Each Rosh Hashannah I try and bring a message that is more global; on Yom Kippur, one that is more personal.  In looking back on recent years, I was struck by how all encompassing and all emotionally enveloping the dominant narrative of each respective year was.  Three years ago, I spoke about the significance in the year 2000 of the nomination of Joseph Lieberman to become a first religious Jewish Vice Presidential candidate.  In the year that followed, it had been less than a week and a half since the world-shattering attack on America of September 11th, so the message wrote itself.  Last year, what to do about the unforeseen proliferation of Global Anti-Semitism became my reluctant, albeit necessary message.

This year, I sense a latent and unyielding feeling of insecurity and futility in our world.  An uncertain future that was built into the surreal suddenness of September 11th, 2001 clearly still hangs heavy in the air.  The continued demonization of Zionism and the Jewish State shows little sign of letting up.  Even the forthcoming release of Mel Gibson’s movie which paints the Jews in a most disturbing light at the time of the Crucifixion of Jesus, seems to invite us back, to some dark medieval chapter of history, ever since philo-Semitism emerged as the agenda since Vatican II.

 It seems, more and more, like Ralph Ellison was right when he said, “History is a boomerang…” Again the world faces a gathering threat that could portend our inevitable destruction.  In the 1930s and 40s, Nazism threatened to rule the world.  In the 1950s and 1960s the advent of the atomic bomb and the Cold War seemed to point directly to some inevitable nuclear war that would destroy our planet.  And now, with Osama bin Laden still not captured – as if his capture would actually make us safer – and Sadam Hussein unaccounted for, and American soldiers dying everyday in Iraq, not to mention the relentless terrorist attacks in Israel, along with the swelling ranks of global terrorist networks, we are right to be feeling – whatever our problems are closer to home – a déjà vu sense of hopelessness is back and as real and present as any danger history has shown us in the past.

 And so I want to bring a message this year that is empowering, but in a different way than I have tried to in past years.  I’ll not soon forget the way I mishandled a gathering we hosted two days after September 11th, 2001.  Most of the evening went pretty well, with people, still very much in shock, simply needing to share their emotional reactions to such an unprecedented national trauma.  But I chose to bring the evening to a close by insisting that America must be strong – that she should respond with force potent and punishing – so that whoever did this will think twice before seeking to inflict future, attacks of greater or lesser magnitude.  One former-member of KI who was in attendance that night, actually walked out in disgust.  When I later asked to meet with her, she conveyed how disappointed she was – not that she thought I was necessarily wrong in my analysis – but in the fact that I had taken a helpful evening of emotional sharing and closed it with a geopolitical policy analysis of defiance that was, not only incongruous with the rest of the evening, more significantly, it was not what she then needed to hear from her rabbi.

 I have often thought back on that moment.  I have thought about what went through my mind in not wanting the evening to end with America brought to her knees, I was determined to not allow them to get away with this.  I now realize that there was a time and a place for such defiance and that I had judged poorly.  Yet ever since then I have continued to speak often from this bema about the need to defy the darkness.

Defiance is, after all, an authentically Jewish impulse, but so is devotion.  And I keenly sense that this year offers the time and place for an empowering message of devotion.  While defiance is rebellious and bold, devotion is steady and trustworthy. If defiance is about periodically having to fly in the face of darkness, then devotion is about consistently adding light. Devotion dwells in our lives like a lamp, while defiance strikes like lightening.  What I would call Partnership theology then, where God is our dependable partner and we are just as reliable with God, where God does things for us and we do things for God.  And it is such partnership theology – offering the indomitable resilience of divine dependability and human reliability – that has the power to survive and overcome whatever dark forces threaten our world today.

Having faith in God doesn’t mean believing in God’s existence, it means believing in God’s reliability.   It means believing that God can be counted on.  When your wife says she don’t worry about what you do when you’re away on a business trip because she believes in you, it’s not your existence she is affirming, its your trustworthiness.  When things are going badly, when forces of evil and selfishness seem to have the upper hand, we can give God the gift of not despairing, of not giving up on Him.

When we see the hand of God in the good things that happen to us, we come to see the world a bit differently.  We see it more hopefully.  We begin to recognize a divine earnestness in history.  If we see the freeing of the Israelite slaves of the end of slavery in the United States as the will of God, rather than resulting from human kindness or economic trends, then those who are enslaved today can hope for freedom because God is permanent while human generosity in unreliable.  When we see the victory of the United States over Hitler, or the Maccabees defeating the mighty Greek army in biblical times, not only as a military victory but as an instance of God giving victory to the forces of good over the forces of evil, then we have reason to feel optimistic about the ultimate triumph of goodness in the next conflict.
As in the 1940s with Nazism, as in the 1950s with the Cold War, so too today we feel there is no way out.  No daylight to be seen over the horizon.  Yet, without minimizing for a moment the forces we are up against today, the course of history suggests that some time in the future, perhaps many decades from now, the sleeping dragon that has been roused of fanatical Islam will return to its slumber and give way to a future, yet unimaginable period of history with challenges of its own.

 Where did we first learn that God would be dependably by our side in dark times?   Some of you may know the story about a Jewish mother taking her young boy to the kindergarten bus stop on the way to his first day of school.

 “Zissela” “yeinikellah” “mezinkella” “sheina punimkella”

“I learned my name is David.”

 Only once in the Torah is God directly asked His name and He gives a very simple three-word answer.  When God first appears to Moses at the Burning Bush, directing him to go to Pharaoh and demand that Pharaoh free the slaves, Moses responds by asking God, “What is Your name?”  God answers him with words that are hard to translate, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, usually rendered “I am that I am” or “I will be what I will be.”  Theologians, who assume that when God speaks, He speaks theology, explain those words to mean, “I am pure being.”  Others understand God to be saying, “What I am is more than you can comprehend.”  But I have recently been drawn to an interpretation that considers the context of the verse itself.  Two verses earlier, the word Ehyeh is connected with God telling Moses Ehyeh Imach “When you go to Pharaoh, I will be with you.”  For me, that is God’s name, the essence of what God is about.  God is the one who is with us when we have to do something hard.  He is the one who is with us when we are tempted to feel that the world has abandoned us.  He is the one who is with when we feel scared of what the future will bring.

Is the conviction that God is with us really enough to dispel fear?  Perhaps it is, even as just a little bit of light is enough to dispel our fear in a room full of darkness.  Picture the scene: a child wakes in the middle of the night in a totally dark bedroom.  He is frightened by the noises he hears outside and by the cracking of the walls of his house, by the rattling of the windows.  But if there is a tiny sliver of light in his room, just enough to make the darkness less than total, then he is no longer as afraid.

In the same way, when we find ourselves mired in emotional darkness, when events and people conspire to fill our lives with anguish, it takes only a little ray of light to make the darkness bearable.  Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “Dark for me is the world if not for the knowledge that God listens when I cry.”  He did not expect God to change things, to eliminate evil, to make all his problems disappear.  It is enough for him that God is there for him.  That he is not alone, that he has not been abandoned.

This morning’s Torah reading brings this point home.  It tells of how Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, was sent away with her young son Ishmael because Abraham and Sarah were afraid that Ishmael was a bad influence on Isaac.  They lose their way in the desert, they are about out of food and water and the boy is about to die of thirst when an angel appears and points Hagar to a nearby well.  Their lives are saved and Hagar names the well Be’er L’Hai Ro’I, “the well of the living God who sees me.”  I interpret this to mean that she is saying, “At the bottom of the well, at the lowest point in my life, when I felt helpless and abandoned, I met God and learned that God cares about me.” This is what Divine dependability can look like.

Then tomorrow we read a story that defies all understanding: God commands Abraham to take his beloved son Isaac, born to him after years of yearning, and offer him as a sacrifice on a nearby mountain.  Abraham is about to comply when, at the last moment, an angel intervenes and tells him to stop and not to harm the child.  God tells Abraham that because he has shown such faith, he and his descendents will play an important role in the religious history of the world.  Abraham calls the place where that happened, Bahar Adonai Yara-eh, “the mountain where God is seen” or as I would interpret it “at the high point of my life, the day when my child would be returned to me safe and unharmed and I learned that I would be successful in my dream of changing the world, I felt I had seen the face of God.”
By depicting the experiences of Hagar and Abraham meeting God at the high points and low points of their lives, days when their children were in danger, days when their most desperate prayers were suddenly answered, the sages were trying to convey to all of us here on this day, something significant about how God can be there for us at times of trauma and trepidation.  .

So too if we look at the times in our lives when seemingly painful events led to us to a better future, when disappointment opened a door to fulfillment, and if we recognize the hand of God in those events rather than attributing them totally to our deserving them, then we will be more hopeful and less discouraged by the next disappointment.

A key reason why it is so important to speak of devotion in terms of mutual dependability is because there are false pieties out there that can undermine our dependability, our reliability.  Fundamental to Jewish partnership theology is the assumption that just as God is reliable in being there for us, so too we are reliable in being there for God.

About a week ago at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport I was perusing the Hudson News bookstore and came across a weighty volume with the title 72 Names for God (hold up the book).  It is part of a genre of new age Kabbalah literature that has gained prominence for Madonna and a number of other celebrities.  Reporters call and want to know about how to “use” the Kabbalah like it is some kind of magic bullet, some alternate reality drug, or like asking a martial arts expert when she may choose to “use” her karate.  From my tone you get the message that I am less than enthusiastic about this neo-interest in Kabbalah.  Yet, whatever people find meaningful in the expansive wisdom of Jewish life and being, I want to encourage.  As long as it bears some semblance to something responsibly Jewish – which is hard to detect in a book that proclaims on its inside jacket: “The 72 Names of God is the ultimate pill for any and everything that ails you because it strikes at the DNA level of your soul.”

 My biggest problem with this approach to spirituality is that it is so non-reciprocal, it requires so little of its adherents.  Jewish partnership theology is about covenant and adherence to mitzvoth.

  If God is with us at life’s high points and low points, as He was with Abraham and Hagar, then when life is being lived at sea level, we can be there for God.  The truth is that we want God to not only comfort us, but also to challenge us.  Part of us wants to be summoned, part of us welcomes the demands of morality, righteousness, and holiness.

 Avot teaching, “Who is wealthy?  One who is content with his or her lot in life.”  Is this consistent with High Holiday message?  Appreciating what we have, being grateful for life’s many blessings, is a cornerstone of religion and healthy living.  But we also want to be challenged, we want to ‘reach’ not just ‘settle.’
Much of life is about figuring out for ourselves what we should feel content with and what we should be challenged to want more of.  If we are talking about more wealth, more fame, and more power over other people, a nicer car, or a bigger yacht, then we should pray for contentment.  But if we are talking about more wisdom, more generosity, more courage, and more wholeness, then we want to be challenged.

 Actually we deserve to feel good about being challenged because we rise to such challenges all the time.  And I’m not only talking about our amazing capacity for resiliency, to overcome whatever setbacks life throws at us.  I am talking about how we rise to challenges when we create new efforts at being more charitable, at fashioning communities like ours here at KI that are more nurturing, and more responsive to communal needs.  If you stop and think of it, the High Holiday prayer book wouldn’t make such demands on us year-in and year-out, if we were inept at rising to its summons. The purpose of the prayer book isn’t to remind us how consistently we fail.  Its demands and expectations are as they are, because we’ve proven time and again that we are capable of becoming better, more forgiving, more altruistic, more compassionate.  We continue to prove that, through our devotion to changing for the better, we are agents of spreading light.  We reliably uphold our end of the partnership in tandem with God that represents a formidable moral force that can defeat forces of darkness that threaten our world – especially when those forces are so disjointed and disorganized.

I recently asked the son of a member of KI, a Marine Captain, who just completed six months of honorable service in Iraq about the endless number of different terrorist groups – whether it is confusing to keep them all straight.  He suggested something very interesting.  That if there was ‘confusion’ it was a helpful confusion that existed not so much for us, as it does for the terrorist groups themselves – a confusion that keeps the efforts of Al Quada, Hamas, and Hezbollah incoherent uncoordinated enough, to be defeated by a coherent cohesive team.

The other major false piety out there that threatens to undermine our reliability to God was the subject of an article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.  A story appeared about the prevalence of Messianic passion within Lubavitch Hasidim.  Jewish history is cluttered with misbegotten messianic pursuits with disastrous consequences, primarily because they render adherents too tentative, too passive to be reliable partners with God.

 Partnership theology casts such a messianic impulse in a different light.  It asserts that no matter how much we’d like to, we can’t bring the Messiah, like throwing a switch to solve the world’s problems.  Nor can we necessarily bring the Messiah for ourselves to solve our own problems.  But maybe we can bring the Messiah for somebody else.  We can hope that something we do or say for another person can help give someone else’s life story a happy ending.

 Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has written: “each lifetime is the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.  For some there are more pieces.  For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble.  But know this: you do not have within yourself all the pieces of your puzzle.  Everyone carries with them at least one and probably many pieces to someone else’s puzzle.  Sometimes they know it; sometimes they don’t know it.  And when you present your piece, which is worthless to you, to another, whether you know it or not, whether they know it or not, you are a messenger of the Most High.”

Our world is filled with spiritualities, spiritualities of violence, of magical mysticism, and of fervent messianism.  Many who are in search of a way, seek refuge in one of these expressions.  But authentic Jewish partnership theology offers the resources that add light and hope, giving us reason to feel better about tomorrow thanks to God’s dependability and our own.

There is fear in this world today as we enter the New Year 5764.  There is much vulnerability and uncertainty.  God cannot tell us that nothing bad will ever happen to us.  God cannot protect us from evil without taking away from other people the power to choose between good and bad.  He cannot protect you from illness or bad luck.  But He can give you the resources to transcend and overcome those fears, so that bad luck never causes you to lose faith in yourself.  So that bad people never cause you to lose faith in humanity.  So that the inevitability of death never causes you to give up on the holiness of life.

Whether the darkness is man-made through wicked acts of terror, or whether the darkness is an emotional gathering of storm clouds that converge on us as a result of bad luck or another’s hurtful words, just a little light can dispel that darkness and enable us to move into the future less afraid.  As reliable partners with God, we also add light to the lives of others when life is being lived at sea level.

May we emerge from this year’s Rosh Hashannah experience with the feeling that we can face an uncertain future, moving forward with our arms locked in partnership with God to create a moral force for goodness and light, which will overwhelm dark forces wherever they gather.  So that the year we have just begun will offer even more reasons to feel more hopeful about what tomorrow will bring.