Yom Kippur

FAITH IN FAITHLESS TIMES

In a moment, we will rise for Avinu Malkeinu and ask God to listen to our voices, to renew us for a good year.  We ask God to thwart our enemies, and remove pestilence and violence from us.  We ask God to have mercy on us and our children and infants.  We ask God to please not send us away from these Holy Days feeling empty. 

Avinu Malkeinu , sh’ma koleinu.  

Avinu Malkeinu, chadesh aleinu shana tova.

Avinu Malkeinu, na al t’shivenu reikam mil’fanecha.

We ask these things, but how many of us believe that anyone or anything is actually listening?  If we don’t believe that God is there, then these long rituals of atonement today feel hollow, even silly.  They feel like quaint vestiges of a time when people believed, but as modern smart people, we know better.  At best they feel like metaphors.

Faith is so hard for so many of us, especially as Jews.  Especially as Reform Jews. 

A 2021 Pew Survey of the Jewish community in America found that while 86% of Orthodox Jews say religion is very important to then, only 14% of those who identify as Reform Jews said religion is very important to them, and another 33%  said religion was somewhat important.  Fifty-three percent said religion was not very or not at all important to them.  Conservative Jews are about twice as like to say religion is important to them.  Only 4% of Reform Jews attend services weekly, in contrast with 14% of Conservative Jews and 73% of Orthodox Jews.  And only 18% of Reform Jews said they believe in the God of the Bible, although an additional 59% said they believed in some sort of higher power.

Why is faith such a challenge for so many Reform Jews? 

Some of it is that not so long ago our people experienced the worst genocide in history and 1/3 of us were wiped out and no God swooped in to save us.  We are still living through the rupture in faith created by the Shoah.

Some of it is that we know from science that many of the things people used to attribute to God are indeed explainable natural processes and we know as time goes on, more mysteries will be solved by science.  As Reform Jews, I think our faith in science is often much stronger than our faith in God.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, but we do need to remember that science can’t answer questions of ethics and justice.   

Some of it is that we have seen all too often that faith can turn to fanaticism and bigotry, to hatred and violence, and we want no part of that.  Reform Judaism emerges during the Enlightenment when Jews were allowed to study at secular graduate schools.  Our movement is rooted in a serious skepticism about true-believers and fundamentalists. 

Some of us have trouble with religion because as progressives, we see religion as just another way those in power manipulate the masses to work against their own interests, and this has no doubt been true in much of history. Some of us still see religion as the “opiate of the masses” that keeps us from uniting against our oppressors.   

Perhaps we put our faith not in God but in progress, in social justice, and in humanism.  We have faith that humanity working together can liberate itself, create more just societies, and move societies toward progress for the greater good.

I find that these days, that sort of faith is getting harder and harder to hold onto as well.  Which leaves us in a vulnerable place this Yom Kippur

So faith is hard for us and for some good reasons.  Faith is hard for me and every rabbi I’m friends with.  Before we rise for Avinu Malkeinu, I want to acknowledge that reality in this room.   I want to acknowledge that this is one of the key reasons so many Jews we know are not in this room, and don’t set foot in a synagogue. 

These past years have been particularly hard on all sorts of faith- faith in leaders, in science, in the courts - and yet we are seeing at the same time unnerving growth of faith in grand conspiracy theories, in great powers that do evil, and in saviors that can defeat the forces of darkness.    Perhaps the fertile soil for conspiracies and authoritarian rulers was in part created by the loss of traditional faith and practices.   

The brilliant writer David Foster Wallace hinted at this in his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.  He said:

…in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

These days, I fear that some of things people are worshipping will eat us alive, but perhaps instead of concluding that faith is dangerous, we should be a bit more thoughtful about what we worship.    And if we have any hope for liberal Judaism to survive into future generation, we need to make it meaningful and integral in our daily lives. As a culture club, it will not last because it will not provide what a spiritual tradition must provide: a belief in and a way to connect to a sense of the sacred.

I believe that is why modern Orthodox Judaism is today outgrowing and more liberal forms of Judaism are not.

If we want Reform Judaism to survive, if we want egalitarian, inclusive, skeptical but meaningful Judaism to continue, and our children and their children to continue to be Jews, then we need to find a way to create a vibrant, spiritual faith-rooted Reform Judaism that is central and meaningful in our lives.  Kids know when we are going through the motions, and no amount of Hebrew school can match what parents convey at home to their children about faith and religion. 

We are all so busy, that adding on time for spiritual exploration just never seems a priority.  Most of us can’t find time to exercise, go to the gym, read a novel, or do the things we most love doing, so how can we make time for something as abstract as spirituality and faith?  I’m a rabbi and I like prayer and I have trouble making time for my daily prayers. 

But I think we need to try to center our spiritual lives more. As Foster-Wallace said, “everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”    What do our kids and grandkids, our nieces and nephews see us worshipping?    

What does the way we spend our time convey about what it is we really worship? 

This is an important question with real consequences for our well-being.  As Foster Wallace continued in his speech:

“If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you…

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

What if our loss of faith, our detached way of looking at the world is just a default setting we’ve copied while telling ourselves it’s who we are. 

In a famous scene in The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway dismissively refers to the clothes around her as “stuff.”  Her boss, Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, reads her:  

Miranda Priestly: This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you.

You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets.

 And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”                                                  

What if our discomfort with faith and spirituality is shaped not so much by conscious choice as it is a cultural default in an increasingly secular, individualistic society?

Disenchanted secular skepticism is the worldview most educated Americans people default to, but as Foster-Wallace concludes,  we can learn to see the world differently.  We can choose to pay attention to what is right here and right now, and we can learn to give time to the exploration of the sacred in our lives.

I am not talking about a dogmatic religious belief system.  I am talking about choosing to look at life from a different lens, a lens that highlights connection, beauty, love, and holiness where our default lenses work to filter those out 

At the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Rabbi Josh Feigelson defines spirituality as “the art of learning to feel at home in the universe.” 

A friend of mine, Miriam Simos, more widely known as Starhawk, a Jewish woman who found little spiritual meaning in Judaism and so went on to create a feminist form of modern Witchcraft. Hers is a worldview in which magic happens all around us if we can learn to see it again, but it is not magic as movies would portray it. It’s a different way of experiencing the world, one that we choose.  Starhawk famously defined magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will.” 

Foster-Wallace put it this way:

…if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Isn’t that Oneness what we affirm when we say the Shema?

If Reform Judaism is to thrive and continue, we clearly need to foster the kinds of shifts in consciousness that are central to a spiritual life, central to meditation and prayer.  Liberal Judaism has not been very good at this so far, which is why so many Jews turned to Buddhism, Yoga, or Wicca to have those experiences.  One-third of American Buddhists are estimated to be Jewish. 

But Judaism also offers those experiences if we give it the time and serious attention that people give to other traditions.  Judaism is a spiritual tradition of great depth and insight, one that puts forth a complex, nuanced view of the world, and one that can offer us profound spiritual growth and experiences if we give it a chance – if we give it the time and regular attention that anything worthwhile requires.

Jewish culture is a spiritual culture. 

I believe it will only survive if it is spiritually relevant in our lives, if it helps us feel at home in the universe.

The Torah Portion we read later today centers on these famous words, “Lo bashamayim hi” -  “the sacred is not in the Heavens, that someone has to go to heaven and bring it back.  Nor is it beyond the sea that we must ask, who will cross the sea and bring it back to us?  No, the law, the sacred is right here in our hearts and in our mouths so that we can do it. 

As we now rise for Avinu Malkeinu, knowing how many of us struggle with faith, let us ask that in the new year, we stay open to the possibility of holiness around us, between us, and within us. 

Ken Y’hi Ratzon.  Please Rise.