I’ve heard it said that every person’s life is worth a
novel. (Actually, there’s a book by
that name!) So maybe everyone also has at least one sermon in him or her.
A Homiletic Interlude
May 5, 2012
D’var Torah—A
Word of Torah
(as slightly revised
for the blog)
This week’s Parashah (Torah portion) is Kedoshim,
part of the Holiness Code and in the middle of the Torah. You could say, though, that we are in the
middle of Kedoshim, because all around us in this chapel (bordering the
top of the wall) are the commandments from Leviticus Chapter 19:
Love your
neighbor as yourself.
You shall not steal.
Do not
profit by the blood of your neighbor.
You shall
not render an unfair decision.
Do not go
about as a talebearer.
You shall not reap all the way to the
edges of your field.
You shall
not take vengeance or bear a grudge.
Do not turn to idols.
You shall
be holy, for I, the Eternal your God, am holy.
You shall
each revere your mother and your father.
You shall
not place a stumbling block before the blind.
And then we come to, “You shall fear your God: I am the
Lord.”
What is that doing here?
In English, here in America, in the 21st century, it may not
sound so good to us. It takes us
aback. It conjures up an authoritarian,
even violent image, as in: “I’ll put the fear of God into you!”
A year ago, I got into a Facebook discussion (which won’t
surprise anybody who knows me) with a friend of a friend. He said he’d never heard anyone but
conservative Protestants use the term “fear of God” in an approving sense. He said that, in his view, “although love is
not incompatible with discipline, (he) would not support a deity that needed to
be feared more than loved, or that encouraged such thinking in her
worshippers.” This person identified
himself as Unitarian, but he had a Jewish-sounding name; you never know. I had mixed feelings—frustration—to think
that maybe he had left Judaism because he thought of God in negative terms.
That was last year, and, as it happened, the very next week
in Torah study, there it was—Leviticus 25:17, “Do not wrong one another, but
fear your God; for I the Lord am your God.”
Because I had already been bothered by my earlier Facebook
discussion, I went on a little treasure hunt through the footnotes of the
Jewish Study Bible. Now, the footnotes
of the Jewish Study Bible are like having a rabbi right with you whenever you
need one, and it cuts down a little bit, at least, on excessive emailing of
theological questions to our rabbis. In
this case, the footnote took me right to the “fear your God” verse in our
chapter today (Leviticus 19:14). And
what it said was that this phrase, “fear your God,” was used when no one is
watching and when there is really no policeman around—no enforceable legal
sanction.
The fear of God, then, means conscience. It is the spark of God that gets inside us
and lights our way.
Many times footnotes in the Jewish Study Bible will say,
“Meaning of Hebrew uncertain,” or they will offer multiple translations of a
term. About “fear of God,” though,
there is no such ambiguity. These
scholars say flat out that “fear of God” means “conscience.”
We see this phrase, “fear of God,” all through the
Torah. Rabbi Berg told me last Fall I’d
have no trouble finding examples of it, and he was right. For example, in the first chapter of Exodus,
the midwives didn’t kill the first-born of the Hebrews when Pharaoh said
to—because they feared God. Because of
that they were able to stand up to “fear of Pharaoh.” Later in Chapter 17, as the Hebrews journeyed through the
wilderness, Amalek attacked the stragglers, picking on the weak—because he had
no fear of God.
In Chapter 20, at Sinai, when the people witnessed the
thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn, and the mountain smoking, they
were afraid of God, but Moses told them, “Be not afraid, for God has come only
in order to give you an experience of Him, and in order that the fear of Him
may ever be with you, so that you do not go astray.” Listen to that! Don’t be afraid, because God wants the fear of
God to stay with you! How paradoxical,
when heard in English! You can see that
“fear of God” has come to be something other than “being afraid”—an idiomatic
expression meaning “conscience.” As
in—inner compass.
And here I thought, too, of miners’ hats with lights, or the
headbands runners wear to light their way at night.
In Rabbi Baylinson’s lunch-and-learn last fall on biblical
women (“Harlots or Heroines?”), Abraham let Abimelech think Sarah was his
sister, because he thought, “There is no fear of God at all in this place, and
they will kill me because of my wife!”
In Rabbi Reeves’ evening class (“A Jewish Look Into the Christian New
Testament”), we encountered Psalm 22—and the instruction, “You who fear the
Lord, praise Him! All you offspring of Jacob, honor him! Be in dread of Him, all you offspring of
Israel!"
Speaking of the New Testament, the same expression, “fear of
God,” can be found there, as well (e.g., Acts 10:35), and the meaning is the
same.
That meaning is: have something stronger than our earthly
fears; have a conscience and do what’s right.
“Fear of God,” yirat
Adonai, is not limited to what not to do, but also includes what to
do. Do what is right. Stand up.
Speak out. When God asks, “Where
are you,” answer saying, Hineni, “Here I am.”
Translation is interpretation, and when yirat Adonai,
“fear of God,” was translated, it became easy to forget what it meant; fear and reverence are both part of the original package, and, furthermore, in the
Torah, yirat Adonai is not clearly distinguished from “love of God”
(Rabbi Louis Jacobs, according to Rabbi Mark B. Greenspan, Torah Table
Talk—Sacred Words; Yirah—Does God Make Us Tremble? 2009).
So, how does this yirat Adonai—“fear of God”—conscience—get
into us? When we are out in the
work-a-day world all week our minds are programmed by commerce and finance and
fashion and competition. Evolution has
made our minds programmable—interactive with our environment—not only by
intentional elements like advertising; but also by incidental and random
elements. Without our minds being
interactive, we could not survive. But
as a result of that programming, we become more individualistic, hard-working,
persistent, independent—and also less caring, more focused on
ourselves—selfish. And we are always
being programmed, one way or another—nothing we can do about that. What we do have is a say in how we get
programmed—how we get our yirat Adonai.
So we come in here, on Shabbat, to experience our tradition, which is so
very mindful of how we are programmed.
Instead of the business of everyday, here we talk about God and surround
ourselves with—the Holiness Code. We
read Torah and study it, and we pray.
And we surround ourselves with other people doing the same thing, which
magnifies and intensifies the impact.
And we permeate ourselves in it and talk it until we have multiple
vectors of God coming from each of us to the other. So much so that God doesn’t stay here only in this building or
when we are together. We help keep the spark shining.
Like finally learning to think in another language, I knew I
was reprogrammed--when I started to hear the spring birds singing, Kadosh,
Kadosh, Kadosh, (“Holy, Holy, Holy”).
The whole world is full of God’s presence.
