AVINU MALKEINU / AMAZING GRACE

                Gut Yontiff, everyone.  I want to wish you all not only a Tzom Kal, an Easy Fast, but also a Tzom Ya’il, a fast experience that will bring us new insights into ourselves and our communities, and our purpose or purposes on earth, and reconciliation with all those whom we need to be closer to.

I recently stood at the grave of a good man, a man who had been taken from us too soon and whose end was characterized by a long and protracted battle which he fought valiantly but ultimately lost.  It was an end he did not deserve because in his lifetime, he had given much to his family and to his community.  And as I stood there, a relative of the man approached me and said, and now I paraphrase: “I probably should not be saying this to a rabbi, but I just want you to know—I’m done with God.  My father died a few months ago, my mother is ill and hospitalized, and now this.  No more prayers, no more mitzvahs, no more acts of obedience.  I am done.”

                As you might expect, this was not the first time that someone has told me this.  I have heard a confession of this sort many times before.  I did say to this man, as I would typically to anyone who had just confessed similarly that there is another way of looking at the world and if he’d like, I’d be happy to sit down with him and talk about it.  Standing at an open grave at Mt. Hebron Cemetery with jets roaring overhead is not the best place for a philosophical discussion.  But he never called and I’m not surprised.  His confession was not an invitation to dialogue.  He had written an essay of anger and disappointment in his head, and what he relayed to me was simply the concluding paragraph.  He wasn’t going to rewrite any part of that essay.  He needed only to vent, and knowing whom I represent for better or for worse, I provided this man with an opportunity, and he took it.

                The prayers of our mahzor admit that the world is one heck of a tough place.  In the Avinu Malkeinu prayer, we ask God to protect us from “war, hunger, captivity, and destruction.”  We ask God to “nullify the designs of our foes,” to ignore our sins and transgressions, and to heal the sick.  In the moving Unetaneh Tokef prayer, we ponder the fate of humanity and wonder who will die by fire, by water, by stoning, by suffocation, by sword, by beast and so forth.  It’s all a very dystopian vision of the world into which we have been thrust. 

                Beginning in the first and second centuries of the common era, there developed groups of spiritual seekers who acknowledging the harshness of the world, came up with an interesting theory.  They decided that this world was so flawed, so imperfect, that it could not possibly have been created by a good god.  To the contrary, our world was a mistake and the god of the Jewish Bible, with whom they were very familiar, was not the one and true God of the universe, but a lesser god, perhaps even a demonic god who operated with evil intent.  It was for this reason that there is war, disease, theft, murder and so forth.  There were other gods who were far better than the Creator of the Universe, and there was also one Supreme God, ruler of All, pure goodness and perfection, but as for the world that you and I know so well, its design and execution was done by a Reject divinity. 

These people came to be known as the Gnostics which is simply a Greek word referring to a special knowledge or knowing.  Our ancestors were pretty unhappy with these people.  The God of Genesis—not the real God?  A lesser god?  An evil god?  Are they kidding?  Our ancestors saw the Gnostics as blasphemous and denying the oneness of God.

                Unlike the Gnostics, people in the modern age are less likely to come up with a theory of multiple gods to explain the world’s deficiencies and excesses.  People today are more likely to go in the opposite direction and conclude that there simply is no God.  In this case, it’s not that a good God has created a flawed universe, but rather there was no God designing anything and therefore what we have is what we have, which is another way of saying—it is what it is.  There may be design in the universe, but it’s far from intelligent.  This world is godless.  For those of us who have been wounded by the circumstances of life, we know how debilitating the apparent absence of God can feel.

                Answering the question as to why the world is so flawed is worth several years of reflection, and that would only be scratching the surface of the problem.  But knowing how flawed the world is, how do we choose to make our way through it all—through the hardships, the anxieties, the disappointments?

                Whenever I’ve had occasion to attend a Christian service, especially a funeral, I am always struck in hearing the hymn Amazing Grace.  It’s a very stirring melody, recorded numerous times by a variety of popular artists—Judy Collins, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson—but the lyrics leave me a bit in a quandary, probably because they reflect a christological approach to understanding the world.  Do I sing with the congregation?  I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I shouldn’t be singing a Christian hymn.  The first two stanzas read:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.

The words themselves were penned by John Newton (1725-1807), a slave trader, substantially depraved—foul-mouthed and irreverent—but one who cheated death on several occasions, went through a personal conversion and ended up an Anglican cleric.  The poem reflects a specifically Protestant idea that it really doesn’t matter what you do in life, it doesn’t matter how good or kind you are, and as far as that goes, it doesn’t matter how corrupt or unethical you are, whether or not you will have any sort of relationship with God rests with God and God alone.  You have nothing to do with it.  Note that this is distinct from Catholic theology which does regard deeds as impacting on grace.  It should be further noted that this in no way implies that Protestants have no reason to be moral.  Morality is the domain of all decent and spiritual people, but the question is whether good deeds can rigger God's grace, and the Protestants will essentially claim that it cannot.  Jews essentially don’t think that way.  

We see it all differently.  God takes all our good deeds and puts them onto one plate of the scale and then God takes all our bad deeds and puts them onto the other plate of the scale and our fate, our relationship with God, our future depends on the weight of one versus the other.  That is to say, we are in control of our fate and it depends on the kind of person we have chosen to be during the past year.  Our Protestant neighbors would simply counter with a Latin phrase, Sola Gratia—Grace Alone.  Our deeds are irrelevant.  The only thing that can save us is God’s grace, and God’s grace is totally in God’s hands, not ours.  When a singer sings that it was “grace that saved a wretch like me,” you can be sure those words reflect a Protestant notion, and however beautiful a hymn Amazing Grace may be, Jewish it is not.

                But here’s the thing about Christian doctrine.  It’s almost always some spin on a Jewish doctrine which was not granted the ascendancy in Judaism that it did in Christianity or, just the converse, Christianity de-emphasized something that Judaism regarded as fundamental.  For that reason, it’s interesting to examine the role God’s grace does play in our tradition.  And we need look no further than the mahzor for evidence of just how important grace is:

Avinu Malkeinu   Our Father, our King…

Honeinu va’aneinu   Be gracious to us and answer us!

 That is the final Avinu Malkeinu in the Avinu Malekeinu litany.  So we do not talk about God’s grace per se but we make reference to God’s graciousness.  What does it mean to be gracious?  We all know what graciousness is—it’s generosity, kindness, high-mindedness, magnanimity.  We know what ungraciousness is as well—selfishness, resentment, pettiness, mean-spiritedness.  But it’s God’s graciousness that we need at this time because as the Avinu Malkeinu hymn reminds us:

Ein banu ma’asim   We really have no deeds to defend ourselves…

Wait—we have no deeds?  That almost sounds like the Protestant doctrine of Sola Gratia—Grace Alone.  Of course we have deeds.  That’s what we’ve been talking about for the last ten days—good deeds versus bad deeds.  Especially during the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance, when we are urged to do as many positive acts as possible to influence a decision of the Heavenly Court that may be leaning a little more in a direction that makes us uncomfortable.  We want our good deeds to speak for themselves, to overpower and outweigh the not-so-good deeds, and influence the Kadosh Barukh Hu, the Holy One, in a direction more favorable to us.  But the Avinu Malkeinu prayer reminds us that the whole heavenly court system creates a terrible dilemma.  And here it is:  Without arguing our case before God, will God really know how good we are?  We do need to defend ourselves.  But in arguing our goodness before God, don’t we come off as a bit arrogant, smug, holier than Thou?  And if you ever want to be holier than Thou, it’s a good idea to not target the Master of the Universe as the Thou with whom you’re trying to be holier than.  What to do?  What to do is to be honest and take to heart the words of Avinu Malkeinu…

Ki ein banu ma’asim   

Because it is impossible to argue how good we are…That would be a huge strategic error!

Honeinu va’aneinu   

Just be gracious to us and answer us!

Avinu Malkeinu   You are our Father, our King…

God, You  know us better than we know ourselves.  

We are at Your mercy.  We are in need of Your grace.

                For the rabbis, God was the Source, the supreme Source of grace, love and compassion.  Those words in the English may sound like a new-agish expression, but you might recognize this dynamic trio from the Sim Shalom prayer when we sing about God’s hen vahesed v’rahamim, God’s grace, love and compassion.  We acknowledge this holy combination daily if not more frequently and it is because faith would have us recognize the presence of God’s grace and love and compassion with us at all times.  And we are all witness to it.  We are witness to it whenever someone overcomes an illness, or starts a new business, or perseveres in spite of the loss of someone close, or who finds an expression of creativity they never knew they had.  To have faith means that we are never at an end.  And for those who have very deep faith, even one’s ultimate end, is not the end.  God’s grace and love remains steadfast with us beyond the grave.

                I am done with God—some will say.  They aren’t feeling the love.  I totally understand that and one’s feelings do not lie.  But the rabbis had answer for that too.  And so it is that we have in the midrash, the words of the sage, Rabi Shmuel ben Nahmani, who said:

Matzinu shehakol bara Hakadosh Barukh Hu b’olamo

We find that the Holy One has created everything in this world

Hutz mimidat sheker umidat shav

Except for falsehood and deception

Ela, habriyot badu otan miliban

Rather, these were created from the hearts of humanity (Pesikta Rabbati, 24)

And there you have it.  A lot of sin in this world is man-made.  The lying, the cheating, that’s all made by human hands, or human tongues, as the case may be.  And if we accept this as true, it makes human beings among the most dangerous of species.  We are the ones who take an otherwise beautiful creation and mar it with our own lies and deceptions, jealousy and greed.  War, terrorism, hatred, bigotry, poverty, so many of the ills of the world are the products of human stupidity and pettiness, some of it innocent but probably most of it deliberate.  Yes—there are problems in the world which we cannot blame human beings for—the hurricanes and the earthquakes, the floods, etc., But you know, even when it comes to disease and possibly the environment, time has made us increasingly sensitive to the role man-made pollution and unhealthy habits play in our own pathologies.  It underscores just how problematic asking God to look at our deeds is.  Between now and the day the messiah arrives, which I suspect is going to be a very long time, we will do our best, but we had better have a firm belief in God’s grace,

Ki ein banu ma’asim   Our own deeds may not be enough to save us…

                Faith is hard for us in the 21^st century.  We have discarded faith so often in order to understand the world in its own terms and not as an authority figure might have us believe.  But to discard faith completely is also to deny ourselves a certain kind of vision that is critical to our own vitality.

So Moshe stands in the wilderness before this burning bush and somehow determines that the presence of God inheres in the flames of this conflagration.  Anyone else might have viewed the whole burning bush episode as just that, a burning bush.  What is that?  It’s a bush, and it’s burning.  Period.  It’s an instance of spontaneous combustion which happens in the wilderness when sustained levels of elevated temperature react with dried vegetation.  As for the fire, it is what fire is—a chemical process releasing heat and light and depending on the fuel burning, other products some of which may be noxious.  The whole thing could have been viewed as a natural phenomenon.   But Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our Teacher, ish Elohim, a man of faith, sees beyond the science.  He was given the Godly-gift of insight.  He had the ability to see beyond the “what is.”  And all human beings have this capacity.  You and I have this capacity to see, in every aspect of our lives, the miracles that lie beyond the “what is.”

It’s this kind of vision that moved Moshe to redeem the Israelites from Egypt; it is this kind of vision that allowed Martin Luther King to have a dream; it is this kind of vision that allows humanity to break through the heavens and walk on the moon; it is this kind of vision that allows each and everyone of us to rebound after some failure or death or humiliation has laid us low.  It is God’s grace operating within the world.  And it is as constant and all-pervasive as the oxygen we breathe.

Whenever someone approaches me with news that their faith has lapsed, they never do so with excitement.  No one approaches me and says, “Rabbi—you won’t believe this, I’m an atheist.  There is no god.  And I call attention to this fact only because when people have what is commonly known as an aha moment, it’s usually an instance of great excitement or happiness.  But coming to the conclusion that there is no God is never an Ah-ha moment;  it more of an Oy-Vey moment.  No one jumps for joy when they conclude—there is no god, there are no Absolutes, and we are all alone in this vast and inexplicable universe.  That is, at least for many of us, the scariest and saddest thought of all.  But I’m here to tell you that it ain’t necessarily so, and that when we feel the absence of God, it’s because we have chosen to shut God out of our lives.

The world is a very tough place and all our attempts to redesign it, have proven it to be a resistant subject.  There are no guarantees.  There are no promises that will assure us long life, material gain, or physical well-being.  Our faith in God does protect us on some level as such faith usually guides us to a more cautious use of our time and resources.  But our faith in God cannot totally shield us from life’s surprises, upsets, or detours.  And that’s the reason to believe in God with even greater faith, because it is the hen, the hesed and the rahamim, God’s grace, love and compassion that is forever with us.  When we choose to see beyond the “what is” and be courageous enough to envision the “who we can be,” we don’t necessarily get rid of all the life’s negatives, but we are able to navigate them so much better. 

After all this, I must tell you that we skip every Avinu Malkeinu in the mahzor (except for the last one) because it is Shabbat.   It’s Shabbat, a day when we try to minimize references to the harshness within the world and focus on all the positives.  It’s our small way of creating our own reality, one free of any mention of life’s difficulties.  But even when we omit the Avinu Malkeinu from this sacred day, there is something that is impossible to omit:  God’s grace, love, and compassion.  It is a theological impossibility.

The sun shines, the earth spins, the galaxies expand, and God’s love radiates forever.  You may find yourself at one time or another giving up on God.  I totally understand that.  But I’m telling you right now, God will never give up on you.  That’s what makes God’s grace and love so amazing.  

May we all be sealed into the Book of Life for a year when we effectively navigate all of Life’s challenges.  G’mar hatimah Tovah—