A Higher Register - Yom Kippur 5785
The prophet looks around.
He sees another cycle of history beginning.
The people are fracturing.
Parent is pitted against child
The world, once again, beginning to change.
Yet he is baffled.
The king does not see this change. Refuses to see it.
The prophet is called to speak.
The people have been told what it is they must do.
Few listen.
They have chosen the comfort of complacency. Excess over ethics.
They say “‘All is well, all is well,’ When nothing is well.”
They have chosen themselves over the collective.
The prophet is called to speak.
And few listen.
Instead, “they follow their own counsels, the willfulness of their evil hearts. They go backward, not forward,”
The prophet is stubborn. He tries again.
But the people are even more stubborn - stiff necked, too stiff, even, to turn toward each other.
The baffled prophet declares: “Because my people is shattered I am shattered;
This is Jeremiah, the prophet, 2700 years ago, in the 7th century BCE.
Jeremiah saw the Temple destroyed. He saw the stones fall - He saw the hunger and destitution in the streets after Jerusalem’s conquering.
He came to see the future he feared seeing. The one he had tried to prevent.
But before that, he spoke.
Before that, he wept. He wept at the state of his community. He wept, trying, trying
Why? He felt responsible.
He could see what was happening, what was inevitable. But he could also see another way, a different way forward-
But he couldn’t change the future that he feared was coming.
“Oh, that my head were water, My eyes a fount of tears! Then would I weep day and night, For the slain of my poor people…
God and Jeremiah say, together, in one voice.
---
Each of our prophets, including our namesake, Micah, have a story just like this.
A call.
A clarion moment when the injustices of the world become intolerable.
A shattering moment -
As the community faces external peril and internal threats
And in that moment, they can hear “the silent sigh” of human anguish.
“while the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” As Abraham Joshua Heschel puts it.
And in these strange days, I find myself turning to them more and more.
These shattering, anxious days, and the questions they bring.
What will this next election bring? What is the future our democracy? Of democracy? Will they ever stop hating us? When will this war end? Will there, can there ever be peace?
I look to our prophets
Because they looked at an unknown future.
Because I look at a future of more and more unknown, unknowns.
Because they were restless.
Because I am restless.
Because they were honest.
Because I am trying to be.
Because they were discomfited.
Because I am.
Because I wish I could turn away.
Because I can not. Because they did not.
And so, I turn back to our prophets - to their holy words
After all, I had been taught that ours was the movement of Prophetic Judaism -
The early reformers of Judaism, reading Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Micah -
Universalized their message beyond their original context.
19th century Reform founding father Abraham Geiger wrote, “Poets and prophets complain of sufferings and trials; they present the riddles of human experience ; they can not understand why many fare well or ill on the earth contrary to their practices; they confess, too,that they are unable to find the full explanation of such facts.”
Our stories and teachings of these visionaries became, for him, “the most viable and important component of Judaism,” the eternal element in Judaism most worth holding on to.
We quote many of them today:
Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.
My House shall be a house of prayer for all people.
Is this the fast I desire?
“The Prophets’ concern for the poor and downtrodden, their contempt for ritual acts unaccompanied by social morality, and their vision of peace for all humanity. These made [The Prophets] both timely and contemporary.”
And still, I have the feeling that what we hear of the timely - the timeless - prophetic call is but an echo of an echo
If we truly are to be the flag bearers of the prophetic tradition -
We must read them seriously. We must let them break us open like Jeremiah-
Their fierceness - their inability to turn away
Must compel us to more.
What is that more?
A starting point -
Our teacher, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, defines religion as “the practice of speaking in a register that does justice to the human condition”
The features of that human condition --
On display here in our Yom Kippur liturgy
Our mortality
Our suffering
Our enabling of others sufferings
Our mistakes and failings
Our awareness of all of them
Our capacity to feel
And to feel joy - enhanced by the knowledge that it is fleeting
Our ability to dream and hope
Our power to create and love
And yet - how often do we fail to do justice to all of this?
How often do we turn to everything else but the depths of the human experience
Engage in pablum rather than pathos
I know I myself am guilty of this far too often.
How I try to ignore the inescapable burden of being human
And still, I stand here on this day, prayer book open, eyes open, heart broken open
And I know I can be more. Do more.
I know we can be more. Do more.
This, Abraham Joshua Heschel tells us, is the prophetic purpose.
They speak in a higher register, “notes one octave too high”
We wish not to hear them - their heart-shattering, discordant, comfort-shattering notes
And yet we must.
They are our more - our higher register.
Heschel again, “The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is stunned at man’s fierce greed. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words.”
The prophet knows that the world has the ability to be better - do better.
That we have the ability to be and do better
And the fact that we make other choices causes a deep rage and sadness that cause a bursting out - the call from high that must not be ignored
So I call on us today to speak in a higher register -
A higher register that does justice to the human condition
The prophets can teach us how.
Not because we believe we are prophets ourselves
Not, perhaps, because we believe that God is speaking to us personally
But because their passion - their ability to see and speak truth, to be better than our current moment
Is what we need.
Scholar Susannah Heschel writes, “what is needed is prophetic passion. Religion is not a series of propositions, nor a social order that creates community through ritual performance. Religion demands affect, emotional commitment, and stirs the basic human need for engagement with other human beings.”
It is not just about ethics - it is about transcendence - knowing we can do more, yes, but also knowing we can be more,
About knowing that there is a bigger story at play - and that we are part of it.
I know this is difficult.
Afterall, there were so few true prophets that today, they fit together in one small section on my bookshelf.
And they were very much unpopular. They were attacked, imprisoned, shamed for their words -
“It [was] embarrassing to be a prophet,” Susannah Heschel writes, “There [were] so many pretenders, predicting peace and prosperity, offering cheerful words, adding strength to self-reliance, while the prophet predicts disaster, pestilence, agony, and destruction. People need exhortations to courage, endurance, confidence, fighting spirit, but Jeremiah proclaims: You are about to die if you do not have a change of heart and cease being callous to the word of God.”
It is not that I don’t believe in encouragement - cheering each other on and building resilience and confidence.
But what I hear in the prophets’ desperation is that they understand the stakes. They can see beyond themselves.
They see an invasion -
A culture that venerates the ephemeral rather than the eternal
They see a culture that pits human against human for sport
They see opulence venerated right next to destitution
They see things that are “legal,” but unjust
They see their world changing too rapidly to stop
And when others pose solutions - to the prophets, they seem tepid, tentative, devoid of the passion they themselves so deeply feel
And us, too, in this moment -
when there are threats within and without
When there are real people who actively seek our destruction
When there is a refusal to adapt even as our planet is pushing back on us
When lies are blindly accepted and truth is mocked
When we talk past each other
How do we help ourselves be greater than the moment? When the moment seems too large; too difficult to see beyond ourselves?
How can we remember that we always have the capacity for more
I believe this is the intent of the Prophetic message -
To look and see what’s more - what else there is. What other ways of being are possible.
To practice being more - to practice speaking in that higher register
To speak in a way that does justice to the human condition
Let us all speak in a higher register -
Perhaps not all the time - but, in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, to allow a “grain of prophet” to grow within us all.
How?
Walter Bruggerman suggests that there are four features of a community that is capable of holding grains of prophecy:
There must be a long memory that sinks the present generation deep into an identifiable past. This memory is told in song and story;
There is an expressed sense of pain that is owned and recited as a real social fact, that is visibly acknowledged in a public way, and that is understood as unbearable for the long term;
There is an effective mode of discourse that is cherished across the generations
There is an active practice of hope, a community that knows
about promises yet to be kept
Important for Bruggerman, is that this takes place in a subcommunity - A group of people who sit both within and outside the broader community
This which enables them to ask different questions and prime themselves for a different kind of discourse
And as I read this description -
I see us. I see the synagogue - I see the Jewish community. I see Temple Micah.
1) We have a long memory -
We are part of a story - a story that roots us in a promise of humanity, a story which our ancestors chose to root in a grand narrative of overcoming oppression - a story which believes in both human agency and a fervent belief that evil can be overcome, and not just replaced with a different form
We have songs that speak of exile
We sing songs of joy - of praise and struggle
We have a past -mythic and real- that instructs us and propels us
That lifts up times when we have succeeded in becoming more
2) And we have an expressed sense of pain
That the world as it is, and not as it should be - not as we hope it to be
That there is still hunger.
That there is still not peace.
That there are still people ripped from their homes and their families
That we can not protect our children while they sit in their classrooms.
That there is still not peace.
I know we have this expressed sense of pain because I’ve cried with you
We’ve felt this pain together - too many times
And as much as I hate the times that have brought us together in pain
I am, without a doubt, grateful that our synagogue is a place that allows pain to live out loud
That does not push it aside because it makes us uncomfortable
Because doing justice to the human condition requires that we make space for all of our pain
And the pain of those suffering outside our walls
Because we can hold it
And 3) We have a beautiful mode of discourse -
The love of questioning
The rabbinic process of interpretation and multivocality
The idea that two partners in debate can be “as iron sharpens iron”
We believe that talking to each other makes both of us better
We know that “Every argument that is for the sake of heaven will endure.”
When we engage in honest discourse, for the sake of holy purpose, it helps us -like the prophets - speak in that higher register
When we stay at the table - when we stay in relationship, it raises us all up
And lastly, 4) We have an active practice of hope
The practice of hope is baked into the essence of Judaism
We don’t just HAVE an ancient story of hope - we ARE that story. All our stories are beginnings - the promise is never fulfilled.
The promised land is always in front of us. There is always hope that we will reach it - or at least that we will make things better as we try. And it is this hope that bolsters and animates us - that even as we set out on yet another cyclical quest, we maintain the belief that history does not repeat itself, and that this time around, we can be better and do better.
Vaclav Havel reminds us that hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Is this not the hope of the Jewish people - that hope of millennia
That although we see the realities of the world around us
That although we have lived through exiles and destructions and pogroms and attempts at our extermination
That although we have every reason to give up -
We don’t. We haven’t. We endure.
Memory. A shared sense of pain. Discourse. Hope.
The prophets themselves engage in these four behaviors as well.
They help us see ourselves in a larger story -
First among our prophets, Moses so frequently reminds the Israelites of their liberation from Egypt
And Miriam, a prophet in her own right, ensures that our story can continue and helps us translate our journey into song
They not only transmit memory, but help translate it for a new generation -
To enable others to ask, what is the purpose of the Exodus - for us - in this generation and this generation
What is our responsibility to be in covenant with these people in this society
And our prophets teach us how to speak an expressed sense of pain out loud -
As Hosea does when he laments, “There is no truth, no love…swearing and lying, killing and stealing…they break all bonds, and blood touches blood.”
And Amos, “you would sell out the innocent for silver, the needy for a pair of shoes …turn aside the way of the afflicted.”
They created their own legacy of discourse - of telling the truth, no matter how inconvenient. Like Abraham, debating and pushing back against the creator of the universe: “Will the Judge of the Entire world not Judge justly?
But perhaps, most of all - they hoped
They always returned to hope
“Isaiah asks, “Can we abandon despair and respond when God asks? Who will speak for me? Who will remember the covenant of peace and compassion?”
They knew the state of their world -
They knew that no one could foresee a future without war
So they did not preach pacifism
But they did still believe that peace was possible
They hoped of a world that we must not, can not forget.
The hope of Isaiah, a world of coexistence not domination, where swords are melted down to become farming tools
The hope of Micah, where all of us will have our own vine and fig tree and none of us ever have to act from fear again
And the hope of Malachi, that when that more redeemed world does come, the hearts of the children will turn towards the hearts of the elders, and the hearts of the parents towards their children.
And they didn’t just hope for that future
They believed it to be actually possible
While Jeremiah is prophesying the exile and destruction of his people, still acquires ownership of a share of land from his uncle
Even as Jeremiah knows he will likely never set foot on that piece of land again
It becomes part of a future he can only hope for
He holds on to it.
All of this must be our job as well -
To hear and to speak in a higher register requires that we know who we are, who we came from, and who we desperately want to be
It is to be more - whenever we can
Where others want us to see simplicity
Fight for complexity - struggle with multiple truths side by side
I know others aren’t doing it -
I know it is easy to play their game. Refuse.
When others can’t see a way forward -
Imagine one. As Walter Bruggerman writes, “the prophet does as if the vision can be implemented…[we must] keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one [we are told] is the only thinkable one.
The experiences of Esther - who the rabbis imagined was actually a prophet (perhaps because the rabbis were desperate for prophecy) - as her story reminds us, “If you keep silent now you will not be able to justify yourself because you had the opportunity of doing good in your lifetime and you did not do it.”
I don’t know that things will get any easier than they have been in the last year -
At least not for some time.
But I do believe that we have the ability - the capacity
To live through this moment better than we are now.
The world is trying to convince us to be less.
But we can be more. - We have to be more.
This moment urges us to be.
The prophets begged us to be.