Believing is Seeing:

Believing is seeing, I believe, even more than seeing is believing. To a very large degree, the world we live in, the way we see things is a function of our beliefs. When the animals in Nazi Germany believed Jews were vermin to be exterminated, no amount of evidence to the contrary could shake that belief. It was only bombs and bullets that ended their insane belief system.

That believing is seeing is what I’m exploring over these High Holydays. This morning I’d like to discuss with you where we believe our beliefs come from. We Jews have a fancy word for this: Revelation.

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Let me continue by telling you, and I promise I’ll connect this to the topic of Revelation before next Tisha B’Av, in the thirty-five years I’ve been a Rabbi, I don’t know how many invocations and benedictions I’ve given, but it’s been a lot. In all of that time, there’s only been one that was booed and one that was rebutted by the guest speaker. It was the same one.

Before I came to New City I served as the Rabbi of Congregation Berith Sholom in Troy, New York. Troy is also the home of RPI, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of the top engineering schools in the country. I was asked to give the invocation at the school’s commencement.

The guest speaker that year was Dr. Dixie Lee Ray, formerly Governor of the State of Washington and at that time, Chairperson of the Atomic Energy Commission. During my invocation I basically told the group of graduating engineers that the ability to cook something up in our laboratories and think tanks, like nuclear weapons, didn’t give us carte blanch to use them.

You would have thought I’d attacked God, motherhood, and apple pie. The graduates booed! They didn’t like being told that what they did ought to be judged by something other than the purely practical question of whether or not it worked. Then, when the guest speaker made her presentation, she rebutted the invocation, essentially saying that I was among the Luddites who wanted to retard progress. She was applauded, by the way.

Dixie Lee Ray was also the last Chairperson of the Atomic Energy Commission. There was so much opposition to the AEC’s inability to sufficiently address safety and other concerns, that Congress abolished the agency in 1974.
Turns out, I was right, and not just because the worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear power, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor, occurred twelve years later on April 26, 1986 at 1:23 in the morning. I would have been right even if the AEC was still around and the Chernobyl disaster had never happened. I was right not because I was speaking politically – well, maybe I was, a little – but because I was speaking Jewishly. We Jews have a yardstick against which we measure reality. We call it Revelation, and I want to tell you three things I believe we Jews believe about it (See? I told you I’d get back to it, and in less than two pages!).

First, the simplest. We Jews believe in Revelation. We believe that there is a transcendent source of values, which is just a fancy way of saying that the ultimate source of authority is not inside us but outside us. That source, of course, we believe is God.

But we’re smart. We can figure out what rules we should have. Why bother with God? Perhaps Dostoevsky put it most succinctly in The Brothers Karamazov when he had one of his characters proclaim: “If God is dead, then all things are possible.” If there is no God, no source of values other than our own personal whim, what’s to stop us from simply doing whatever is possible? Isn’t that why the graduates at RPI booed my invocation, because they wanted no authority outside themselves to judge how they used what they cooked up in their labs?

Anyone who thinks that people won’t do this has only to look at any history of the Second World War. In response to that tragedy the modern rabbi and philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

We stand on a razor’s edge. It is so easy to hurt,
to destroy, to insult, to kill.
Giving birth to one child is a mystery;
bringing death to millions is but a skill.

Only a skill, yet certainly well within the realm of the possible. It is indicative of our dilemma that much of the Zyklon B gas that was used to kill our people in the concentration camps was originally developed to kill insect pests so that more food could be grown for the benefit of humankind.

Is it not abounding arrogance for us to permit ourselves to do anything we want? As Rabbi Heschel phrases the question:

It is indeed grotesque that while in science the view
of the earth as the center of the universe
and of human beings as the purpose of all creation
has long been discarded, in actual living,
we view ourselves as the measure of all value,
with nothing to determine our way of living except our own needs.

Perhaps that’s a good name for an age in which we do whatever is possible: the Age of the Grotesque. Dostoevsky was right: when people can no longer hear God, hear Revelation, hear a source of values outside themselves, all the strange and grotesque things that humans can think up, will be done. Just read your morning newspaper, or look at your podcast, or…

What do we believe Revelation is mostly about? What is the core, the heart of what God wants of us? It’s ethics, not power. Rabbi Heschel recounts a famous rabbinic summary of this message:

After the Eternal had created the universe God took a look at creation.
What was the word that conveyed God’s impression?...
the word that the Bible has is “good.”
When looking through a telescope into space the word that
comes to our mind is grandeur, mystery, splendor.
But the God of Israel is not impressed with splendor;
God is impressed with goodness.

          At another moment when our people felt they had heard the direct voice of God, the revelation at Mount Sinai, one of our sages asks:

When the great moment arrived
and the voice of God became audible at Sinai, what mysteries did it disclose? ...
Did Israel learn anything at Sinai about the enigmas of the universe?
About the condition of the departed souls? About demons, angels heaven?
The voice they perceived said:
“Remember the seventh day to keep it holy... Honor thy father and thy mother...”

God’s Revelation, however we each understand that word, has always said to the Jewish people: seek goodness through ethical conduct.

That’s all well and good. We believe that there is Revelation, a source of values outside of individual whim. We believe that the heart of that Revelation is ethical conduct. But how are we to know any of this? Do we believe it just because that’s what we’ve been taught, because of, to use Tevye’s immortal word: Tradition!?

It must have been so much easier to figure out what God wanted long ago in our history. “God spoke to Abraham, saying…” “God spoke to Moses, saying…” God spoke to the prophets, and to God knows how many others. At Mt. Sinai, says our tradition, God spoke to the entire people. You know what would happen now if you walked around claiming you heard voices? People would think you must have gotten a call on your cell phone and the words you were speaking, seemingly into thin air, were being picked up by microphone on your ear piece.

But you know, maybe it would be enough, knowing that if we follow Revelation we get rewarded and get punished if we don’t. At least that’s what Moses tried to prove to the people, but it didn’t work. On his deathbed he prayed:

Master of the Universe, I ask of you only one favor before I die:
open all the gates of heaven and hell, if only for a short while,
so that the people may see there is none besides You,
who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked.

 Do you know what happened? Nothing! Moses’ request wasn’t granted. The gates remained closed. The people never saw for themselves that obeying God’s Revelation would be worth it.

The reality of our condition is that there will always be doubt. Even though we seek God’s word, we can never be sure we have found it. Our sages didn’t shrink from this truth. It is we who shrink, we who demand absolute certainty that we know what God wants or we will do whatever we damn well please. The Rabbis, in their usual poetic language, said that all the prophets had seen a vision of God. All but Moses, however, saw God through a hazy surface, an ispaklaria as the Talmud puts it. Nonetheless, they were each sure that they had seen God. Only Moses, because of his greatness, was granted the privilege of looking through a clear surface. Therefore, he was the only one to know that he had not seen God directly, but only the after-effects of God’s presence.

We know we doubt, we know we will not see clearly, and we continue to seek transcendent goodness anyway. That, my friends, as simply as I can put it, is one of the most profound beliefs of Judaism. That’s why we’re here, that’s why we send our children and that is why we’ll preserve our Judaism:

Because a person who believes the good is found outside his or her personal whim acts differently than someone who does not.

Because the person who believes that the core of Revelation, the heart of what God wants of us, is ethical behavior, acts differently than someone who does not.

And because the person who believes, in all humility, that we will never know exactly what God wants of us but keeps looking nonetheless, acts differently than someone who does not.

In this New Year and throughout the years to come, may we seek the voice of Revelation and so seek blessing and peace.