This summer while I was in Jerusalem I stopped in a book store and picked up a book of Hasidic stories. Coincidentally, I opened the book to a story I had never heard before. It seems that one morning after prayers, the Ba’al Shem Tov began to smile broadly and even did a little dance. He called his Hasidim together and said “bring cake and wine, we must celebrate.” Naturally the Hasidim were curious, so they asked, “What’s the special occasion?” The Ba’al Shem Tov replied that during davenning he had a vision in which he saw a pure soul being born. “This baby will be named Levi Yitzchak and he will bring healing to the souls of Israel”. Hearing this, the Hasidim began to sing and dance, until they noticed tears streaming down the Ba’al Shem Tov’s face. They stood still, shocked, waiting for an explanation. Finally, the Ba’al Shem Tov said, “No, it will not be that easy. You see, Satan came before God’s throne and pleaded not to let this soul be born, it would make his work too hard. And the Holy One said, ‘you don’t need to worry. You see, this soul is destined to become a rabbi and he will be so busy that he will have no time to bring healing to anybody.’ “
Well, I laughed too. But I laughed with a little bitterness. By the time I “coincidentally” came across this story, (and Rabbi Levy taught me that ‘coincidence is just God’s way of remaining anonymous) I had spent much time during my sabbatical wondering about how busy I am as a rabbi and whether I have been busy with the right things? And again, not coincidentally, the more I thought and the more I prayed and meditated, the clearer I saw that in my busyness, I had neglected the one message that was at my very core: that life and God are inseparable; that God is present in every moment; that God is my strength and my comfort. I began to understand that to be the rabbi I wanted to be I had to bring God into your lives. And to do that, I had to bring God back into my life.
As a child I yearned for God, cried for God, prayed for God to comfort me from the human pains of growing. I loved God and I knew that God loved me and would always care for me no matter what. It was a simple, easy faith. A child’s faith. And as I got older and became more “mature” my simple faith receded to be replaced by intellectualizing about God. Not coincidentally, the more I intellectualized about God, the less real God became to me. Even when I discovered the Kabbalah and its teaching that God is everything, that nothing but God exists, it remained an intriguing intellectual hypothesis, just a thought. I had a master’s degree in Jewish Studies and was an ordained rabbi, but the place where God had lived for me as a child was empty.
You probably think it’s easy for guys like me. I grew up in a religious home. I got a great Jewish education. I could pray by heart and studied Talmud by the age of 10. But it has never been easy for me. I was taught that God is real, but never what that means. I was taught that if we seek God, we will find God, but I was never taught where to look, or how to look. I was taught to read words from a prayer book, but never taught really how to pray. All I knew was that God was hiding from me. I was religious, but God was absent from my life.
At one point in my twenties, at a time when I was in personal crisis, I met an older man named Menachem Mendel. He was a Hasidic Jew, the owner of a string of old age homes. Somewhere along the way he had become a cocaine addict. He borrowed and stole every penny he could from his family to support his habit. He depleted his savings and his pension. Then he began stealing from the company. He was caught breaking into his own safe for a third time and he went to prison. His wife divorced him and he lost his children. He lost everything. And when I asked him how he had survived his life, he said to me that he had been religious his whole life, but it was only when he found God, a higher power, a God of love, that he was able to lift himself up. He said, “If we have God in our lives, what is it that we truly lack?”
I have other friends who are recovering addicts or alcoholics. Each of them tells a similar story. One friend was driving in the morning with her 11 month old son in a car seat in the back. Stopped at a red light she turned around to smile at her son. As he cooed at her she said, “I love you so much, son but I am so drunk and I don’t know if either you or I will get home alive this morning, and I am so sorry because I love you more than anything and its your bad luck to have me as your mother.” And when I asked her how she turned her life around she said, “I prayed like hell. Every day. Every minute. I prayed like hell.”
Then there are people for whom God is a constant companion. My friend Shulamit gets up in the morning at 4:49 and starts her day with quiet, meditation and prayer. In her morning blessings she expresses gratitude for the gift of this particular day. She prays for the intention to have patience during the day, and compassion for others. And in the quiet she invites God to be present to her all day long, to hold her, and to be there with her especially when she feels overwhelmed.
There are many different ways in which we experience a longing for God, but I think the experience of that yearning is at the very core of being human. The yearning is often triggered by an experience of suffering: a sudden illness, a death, the loss of a job, the end of a marriage. There is fear or anger or deep sadness. It feels as if our life is coming apart at the seams, we are falling and we pray for God to catch us, to hold us. We pray that everything will be alright and beg God to be the source of our comfort and hope.
Sometimes it is not tragedy that triggers our yearning but a spiritual malaise, a feeling that something is missing. We may have everything we ever wanted and more -- the house, the cars, the clothes, the toys – and still have this aching emptiness inside. That’s when we fall most easily into substances that we hope will fill us. And we just feel emptier than we started. I may have told you about sitting in the living room of a Marin mansion while the woman who lived there waved her hand around the room and wept quietly, as she kept saying, “look at what I have, look at what I have. Why does it feel so bad?” We need the assurance that our lives are meaningful, that everything still makes sense.
And sometimes, we are just eating a peach and are overcome by its amazing sweetness. We notice a deep feeling of well being while on a hike, and a mysterious sense of connection to nature. We see pain etched on the face of a friend and become aware of compassion arising in our hearts. We may be sitting quietly or in prayer and suddenly feel peaceful, whole, and connected to something must grander than our own self. We open a book and see a story we have been waiting for our entire lives. We become elevated by these peak moments of wholeness and suddenly feel renewed in our sense of belonging and meaning.
Whatever the source of our yearning, it almost always brings with it with an experience of the heart breaking open. The poet Jack Gilbert describes his experience this way: “Three days I sat bewildered by love/Three nights I watched the gradations of dark/ Of light/ Saw three mornings begin…/My heart split open/like a melon/ And will not heal. Gives itself senselessly/to the old woman carrying milk/ the clumsy men sweeping/God protect me.” The heart breaks open and we are touched deep inside, touched by mystery, touched by knowing that cannot be expressed by the intellect but only in poetry.
The Book of Psalms, is possibly the greatest book of spiritual poetry ever written, and it is filled with passages expressing the agony and the glory of the human condition. It gives voice to the cry of the broken heart, and the exultation of the joyous heart:
“From the narrowness I cried out to God, and was answered with expansiveness.”
“Happy are those who dwell in your presence…”
These exclamations are supported in the Psalms by faith and the sure knowledge that God loves us, that God’s love for us is infinite and all-embracing, that when we feel abandoned by everyone else, God will always be there in sure-handed love to catch us: “For my father and mother abandoned me, but YHVH gathered me in.”
Even as I say these words to you I am aware of how difficult it may be for you to hear them. We are so uncomfortable talking about God. Say “God loves you” to Jews and they begin to fidget. Any serious talk of God spurs our intellects into overdrive. Just pay attention for a minute how your mind is reacting to all this talk about God: note the intellectual questions, the doubts and philosophical conundrums that have to make themselves heard: He can’t prove God is real! If God was real, why is there evil in the world? Why did God let my mother die – she never hurt anyone. Why doesn’t God answer my prayers? And the ultimate conversation stopper: How could God let the holocaust happen? Our minds have returned God to philosophy -- and to irrelevance. How tragic that in our world the “idea” of God has become the greatest hindrance to having a truly spiritual life! God, who in the Psalms is the answer to all life’s challenges, has become our greatest spiritual problem.
Jewish mystics have described God’s relationship with us as the deepest possible intimacy, and our yearning for God as the intense desire of the lover for the beloved. Only the presence of the beloved can heal our lovesick hearts. Only the love of the beloved will elevate us, and make us whole. And so we sing every Friday night:
“My soul pines for your love. Please, God, heal her. Show her the beauty of your radiance… Hurry, my love, for the time is now”
The intimacy we crave with the Yedid Nefesh – the beloved of my soul – is not a concept, and not a philosophical idea. It is the most human of needs and desires. Intimacy occurs when our well-constructed defenses dissolve and our hearts soften and we feel connected to others in an oceanic feeling of connection. There is no logic, no intellectual basis for falling in love. There is only the sweet comfort of intimate connection, of being completely known in all our truth and being perfectly accepted. To be loved by God is to be invited to return to our true essence, to the truth of our hearts, to our natural state of compassion and care for others, as for ourselves.
The alcoholics and addicts, the mystics and spiritual seekers who are my teachers on this journey, constantly remind me that when the heart breaks open there is more space for God to enter. We can bring God into every moment of life, the moments of desperate need but also in moments of joy and wellbeing. When we are disappointed, when we have fallen down, when we are dealt a blow, when we are crushed by burden, when we are in despair, when we are surrounded by darkness and afraid we will never see the light again, when we are alone and feel abandoned, we can cry out to God to hold us tight, to pick us up, to bandage our wounds, to kiss our booboos, to carry us into the light. Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav taught that just the act of asking “where are You, God” is enough for us to feel God’s the comfort of God’s presence in our hearts. With the courage to take this first step we discover that God is already here, waiting for us. When we are in need we can ask God to hold us. My constant prayer these days is “Please God, untie my knots” over and over again. Annie Lamott writes that her favorite morning prayer is simply “please, please, please.” We can invite God into every minute, every experience, and be lifted up. We can take five or ten minutes each day to mindfully express endless gratitude for the gifts of life; and we can ask God for help over and over again when we are afraid and overwhelmed. We can pray for wisdom to know how to act. And we can stop naively thinking that God is like some cosmic waiter taking our order for whatever we desire and pray instead to know God’s intention for us in this moment.
We may find that if we nurture an intimacy with God in our lives, not just the thought of intimacy but real closeness, that the breaking open of the heart will bear the luscious fruit of compassion. When we realize that we are not special, that everyone hurts at sometime; when we experience the pure goodness of life, or hold the joy and sadness of life simultaneously in our hearts; then separateness melts away and we know a deeper connection with all life. We can accept the frailty of being human – ours and others’. That’s how God’s love for us becomes converted into our love and concern for others.
I have been a seeker after God my whole life. You don’t need to be an accomplished kabbalist to know that all too often God is so hard to find in our lives. It’s as if God is hiding from us and there are walls and barriers preventing us from getting close. But the truth is that the barriers of separation are really only illusion. God is present at every moment, waiting for us. If we could open our eyes and see clearly, we would find what our souls yearn for, the meaning, the connection, the compassion, the love we crave. There are so many places to look, to find connection. Some of us will find God in nature and some of us in meditation. Some will seek God’s presence through acts of loving-kindness or political action to better the world. Some will know God through prayer and some will experience God in ritual. God is not in some distant place. God is a heart beat away, if only we knew where to look.
There is a story told of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s son, Reb Barukh of Mezhibuzh, who was sitting at home on a lovely day like this one when his young son came running in sobbing and grasped his father’s legs. Reb Barukh closed the book he was studying and said, “tztaztkele, what the matter, why are you crying?” And his son, through the tears told him: “My friends and I were playing hide and seek and it was my turn to hide, so I found the very best hiding place ever and waited and waited and waited but no one came to find me.” Then Reb Barukh stroked his son’s face and tears started to roll down his own cheeks. Now it was the son’s turn to ask, “Tatteh, why are you crying?” “Because,” said Reb Barukh, “it is the same with God. God found the best place to hide and no one is looking.” “Where is God hiding, Tatteh?” asked the son. “In our hearts, tzatzkele, in our hearts.”
I want to bless us all, that during these weeks and months of the New Year, each of us will make the effort to seek God and explore our hearts. We may just find what we have been yearning for all along.
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