SERMON
SEDRA
VAYETZE
“SPIRITUALITY”
This week we find ourselves in the Torah deep in the
narrative section of the Book of Genesis. You probably know the story as well as
I do. Isaac has told his son, Jacob, not to marry a Canaanite woman; rather he
should marry someone from within his own tribe.
So Jacob sets off, as his father has instructed him, to find
a wife from among the daughters of Laban, his maternal uncle. The most familiar
part of the story is what comes next. Jacob comes to a certain place at around
sunset and, because he is tried from traveling, he lies down to go to sleep,
putting a stone under his head as a pillow.
Then the text says, “He had a dream; a ladder was set on
the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and
down on it. And the Lord was standing beside him and He said, ‘I am the Lord,
the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac: the ground on which you are
lying I will assign to you and to your offspring. Your descendants shall be as
the dust of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and the east, to the
north and the south. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you
and your descendants. Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you
go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done
what I have promised you.’”
The text continues by saying, “Jacob awoke from his sleep
and said, ‘Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know
it!’”
I’ve read this passage so many times that I’ve lost
count, and I’ve heard the story many times more. The story of Jacob’s ladder
is easily one of the most popular and familiar stories in the entire Bible. But
this time, as so often happens, something in it spoke to me in ways that I have
never considered before. This time there was an “ah-ha” phenomenon that
really took me by surprise. Once again, please allow me to give you a context
and then try to pull things together for you.
For as long as I have been a rabbi in California, some
twenty-eight years, I have been hearing about ideas and concepts of
spirituality, both from Jews and from Christians, and I have always felt
ignorant, stupid or inadequate about the subject, because I was never quite sure
what people meant by the term spirituality, and I was often too embarrassed to
admit that. After all, I thought, I am a rabbi. I’m even sometimes called a
“spiritual leader.” But I don’t think I understand, for the life of me,
what people mean by spirituality.
So with that background of ignorance and lack, I read this
passage in the Torah, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Jacob says, ‘Surely
the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!’ Now I get it. And
back then, Jacob got it, too. Spirituality is the experience of something that
you, as an individual, believe connects you to things that are not rational, not
describable, not definable. That means, among other things, that each person
experiences spiritual things in his or her own, individual way. It means, among
other things, that no one can tell you whether your experience of something
spiritual is right or wrong, any more than you can tell them that theirs is.
Starting this with concept of spiritual things, I had
another, much more disturbing series of thoughts. For a while I thought I was
the only one hearing about this. But as I have dared to discuss this set of
issues with other rabbis as well as with other non-Jewish clergy, I have found
that the problem is universal. We just don’t talk about it much. The problem
is this:
People come to all kinds of houses of worship for all kinds
of reasons. But these days, much more than in previous times, people say they
come to these places looking for spirituality or for spiritual experiences. And
then they leave, disappointed that they didn’t find what they were looking
for. So what, I ask myself, were they really looking for, exactly? What are we
not providing as a synagogue that they are looking for so desperately. Notice
that I immediately assume that the problem is ours or mine, that just because
they say they are looking for something that they are not finding that the
problem is with us or with me. How much guilt, based on a growing sense of utter
inadequacy, could I shoulder before the burden becomes too great? How much of a
failure as a spiritual leader am I that I cannot seem to provide what some
people so desperately want?
And then it dawned on me: What, I wondered cautiously but out
loud, would happen if the problem weren’t mine, either exclusively or at all?
What if the question were the wrong question? It was a daring thing to do, to
question the questioners. But I did it. And I was flabbergasted to come to the
realization that people seem to be looking for what so many of us are always
looking for: a commodity. People want to be able to quantify something that
simply isn’t quantifiable. They want to find a Costco or a Wal-Mart or a
McDonald’s of spiritual things so that they can supersize something that
doesn’t come in any measurable quantities.
But if they are looking for a way to find what they are
looking for, but probably wouldn’t recognize it if they fell over it on the
sidewalk, then they should read this week’s Torah portion and listen to the
words of Jacob, who wasn’t looking for spirituality, but for a wife. Instead,
when he awoke from his dream, he said, “‘Surely the Lord is present in this
place, and I did not know it!’”
What I believe Jacob meant was that sometimes spiritual
things kind of sneak up on us when we aren’t looking or expecting them.
Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber, two of the 20th century’s
greatest Jewish thinkers, suggested that experiencing the ineffable, the
indescribable, and experiencing awe during it was probably a sure bet for
something spiritual.
When a piece of music or poetry moves you, or a human
interest story, or something in the out-of-doors, or a work of art or dance, or
the unexpected recovery from an illness or a loss, or the first blushes of love,
or an unexpected success that is the result of hard and honest work, these
things can all inspire awe, and that awe can be experienced as something
spiritual. But can we measure it? Can we count it? Can we describe it so that
someone else can understand it? I doubt it.
Can we appreciate it when a musician plays a piece of music
in ways that move us beyond what we would have or could have expected? What
about when a gymnast performs some remarkably difficult maneuver? Or an ice
skater does some unbelievable jump or turn that seems physically impossible? Or
a swimmer performs a dive that seems unthinkable?
Or what about seeing the most exquisitely beautiful sunset of
your life? What if you add to that the unexpected sense of peacefulness that
accompanies that sunset? And what about experiencing it in the company of
someone you love? Or what about hearing about someone saving someone else’s
life?
And what about hearing the prayer of someone who has faced
one of life’s most difficult challenges? Or someone who seeks enlightenment,
truth, hope or any of the multitude of things that make it possible for us
humans to go on?
We live in a world that is dominated by things. We live in a
world that counts wealth as the accumulation of things. If you can’t count it,
then it doesn’t count. But in spiritual matters, if you can count it, then it
probably isn’t spiritual. Perhaps one of the reasons that spirituality is so
difficult to understand or grasp is that, by its very nature, it is
counter-intuitive. It simply is not a commodity, and since we are so accustomed
to thinking in terms of commodities, we cannot imagine that if we want it, we
can’t just go some place to get it. And I now believe that when people
complain that they go to a house of worship, whether this one or any other one,
and they leave because they didn’t find it spiritual enough, they are going
about the whole process backwards.
Our ancestor Jacob was right on when he said, ‘Surely the
Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!’ Well, if that is true,
then what’s the problem? The problem is that spirituality is not something you
find in a place, although one may definitely experience spiritual things in all
kinds of places. People can experience spirituality anywhere, under almost any
conceivable situation. That’s because one carries the capacity for spiritual
experience within oneself. It only needs to be tapped. And that can only happen
when someone is open to it. We cannot demand spirituality; we can only be
grateful for it when we become aware of it. And we can search for it with all
our hearts and souls and still not find it. But then, when we do find it
unexpectedly, we are all the more thrilled by the experience because we are
taken by surprise by it.
So can someone find spirituality, for example, in a classical
Reform Jewish setting, those places where organ music predominates, and
non-Jewish professional choirs, and so on. Absolutely! Just as it can be found
in gospel-filled church pews. Spirituality is not part of the entertainment
industry, even though people come to some houses of worship expecting to find
“the spirit” in some form of worshipful entertainment. But believe it or
not, I think that one can find just as much spirituality in studying the text of
a prayer book, even outside the setting of a worship service. It is not, in the
end, what you take away from the experience as much as what you bring to it. And
as hokey as it might sound, it is every bit as much about your openness to
experiencing things as it is about what those things might be.
There were reported to be 600,000 at
The important thing is that one have the willingness to be
open to the possibility that there are spiritual things in the universe and that
it is possible to experience them on a personal level. But if we go in search of
a thing, a commodity, that we will be able to define as spiritual, I think we
will always be frustrated and disappointed. I think spirituality finds us rather
than our finding spirituality. And of course, when it finds us, it leaves us
changed forever, always for the better.
And by the way, just as Jacob had a dream at a point in his
life when he was searching, so do most of us. Judaism has always maintained that
dreams are spiritual by nature, one of the most common ways for God to
communicate with us. And just as Jacob said, ‘Surely the Lord is present in
this place, and I did not know it!’ Surely if we are open to the experience of
the spiritual, the divine, or anything else that falls into that category, we
are more likely to realize that we have been through it by the time it is over.
Maybe, if we train ourselves, especially not to look for spirituality as
if it were a commodity, then we can more often be open to the possibility of
spiritual experience. I have often wondered if participating in worship services
might be a good way to do that. And I have no evidence to suggest otherwise. Yet
I hear from people all the time that they drop into a place for a service, that
they are relatively, if not completely, unfamiliar with the liturgy and the
atmosphere, and they are disappointed that they don’t find the thing
they are looking for.
We can do better than that. We can become accustomed to the
settings in which we believe it is more likely that we will experience the
spiritual, and we can try to be more open to what possibilities there are in
those settings. Then, we can only hope that with patience and hope, the spirit
will find a way to move us. Perhaps then, too, we will be able to say as Jacob
said, ‘Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!’
Amen.