When Joy & Truth Meet:  Reflections of the Days of Awe
Sermon preached by Reverend Carolyn Patierno
October 2, 2005

The Jewish tradition is one that I’ve always loved.  I’ve had Jewish friends since childhood and have been honored to have attended Passover seders, bar and bat mitzvahs, Shabbat dinners.   In fact, during my freshman year of college, during Passover, I went through the food line in the dining hall foregoing bread until I remembered that I wasn’t actually Jewish.  This is to say that I have a great affinity for the tradition and especially for the richness of the each of the holidays.  These autumnal high holy days are the most deeply moving of all.

I especially love the traditions that accompany the Days of Awe, as they are named.  The apples dipped in honey signifying a sweet year; throwing bread into waters signifying the casting away of old hurts and trangressions; the public and communal repentance; the blowing of the shofar.  All of these circle around the ancient stories of the Hebrew Bible. 

Yet, the biblical readings that are shared for the holidays are among the most difficult with which to contend.  Twice in the past four years, I’ve felt called to reflect on the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, a story that I thought I’d never consider, this story that is the cornerstone reading of Rosh Hashanah, read on the second day. 

Yet, Abraham has plentiful company.  Consider other central figures of the stories: Sarah, Hannah, Hagar, Laban, Rachel, & Leah, among others.  These characters include one who when she cannot fulfill God’s covenant to bear a son enlists her maid servant to do so on her behalf; she later shuns the woman, casting her and the young boy out into the desert.  And then there’s the father who despite loving this first born son, does not intercede.   Indeed he has his own personal crisis with which to contend.  He believes that he is asked by God himself to bring his second son – as beloved as the first - to the mountaintop to be sacrificed.   He agrees to take his son’s life.  He is about to do the murderous deed when a voice he recognizes as an angel of God intercedes.   And then there’s the father who promises his youngest daughter to a man who loves her dearly and who she loves in return.   But at the last moment, he betrays his daughter and the man who loves her, substitutes his oldest daughter for him to marry instead.   And then there is the childless woman who is taunted by other women of the community for her apparent inability to bear a son.  She prays to God for that son and in that prayer promises to give the child to God as servant effectively agreeing to birth the son, but not raise him.     Oy.  

These are tough stories.  The last time I preached on the Akeda, the binding of Isaac, there were some among you who on the receiving line were moved to ask me why, oh why, must I consider this gruesome story? 

Allow me to remind you that the Akeda was the topic of the first sermon I preached from this pulpit as the called minister.  You may remember the timing.  It was September 16th, 2001 … five days after that dreadful day in our nation’s and personal history.   We leaned into that story, friends.  We needed something that big and tough to help us sort through the incomprehensible.  Preaching on that story on that particular day was the right thing to do.

Beginning Anew is an anthology of women’s writing for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.  The writers are all Jewish feminist theologians and the writing crackles and sparks.  Let me share what one of these women, Marsha Pravder Mirkin, says about these stories and their biblical characters.  She writes:

If the people we read about on Rosh Hashana were perfect, there would be no need for our foreparents to do the teshuva and we would be taught no lessons of empathy.  The beauty of our tradition is that its stories are about good but imperfect people, people who at times can be much wiser than ourselves but at times can make mistakes that are even more devastating than our own. Their failures are all the more tragic because they have also experienced brilliant moments of empathy.

One of the things that I love about Jewish culture is that the study of the scriptures is ongoing and understood to be open for interpretation and argument.  The tradition of midrash is one that allows creative engagement with the ancient texts.  It is this approach that keeps these writings relevant, no matter how separate from our own social location these stories may seem at first glance.  They are stories for all ages.  They are our stories.   

Of course, these stories all somehow highlight the foundation of the high holy days.  The foundation is repentance or teshuva - repentance as turning inward.  And what better time than at the turning of the seasons?  What better time than in the majestic and mysterious autumn?  A time when we shore up our energies and prepare for the long winter to come.

Universalism is a tradition that at its own foundation, claims salvation for all.  But for our fore parents repentance was a significant aspect of salvation.  Certain Universalist theology claimed that heaven came to those who worked through the transgressions of their mortal life.  Today, there are no doubt Unitarian Universalists who continue to struggle with the concepts of sin, repentance, and salvation.  I don’t happen to be one of those.  I can stand behind that old Universalist theology, even if my concept of heaven is decidedly humanist.  For me, the Jewish concept of sin is the one to which I ascribe. This concept defines sin as a break in relationship between one’s better self and others and in another light, between oneself and God, however you may name God – if at all.

Tamara Cohen is another contributor to the Beginning Anew anthology.  She understands teshuva as encompassing three levels.  These levels relate to the concepts of sin that I’ve just described.  However, the third has a particularly radical twist.  She describes the three levels of repentance as the following:   

• The internal process of returning to self;
• The external process between an individual & fellow human beings … and finally;
• The process of being responsible to God and from the feminist theological perspective, God being responsible to you.

Cohen demands of her God equal responsibility for the covenant of mutuality that healthy and holy relationship demands.   Of this relationship she says that as she is held responsible by God for the ways she has failed as a human being so she holds God responsible, “for failing me as a Jewish woman by giving me a world and a people and a text that continue to betray women, often making it difficult for us to uphold our side of the covenant.”

Feminist theologians of all traditions offer us this deep-seated demand for mutuality.  It is a mutuality that does not require that we walk through the desert on our knees.  Indeed, Cohen poetically describes the process of repentance in which she is willing to engage.  She writes:

Not repentance in its stiff, starched whites, but return like a spiral of purple silks.  Not a beating on my chest but a soothing hand on my heart. I want to be involved in a process of teshuva that lets me see where I have failed without drowning me in the self-doubt I am finally learning my way out of.  I want a teshuva that is about integrating different parts of myself and understanding that the more whole I allow myself to be, the closer I will come to righteousness.

What a beautiful image … the returning to our best selves not as in the stiff, starched self-sabotage we grow to let go of but rather returning by demanding of ourselves a gentle coaxing … a spiral of purple silks.  Not to beat on our chests … to remove the hair shirt and instead soothe our repentance with a hand upon our heart.  Such an approach would more likely allow an integrated, whole self to emerge.  We may be more likely to come clean, so to speak.

And the ancient stories remind us that perfection eludes even those who through the ages are honored as sacred ancestors.  Actually, basic decency eludes many of these characters. 

And at times, we certainly fail to live up to the high ideals we set for ourselves.   Further, at times we fail to achieve what we know to be basic decency.  We loose sight of the empathy that allows us to forgive others and also helps us to forgive ourselves. 

Pravder Mirkin believes that the primary obstacle to teshuva again, repentance or as she says, the ability “to hear, listen, and respond to God’s voice,” is a failure to pay attention.  In fact, her interpretation of the story of the binding of Isaac is that Abraham failed to hear God’s true voice.  Now, whether you ascribe to a belief God’s voice can be heard or not, in matters of conscience we are reminded of the hymn we sing, “voice still and small, deep inside all, I hear you call, singing.” When we are paying attention; that is the voice that surfaces.  Through the course of a year that voice is drowned out by all matter of static.  How exquisite, to return to that voice, to return back to our self, and reclaim the best of who we aspire to be, where love and truth meet.

Never easy.  But essential.

La shana tova.   A sweet new year to you all.

Shalom.  Amen.

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