Ahz mah (So what)

Where is your brother? I talked earlier about hearing this question as it relates to humanity globally, to people who are not literally our brothers and sisters. And now let’s hear the question another way. Let’s hear Where is your brother? as Where is your brother ? Let’s think about our real brothers and sisters, plus our parents, children, partners, close friends, and colleagues. Let’s call these people our “circle.” People who we actually know and experience in our daily lives, including people who have died. (So, for example, I still consider my parents to be in my circle, because I still feel myself to be in relationship with them.) Everybody think for a moment about who is in your circle. Okay now a brief survey. Raise your hand if you… ever expressed anger towards someone in your circle and you then regretted it. Raise your hand if you… ever held a grudge about something said or done by someone in your circle. Raise your hand if you or someone in your circle … lives with any t...

The summer is usually when I begin to reflect on possible ideas for high holidays sermons. But I began this summer with a palpable sense of dread. It felt to me like this presidential election process was giving too much oxygen to the dark side of human nature. The side of human nature that turns fear into hatred and violence. And I did not want that to be the focus of my message to you. And then I remembered that back in 2014, my sermon theme was What Can One Person Do? I felt like those sermons from 2014 expressed the essence of what I have to say about the paradox of hope and despair in difficult times. This year my theme is Questions Worth Asking. And without being entirely conscious of it, I settled on two questions for today which end up circling back to that earlier theme. Today’s questions echo down to us from another one of our mythic origin stories in the Torah, this time a story of murder. Cain kills his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy. God calls out to Cain: Where is Abe...

There’s a brief story near the end of the book of Genesis in the Torah which I have always found touching. Joseph becomes the Pharaoh’s right hand man in Egypt, and brings his entire family down from the land of Canaan because of a severe famine. Joseph brings his elderly father Jacob to meet the mighty Pharaoh. Here is how the story is told: “And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and Pharaoh said to Jacob, how many are the days of the years of your life? Jacob answered: The days of the years of my sojournings are 130 years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and I have not attained the days of the years of my fathers in their days of sojourning. And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and went out from his presence.” How many are the days of the years of your life? The Pharaoh’s question seems on the face of it to be just an odd, old-fashioned way of asking How old are you, old man? But we can hear in Jacob’s answer that he is responding to a deeper question. Jacob’s brief answer is dr...

It’s somewhat trendy nowadays to be a “spiritual seeker.” People used to talk about searching for God, or for an experience of God, although lately the language has shifted and people are more likely to say they are seeking a “spiritual experience.” Either way, many of us think of ourselves as seekers. But what if we’ve got it backwards? What if we are the ones hiding, not the ones seeking? Hide and seek. It’s not just for children. My theme for the high holidays is Questions Worth Asking, and today’s question is a hide and seek question. For context we need to go all the way back to the mythic story of creation. In the opening chapters of Genesis, the world is created, and light and dark, and ocean and land, and the vegetation and the animals and bugs, and then the humans. And Adam – the first human – is instructed about which trees are okay to eat from in the garden. And then Eve eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that they were not supposed to eat from, and Adam t...

Last year, a young woman wrote an essay which was published in the Modern Love section of the New York Times. In the essay, she describes an evening she spent with a young man, deep in conversation. They had chosen to work their way through a series of 36 questions to get to know one another – 36 questions designed back in the 1990s by social psychologists for a study about generating closeness between strangers. She and the young man, already clearly interested in one another, sat talking for hours. Near the end of the essay, she writes: “You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate.” I loved the idea of the 36 questions as soon as I heard about it. Seeking out the original research, I learned that the 36 questions were designed to elicit “escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.” The researchers foun...