Rabbi Dr Walter Rothschild
It is not always easy when God speaks to you. I think we need to be very honest about this. It is also very, very hard to describe, or at least to describe convincingly. Somehow, some times, out of nowhere, you hear or you feel a decision being made for you and your challenge is to decide whether you wish to obey it or not.
It is something mysterious and rather frightening, both to the person concerned and to those who know them. It can lead to people making momentous life decisions – or life-or-death decisions – or even death decisions – that others who know them, or think that they knew them, or think that they think that they know them, will find incomprehensible and worrying. It has happened many times, so many that some of these incidents have been written down, either by those concerned or by others who knew of the story. These texts then form the bases of different religions. We use words like ”Revelation” and ”Holiness” to describe these encounters, but each one is different even if all are similar. Sometimes, often indeed, we would class these moments as a form of mental illness, a psychological crisis, an incident when a human being stops acting like a normal human being should behave and branches out into some other world, some other dimension, some other direction.
How should a ‘normal’ human being behave? Well, I know that some people now find it politically incorrect even to use the term ‘normal’ – but I will use it anyway. Not as a sociologist, not as a psychologist, not as a political scientist, but as a Rabbi. There are indeed certain social ‘norms’ and even if in some modern societies – by no means all – the Individual is allowed to break them easily and frequently to pursue their own individual tastes and goals – there are still the ‘normal’ expectations that most of us have of most of our fellow human beings. ‘Normal’ does not mean ‘universal’ or even ‘easy’ or ‘automatic’ and some flexibility is also quite normal, every rule has many exceptions, children and new members of society have to be taught these rules and expectations, but nevertheless society functions on the basis that one can expect certain behaviour from others – from neighbours, from family members or partners, from fellow citizens – and if someone moves from the normal, some would say ‘deviates’ from it, there are means of coping. There have to be. The entire concept of Law, of Torah, the entire concept of Mitzvot, the entire structure of a society with those who guard against those who break the laws and punish them if necessary, is based on the idea that the norms may not always be universal or automatic or even instinctive – it is just that these are the norms this society has developed.
How are they to be applied? Sometimes, usually disastrously, by external authoritarian control; But an ethical religion should argue instead: By absorbing these views into yourself, by applying self-discipline; By learning to behave as best as you can and by trying hard to avoid behaving badly. Often people have to be TOLD not to steal or lie or murder or indulge in destructive relationships – which teaches us that these forms of behaviour are possible and even attractive, but that they are prohibited for the common good. It is not just that You might be tempted to do it – the problem is that Others may also feel tempted, and then, if one has no rules, one has no defence. Those who argue only for their own personal freedoms to define things for themselves often overlook this dimension – for example, that if YOU are allowed so take someone’s property, then another person may also be allowed to steal yours! That if You can get away with a lie about someone, you may find that others can lie about you too. That if you feel You have the right to take someone’s life – they might feel the same. And it can happen that suddenly – too late – you realise that You need the rules too……
The word ‘norm’ I would define here as ”What one could legitimately expect of yourself, and of others.” Changes may not be wrong, or evil, or ‘sins’, but they are changes nevertheless.
It is for example considered ‘normal’ to respect or love or care for your parents – even though some parents act in ways that makes this difficult. It is considered ‘normal’ to love your children – even though some children make this difficult, even though some parents have difficulty doing so. It is considered ‘normal’ to feel at home in your homeland, in the place where you grow up, within your family which may be small or extended. It is considered ‘normal’ to respect the general concept of Property, although how this relates to ‘abstracts’ like ‘intellectual property’, or ‘joint property’, ‘communal property’, lost property that one finds, or what happens when other humans become just ‘property’, is still often unclear. It is considered ‘normal’ to grow up in a culture and to stick with it. Or a religion…… It is normal to be able to expect what the weather will be like – not that it will stay the same, but that it will follow a regular seasonal cycle. When this changes or is disrupted one feels disturbed, worried.
I am speaking at length on these matters for several reasons. One is that these are the days set aside each year in the Jewish calendar for us to think deeply about ourselves, what we have hoped for, aimed for, and achieved, and where we have failed or disappointed both ourselves and others. Another is that many of us have, following the example perhaps of Abraham, made deep changes to our lives. We have not stayed in our home towns, we have not stayed with our families, we have perhaps adopted new ideas about God, developed a new relationship to God, than our parents did. Maybe they believed in no God – and we do; maybe they believed that God had a specific Son – and we do not. These are big, existential changes and have the potential to be very destructive of relationships.
Yet another is that the world seems filled with people who claim that God has spoken to them and commanded them to do things that we find despicable or frightful. They kill other people, whom they do not know, not out of greed, or lust, or fear, but simply because they believe God told them to. This has happened before, many times, in the past, and is perhaps the main reason why we have a command in Exodus and Deuteronomy not to ”lie about God” – to misuse God’s Name – which is different to the command not to lie about your neighbour. People DO lie about God, and other people often bear the consequences. But we live in a world where some people kill others almost out of fun, they take guns and shoot wildly in schools and shopping centres and concerts and, if you ask them ”Why?” – what answers would they give? Some will have bizarre mad ideas about ‘racial purity’ and others will say that ‘God had told them to do this’ – to ‘punish the Unbelievers’.
As I have said before, we are confronted with people who do not believe in God, they believe that they believe in God – and this is something very different and much more dangerous.
We live at present in a world where some people will try to forbid other people from saving yet other people from certain death. Whereby the one who says ”Let them drown, let them die” is as much a murderer as the person who takes a gun or knife into their own hand to strike someone down. Ironically some of these politicians will even appeal to the need to maintain a Europe ”influenced by the Jewish-Christian ethics” and defended from those who have a different religion!
Today is the beginning of a period – only ten days out of over 360! – in which we really need to think deeply about ourselves and each other, about our past year and our future years. Maybe I should widen that to the past decades and the future decades, for it seems that in the past few decades decisions were made that can have major influence on the future ones – on the climate, on the purity of air and water, on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (or what is left of it), on the amount of microplastic in ourselves and plastic in the seas, and more. We cannot ourselves, alone, change everything but there are steps that each person can take at their own individual level and the Yamim Nora’im are an opportunity to start this process again.
We read on this day of Abraham, our symbolic joint common ancestor. He left his family and homeland, he adopted a different view of God than his father Terach had done, he entered a not wholly happy marriage, he faced economic challenges, he had troubles together with his wife Sarah in getting and raising children – he was prepared even to kill his children when he felt that God had told him to. He provides us with a troublesome image or role model, one we will look at further tomorrow morning in the Torah reading. Would we want to be more like him, or less like him?
Rosh Hashanah is a Day of Judgement. We have to understand ourselves as standing before God’s judgement. Too often we feel that the judgement of other humans is important, we want them to like us, respect us, obey us, to buy from us, to believe us, to love us……. But we also stand before our own judgement, about ourselves. And from this perspective life can seem very lonely indeed. Without God.
It is not easy when God speaks with you. The only thing worse is when God does NOT speak with you. Or when God does not answer……..
Rabbi Dr. Walter Rothschild
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