A version of this sermon was delivered on Erev Rosh HaShanah, 5784 at Temple B'nai Torah in Wantagh, NY.
Many,
if not most of you, may by now know that I spent a large part of my sabbatical
time this past summer in the Pacific Northwest, traveling around, learning,
seeing beautiful things, and then attending Glass Blowing School for 12 days at
the renowned Pilchuk Glass School. Over
these next weeks, and probably longer, I’ll be excited to share about my
experiences there and while traveling around that part of the world. The experience was and continues to be
inspiring for me. I’m grateful to this
community and Cantor Timman for affording me the time to be away.
The
Pilchuck Glass School was started in the 1970s by Dale Chihuly and his friends, setting
up their temporary shop in the middle of a tree farm about 90 minutes north of
Seattle. This photo, taken by a
classmate, Alyssa Miller, shows the sunsetting over the hotshop, whose furnaces
never extinguish. Each year over the
summer, the school hosts a series of sessions with various classes offered in
different glass disciplines. Here’s my class.
That’s me in the back. There was
glass casting, stained glass, and I was placed in a flameworking class, which
is not the large-scale furnaces in a hot shop you may be familiar with. Of course, they had quite the hot shop as
well. Flamework involves an individual
flame in front of you which you use to melt, shape, and blow glass. Here’s a photo of me at work at
the flame, wearing special glasses to protect my eyes from its brightness.
In order to
flamework glass, you need two things…glass and a flame. You light the flame, you introduce the glass,
you keep it moving, and you melt, shape, form, combine, and stretch the
glass. Now this is not just any old
flame in front of you. For the glass
that we are using, which is borosilicate or true PYREX glass, you need a lot of
heat to get it to melt. To get a flame
that hot, you mix propane and oxygen.
Now these torches we
were using had inputs for both gases, and two knobs for each one, so that you
could adjust the flame as needed to create differing flames of differing
strengths to accomplish different tasks.
If, for example, you’re working on a small detail, you want a small,
pointed flame. If you need to melt a
large gather of glass to molten, you need a dense, wide flame. It’s a constant adjustment of flame size and
composition.
In addition to the
gas, of course, you need something to spark the flame. You can use either a sparker that you
squeeze, like you may recall from high school science and your Bunsen burner,
or you can use a lighter. Either way,
there’s a correct order to lighting the gases and a real finesse to getting the
mixture right.
But the sparks from
the lighters were not the only sparks that were impactful to me. There were other sparks, equally important
for the many artists who spend their summer at Pilchuck. Each night, the entire session gathered
together for dinner. Dinner was followed
by slides and presentations by the visiting artists, teachers, and TAs, showing
off their work and explaining their inspiration. Almost without fail, each presentation
included a description of the moment that the artist first saw glass art or a
demonstration that sparked their passion for glass. In order to devote your life to this art,
which is expensive, time consuming, fickle, and dangerous, you have to have the
passion for it, and that passion requires that spark. As in glass, as in life.
Being surrounded by
folks with such a passion for their art was inspiring in itself. For some of these artists, both aspiring and
established, everything, every aspect of their being has to go into the art:
their hearts, their souls, and their might.
They are always thinking about it, feeling it deep within themselves. They are guided by their desire to make this
art because ever since that spark, they haven’t been able to put out the
internal flame. Even when their lives
are hard and unpredictable, they choose not to leave it behind because they
love it so deeply.
What is passion if
not a deep love for something? A love
that encompasses all we are and all our decisions. Passion means to love something entirely,
with heart, soul, and might. And as Jews
we are commanded to be passionate. We
are commanded to summon our hearts, souls, and strength—our passion—to love
God. V’ahavta et Adonai eloheicha,[1] we
chanted together a little while ago. You
shall love Adonai your God bechol levavcha, uv’chol nafshecha, uv’chol
me’odecha. We are supposed to be
passionate about loving God. It may
sound redundant, that we’re supposed to love loving God. Isn’t loving God enough? Our tradition would seem to say no. You might think v’ahavta et Adonai eloheicha
would be enough. The Torah comes to tell
us that there’s more to it.
What
does our tradition understand this command to mean? What does it mean to love God as a Jew, and
what does it mean to do so with all our heart, soul, and might? With the entirety of ourselves?
“But
wait, Rabbi, I’m not sure I even believe in God. Have you looked at the world lately?” That’s ok.
Because no matter how elusive God may be, love is less so for us. So, if we’re having a problem with God, let’s
start with love: v’ahavta. It’s a
seemingly simple command, yet can we command the love of another? Isn’t love supposed to grow organically? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks teaches that many other
nations in the ancient world had systems of justice like the Israelites, but it
is the Torah which originates the idea of love as a moral imperative. We are commanded to love our neighbors and to
love the stranger at the same time as we are commanded to love God. Perhaps the focus here is indeed not on God,
or the stranger, or the neighbor, but on the action, on the love.
Maimonides[2]
explains that to love means to be obsessed, lovesick, so that all the time, no
matter what we’re doing, we’re thinking, acting, and living with our beloved on
our minds. When love refers to God, Maimonides
means that every action of our day, from waking in the morning to lying down at
night, ought to be done with God on our minds.
With a sense that what we are doing in each moment serves to spread
light, peace, mercy, and justice. If we
strive in every moment to live a life dedicated to morality and Jewish values,
we’re loving God every moment. It means
we’ve become passionate for God.
You’d probably be
less than surprised to learn that there’s some disagreement on how to
understand the second half of our verse, with all your heart, with all your
soul, and with all your might.
B’chol levavcha, with all your
heart. Rashi says that this means that
you are to love God without division, such that what we do is not at odds with
what God wants. Ibn Ezra says that heart
means knowledge. Ramban says that hearts
means the power of desire. So, while Rashi tells us it’s about listening to
God, Ramban and Ibn Ezra disagree with each other on what the heart represents.[3]
B’chol Nafshecha, with all your
soul. Here, Ramban and Ibn Ezra disagree
again. Now, Ibn Ezra says that this is
the spirit within, your nefesh, your
divinely given breath and soul. Ramban
says that this is the intellectual capacity.
But they do both agree that within these two commands is a combination
of mind and spirit. So, we are to love
God with all aspects of ourselves, our mind and our spirit.
And
then we get to b’chol me’odecha, with
all your might. Here, we find some agreement. First, Rashi says that we have to love God no
matter whether God sends us the good or the bad. And then Ibn Ezra and Ramban agree that with
all your might actually just means very, very much. They pick up on me’odecha and hear
in it me’od, very, like tov me’od,
very good, as God calls creation in Genesis.
They both explain that the love must be fervent. It must be passionate.
But
there’s an additional wrinkle to this last one because earlier than all these
commentators, the Mishnah[4] suggests
that with all your might should actually be rendered as “with all your wealth;
[explaining that we are to] put our resources toward good purposes and to serve
the Most High with everything we possess.”
Nineteen hundred years later, Rav Kook goes on to explain that this doesn’t
mean that we are supposed to reject material things and comfort. Rather, we are supposed to use these things
we have to live fully, to cherish the world and its treasures in order to
achieve a full measure of love which will then allow your heart to expand,
which will in turn make you more giving as a person.[5]
We have
to love God with our bodies, our spirits, our minds, and with great passion. We have to love God by loving the life that
God gave us. And, like the gas in the
flameworking torch, we often have to adjust to achieve the right balance.
Sometimes we may need more heart than mind, and sometimes we may need more
passion than spirit. Each moment of
every day requires a different combination of loving God, and I promise you, if
my experience with the flame can be your guide, sometimes the mixture will just
be wrong. And it will take practice to
get it right more often than not. And
that’s ok, even helpful, because the effort of loving God, according to Rabbi
Adin Stensaltz[6], will
be enough to lead you to where you need to be.
Striving for love leads to love.
This is why it’s not enough to love God.
We have to love loving God.
But to
light that flame, we also need that spark.
And so, as we embark on this new year, let us all ask ourselves, what
will spark our passion in 5784? Will it
be prayer or meditation? Do you need to
turn up the knob on your spiritual self?
Will it be study? Do you need to
increase the amount of Torah in your life?
Will it be spreading tzedek,
justice? We could all turn up that knob
more often. No matter what it is, your temple
is here to help. Seek out your flame
with us this year.
Kindling
a flame ushers in the holy days.
Kindling our personal flames ushers holiness into our lives. As we add our hearts, our souls, and our
mights, our flames of love grow stronger until we cannot help but fulfill those
commandments. May our flames burn strong
this year. May 5784 be a shanah tovah and a shanah shel ahavah. A good
year, and a year of love.
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