The Purpose of our Enterprise
Psalm 8
When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and stars that You set in place,
What is man that You have been mindful of him,
Mortal man that you have taken account of him,
That you have made him little less than divine
And adorned him with glory and majesty?
The psalmist captures the religious enterprise, my work for these last 4 decades and more.
As far as we know, we homo sapiens, the upright mammal, are the only beings that ask the questions, "Why am I here and why do I die?"
In investigating our surroundings, starting with ourselves and moving outward, like an infant child who discovers there is a world beyond his hands, we humans experience the emotion of holiness: awe at a Presence more worthy than and beyond ourselves. The emotion is akin to fear; but is so much more, because unlike fear, awe does not threaten but is a salve for the earthbound soul.  Its trembling is the shudders of encompassing love, and a longing for the eternal home.  Awe overwhelms and uproots the moorings of place and time, transporting us for just moments into the midst of eternity, among the stars as our psalmist might opine. Awe grants perspective, and we find ourselves and our place in the universe in its embrace; like a child set free of his mother's hug yet knowing that mother's breath is ever so near.
Awe alerts humans to the presence of the holy, but does not define what is holy. That God left as a human task. Holiness may be easily discerned at a baby naming or a wedding.  But throughout the centuries holiness has donned different costumes. Our Torah portion this week, Naso, contains episodic encounters with events our ancestors felt to contain holy awe.
Our biblical ancestors often experienced disease as God’s absence or curse, and so disease indicated impurity and God’s disapproval, the opposite of holiness. The entire Book of Job consciously dispels the equation of disease with sin, so present in the Torah. Yet, people ask all the time, “What did I do wrong to deserve this disease?”
On the other hand, some of our biblical ancestors, called Nazirites, chose to declare themselves holy. Nazir today means hermit, or abstinent, or even a nun in modern Hebrew. These people temporarily or permanently chose holiness as their preoccupation. To achieve a holy state of being, they refrained from grapes in any form, including wine, or any strong intoxicants. They didn’t cut their hair. And they were particularly forbidden to approach a dead body, a strong contaminant because death absolutely defiles; it’s the polar opposite of holiness.
How they arrived at these particular stringencies, like wine and grapes, is anyone’s guess, and many have. Rather than analyze the holiness in such laws, some of which we understand and some is beyond us, let us state the obvious: that humans search for experiences revealing God’s inexhaustible presence.
Perhaps Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was correct and God is in search of humanity; that it is not God who moves away but we humans. We witness the same phenomenon concerning love: many people will declare that they were once in love but no longer are. Who moved away, ourselves or the beloved? Perhaps in the divine/human encounter we know who moved, as God is a constant without change. Perhaps we move away from God. But the emotion of awe demonstrates God’s existence and presence in our lives.
We, like our ancestors, encounter God’s presence in the awe of life and death. We feel it viscerally at births, brises, baby-namings, deaths and funerals. We may feel it when a youth breaks through the childhood chrysalis to become a butterfly at bar/bat mitzvah or Confirmation, when we see our children glow in a new light and it brings perhaps inexplicable tears of joy. So often we make a joke, or become sarcastic, in this world that avoids and even rejects the holy as though it were unreal. How often I have wished that celebrants would simply live the moment as is, and fully imbibe, taste and swallow the overflowing joy and awe of the spiritual moment. Instead, so often we escape into humor, banishing the uncomfortably awesome Presence,  the momentary flash of lighting, the incursion of the divine into our small, time-bound world. How sad for us that we have been trained to not tolerate God’s presence and experience the eternal present in the moment.
But awe is not limited to a single set of experiences. We, like our ancestors, encounter God when we altruistically reach out beyond ourselves, connecting in Martin Buber’s I-Thou awe, losing the sense of isolated selves in that moment and gaining oneness with the world.  Anyone who has been there knows the fleeting energy and sheer joy of intense camaraderie.  It’s the reason soldiers give their lives for their buddy. It’s the unio mystica of the mystic. It’s eternity lived in a moment as clock hands merge into a single, seamless and timeless reality. You’ll hear soldiers talk about never having lived as meaningful a life as when they feared for their lives on the battlefield and suffered. Why? Because they were prepared to give up everything for a friend, or a cause so deep they’d sacrifice life itself. Here we find awe, just as in our people’s past.
And finally, there is the awe of community, being part of something greater than ourselves. You and I together comprise a community, stretching back 3000 years and across every continent and country on this globe. We are the spiritual inheritors of Moses and Zipporah, of Akiva and Rachel, of Emma Lazarus, and Albert Einstein and Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin and Theodor Herzl and David ben Gurion and millions of others. When people enter this building, even strangers tell me how accepted they feel because of the heartfelt reception. In this congregation everyone sings out, everyone prays together. You should be up on the bima sometime and hear this congregation sing Shema, or Avot v’Imahot, or Chatzi Kaddish. It takes my breath away for its beauty: one voice and one people. Together we have achieved a modern American Judaism in southern Johnson County, and I hope and pray there will be moments in your lives, as there are constantly in mine, when you feel the awe and God’s presence among God’s people.  We bring the Shekinah down to earth with our prayers, and everyone feels it each time we gather in large community.  When we welcome strangers; and when we collect tons of food to feed the hungry; and when we serve meals at reStart, God’s awesome presence abides. I can close my eyes and feel God’s awe, and I pray that you do as well.
The relationship continues through the millennia.  Like the psalmist, we know God’s presence when we gaze on the beauty of creation. But each generation also finds its own way. I pray that just as Numbers 6 concludes, so will we conclude each awesome encounter with God’s face:  May the Lord bless you and keep you; May the Lord’s face shine upon you and be gracious to you; May the Lord lift the light of his Presence to you, and give you peace.