The Sacred Fire: Discerning How To Be In The World
Kol Nidre Sermon 5782
One of the stories that struck me this year going through our annual cycle of reading the Torah is one that is not often covered in your classic Hebrew School curriculum. Long after Noah and the flood, long after the Exodus from Egypt, even long after the revelation of Mt. Sinai is the story of Korach.
The story of Korach takes place as the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness towards the Promised. Korah is a Levite, like Moses and Aaron, which means that Korah and his family have the special duty and privilege of tending to the tabernacle, the sacred space of the people; he is privileged to do sacred work.
But, as it turns out, he has his eyes set on something higher. “Vayikah Korah,” the story begins, “Korah betook himself:
וַיָּקֻ֙מוּ֙ לִפְנֵ֣י מֹשֶׁ֔ה to rise up against Moses, together with two hundred and fifty Israelites, chieftains of the community. This band combined against Moses and Aaron and said to Moses and Aaron, ‘You have amassed too much! For all the community are holy, all of them, and Adonai is in their midst.’”
Moses is devastated. “Hear me, sons of Levi,” he responds. “Is it not enough for you that the God of Israel has set you apart from the community of Israel and given you access to God, to perform the duties of God’s Tabernacle and to minister to the community and serve them? Now that God has advanced you and all your fellow Levites with you, do you seek the priesthood, too?”
The answer is clearly yes, and so a test is invoked. In order to determine who should be High Priest Moses says to Korah, “You and all your band, you and they and Aaron take fire pans, and tomorrow put fire in them and lay incense on them before God. Then the man whom God chooses, he shall be the holy one.” Some consequence of their laying incense in their fire pans is going to lead to it being clear who should be High Priest. So, the next day, each contestant lays fire in their pans and, lo and behold,
And a fire went forth from God and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering the incense,” everyone offering incense but Aaron.
Whew. A high risk gambit on the part of Korah results in devastating consequences for him and his followers.
If you’re like me you have many questions about this story, but perhaps one fundamental one: what did Korah do that was so wrong?
“Rav Lachem,” Korach said to Moses and Aaron. “You have amassed too much! For all the community is holy, all of them, and God is in their midst.”
On the face of it, what is so problematic about this charge? Korah is simply identifying that Moses and Aaron have a disproportionate amount of power and prestige relative to the rest of the community, which is clearly true. So again, what’s the problem?
Well, for starters, as becomes clear as the story goes on, who would Korah have replace Aaron, but himself?
Even still, that in and of itself does not seem, definitionally, a problem. After all, how would any of us get anywhere if we didn’t identify a role for ourselves and pursue it? What is so problematic about Korah setting his sights on Aaron’s priestly role? Aaron is no demigod; it was he, after all, who helped the people mold the golden calf. What makes Aaron inherently better for the role than Korah?
The way I answer this question, and which leads to the question I want all of us, including myself to ask tonight, is for Korah, when would it have been enough?
How do we know, for example, that Moses wouldn’t have been next? How do we know Korah wouldn’t next have wanted to be the singular prophet channeling words between the people and God? Korah had a voracious appetite, one understanding of the tradition suggests, an unending quest for power, gratification, and validation.
Which brings us to our question here tonight. It is Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, the season of teshuvah, the season of repentance, of return, when we return to our core selves. Elohai neshamah shenatati be tehorah hi. My god, the soul you placed within me, she is precious—the season where we return to our the precious souls placed within us, and ask, how we can do better, how can we align who we are and how we act in this world with our precious neshama, our precious soul, recognizing that our roles in this universe matter, that our actions have ripple effects through the cosmos, and recognizing that it is our duty to be as precious a presence in this mysterious community as we can be.
And so the question I want us to ask this year, the question I want to ask myself this year, is when are we enough, when am I enough, when is it all enough for each of us?
When I let a certain voice inside myself win out, the answer, as it is for Korah, is never.
There are times when my understanding of my presence in this world is either (a) I’m not enough: I’m not good enough. I haven’t done enough; and/or (b) I don’t get enough credit, I don’t have enough power, enough prestige. Either way, I deserve, I should be more, more, more.
Teshuvah means return and so when I encounter parts of myself that have become unmoored, that are especially charged, I return to my roots to help discover who I am and how I came to be this way. Some might call it Freudian psychology, I call it good old-fashioned teshuva, a process worth revisiting year after year.
Each year I revisit my story, which, by now, most of you know: my father the rabbi, dead suddenly at 35, leaving behind 7 year old me, my four year old sister sophie, my four week old sister henya. To say my mother had her hands full is like saying the ocean is full of water. My mom’s system for caring in the multitude of ways I needed her was flooded. She poured as much love out, put as much food on the table as she could, but for a little kid going on adolescent going on adult trying to figure out who he was, what the heck had happened, and what mattered in the world, I needed more than she was able to provide. It was too much to ask of any one person in those circumstances to be fully present to the still-formulating person I was, looking for affirmation, reassurance, and love in the many ways I needed.
Instead, I turned to whatever sugar high versions of those things I could find out there in the world. Whether it was through, in successive years, popularity at school, success with dating or achievement in sports, I was always chasing that sense of validation. It culminated with that ever tantalizing drug and validation that I discovered in college: good grades. Oh how sweet that first A plus tasted when I discovered I could do that. You mean there was a seemingly objective metric that told me I was worthy in this world? That I mattered? Sign me up for more of that.
Since then, I have been on a never-ending search, consciously or otherwise, for just the right piece of recognition, just the right piece that will quench my thirst. Just the right award, just the right list to be placed on, just the right platform that will communicate to everyone—and perhaps more importantly, to myself—how much I matter in this world.
Like Korah, there can be a voraciousness to this appetite.
Still, the fact that I am talking to you about this tonight suggests that I am aware that this can be a misguided search.
Like everyone, I was intrigued by Simone Biles’ performance at the Olympics this year. For those living under a rock, Biles entered these olympics as the most successful gymnast of all time. Four gold medals at the previous Olympics in Rio De Janeiro and a record 25 medals over the course of five world championships. With apologies to Nadia Comaneci, Olga Korbut, and Mary Lou Retton, Biles is what they call the GOAT. The Greatest gymnast of All TIme. There’s really no debate.
And, as most of us are by now aware, at these most recent olympics, a most peculiar thing happened: All of sudden, this athlete, who had been all but deified going into the games for the seemingly miraculous feats she could perform, started to experience a series of mental and psychological twists, twists of the sort she was usually able to do in such a controlled manner on the mat, now uncontrolled in her mind and in her psyche.
She began to lose track of where she was in the air, a serious danger for someone performing double and triple flips and somersaults a dozen feet above the ground.
And so, just like that, she withdrew from the competition.
It sent shockwaves around the gymnastics world and, ultimately, the globe. The greatest to ever do it had pulled out of the first events of the olympics. The world, and, let’s be real, she herself, had put so much pressure on herself that her mental health had begun to suffer, to crack.
But this isn’t even the remarkable part of the story. What’s remarkable about this story, to me, is what happened next. While there were some critics offering the usual pablum about toughness and quitting, largely speaking there was an overwhelming outpouring of support. Think piece after think piece, tweet after tweet hailing Biles’ courage for tending to her mental health when she needed to and modeling for all of us what that looked like.
The response was something even Biles couldn’t have expected, and she named that dynamic in a comment to the world and to her fans. “The outpouring of love and support I’ve received,” she wrote “has made me realize I’m more than my accomplishments, more than gymnastics, something I never truly believed before.”
“more than my accomplishments, more than gymnastics, something I never truly believed before.”
If you want the cliff’s notes of the first part of this sermon, there it is: we are more than our accomplishments, more than what we’ve done, something that it takes most of us a lifetime to realize.
Biles was raised in foster care, so I have no doubt she also had a hard time discerning who she was and what mattered in the world around her as she tried to make sense of the world growing up. It makes sense that something tangible like a gold medal would be the thing to give her her sense of self worth. When we don’t have a steady presence to see us, to mirror us, to communicate our inherent worth to us, we rely on objective metrics like good grades and medals to let us know whether or not we are worthy of love.
In case it’s not clear yet, let me make it clear: we are worthy of love. You. Me. All of us. Elohai neshama shenatata bi tehora hi. My god, the soul which you have given me is precious. Created in the image of God, each of us precious, independent of any accomplishments we have achieved or that we haven’t achieved. We are worthy of love, period. If to save one life is to save an entire world, as the Talmud teaches us, then we contain entire worlds.
Still, there’s a sense in which we know it’s not quite this simple. As beautiful and important as it was to witness Ms. Biles learn the lesson, a lesson I’m still trying to fully learn, that she is worth more than her accomplishments, how do we reconcile this understanding with the sacred fire that pushed her to surpass bounds we had ever seen on the balance beam? the vault? the gymnastics mat? Is that fire not also sacred, fueling her to push herself? Or was it—is my fire to be all Ican be—simply the product of a difficult childhood—neuroses to be managed, not a fire to be channelled. How do we navigate this tension between wanting to be all we can be, living up to our God-given potential, on the one hand, and chasing down false notions of success, dependent for sustenance on the applause, the approval of others, on the other? How can we be satisfied that our tree which falls in the forest with no one to hear it doesn’t merely make a sound, that its echoes reverberate through the cosmos? How can we push ourselves to live up to our potential without losing ourselves in the search for perpetual external validation?
Here as always, I turn to Jewish tradition, the medium through which I search my soul and the soul of the universe.
In one of the most challenging texts of our tradition, and one which some of us chant twice each day, morning and evening as part of the shema, listen, that articulation of our unimpeachable oneness—as part of the shema—we turn to a text which, I’ll be blunt, is one of those which has the effect of turning people off from Judaism and from Religion.
“V’hayah Im Shamoa,” begins the second paragraph of the shemah “If you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day,” the text says, “loving Adonai your God and serving God with all your heart and soul,” “v’natati metar artzechem be’ito,” “I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil. I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle—and thus you shall be satiated.” This is the paragraph we read silently to ourselves right after we finish the v’ahavta of the shema: If you love and serve Adonai your God, I will grant you rain.
But. “Hishamru lachem pen yifteh levavchem.” “Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them.” “Ki Chara af Adonai Bachem” “For then Adonai’s anger will flare up against you, and will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that Adonai is assigning to you.”
It’s a heavy text. A classic example of a text we moderns tend to recoil from: Tsk tsk says the lord. Obey me and I’ll reward you. Disobey me and I’ll punish you. It is not one we naturally respond to with openness.
And yet, buried within these words I feel seeds planted by their Author, pointing to a nourishing path on one hand and one in which we remain largely parched on the other.
If you love the Adonai Eloheichah, Adonai your God, serving God with all your heart and soul you will experience rain, nourishment.
And what is Adonai Eloheicha? We talked about this on Rosh Hashanah, Adonai is a pronunciation of the name for God which contains echoes of the word for existence, of the source of life itself. If we love the source of life, existence, devoting ourselves to it, this text seems to be saying, that is a perpetually nourishing source in and of itself. If we attune ourselves to the Wonder that underlies creation, if that is the pulsing life force we pursue with vigor, we are drawing from an infinite source and, savatah, we can invite ourselves to experience that ongoing sense of satiation.
If, alternatively, we pursue elohim aherim, false gods, false values, empty calories, things which do not nourish our soul, cheap forms of sustenance, sugar highs, it is self-fulfilling: We don’t feel nourished, we do not feel satiated, it is never enough. We are never enough. Like sisyphus, pushing the rock up the hill only for it to roll all the way down again, like bending down to take a sip of water from the pool at our feet to quench a parched throat, only for it to sink out of reach, like being elected the most powerful man in the world only to be concerned with the size of our crowd on inauguration today, there are versions of the holy fire which leave us only wanting more, more, more.
I sympathize with the former president, I do. And I implicate him not to get political but to underscore what can happen when one loses their moorings. When we are unable to identify what it is that nourishes our soul, what our unique contributions to this world are, not so others see it and give us applause but so we can feel, in the moment like the work we are doing is something that meaningful, lasting, and that we are called do.
Now, I get nervous about such a stark binary. The idea that there are proper forms of fire, torches with which we light our soul helping blaze our trail through this universe, and improper forms of fire, fire burning out of control, consuming all in its path, never quenched. Life is oftentimes more complicated than that. It’s often the same spark that would ignite each fire, the fire of righteousness and impact and service, and the fire of ambition and greed and fanaticism. Jewish tradition speaks to this.
One fanciful rabbinic story goes as follows. The ancient rabbis believed that we all have within us an instinct to do good and an instinct to do bad. One day, the embodiment of the impulse to do bad was apprehended, arrested, and handed over to the people. While determining what to do with the instinct to badness that they had arrested, someone fell sick. The remedy they used to help sick people recover involved an egg, so they went in search of an egg. It turned out, with the instinct to badness imprisoned, not a single egg had been laid. They recognized at that moment that caught up with the instinct to quote unquote badness were the seeds for growth, procreation, efflorescence, if it could but be channeled in a sacred manner.
For another tale underscoring the complicated nature of ambition, look no further than the story of Korach himself.
The firepans used as part of the test by those who joined Korach and who died in the fire of rebellion, were later, the Torah teaches us, hammered into plating for the altar of sacrifice. “Gathered from the charred remains of confrontation,” Observes Rabbi Shefa Gold “the firepans had become holy. “
She goes on to reflect how this piece of Torah touches her own life. “Searching through the rubble of my own rebellions,” she writes, “I find that a great deal of my arrogance has been burned up in the fires of experience, but there in the ruins I also find treasures: my passion for truth, my holy questions.”
The nature of the fire that burns within us to achieve, to be recognized, is a complicated one. And it is worth honoring. We know it is responding to something, whether it is a primal scream to be seen or a wounded soul crying out to be recognized. Now, left untended this fire can be all-consuming, turning everything and everyone in our paths into objects, tools in our journey towards our own warped understanding of success.
But carefully tended to, meanwhile, it can be the fuel that pushes us to be the best versions of ourselves, fulfilling our potential to be vessels of love and holiness as we undertake our sacred work in this world.
So how do we identify the difference between the fires? How do we ensure that the right one is blazing? How do we tend to that spark in our souls to make sure it grows into a ner tamid, an eternal candle, like the one above me in this sanctuary, lighting our way in the midst of darkness, rather than an esh zarah, an alien fire like the one that consumed Korah and his band or like the one offered by Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron, who also, according to legend were too eager to replace their father, leapfrogging him to become High priests, and who, also, were burned up in their own fire?
How do we tend to the flame within us so that it becomes an ner tamid, an eternal candle, not an esh zara, an all consuming blaze?
I’m not sure I know.
I have wrestled with this question for much of my life and in an intensive manner for much of the last year.
Each year when I write my sermons I alight, in the course of my work, on at least one sermon topic for the following year.
I have known for over a year that one of my topics for this year would be on the complicated topic of ambition, on the fires that blaze within us, and I still don’t totally know how to push myself to live up to my potential without losing sight of what matters most. How to discern the call to sacred work from the call for adulation and appreciation.
My hope is, this imperfect sermon is something of its own answer. A reminder that we are more than our accomplishments, that I am more than my sermons. That part of the nature of tending to our own flames so they can be nerot tamidim, eternal candles lighting our way, is recognizing the humanity in our efforts, that our charred remains, too, are holy. That missteps and imperfections are part of the tapestry that make us human, and that that is sacred. That slowing things down to help attune ourselves to the calling—v’haya im shamoa; to listen to the ways in which the Source of Life calls out to us, my teacher Bobbi Breitman offers, rather, than to the hollow calls of elohim aherim, empty vessels, can help us feel the love that we so deeply crave and deserve, the love which sustains this universe.
Elohai Neshamah She’natati Bi Tehorah Hi. My God, the soul which you have placed within me, she is precious. Help me to remember that. G’mar Chatimah Tovah, may you be sealed in the book of life, for good. Shanah Tovah.
