Sermons

Rosh Hashanah 5772 Morning Service:
"Open Up our Eyes"

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If you were to go to another synagogue on the first day of Rosh Ha Shana, a synagogue that is not Reform, you would not hear the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The Torah you would hear on the first day of Rosh ha Shana would be the story of Hagar and Ishmael. Hagar is Sarah's maidservant. Sarah is barren, so she tells Abraham to sleep with Hagar as a kind of surrogate mother. Hagar gives birth to Ishmael, and several years later, at the age of 90, Sarah gives birth to Isaac. After Isaac is born, Sarah tells Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Abraham gives them a skin of water and sends them out into the wilderness. When the water runs out, Hagar sits down and weeps, believing that she and her child are going to die.

At that moment, God opens Hagar's eyes, and she sees a well of water. The Hebrew verb used when God opens Hagar's eyes is:

- the same word we use in our blessings for daily miracles when we acknowledge God for "opening the eyes of the blind." There are other words in Hebrew that mean "open," but this word has a particular resonance – the sense of being aware of something that we could not "see" before, the sense of God enabling us to see something to which we had been "blind."

Traditionally, it is the following day, the second day of Rosh Ha Shana, that Jews read the story of Abraham and Isaac. In this story, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, and Abraham obeys. He builds an altar, binds his son Isaac, and lays him on the altar. As Abraham raises the knife to kill his son, an angel of God calls out: "Do not lay a hand upon the boy." At that moment, Abraham lifts up his eyes, sees the ram caught in the thicket, and offers the ram in place of his son. In this story, Abraham is so focused on obedience to God, that he is blind to other possibilities. He cannot see the ram that has presumably been there in the thicket all along.

I do not think it is an accident that Jews have read these two stories together on Rosh Hashanah for generations. Abraham and Hagar share an inability to see the possibilities in front of them. When Hagar is cast out of the life she has known, she wanders in a wilderness of despair, unable to see that there is a different future for her and her child. Abraham hears the divine command and sees only two options: to obey God or to disobey God. This is the same Abraham who just a few chapters earlier urges God not to destroy the city of Sodom. Far be it from you! Abraham cries. Must not the judge of all the earth do justly? And yet, when God tells him to sacrifice his innocent child, Abraham is silent.

It is hard to explain; we struggle year after year to understand how Abraham can agree to this. Yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we all have these blind spots – places where we can only see one or two options, or perhaps none at all. At the worst we feel trapped and powerless in those places; we feel like victims. We say there is nothing we can do. At the very least our lives are limited by our inability to see beyond our own narrow viewpoint.
Over the past year at adult education, we have explored different concepts of God in Judaism. As I reflected on these two stories that are associated with Rosh Hashanah, it seemed to me that perhaps God could be defined as ‘that which opens our eyes.’ When we find ourselves opening to new possibilities, new ways of seeing, there is holiness [surely God is present].

I began to think about ways that this holiness manifests itself in the world, things that help us get outside of our usual way of seeing. The first thing that came to my mind was cleaning the basement. Now, you may not immediately see the holiness in cleaning the basement, but this summer as I was trying to work on High Holiday sermons, I found I was much more interested in cleaning the basement. Some people might call that procrastination, but I think there is some wisdom in it – literally, physically cleaning out the old to make room for the new.
For some people a fresh perspective can come from traveling to a different part of the country or the world. For some it can come from building close relationships with people from different backgrounds, whether it is a different religion, race, class background, or nationality.

I have recently become part of the Jewish Muslim women's dialogue group, and I am already falling in love with these women who challenge some of my long-held assumptions. Sometimes, an illness or crisis can change our perspective and help us see in a new way what is most important. Stepping out of our comfort zone and trying something new, perhaps something that you never thought you could do, something that makes your palms sweat and gets you all jittery, and discovering that you can succeed – that can make things look different.

I imagine most people have had the experience of being able to talk about something that's bothering you or a problem you're trying to solve and having someone really listen to you, and afterwards being able to see the situation in a new and creative way. I recently heard someone on the radio talking about a new book called A First Rate Madness that proposes that certain kinds of mental illness has prompted fresh solutions for leaders in times of crisis. I haven't read the book yet, but it is an intriguing idea that something that is usually perceived as a weakness or failure could be an opening to new and creative ways of thinking.

I am interested in exploring this aspect of holiness that is expressed in seeing the world afresh, and if you have thoughts about what has enabled you to do that in your lives, I hope you will share them with me. Today, I want to focus on one particular way of perceiving the world anew, and that is poetry. Our High Holiday liturgy is filled with poetry and metaphor, but because we have heard it so many times, it may have lost some of its ability to surprise us and open our eyes. For that reason I try to bring modern poetry into our services. Poets have a gift of seeing things in fresh new ways, and through their words, they can help us to see life anew.

A woman named Kim Rosen wrote a book called Saved by a Poem, the Transformative Power of Words. In an interview, Rosen says, "To me a good poem is like a sacred mind-altering substance: you take it into your system and it carries you beyond your ordinary ways of understanding."

Rosen describes an initiative called "The Freedom Space" that was created by an Iraqi woman named Yanar Mohammed. This woman brought together Sunni and Shiite poets in Baghdad for a poetry competition. Yanar described the first competition as "ping-Pong poetry." Someone on the Sunni side would recite a poem, and somebody on the Shiite side would recite a poem expressing the same woundedness and longing. By the end of the first gathering, the distinction between the teams had dissolved, and they were in each other's arms. After that, the movement began proliferating all over the city and surrounding countryside.

Hundreds of people started coming. Gatherings were held in areas where people had been killed by militias for speaking poetry, and poets risked their lives to travel there. Even soldiers from the Sunni and Shiite militias have joined the movement, to guard the space or sometimes speak poetry from the stage. A few left their posts in the Army because they saw these poetry gatherings as a more powerful form of peacemaking. In 2008 the Freedom Space was held at the technical University in downtown Baghdad. A thousand people – Sunni and Shiite – danced and wept and cheered even as bombs were heard in the background.

Rosen believes that we need a worldwide Freedom Space. She has a vision of bringing poetry to every gathering of the UN, every peace summit, every World Economic Forum. She believes that poetry would interrupt the dualistic, sectarian thinking and bring everyone into a place where we are connected. Another kind of wisdom could come through.

We need more of that kind of wisdom in our world and in our lives. While I was writing this sermon, I saw an article on the front page of the Boston Globe. The lead paragraph read: Broadsides and partisan bickering pass for business as usual in Washington these days, but the Chief of Staff for the Senate’s liberal firebrand has created an unlikely patch of common ground. The article goes on to talk about Huck Gutman, aide to US Senator Bernie Sanders, who distributes poetry by e-mail to 1,700 readers including all of the senate chiefs of staff – both Democrat and Republican. Gutman’s advice is to listen to the poem. He says, “The worst thing to do with a poem is try to get at its meaning.”

Instead, Gutman encourages his audience to listen to poetry just as they would listen to music. He says that a poem should be an accessible way to hear an array of voices that speak profoundly and passionately. And it seems to work. The article quoted a chief of staff for one of the most conservative members of the Senate, who said: "He's not narrow-minded, and that's not something that you find everyday."

Dualistic thinking that sees only two possibilities – right/wrong, good/bad, us/them – is destructive. Ue need creativity; we need nuance; we need paradox; we need ambiguity. The writer Eve Ensler says that "we live in a country where people have forgotten to think in metaphor. With the loss of metaphor comes a lack of imagination, ritual, mystery and discovery."

This need for ambiguity and nuance is expressed in a poem by Paul Celan.

Speak, you too,
speak as the last,
say out your say.
Speak –
But don’t split off No from Yes.
Give your say this meaning too:
give it the shadow.
Give it shadow enough,
give it as much
as you know is spread round you from
midnight to midday and midnight.
Look around:
see how things all come alive –
By death! Alive!
Speaks true who speaks shadow.

Poetry, prayer, meditation, friendship, housecleaning! Whatever it takes, we need to seek out ways to open our eyes to new possibilities for wholeness, for healing, for internal and external transformation, for peace, for justice.

Let our prayers in this new year be for the ability to recognize the well in the wilderness, the ram in the thicket, the path forward that has been there all along but we have been too blind to see.

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