Today’s parasha starts out:
Jacob left Beer–Sheva and set out for Haran. He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and the angels of God were going up and down on it. And the Lord was standing beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac: the ground on which you are lying I will assign to you and to your offspring. Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendents. Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.
Most people like to look at the differences between the three flood stories, but I'd like to point the similarities. All three flood stories have the destruction of people and the gods help a few people survive. The people had all built arks to protect themselves from the destruction created by the god or gods.
Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!”
I love this story for many reasons, but the one I want to talk about today is Jacob’s observation that God was in that place and he didn’t know it. This strikes me to be a very contemporary sentiment. A book was recently published by an Italian playwrite named Antonio Monda called “Do you believe? Conversations on God and Religion” where he interviewed 18 American cultural icons about their views on God. Saul Bellow was one of five who was certain in his believe in God. Six were confident in God’s non-existence; seven weren’t convinced one way or the other. The results showed a startling lack of unaniminity which is reflective of the ambivalence felt by many of us. The author Michael Cunningham had an interesting observation in the book. He said, “if you believe in physics, it is really not a big jump to believe in God. Some sort of God.” I think he was onto something.
One: I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
Two: If something is in me which can be called religious, it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.
And Three: Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
One of the things that Einstein seems to be saying is that knowledge and religion is a two way street. One who has a thirst for unraveling the secret and hidden order of creation indubitably cultivates an awe of the Creator. One who has an awe of the creator appreciates the complex mysteries that allow our universe to function, and has a drive to uncover them.
Einstein’s conception of the relationship between God and knowledge is deeply ingrained in Judaism. The second prayer in the Artscroll siddur, after Modeh Ani, expresses this idea. Raishit Chachma Yireh Adonai- Sechel tov l’kol osahem. The beginning of wisdom is awe of Hashem, deep understanding comes to all who have this awe and pursue it. Awe of God is the driving force for wisdom, and the more knowledge we attain, the greater our awe of God.
Let me bring us back to Jacob’s Ladder. Jacob, Sarah Bier informed us last week, was a passive personality, a tumbleweed, constantly being acted upon rather than taking control of his situation. Let’s just say he was no Einstein. She questioned whether he was even in the same league as Abraham and Isaac. His surprise upon learning that God was in this place seems a shocking admission for one of the big three patriarchs. Even more so, as the Midrash tells us that the place he was in was none other than Har Moriah. It also tells us that Jacob didn’t come to be there by accident. He passed it by, made it all the way to Haran, and realized that he forgotten to pray at Har Moriah. He then decided to go all the way back there to pray. God, appreciative of his late, but admirable desire, performed a miracle for Jacob. So he should get there more quickly, God move the mountain to him, so that he should reach it in a short time. So how could the grandson of Abraham, and the son of Isaac not know that God was everywhere, especially on Har Moriah? In some ways, he is like many of our contemporaries, and like a majority of those interviewed in Monda’s book. For many people who haven’t had a direct personal experience of the divine, they are either not sure about God’s existence, or can even be affirmatively convinced of God’s non-existence.
It seems that some people are blessed with the ability to divine a Transcendent Being in the nature of the world (pun intended), while others have more trouble perceiving the Creator behind creation. These people need a little extra help to see what they are missing, or to get past their skepticism. These people need an imminent presence, rather than transcendent, unknowable, and distant God. Jacob’s dream is an example of a direct experience with an imminent God. God executed this dream as a “wake up call” for Jacob. God showed herself as the kind of God that talks to you and promises you things like protection, food, shelter, future progeny and real estate, not one who establishes the fundamental laws of physics and then steps into the shadows. This is a personal God concerned with the fates and actions of human beings, not Spinoza’s God who is revealed when encountering the awesome majesty of the rational ordering of creation.
I have often heard that the ability to believe in God is a talent, akin to musical ability. One either has the ability to sing or play an instrument, or one doesn’t. I think I understand this metaphor. I think this is saying that some of us have the ability see something invisible, touch something incorporeal, and hear something in the sound of silence. This ability is a true blessing; one that can’t be stolen by trickery, like Isaac’s blessing was by Jacob.
To provide an example from my own experience: I have been trying to understand the physics principles that allow a geothermal heat pump to exploit the difference between the earth’s constant temperature and the more extreme fluxuations at the surface to heat and cool indoor space. This requires an understanding of the change in temperature of a fluid as it changes state from liquid to gas when it expands and from gas to liquid when compressed. I have read the explanation more than a dozen times, I have studied colored diagrams, I have looked at my refrigerator inside and out, but while I can understand the words, the concepts still elude me. I bet Josh Burton and others of you here fully understands these principles and will try to explain them to me later. Don’t waste your time. I’m tone deaf in physics. I am happy to accept that the heating and cooling bills will be lower with a geothermal system, but ultimately a veil separates me from a clear understanding of the principles that make this true. Because I lack the ability to understand these principles, the awe of creation gained by others who do, eludes me.
For those with a musical ear for the awe of creation, God’s existence is evidenced in everything around us. Belief is not a leap of faith, but a scientifically demonstrated fact. For those with a tin ear, and the lack of patience to delve into the mysteries and miracles of our world, grasping God’s existence is not a given. In fact, we often confuse the fact that we can’t understand something with an uncertainty or even a lack of belief in its existence. In other words, a Transcendent God can be so distant as to be beyond our view.
This leaves many with a deep wish to have a direct experience with an imminent God, like that experienced by Jacob, because the transcendent God is too hard to grasp. But how would a person with a lack of this “musical talent”, likely react to a direct experience with the divine. The movie (I won’t call it a film) “Evan Almighty” deals with this question in a lighthearted way. God reveals himself in the form of Morgan Freeman to Steve Carell several times and in miraculous ways. But the skeptical and rational Carell, representing most of us, is initially reluctant to believe. This would probably be the reaction of many. Who, right now, right here, actually believes in a God that can take on a human form and speak to you like a person? Even if you did believe this, would you be willing to tell others of your experience? Or would you fear being treated like Dennis Kusinic after admitting to an encounter with a UFO in a Presidential debate?
Jacob doesn’t hesitate or equivocate; he doesn’t try to explain God away. Jacob has a dream in which he meets God, and then he wakes up and says, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.” He then pledges his allegiance to God, contingent on God following through on his promises of security, and material possessions. Okay, so maybe he isn’t the unquestioning musically-talented Abraham who is willing to sacrifice his son to prove his devotion to God, but it is clear that Jacob, one of us, a tone deaf shnook, finally gets it. God is the creator and sustainer of this awesome place in which we inhabit, and for that we owe him our allegiance.
At Pesach, we talk about the four children and the different ways we are to address each of them to guide them to an understanding of the meaning of the holiday. Perhaps we can extend the four children metaphor to this story and the different approaches to reaching a belief in God’s existence. The wise child-that little Einstein-can discern God’s existence from the miracles of creation; the wicked child is agnostic or skeptical and needs to have a direct experience with God before he or she is willing to entertain the truth of God’s existence; the simple child accepts the parent’s explanation of God’s existence without question. But this may be only a way station to becoming either a wise or wicked child in a few years; and who is the child who does not even know to ask a question, the baby who is too young to grasp the concept of God, but who is in awe of everything around them, finds joy in colors and smiles and funny sounds and intuitively lives in harmony with God’s existence. Look into the face of a baby, and you can see God. If only we could keep this child’s qualities throughout our lives.
So back to Jacob. Sarah Bier might be right that he isn’t a larger than life character like Abraham. He is more like many of us, struggling to make sense of the world, concerned with material survival, but when he does have an encounter with the divine, he rises to the occasion and dedicates himself to God, and we are here today as a result of his fidelity. Maybe he’s no Einstein, he’s an everyman’s hero. And that is no small feat.
Shabbat Shalom.
Go home.