2
High Holiday sermon
5770
Navigating through Life
Alan Henkin
In the medieval days of Marine navigation sailors made use of something called a chip log. Essentially it was a crude speedometer, it was a light line knotted at regular intervals and weighted to drag in the water. It was tossed overboard over the stern of the boat as the pilot counted the knots that were let out during a specific period of time. From the number of knots the pilot could figure out the speed that the vessel was moving, and therefore its approximate location. This is reason why, to this day, we refer to miles-per-hour on water as... knots.
In this era of Global Positioning Systems, Google maps and sigalert.com, it is easy to forget how people used to get from one place to another safely and efficiently. I suppose that the earliest and still most reliable way to get around is by landmark. If you were an ancient mariner, you would stay close to the shore and you navigated by landmarks or land characteristics that you could see. Same thing on land -- you would travel towards this mountain or that hill or along the river.
As time went on, folks began using other means to find their way. For example, Floki Vilgjerdarsson (Vil-jer-dar-son), a great Viking explorer credited with the discovery of Iceland, carried aboard his ship a cage of ravens. When he thought land should be near, he would release one of the birds. If it circled the ship without purpose, land was not near. But if the bird took off in a certain direction, the boat followed, knowing that the raven was heading towards land. It is kind of like the story of Noah, who let loose birds to determine whether the Flood had receded to safe levels.
Eventually the Chinese around the year 210 BC or BCE began working with a magnetic compass, which they eventually utilized as a navigational aid. After a long period of time the compass gave way to the astrolabe, the sextant and then the gyroscope. Then came radar and GPS and computer guidance systems. And well, here we are today...
I heard a story about the different ways in which men and women tend to navigate. I know you're thinking, "Yeah women ask for directions; men don't." They say that men's inability to ask directions is genetic. That is the reason it take 280,000,000 sperm to fertilize one egg. None would bother to ask for directions.
But seriously... Imagine this conversation: the woman is driving, and she calls her husband for directions from the car. He: "At Devonshire and Reseda you gotta turn south." She: "South?! Which way is south? which way should I turn?" He: "You know, south. Towards Northridge Park." She: "Ohhhh. OK. Thanks." You see, according to studies -- and this is a huge generality -- men tend to navigate by the compass, and women tend to navigate by landmark. Men tend to orient themselves by the four points of the compass: north-south-east-and-west, and women tend to orient themselves by their surroundings. Clearly this is grossly stereotypical, but it is an intriguing notion that we orient ourselves in our physical world either by landmark or by compass.
This idea, that we navigate by landmark or compass, applies to our moral and spiritual life, as well as to our physical life.
Sometimes we make our way through life by means of goals and sometimes we make our way through life by means of rules and guidelines. Goals in life are like landmarks; they let us organize information, plot a particular course of action, and give us a means of knowing how much progress we have made. Guidelines, rules and laws are like compass points; they structure our lives and make our direction predictable and knowable.
Torah is like a compass, the preeminent compass of life for us Jews. The Torah actually determines our direction; the direction in which we pray. We all think that we Jews are supposed to pray facing east. That is a very weak custom; the Torah trumps east. In this sanctuary, for example, east is that way, but we pray facing the Torah -- and that is as it should be. The Torah determines the direction of our prayers.
The Torah is our compass in another way: It provides us with the most the most sublime ethical rules in all of Western civilization. In the Holiness Code that we read on Yom Kippur afternoon we find some of the most astonishing ethical laws of the Torah: "You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal One your God, am holy": "You shall each revere his mother and his father;" "You shall not steal; you shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with one another":"You shall not render an unfair decision."
Let's take one of these ethical compass points and follow its direction for a moment. Deuteronomy 19:14 says, "You shall not move your countryman's landmarks, set up by previous generations." In biblical times they had no surveyors to determine a real property's boundaries, so land was demarcated by piles of stones serving as landmarks. Little prevented me from moving the pile of stones a few yards from my property onto yours, enlarging my field and enriching me. The Torah made this serious offense, usually committed in secret, a crime. This prohibition came to be called hasagat gevul, "encroaching on a boundary." But subsequent Jewish law expanded hasagat gevul to forbid many other kinds of financial misappropriation, such as using someone else's words (copyright), the location of similar businesses next to each other, soliciting another synagogue's members for your own synagogue, and other forms of unfair business competition.
The point just is,/ that, in this one little verse, meant to maintain geographic boundaries, the Torah can provide us with powerful ethical direction as we navigate through life.//
If the Torah functions for us as a compass in the navigation of life, Shabbat functions more like a landmark, a constant by which we can orient ourselves around the week, month and year of our lives.
I think of the Shabbat as the Jewish people's spyhop. Do you know what spyhopping is? It is a kind of whale behavior that Orcas, killer whales, in particular, display. It is when they vertically propel themselves half-way out of the water and tread water, so to speak. It is not breaching or lunging; the Orca rises half out of the water and holds the position. Evidently, Orcas, which have very good eyesight, do this in order to view their surroundings -- the shore, the whale watching boats, or whatever else in nearby on the surface. They use this spyhop to orient themselves to the world above water.
Shabbat is our spyhop. We too take a break from our workaday lives, look around ourselves to get our spiritual bearings, and align ourselves with our world above us. Shabbat is when we tread water, instead of fighting the brutal currents that buffet us during the work week. On Shabbat we raise ourselves above the tumult and chaos that surround us, and locate ourselves in the ebb and flow of life.
Shabbat serves as a landmark in our weekly life, giving our lives a rhythm and a goal. We work hard for six days or go to school but on the seventh day a new routine takes over. Ideally we have a special Shabbat dinner, we enjoy the company of family and friends, we attend synagogue and pray and study. Our week builds up to Shabbat for the peak of our week, and rest.//
I want to suggest that the synagogue itself is yet another landmark in Judaism, enabling us to navigate life. Throughout the many centuries in the many lands of our Jewish sojourn/ the synagogue has been the central institution by which Jewish society has organized itself. Meeting place, worship place, learning place – the synagogue is all these and much more.
In the Mishnah we read that a person must not make a synagogue into a kappandaria. The Talmud asks, what is a kappandaria? The answer, it decides, is a shortcut. You can't make a synagogue into a shortcut. If you're walking on Rinaldi Court and you want to get to Chimineas, you can't cut through TAS as a shortcut. No, synagogues are not shortcuts.
You can’t just go to a synagogue and sit and expect to be educated. You can’t just go to a synagogue and sit and expect to be spiritually. You can’t just go to a synagogue and drop off your kids at religious school and think that the synagogue alone will make your kids into Jews.
Synagogues are not shortcuts to living Jewishly. Synagogues are places where learning is available to you if you are willing to study. Synagogues are places where spirituality awaits you if you work at your praying. Synagogues are places that you can partner with you in making Jews and mentschen of your children if you will hold up your end of the partnership.
Synagogues are beacons that can illuminate your path as you go on your journey through life. A synagogue is a place where you can find comfort in your bereavement, joy in your celebrations, and companionship and love among friends. In the synagogue your soul can stretch horizontally to encompass other seekers like yourself or soar vertically to experience God in the way that only you can do so. The synagogue is our lighthouse, lighting the way to home and safety and love.
My friends, Judaism provides us with multiple ways to help us find our way in life. We have guidelines and rules, and we have landmarks in time like Shabbat and landmarks in space like Temple Ahavat Shalom. Let us use them to steer our through this complicated life we live. Let us look to Shabbat to locate ourselves in sacred time, and let us re-discover Temple Ahavat Shalom as the sacred place from which Jewish learning, companionship and prayers flow.//
At a Ramadan dinner a few weeks I met a deputy chief of the LAPD, and he told me a story that happened long ago when he was driving a black-and-white cruiser. It seems a seven-year-old girl who got lost in Encino. The girl was frantically running up and down the streets looking for some place familiar. The LAPD officer spotted her, and drove her around the neighborhood. Suddenly the girl excitedly pointed to a synagogue, and she shouted, "This is my Temple. Now I know where I am! I can find my way home from here!"
Just so... May Ahavat Shalom and the Judaism that it embodies be the place from which we too can find our way too.