Ki Tavo 5770 / Elul

Dear Friends:

These days most of my energies are directed toward the High Holidays and temple programs for the coming year which all are shaping up to be very exciting. Thus my blogging time is a bit short, so I am pleased to share with you a D'var Torah on this week's parasha that I delivered to the congregation in 2006.

Happy studying and in the spirit of Elul, meaningful reflecting.

RJEB

KI TAVO 5767

September 8, 2006

Two weeks from tonight, most if not all of us will gather here again—if not in this exact space, then in one very much like it—to usher in the year our people names 5767. So I was thinking about what I could say to you tonight by way of a sermon, without giving too much of a sermon. That is to say, I promise to keep my remarks succint—though, it should be noted, not so much as Salvador Dali, who, in what has been called the world’s shortest public speech, once said, “I will be so brief that I have already finished.”

I have not already finished, so let me get on with it. It turns out this Torah portion contains an appropriate message for the season. We’re nearing the end of the Torah, and Parashat Ki Tavo contains some of Moses’ final remarks to the Israelites. With promises of abundant blessings and threats of hideous curses, Moses exhorts the people to obey God’s commandments, to the end that they will live long and prosper. But Moses is old and, truth be told, crotchety, and he can’t help periodically blurting out his frustration with a people that over the past forty years of wandering in the wilderness has given him more than a few grey hairs. He says, “…You have seen all that the Eternal did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt . . . the wondrous feats that you saw with your own eyes, those prodigious signs and marvels. Yet to this day the Eternal has not given you a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear” (Deut. 29:1-3).

Poor Moses! Forty years of schlepping this people from wilderness to promised land, and they can’t even recognize a good thing when they see it. Within minutes of their deliverance from Pharaoh and his murderous slave captains, they’re begging to go back to Egypt. Within minutes of manna dropping at their feet, they’re begging for meat. Within minutes of arriving at Mount Sinai they’re building a golden calf, that monstrous idol, and dancing around it in a frenzy. Within minutes of scouting out the land of milk and honey, they’ve declared it unsuitable on account of its inhabitants, who are, by at least one account, big. So Moses derides them: “You lack the eyes to see!”

Which takes me to my very simple theme, what I would wish for us in the new year, if I could have only one wish. My wish is that we would have eyes to see, in this new year.

Thousands of years ago, the Bible’s gentle cynic Kohelet famously declared, “There is nothing new under the heavens,” and how well we know the feeling. How easily we say that we’ve seen it all before, that we’ve “been there, done that.” Our colleague Rabbi Charles Sherman, whose congregation is in Tulsa, Oklahoma, says that “the real enemy of religion is not atheism but boredom. Being jaded is the opposite of being religious. The great Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin wrote: ‘If you look at the stars and yawn . . . I created you in vain, says God.’”

Rabbi Sherman also shared the story of Bob Edens, who was born blind but who, thanks to a delicate and complex operation which involved attaching a detached retina and implanting a transplanted cornea, has gained the ability to see.

This is how he describes his new world.

“To me, yellow is amazing, but red is the best; although, I haven’t seen anything yet that I don’t find wondrous.

I never would have dreamed that yellow was so, so yellow. I don’t have any words with which to describe it. I am amazed by yellow. I am simply dazzled by yellow.

But red is my favorite color. I just can’t believe red,” said Edens who says that the first thing he ever saw in his life was an eyedropper in the hands of a nurse, a week after his surgery.

“Grass is something I had to get used to,” he said. “I always thought it was just fuzz. But to see each individual stalk, and to see the hair on my arms, growing like trees, and to see birds flying through the air, and everything, it’s like starting a whole new life. It’s the most amazing thing in the world to see things you never thought you’d see.

I saw the purple and orange recently in the face of a tiger. I could see the individual hairs and the color of his eyes.

I can see the shape of the moon now and I like nothing better than seeing a jet plane flying across the sky, leaving a vapor trail. And of course sunsets and sunrises.”

“I can’t wait to get up each day to see what I can see. I am still seeing most of it for the first time.”

“And at night I look at the stars in the sky and at the flashing lights on the highway. And I am learning how to read and write like a first grader. Everything is like a constant high. You could never know how wonderful everything is!”

Edens had been blind from birth and yet he managed to graduate from Furman University, learned Braille, married and had a daughter. He even coached a Little League baseball team, while working as a masseur! He claims that every single governor of South Carolina since 1963 has come to him for a massage. But right now, he would rather talk about what he can see than about what he has done.

“I saw some bees the other day,” confided Edens, almost as if telling a secret. “And they were incredible. And I jumped a covey of quail too. I had heard of quail before, but to actually see them, what an experience!”

“And I saw a truck drive by in the rain the other day. It threw a spray into the air. It was marvelous!”

“And did I mention,” he said, genuine rapture in his voice, “did I mention that I saw a falling leaf, just drifting in the air! What a wonder that was!”

I was moved by Bob Edens’ account of what it is like to see things for the first time, and I hope you are too. And I hope we could spend a few minutes on the cusp of this new year, just trying to recapture the feeling. Maybe you keep safe somewhere deep within the thrill you felt the first time you saw something magnificent, like the Grand Canyon with its sunset-hued striations plunging a mile beneath your feet, or you saw Israel, its low coastline breaking through the clouds as the airplane descended, or you first set eyes on the person you would someday marry.

The Psalmist was right when he exclaimed, “Ma rabu ma’asecha Adonai” – O God, how wondrous are your works. And Abraham Joshua Heschel was right when he said that the religious experience begins when we learn to cultivate a sense of sublime wonder at the universe. That, in its most literal sense, is why we call this season the Days of Awe. And that is why my wish for us is to open our eyes in wonder and, just two weeks from tonight, stand in awe, alongside Bob Edens, and Heschel, and the Psalmist,

. . . and this child:

Kevin was in the first grade of school and his teacher asked the class, “What is the color of apples?” Answers were red and green. Kevin raised his hand and said, “White.” The teacher explained that apples could be red, green and sometimes golden, but never white. Kevin was insistent and finally said, “Look inside.”

I wish we’ll all have eyes like Kevin’s in this new year, eyes that can’t wait to get up each day to see what they can see, eyes to see the majesty and the mystery of this world, shot through with God’s presence.