1
Rabbi Michael Beals October 1, 2024
Temple Beth El Newark, DE
Erev Rosh Hashana Sermon 5785
Judaism is About Love
Today I am a horse. Dear God, did you have to make my poor old horse lose his shoe just before the Sabbath? That wasn't nice. It's enough you pick on me, Tevye, bless me with six daughters, a life of poverty. What have you got against my horse? Sometimes I think when things are too quiet up there, You say to Yourself: "Let's see, what kind of mischief can I play on my friend Tevye?"
The movie version of Fiddler on the Roof, premiered on November 3, 1971. I was eight and a half at the time. I remember my parents taking me to see it in San Francisco. It left an indelible impression on me, as I am sure it did for many of you in the congregation.
But, to be perfectly honest, I was speaking to God LONG before I saw the scene I referenced above. Perhaps it is because I am an only child. Afterall, who ELSE did I have to speak to?
2
Do any of you, by a show of hands, remember that image of God reflected as shafts of light through gray clouds, on the front cover of your first Sunday School book? That is another indelible impression that has stayed with me. It certainly speaks to the magnitude of God, but NOT the personal, loving God, I imagined I was speaking to.
YOM HA DIN! The Day of Judgement. That’s one of the names for Rosh Hashana. The time we are entering in is known as Yamim Nora’im – the Days of Awe. We imagine a Book of Life opening, and during these next Ten Days, God will decide who will live and who will die.
That idea totally flies in the face of the loving God I have come to adore. How can one reconcile a loving of God with a God who is judging and decide what will become of us in the year to come? Have you been bothered with these two competing ideas of God – one loving and one not at all amused by our bad behavior?
It turns out, we are NOT alone. One of my fellow rabbinical students from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Shai Held, recently wrote a book called Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.
3
The inspiration for the book started when Rabbi Held was teaching senior students at rabbinical seminary. He made the remark: “Judaism is built on the idea that God loves us and beckons us to love God back.” One of the rabbinical students shot back: “I’m sorry but that sounds like Christianity to me.”
Where did such an idea come from? Let’s face it, we’ve heard it so often. “Christianity is about love,” our non-Jewish friends will say, but Judaism is about …. Well, something ELSE, like law, or justice or whatever. This idea is based on a fancy-shmancy theological word called “supersession.” That means first there was Judaism, and it was surpassed or seceded by a new and improved religion, Christianity, because there was something fundamentally missing from Judaism – like an angry, vindictive, bloodthirsty God being replaced by a God of love and mercy and grace. That’s why Christians, and Jews who don’t know better, call Tanakh or Hebrew Scripture, the OLD Testament, and their own holy book, the NEW Testament, as in, New AND IMPROVED Testament.
4
As a rabbi, it is NOT my place to tell you what Christianity is about. There are so many people who can help you out with that – just seek out any downtown street corner in any large city in America. But it is indeed my place to tell you that Judaism believes in, and includes a God filled with love, mercy and grace.
Rabbi Held holds that grace, hein or hesed in Hebrew, is foundational to Jewish theology and spirituality. That is to say, the gift of life is grace – the existence of the world, who birthday we celebrate on Rosh Hashana, is not something anyone earned. God’s love for us IS grace – it is NOT something we earn but rather something we STRIVE to live up to! And, of course, God’s greatest give of love is the revelation of the Torah – a divine gift given to us through NO merit of our own.
This idea of creation being an act of God’s grace is not something that Rabbi Held came up with. One of our greatest Jewish thinkers, Moses Maimonides, aka The Rambam, who lived first in Spain and later in Egypt in the 12th and 13th centuries, wrote: “This reality as a whole – I mean, that God has brought it into being – IS GRACE.” And grace is closely entwined with LOVE.
5
Listen, I am not really telling you something you don’t already know. Just before the Shema, this evening, we sang a lovely melody to the prayer, Ahavat Olam. It means “everlasting love,” and its our way of celebrating God’s forever-love for us by giving us the Torah and Mitzvot. How much more explicit can we be about Divine Love than this prayer? And it’s not just love. In Judaism, love doesn’t mean a thing unless it is followed up by ACTION. God loves us by giving us the Torah.
And for love to be fully expressed, it needs to be reciprocal. Which is why, following the Shema, we talk about the command to love God right back, in the V’Ahavta passage. And it’s not just a passive love. Rather, we are commanded to love God PASSIONATELY: b’chol l’vavcha – with ALL your heart, b’chol nafeshecha – with ALL your soul, u’v’chol m’odecha –and with all your might.
Our love for God is supposed to be contagious. For once we love God, then we can expand that love. In the Torah, we are commanded to LOVE our neighbor as ourselves. We are commanded to LOVE the stranger. And we are commanded to love all human beings because, as we learned back in Genesis, we are created b’tselem Elohim, in the image of God. Here, the logic
6
is circular. Since God loves us, and we are all created in the image of God, ergo, we must logically love our fellow human being.
So, let’s identify the elephant in the room. How do we reconcile a loving God with the notion that we are sitting at the eve of Yom Ha Din – the Day of Judgement?
And here I found Rabbi Shai Held to be particularly helpful. While Christianity makes a dichotomy between law and love – where THEY have the God of LOVE, and WE are stuck with the God of LAW – we Jews don’t believe in this artificial divide between these two ideas. Rather, as the second blessing of the Shema so beautifully states, God gives us law as a Divine gift of love. We use the law to find our way to love – through doing. Or as I am fond of saying, it’s all bound up in Liza Doolittle of My Fair Lady fame, challenging her suitor, Freddy Eynsford-Hill: “Don’t talk of love, SHOW me! Show me NOW!!!”
Rabbi Held writes: “The path to universal love runs through the particular.” That is to say, where we “have missed the mark,” the truest definition of chet, or sin, are those times when we have failed to keep God’s laws, and in doing so, we have missed moments to show and experience love of God.
7
As we enter these days of Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe, both Rabbi Held and I invite you to read our Jewish tradition as a story about a God of love who loves humanity and the Jewish people and who bids us to lead lives of love. Let us then not see these days to come as days of awe, but rather as days of WOW. May we see in these next ten days of transformation, awesome possibilities to demonstrate our love for one another and for God by upping our observance of mitzvot, all towards an eye of doing teshuva, RETURNING to the best possible version of ourselves.
I am in touch with Rabbi Held, who is currently working on a study guide to accompany his book, Judaism is About Love. When it is ready, let’s find a time to study this book together, as we endeavor to infuse love into the New Year 5785.
L’shana Tova maalei eem Ahava Rabah – Here to a year filled with Abundant Love.