My First "Official" Sermon

(I get to deliver my first drasha as a rabbinical student tomorrow, and thought just for the heck of it I would post the sermon as well. Please forgive the lack of literary polish as I tend to speak with only bullet points and the written version of this was really just meant to put my thoughts together. As for the picture, it really doesn't have much to do with this post, except it is a pretty fine view from atop the Austrian Hospice in the Old City.)

Parasha V'zot Habrachah

I met G-d face to face a few weeks before I came to Jerusalem.

At least that’s what I think happened—I have no other way to describe it. I was driving along an arterial in South Seattle right as it began to rain. Normally this would not be much of a problem, except my vehicle had two wheels and a motor instead of four wheels and a seatbelt, and when I started breaking at a four-way stop, the fresh oil on the road transformed the pleasant ride into a most unpleasant one—my helmet hitting the pavement at around 30 miles and hour.

So I am not really sure if that constitutes meeting G-d face to face—Panim el Panim—but it sure felt like it.

You see, the timing just didn’t make sense. I had been working for over a decade in various corporate jobs that emptied me a little more each day. The knowledge that I would soon be at a transition point of leaving that wandering wasteland and entering something that seemed filled with purpose and promise kept a light at the end of the tunnel – and now here I was a few feet from the end of that tunnel, except I am lying on the pavement unable to move without the help of kind strangers. And then came the hospital and x-rays and fear and hope and . . .

And then the worst part: Usually I can figure stuff out. Usually I can pin down some lesson or truth to make sense of an experience. But not this time. Baruch HaShem that in the end what could have been very serious turned out to be a broken shoulder, a lot of drugs, some lost time and a deepened sense of mortality. Except there is also the other stuff – the recurring images when I close my eyes – the clenching in my gut when I watch the antics of some of the cycle riders in this town— the reoccurring thoughts of “What does this mean? Why did this happen?”

I am not sure if I met G-d face to face, but I do know that I came face to face with something and now nothing is quite the same—and as Rosh Hashanah came and went and now Yom Kippur and the sealing of the Book of Life looms so near in our future, I simply know that I cannot take these thoughts and images with me into the New Year.

I can only imagine that people of Israel, as they faced the death of their leader of 40 years and the looming reality of their own step into a new unknown, also thought of transitions. As Moshe Rebinu is the human hero of the majority of the Torah narrative, we often look at this last portion of Torah with Moses as the focus. Midrash says that before his death, Moses pleaded with G-d to allow him to let his final act as the leader of Israel to be a blessing. Yet as we have already seen from the Torah reading this morning, this blessing is incredibly opaque. As a member of Klal Yisroel listening to such words I cannot imagine feeling much comfort—or quite frankly much blessing. What I can imagine is feeling the deepest anxiety that the only leader I have ever known, for good or for ill, is not coming with us. I think that it must be from the perspective of this anxious voice in the community that before the moment of Moses’ death we find some of the most interesting words in all of Torah:

“And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moshe, who Adonai knew face to face.”

So what in the world is this? In the Torah the words can only be shocking. In Sh’mot we are told:

“You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.”

And to thicken the plot, we have Jacob, after the night or wrestling with whomever or whatever he wrestles with, naming the place Paniel, or literally “the Face of G-d . . ." because he too has seen G-d "face to face."

So what exactly is going on here? Why does Moses get this powerful designation as the one who has seen G-d face to face, and even though there seems to be other traditions in Torah that relate similar statements, why does it seem like Moses’ designation is meant to be unparalleled?

Rashi looks at the verse in V’zot HaBrachah matter of factly and comments that the designation is due to the fact that Moses had an easy familiarity with G-d that no one else possessed. Heschel in his work The Prophets sees this as a mystical statement where the relationship between G-d and the Prophets is a relationship of Devakut – the boundary of G-d and man is broken down through mystical experience. Seeing G-d “face to face” is the best way that the writers of Torah could express this mystical “Oneness.”

Normally I would gravitate to the mystical interpretation, but I think there is something practical behind all this. If we can all agree in principle that G-d is not a human and that terms like face and hands and voice are anthropomorphisms designed to comment on a truth other than the literal meaning of the human body part, and taken in context with these verses of Torah, then the search for G-d’s face can be understood as some sort of process.

In these terms, it is also interesting that Jacob’s face to face meeting with G-d and Moses’ designation as the one that has seen G-d face to face occur at endings and points of transition. Jacob didn’t see G-d face to face when he fled from his brother and had a mystical experience where he recognized G-d’s presence, Jacob saw G-d face to face when he was in the process of doing the most difficult and terrifying thing that he had ever had to do—face his brother. Likewise earlier in Moses’ life, before the wandering in the wilderness, Torah comments that Moses was only able to see G-d’s glory by seeing G-d’s back after the Eternal had passed by. Only at the end of Moses’ life, after his last acts of assuring leadership and then blessing the tribes did Moses get the designation as one that has seen G-d face to face. It is almost like the writer, some one from the people Israel writing at some unknown point of time recognized the uniqueness of Moses’ relationship with G-d—enough to understand some truth of the process behind this relationship with G-d—and said, “We don’t have that. He did. How do I get me some of that?”

A spiritual healer by the name of Caroline Myss wrote a book called “Energy Anatomy” where she researches and comments on the similarities between the Jewish Tree of Life, the Christian Sacraments, and Eastern Religions’ concept of the Chakras. But one of the most critical points that she makes in the book deals with what I believe to hold a key to the meaning of meeting G-d face to face. She writes that the human physical and spiritual system has a finite amount of energy to work with at any given time. I think the logical positivists and mystics both among us can find some truth in that statement to hold onto. She uses the image of a hundred energy rods passing through the top of your head to describe that finite energy, and then says, “Think of someone who wronged you in your life and that you have not forgiven. Now take five of the energy rods and place them against that memory—that need for retribution.” Now think of the next person that has wronged you, and then the one that you have wronged and are avoiding, and then the mother or father that should have raised you better or understood you better and then the grandmother that was never mourned and is burning in your soul and then your best friend that died one day after you cancelled an evening with him where he had really wanted to talk with you. Pretty soon and pretty easily, all one hundred of the rods of energy are attached to and feeding these memories and pains that we cannot let go of, and at that point we start feeding on our own cells to finance these our pain.

Ms. Myss describes how we look at the model of the Chakras or the Sacraments or the Tree of Life as a pathway to finding each of those pains to which we are giving our energy, and then releasing them through forgiveness or asking forgiveness or acknowledging a specific need for mourning—

Or even simply letting go.

As each of these burdens is found it must be named, acknowledged, and faced, sometimes with very real and very painful work which when complete allows the individual to reclaim their energy.

There is nothing easy about this. Sometimes we have built our entire identity around our pain – past or present. I am the one who was hurt or abused or wronged—or in the motorcycle accident– my identity is in that pain.

But we are financing our pain with our life, and meeting G-d face to face means facing the hardest things to face—and then doing something about it.

My wife always jokes that in 12-step programs this is called the forth step.

In Judaism it is called Elul, and interestingly enough, every day during Elul we recite the 27th Psalm.

“My heart tells me to seek your face—Oh Lord I do seek your face.”

We talk about the need to make Teshuva at this time of year, but Teshuva is not the thing itself. Teshuva is the practical application of what we are called to do when we seek after G-d’s face—make this searching inventory—look into the parts of ourselves we least want to look into.

There is nothing romantic about this process—much like Jacob at the threshold of his brother’s household or Israel at the threshold of the complete unknown of the promised land—it is terrifying but necessary to any sort of growth. Only after seeing G-d face to face did Jacob become Israel and only after the recognition of this other thing that Moses had did Israel enter the promised land.

I still don’t have good answers for why my most recent meeting had to be so dramatic, except that I have had to in this time do the most uncomfortable thing I could – peer into my hopes and expectations of my own promised land and look unflinching at my motivations and weaknesses. I have had to do the very real work of forgiving myself for being flawed and mortal and face squarely all the work I have yet to do. The Book of Life is written but yet not sealed. Our tradition contains a well defined guide that helps us all recreate the pathway that Moses took to being labeled “one that saw G-d face to face.”

It is not an easy path—merely a necessary one.

Shana Tovah.

(update -- on my way to HUC that morning to deliver the Drasha, in good Paul fashion, I rewrote in my mind the ending. Instead of what is written above, what I actually said is as follows:)

So it seems like this business of meeting G-d face to face is an actual process. Moses, whether the stories are physically historically "true" or exist only to metaphorically, Moses meeting G-d face to face means that Moses had something instrinsic that allowed him to bring us Torah. The pattern that we follow in our holidays and life cycle is a reenactment of these metaphorical truths, and call us to search ourselves in such away that our own barriers do not prevent us from hearing Torah.

How can anyone expect to hear G-d's "voice" if we spend all of our time wrapped in our own unhealed pain and memories.

How can we expect to hear G-d's voice if we do not first seek after G-d's face?