendents enslaved in Egypt. Each Passover we celebrate the miracles God wrought on their behalf. But do you know what I think was the greatest miracle? The greatest miracle was that hundreds of thousands of people, who knew only a life of slavery in Egypt, actually packed their bags, put one foot in front of the other, and walked out of Egypt to an unseen place and an unknowable future. Our ancestors repeated this exodus in every generation as oppressors rose to destroy us.
It takes a tremendous amount of courage to take a chance on an unseen future when there are no guarantees things might not get worse.
Yet, none of us would be sitting here today if Abraham and Sarah or the generation of the Exodus had not had the courage to take such risks, to believe in things unseen and step forth into the unknown.
None of us would be sitting here today if our grandparents or great-grandparents did not leave all they knew and come to build a new life in a new land.
None of us would be sitting here today if members of our congregation had not had the courage to build a Jewish sanctuary in a community organized around interfaith centers.
Our belief in things unseen gives us the courage to go where others have not yet gone, to build what has not yet been built, to try that which has not yet been tried, when it seems terrifying, impossible or merely irresponsible because it can offer no guarantee of success. To really believe in things unseen means to have the courage to act to make those things real in the world.
Hayim Nachman Bialik, the father of Hebrew literature, understood this.
As he stepped off the boat from Europe onto the land of Israel (then called Palestine) he began to speak only Hebrew to his wife, even though she did not understand a word he said. It must have taken some courage to withstand her frustration and that of the shopkeepers and acquaintances with whom he spoke.
Reserved for prayer and study, Hebrew had not been spoken for thousands of yearsi. For all intents and purposes, it was a dead language and a dead language had never come back to life. Nevertheless, Bialik, and his colleagues, believed that Hebrew needed to be the language of a renewed Jewish State. Largely due to their efforts, the language spoken so long ago by Abraham and Sarah became the vibrant language spoken proudly today in Israel and around the world.
Without the courage to believe in things unseen, Hebrew would have remained a dead language. Without the courage to believe in things unseen, the State of Israel, itself, would never have been reborn.
Courage is the fuel that motivates people, like you and I, to take the steps necessary to transform our belief in things unseen into tangible reality, a reality that is seeable and touchable, that can move science, society and even history, itself, forward.
The antithesis of courage, of course, is fear and anxiety: fear of our enemies, anxiety about the future.
A certain amount of fear and anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing. Fear of strangers or wild animals can be a survival mechanism when it keeps us out of danger.
But psychologists teach us that fear and anxiety also have a serious down side: Our entire mental and physical processes become hijacked by the need for flight or fight.ii Driven by fear or anxiety, we may grasp a simple solution only to find ourselves facing a complex disaster we could have prevented, if only we had considered the situation more carefully before rushing forward. Driven by fear or anxiety, we may focus so much on what is going wrong that we cannot see what is going right.
The danger is that fear and anxiety obscure not only our ability to believe in things unseen but even to see the good things which may be right before our eyes.
We see this dynamic at work in our Torah reading this morning.
Hagar has many good reasons to be filled with fear and anxiety. Her strategy has backfired. She had planned to usurp Sarah and Isaac by substituting her own son Ishmael as Abraham’s heir. Instead, Hagar finds herself and her son exiled and alone in the wilderness. Their water exhausted, seeing no alternative to sure death, Hagar abandons her son under a bush and walks away to weep in despair.
Our Torah text is very interesting here: it says that God responds not to Hagar’s despair but Ishmael’s cry. As a son of Abraham, Ishmael, too, believes in unseen things, in an unseen God. He, therefore, believes he can be saved and so cries out for help. God does indeed send help, teaching us that the first step to being saved is the belief that salvation is possible; the first step to realizing any dream is the courage to believe it is achievable.
The Torah then tells us something else interesting: God opened Hagar’s eyes and she saw a well of water. In other words, the well was always there within sight! She just could not see it because her vision was clouded by fear and anxiety.
Don’t get me wrong. Pandering to fear and anxiety can work in the short term. It can win elections and mobilize armies. It can motivate good people to do great harm. One thing fear and anxiety cannot do, though, is empower a people to achieve victory. Hitler rose to power and swept across Europe by fostering fear of the Jew among people anxious over the economy. But it was Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt who led their people to victory by reminding us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And it is the Jewish people, rather than Hitler’s ubermentchen, who have survived and today continue to thrive.
As Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish taught so many centuries ago in the Talmud: “We (Jews) are believers and children of believers.”iii
That is true of the entire People Israel, our modern State of Israel, and our own community here, in Columbia, Beth Shalom Congregation.
We are believers, the children of believers.
Thirty-four years ago,iv a small group of congregants believed in something unseen: that a Conservative synagogue could thrive in liberal Columbia. They weren’t frightened by lack of funds or space, by demographics or temporary setbacks. Within 14 years,v these congregants, and the members who had joined them, began to believe in something else unseen: that a synagogue could still be part of the Columbia interfaith community and have its own building. Working side by side, they planned and saved until Beth Shalom was able to open the first freestanding synagogue in Columbia in 1995.
They may have disagreed over one thing or another, but they agreed that if you build it they will come: and they did: the congregation grew from about 150 member families to about 250, most of whom joined after the new building was opened (which I guess shows that some people still need to see something before they can believe it).
It seems like yesterday when David, Yoni and I first came to visit. It was love at first sight. We fell in love with the good hearted and caring people we met, people sincerely interested in fair play and in going out of one’s way to help others. We fell in love with the willingness we saw to grow Jewishly and to celebrate the joy of Judaism. We fell in love with the fact that children can be seen and heard here and that people are valued by how they act rather than what they wear. We also fell in love with things unseen: the potential to reach towards heights yet unachieved, toward goals still unimagined.
You know, when you fall in love, it is clear what you have to do. So David, Yoni and I moved from Yankee territory to Oriole country to become part of this wonderful congregation.
It has been a challenging seven years, sharing joy and sadness, growth and change, being welcomed into people’s hearts and homes.
Much has changed during this time: Beth Shalom had a little more than 250 member families when we first came. Today we have over 400 families. That is why there are not enough seats today and why we really do need to expand our building. We had 16 Bnai Mitzvah students in the first class I taught here. This year we had over 40. That is why we need more classrooms and a larger bimah for our children.
We have not only grown in numbers. When I came, we had no formal adult education program, now our program vies with that of much larger synagogues. We had no significant interfaith programs, now we are among the county leaders of meaningful interfaith engagement. Our social action programs vie with those of much larger congregations. Our youth programming is growing, as is our Hazak group for mature adults. Our Hebrew School really is fun to go to and our Bnai Mitzvah graduates are better prepared than they have ever been. We just won the gold in our Movement’s Schechter Awards for our Hesed Committee, which, with our Bereavement and Religious Committees, reaches out to congregants in times of sorrow or need. To serve our diverse population, on an average Sabbath we now offer a variety of services, from Tots Services, Family Services, or Kton Tales for the young, to our growing junior congregation and Shabbaton program for second through sixth graders, to services in our main sanctuary. We added monthly signing for the deaf and hard of hearing and raised the level of ruach (spirit) in all our services. This year, we are adding monthly teen services. There is a lot of choice for a congregation our size. I am happy to have such good partners in Cantor Walters and the Religious, Youth and Membership Committees to make all these services possible. Of course, none of this would be possible without the behind the scenes work of dozens of volunteers, the rest of our staff, and your generous support.
I won’t kid you: We have some real challenges and a lot of hard work ahead of us.
We are growing so fast, it is hard to get to know each other. It is hard for new and more veteran members to find where they belong within our varied and changing whole.
That is why we are beginning a new member orientation program and more actively building havurah fellowship groups. That is also why we have been reaching out to more veteran members with such programs as Kvetch with the Rabbi (in which congregants, lay leaders and myself get together to discuss congregational challenges and try to envision solutions) and the Golden Oldies Shabbat services, with the tunes you know and love from the 70s, 80s and 90s.
There is no growth without growing pains. We have been doing our best to juggle the competing needs of congregants and Bnai Mitzvah families now that we have a bar mitzvah or two almost every weekend. Like all compromises, it may not be perfect, but at least we made it work this year. And if we need to develop an alternative Saturday morning minyan, we will find a way to do so.
You see, our expansion plans are about more than just a building. The point of having more space is to take us to the next step in our growth: to allow us to provide more programs, from parenting and family education classes when the kids are in Sunday school, to a full teen lounge, to our own nursery school, to more outreach programs, to more choices of religious services, etc. etc. etc., to meet the ever expanding needs of both our new and veteran members. All these programs are possible; they lack only the space in which to hold them.
I believe we can achieve all these goals and more: we can achieve the truly unseen:
I believe we can become a congregation that reaches out so warmly and widely to the unaffiliated that they feel the need to come and stay.
I believe we can become a congregation that meaningfully engages every member in some aspect of our congregation.
I believe we can become a congregation that teaches our kids how to understand the Hebrew they now can so fluently chant.
I believe we can raise our spirituality quotient, to make even more services more meaningful for more of our members, and to make Shabbat as moving as the High Holidays.
I believe we have the talent, commitment and courage to expand our building and fill it with a dynamic, authentic, compelling expression of Judaism for the twenty-first century.
I believe we here at Beth Shalom are believers and children of believers. We are the children of Abraham and Sarah. Like them, we believe in things unseen: in a God who hears our prayers, in a community that helps us survive tragedy, in a group of people who work together to transform a modest synagogue into a dynamic community within which God dwells and through which God works.
In every generation and to each individual, God whispers, “Do not fear, for I am with you.”vi We really have nothing to fear except fear itself. The unseen is only unseen for as long as it takes us to actualize it in the world. There is nothing we cannot accomplish if we work together and continue to have the courage to believe in things unseen.
Much has changed. Much has been achieved. Much remains to be done. The best news, though, is that all of the initial reasons I fell in love with Beth Shalom are still true, because you remain a warm and wonderful group of individuals. Thank you for opening your hearts and sharing this journey with my family and me. May God bless all of us, our nation, America, and our people and homeland, Israel. Together may we go from strength to strength, and let us say, Amen.
© Copyright. Rabbi Susan Grossman. 2004. All rights reserved.
Notes:
i It has been brought to my attention that Rabbi Golinikin knew a tradition that Jews in Yemin, lacking Yiddish and Ladino, did speak Hebrew. Even if that is the case, Hebrew was a language reserved for prayer and study in most other places until the rise of the early Zionist Hebrew writers like Bialik.
ii Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 22ff.
iii San. 97a.
iv 1970. My appreciation to Marty Chaitovitz, Shirley and Larry Greenwald, Al Sperling, and all those who took the time to share Beth Shalom’s history with me.
v 1984.
vi Gen. 26:24.
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