THE HUNGER BEYOND THE FAST

Like truth itself, Isaiah’s message in our Haftarah this morning stands in judgment before us, questioning our integrity and challenging us to pursue righteousness. Listen once more:

"Is this the fast I look for? A day of self-affliction? Bowing your head like a reed, and covering yourself with sackcloth and ashes? Is this what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? . . ."

"Is not this the fast I look for: to unlock the shackles of injustice, to undo the fetters of bondage, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every cruel chain? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and to bring the homeless poor into your house? When you see the naked, to clothe them, and never to hide yourself from your own kin?"

"Then shall your light blaze forth like the dawn, and your wounds shall quickly heal: your Righteous One will walk before you, the Presence of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then, when you call, the Lord will answer; when you cry out, God will say: "Here I am."

Isaiah is telling his audience that their wounds will be healed through acts of kindness and compassion. To whom was he speaking, what were their wounds, and what is the implication of his message for us?

Isaiah was speaking to a generation in spiritual distress. They were the remnant of our people left after the First Temple was destroyed and the wealthy, well-educated and powerful were taken into exile in Babylon. Without leaders, the community was in disarray, and with their spiritual center, the Temple, destroyed, their connection to God was uncertain. Many were barely subsisting. And finally, recent waves of immigrants had introduced unfamiliar cultural and spiritual ways.

Our ancestors were weary, uncertain about their future, and their souls were in pain. This is the audience to whom Isaiah spoke. And to the extent that we are consumed by work, uncertain about the future, and suffering from a sense of spiritual emptiness, we are his audience as well.

We rarely hear voices like Isaiah’s now. The God-intoxicated person, clear and passionate about his mission, has become an aberration. Even when such souls do arise and call out to us, most of us are too hassled, too over committed, too weary to listen.

There is a hunger inside us. It is deep and intense and it cries out to be fed. So we try to satisfy it. We try personal growth programs, vitamins, drugs, alcohol, possessions and travel. We follow the Bulls or Sammy Sosa, false messiahs and gurus. We take refuge in television and the Internet and seek solace in meditation, yoga, painting and music. Still, we feel empty and we sense that something deep inside us is missing.

Many of my contemporaries are cynical about religious life. They remember the worship of their childhood as formal, cool, elegant, and vacuous. It was experienced as idolatry B the idolatry of form, as suggested by our scholar in residence Ken Seeskin. And today, there is the danger of a different kind of idolatry -- the idolatry of what is called "spirituality." It is the extolling of whatever promises to sooth us and give us respite. In the words of Daniel Berrigan, "This focus on equanimity is actually a narrow-minded, selfish approach to reality dressed up within the language of spirituality."

Don’t get me wrong. I believe we need to bring peace, presence, and centeredness into our lives. But don’t we already know that while sometimes our spiritual life touches us deeply, it still doesn’t fill the void? Just as Isaiah criticized the perfunctory fasting of his contemporaries, he would reject the effete spirituality of ours. He would tell us that there is something else we need, something that those who came before us knew and had and which we need to learn and have for ourselves. He tells us that: By doing acts of justice, our wounds shall quickly heal and when we cry out, God will answer, "Hineni -- Here I am."

Isaiah did not see social justice and spirituality as mutually exclusive. His view of the world was holistic. Along with our ancestors, he saw the unity of all things. For example, he wrote that God is the one "Who forms light and creates darkness, Who makes peace and creates evil."(45:7) The message is that reality is one, and what appears to our limited human intelligence to be contradictory or in opposition, is, in fact, one from the perspective of Higher Reality. This is no less true of social justice and the spiritual quest.

Reflecting on this in her "The Riddle of the Ordinary," Cynthia Ozick notes that we have a tendency to divide our lives into two distinct categories, the Ordinary and the Extraordinary. The Extraordinary, she writes, is obvious, and Judaism has created appropriate responses to it. So, for example, we have special blessings for lightning, a rainbow, and meeting a king. But what of the Ordinary? Does it pass unnoticed? No: We have a b’rachahfor the washing of hands, another over food, others for all manner of ordinary events. No matter how mundane, every element in life presents us the opportunity to experience holiness -- the experience that we are in the Presence of God. This is why, when we do things that would help mend the world, we find ourselves feeling spiritually one and at peace.

In an article in the most recent issue of Tikkun magazine, Arthur Waskow writes: "Some ask: Is it more important to "serve God" and heal the self through religious devotion and individual psychotherapy, or to "do God’s will" and heal the world through public action to achieve social change? Some ask: Is it possible in honesty to separate the two? To me it seems that there is not a conflict but rather a crucial confluence between meditative mysticism and a religious commitment to heal the outer world." Or, in the words of Isaac Twersky, dean of this generation of Jewish scholars, "One cannot claim to be a God-intoxicated Jew without having an unquenchable thirst for social justice."

Just a generation ago, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said "My legs were praying!" as he marched in Selma to oppose racism and the Vietnam war. The monk Thomas Merton kept a Trappist silence through which his voice against that war echoed continents away. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh led Vietnamese into a way of life that affirmed life, against both the tyrannies of Washington and Saigon and those of Hanoi. The Catholic Worker Dorothy Day prayed with deep devotion, with her own hands fed the poor in soup kitchens, and was often arrested as she protested war and militarism.

But "How do we bring our legs to pray, our hearts to act?" Isaiah tells us that achieving genuine spiritual fulfillment is a function of our working to mend the world. Then true integrity is attained. Listen to the interpretive poetry of Marcia Falk in her Book of Blessings as, in her rewriting of the Sh’ma and V’ahavta, she brings light to this quest:

In the spirit of the rabbinic saying, "Mitzvah goreret mitzvah --one mitzvah calls forth another," I ask you to commit to one, just one of the acts of which Isaiah speaks: to unlock the shackles of injustice, to undo the fetters of bondage and to let the oppressed go free -- to share our bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless into safe shelter, and to provide all of God’s creatures with the necessities of life.

Individuals and families, for example, might fulfill your commitment to share our bread with the hungry by sending a donation to MAZON or by volunteering at a soup kitchen.

Havurot, might fulfill the commitment to bring the homeless into safe shelter by staffing a regular night at a local PADS shelter.

Study groups, might go about tasks related to text-based discussions of domestic violence, adult literacy, or honoring our elders.

Committees and boards might select a form of community service that parallels your service to the congregation. The Glasser Preschool might give some time to Parenthesis. Those involved with our religious school or youth groups might work with the newly formed Oak Park social action youth group called "A Voice for Youth," and envisioned by our own Adam Koren and advised by Pat Allen. Our House Committee might give some to Habitat for Humanity.

Our Social Action Committee will be available to help such natural groupings find a way to heed the call of Isaiah. I urge you to draw upon their wisdom and experience and become involved in their work.

Secondly, it is appropriate to have blessings to say when we engage in a task that is at once utterly mundane and truly sacred -- the mending of the world. By reciting a b'rachah while performing this work, we make an explicit connection between the actions we undertake, no matter how humble, and their significance in the Divine Scheme. We connect the task of repairing our world with our praise of God for the privilege of engaging in such sacred work.

Each of you has been offered a Social Action Blessing Card to help you to make this connection. For every act of social responsibility, there is a blessing that can be said. The blessing ending with the words zokef k’fufim praises God Who lifts up the fallen and might be said when we feed the hungry, house the homeless, or provide disaster relief. Educational activities, interfaith or interracial discussion groups might be occasions for the blessing that ends pokeach ivrim, praising God Who opens the eyes of the blind. Or when we engage in political advocacy for human rights and civil liberties, or attend to the needs of our sister community in Daugavpils, Latvia, we would recite the blessing that ends matir asurim, proclaiming God to be the One Who frees captives. And for any and every offering of social action, we might say the first blessing which concludes lirdof tzedek, affirming God’s command to pursue justice.

Our lives are filled with opportunities to recognize God -- to draw a spark of the Divine into everyday tasks and thereby awaken the Divine Spark within ourselves. Such holy work deserves sanctification through these brachot.

Finally, many of you will recall the "Town Hall Meetings" we convened several years ago. Those meetings were intended to move us toward a greater sense of community and of purpose. We would like to bring that process a step further.

We had our first Service Day at the temple on Sunday morning, August 23. Nearly 150 men, women and children came to help prepare this building for the High Holy Days and a new year. At the same time, they were called to the inner preparation necessary to make the High Holy Days spiritually fulfilling. So many came to connect with the community B to meet new friends and to reaffirm ongoing relationships. We worked together, seeing that no one was above washing tables or cleaning washrooms. And we began to cut each other a bit of slack. We honored each other for coming, out of role, to be part of something greater. And the warmth and affection became palpable as time passed. We sat together on the floor and ate. We were rejuvenated, more by being part of a united community working together than by the food we shared.

In the weeks ahead, our Social Action Committee will be organizing a follow up to our Service Day and to our Town Hall Meetings of two years ago. The invitation is extended to everyone, whether or not you were part of those events. Following from what we have learned from our congregation’s involvement in United Power for Action and Justice, we will be asking, "why did you come," "if you were part of these events, what was your experience?" and "what more needs to be done?" This will be a time to speak of your vision of the community you seek -- within the temple, and beyond the temple, in the wider community of which we are a part. The results will be reported to everyone through a number of channels: The Messenger, a mailing concerning the new initiatives we will be taking, and from this pulpit.

There is an old story of the missionary, Sadhu Sundar Singh. He was traveling through the Himalayas with a Monk in the bitter cold. Night was coming and the Monk said, "if we don't reach the monastery by nightfall, we are in danger of freezing to death." Just as they reached a narrow path, they heard the cries of a man who had fallen over the edge. The Monk said, "Do not stop. God has brought him to his fate. He must work it out himself."

Sadhu replied, "God sent me here to help my brother. I cannot abandon him." The Monk went on and Sadhu climbed down a steep path to the man. When he found the man, he saw that his leg was broken and he could not walk. Sadhu made a sling from his blanket and tied the man to his back. He then began a treacherous climb. He made his way through the deepening snow. It was dark and the path was almost impossible to follow. Yet he persevered, and faint with exhaustion, he finally saw the lights of the Monastery. As he moved toward the light, he stumbled for the first time and nearly fell. He did not stumble from exhaustion, but over an object.As he brushed the snow off the object, he saw that it was the body of the Monk.

Years later when a student asked him, "what is life's most difficult task?" Sadhu replied, "to have no burden to carry."

To have no burden to carry . . . .

The monk had dedicated his life to his spiritual quest. But it was a solitary quest cut off from others. Because of his narrow minded, selfish approach to spiritual life, the monk died. But Sadhu, who took up the burden of his fellow lived. Lest we suffer a death of the spirit, let us dedicate ourselves to the tasks given to us by Isaiah on this Yom Kippur morning. Then, may the promise of Isaiah be fulfilled. Our wounds shall be healed, we shall stand in that Presence we call God, and when we cry out, God will answer " Hineni -- Here I am." Amen.