Believing is Seeing:

If someone shows us, often with slow-motion replay, that the guy trying to steal second really was out, we reluctantly believe it. Seeing is believing, right? But boy, did we believe he was safe the first time we saw the play. Why were we wrong? We wanted him to be safe, we believed he should have been safe. We believed our team should win, so that’s what we saw. Our beliefs are the filters through which we see the world. In other words, just as much as seeing is believing, perhaps even more so, believing is seeing.

One of the most important things we do at this time of year, at this time of the High Holydays is to take an inventory of who we are, and much of that is a matter of what we believe. What do we believe about God? Ourselves? Prayer? Ritual? Israel? Judaism? Life and Death? It may be good to believe as we already believe, to see what we already see. Or it may be time to challenge some of these things, and perhaps change some of our beliefs.

That is what we will explore during this year’s High Holyday sermons: Believing is Seeing. Tonight, let us examine our belief in God.

For those of you who’ve already heard this story, I hope you don’t mind hearing it again, because I believe it is well worth repeating:

When I was a kid, my Grandmother often stayed over at our house. One afternoon I came home from wherever I’d been and she was sitting by the window with no other lights on – “it shouldn’t be too much electric” – and reading the paper. It was one of those days when all the headlines were dark and depressing: a war, a murder, a rape, a terrible car crash. She looked up at me and said, with great sadness:

“Az der Abishter volt du gevoint, volt men zeinen fenster oichet tzevbrochen.,”
Which means: If God lived on earth they’d break his windows, too!

          You know what? Jewish tradition says that God did once live on earth, used to live on earth in the Garden of Eden, or at least hung out there a while to inspect what the Almighty had created. Right after Adam and Even ate the apple and realized they were naked the text says:

They [Adam and Eve] heard the sound of God moving about in the Garden at the breezy time of the day; and Adam and Eve hid from the Eternal among the trees of the forest.

I believe that there are three crucial beliefs about God contained in this short verse.

First, If God was here on earth in the past, why isn’t God here anymore? We believe, says our tradition:
When Adam and Eve became wicked, God retreated sadly to a point a little above the treetops. When Cain slew Abel, God retreated further. With each incidence of wickedness, the Divine Presence withdrew a bit more, until now God lives in the highest heavens.

          Not just Alice, God, too, doesn’t live here anymore. Why? Because we kicked God out! Yes, really. You did and I did. No, you never killed your brother like Cain killed Abel. No, you never put a bomb on a bus that killed scores of innocent people. No, you never raped or murdered or did anything so major it would make God want to leave earth. Neither did I.

But listen again to the first part: “When Adam and Even became wicked.” What did they do? They disobeyed a direct order. That’s all. That’s how they kicked God out and that’s how we do, too. Forget about what the Rabbi says, or your partner says, or your boss says. What do you say about what’s right and what’s wrong? What do you believe about how you should act and what you should do? What do you believe about what God wants of you, what rules you should obey? Now think about whether or not you do. Think about how big the gap is between what you believe and what you do.

My friends, that is a good deal of what these High Holydays are all about: to close that gap, to act on what we really believe, to stop kicking God out of the Garden.

Second, God doesn’t live here anymore because we don’t like what we think God is like. Listen to the sentence again: “Adam and Eve heard the sound of the God moving about in the Garden at the breezy time of day…” Why the weather report? Does God care whether it’s calm or breezy, or if there’s a tornado in Brooklyn? Of course not. Who cares about the weather? Who’s impacted by the weather? Who can be at least inconvenienced and at worst killed by the weather? And who can’t do anything at all about the weather?

God, we often believe, is the storm that decimated New Orleans. Just look at your insurance policy: it’s an act of God. Floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, these are acts of God. And, according to many of us, so are cancer, heart attacks, car crashes, aneurisms – and all the other things that harm and kill us that are out of our control.

Friends, I don’t mind telling you in public that I don’t like that kind of God either. Having had it, and my wife having had it, I especially don’t like a God decides who gets cancer and who doesn’t. I don’t like a God decides who dies in a car crash and who doesn’t.

Many years ago I performed a funeral for the mother of one our congregants. Her father, the woman’s husband, was there, very much alive. To make things worse, the man’s favorite nephew had been killed in a terrible traffic accident a few months prior.

In the middle of the service, in his grief and his anger the man jumped up, pointed his finger at me and screamed:

“Your God did this to me! Why did your God do this to me?”

There was more, until his completely embarrassed daughter was able to get him back into his seat.

I understand why he acted as he did, and I empathize with him. The man was in terrible pain. He did what we all do when God’s actions aren’t to our liking: he kicked God out of the Garden. If God let his nephew die, then God wasn’t there. But who ever said we weren’t susceptible to the breezes in the heat of the day, or the car wreck that took his nephew or the disease that took his wife away from him? Who ever said we should believe that God is directly responsible for those things. Maybe it’s our beliefs that are off, and not God.

As long as we are human we will be susceptible to… whatever. Insisting we ought not to be is to send God packing out of our garden.

Lastly, the verse says that Adam and Eve heard God moving about in the Garden and “Adam and Eve hid from the Eternal among the trees of the forest.”

Did Adam and Eve ever see God? No, they just heard God. Based on these sounds, what did they do? They hid! Were sure it was God? How could they be? But they hid anyway. They jumped at the possibility of an excuse. We hide from the inevitable as Adam and Eve did: by convincing ourselves that if we’re not absolutely sure it’s really God, if we’re not completely sure it’s an absolute necessity, then we can evade and avoid.

Like Adam and Eve, there’s plenty of wiggle room, we often say to ourselves. There are others who can give. There are others who can volunteer. There are others… So unless I see and not only hear, unless I’m absolutely sure I have to, like Adam and Eve I can hide among the trees in the forest.

But we can’t be sure, and we’ll never be sure. Like it or not, we are shutafim ba’Elohim, partners with God. As one of my colleagues, Rabbi Marc Gellman, put it so beautifully:

Before there was anything, there was
God, a few angels, and a gigantic,
spinning, swirling glob of rocks and
water with no place to go.

The angels said to God, “Why don’t
you clean up this mess?”

So God took all the rocks out of the
swirling glob, put them in one place,
and said, “I will call this place the
universe. Some of the rocks will be
planets, some will be stars, and some
will be just rocks.”

Then God took all the water from the
swirling glob and spread it around the
universe saying, “Some of this water
will be oceans, some will be clouds,
and some will be just water.”

Then the angels asked God, “is the
world finished?”

God answered, “NOPE!”

On some of the rocks God placed growing things-and creeping things-and things which-Only God
knows what they are! And when God
had done all this, the angels looked
around the universe and said,

“Well, it’s neater but is it finished?”

God answered, “NOPE!”

God made a man and a woman from
some of the water and dust, and said,
“Look, I give you the whole world,
but you have to finish it.”

“Now you look!” they said, “We
can’t finish the world without your
help-so maybe-we could be
partners?’

God warned them, “If we’re going
to be partners, sometimes you might
get angry at me, and sometimes I
might get angry at you, but even so,
none of us can stop finishing the
world-that’s the deal.” And they all
agreed to the deal.

Then the angels asked God, “Is the
world finished?”

God smiled and answered, “I don’t
know. Go ask my partners”

          So that is some of what we believe, and that is some of why we’re here:

          To understand that God used to live on earth and can again, that in spite of the horrors of the daily newspapers, our world still has the potential for holiness.

To understand that we kick God out of our Garden when we blame God for our inevitable human frailties.
That our job is to be partners with God in cleaning up this mess and helping with the ongoing, unfinished process of creation.

          On this Rosh Hashanah, at this season of newness and change, let us return to our task of making God’s garden here on earth. Let us see if these are some of the things we believe about God. I do. I hope you will as well.

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