God Is In This Place

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome and thank you for joining me. I'm Rabbi David
Lyon from Congregation Methisrael in Houston. For those of us
who live in Houston or cities like it, it isn't
really very difficult to find a house of worship, a
billboard selling religion, or any number of symbols of religious faith.
Given all the attention to faith in a city like ours,

(00:22):
you think that the search was over already. But we
search for God every day. If you have found God,
well bless you. But if you haven't, then you'll join
the countless others who are still searching too. What does
Judaism have to say about finding God? How appropriate to learn?

(00:42):
In a recent tore a portion about Jacob, the father
of the twelve tribes of Israel, who himself was unsure
about God's presence. In Genesis chapter twenty eight, we read
that Jacob, on his way to Haran, rested on the
ground with a stone as a pillow and had a dream.
He dreamed about a ladder sat on the ground that
reached the sky. Above on it were angels going up

(01:06):
and down on it. In the dream, God said to him,
I am the Lord, the God of your father. Abraham,
and the God of Isaac, your descendant, shall be as
the dust of the earth. You shall spread out to
the west, the east, and north, and the south. All
the family of the earth shall blet themselves by you
and your descendants. Remember, I am with you. I will

(01:26):
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. And when he awoke,
Jacob said, God is in this place, and I did
not know it. Suddenly surrounding him, accompanying him and living
with him, was an eternal presence that blessed his father
Isaac and called on his grandfather Abraham. And though Jacob's

(01:50):
awareness awakened his faith in God, he was still very
new to him. So he said, if God remains with me,
if God protects me on this journey that I am making,
and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear,
and if I return safe to my father's house, the
Lord shall be my God. And this stone, which I
have set up as a pillar, shall be God's abode.

(02:12):
And of all that God gives me, I will set
aside a tithe for God. Though we found God in
that place, his recap of events leaves us, as it
left commentators of the past, wondering what kind of bargain
is Jacob making with God. If God remains with me,
then the Lord will be my God. If God gives

(02:32):
me bread to eat and clothing to wear, then the
Lord shall be my God. How could faith be found
and lost so quickly? Hutsba nerve gall, you might say.
Commentators of the past agreed, But they thought that Jacob
was by nature not just a man of the tent.
He was also a cunning man. He found God in

(02:54):
that place, but he didn't know God beyond that place,
not yet. His faith was not as secure as we
first believed. All that Jacob suddenly knew was that God
was in that place. Later in Genesis chapter thirty two,
Jacob wrestles with an angel, a messenger of God. Jacob wrestles,

(03:17):
his hip is strained, and he prevails. Before the match
is done, Jacob was blessed and his name was changed
from Jacob the supplanter to Israel, Israel, the one who
wrestles with God. How did Jacob's life of god wrestling end?
It ended with gratitude for God's way in his life,

(03:37):
for the blessings he came to know, and also for
the hard way that helped him see his life's purpose
more clearly. Ultimately, when his sons gathered around him, his
only fear was that the God he found and the
faith he came to know would be lost in his
children's generation. The Midrash, a rabbinic interpretation, teaches, which many
of you might know, that his uns assure their father

(04:01):
Jacob Israel, saying, here Israel, that is our father. Ato
nih is our God too. Ato nih is one, to
which their father responded, as his eyes did, blessed be
God's name, whose glorious kingdom will be forever. And these
two verses are part of the central pieces of Jewish

(04:22):
worship today. And so in death as in life, Jacob
Israel taught us that faith has lived in the hearts
and minds of the living. Our faithfulness is challenged and
tested in life. It's enduring strength, its muscle memory is
sustained in each subsequent generation. And so we the Jewish people,
the descendants of Jacob are also Israel. Israel, we wrestle

(04:47):
with God too. Now, even if we have found God,
we continue to wrestle with God as we come to
know God and our life experiences. So we ask, how
do we wrestle? Well out, We debate, we raise questions,
we believe, we bless, we sin, we endure, and we
emerge whole but strained, worthy and set apart for the

(05:11):
sacred covenant between God and us. I've been asked if,
as a rabbi, do I believe in God? Yes? I do.
It really helps to believe in God and be a rabbi.
My faith in God began in childhood and has never wavered. Oh,
I've questioned and debated and wondered like you might have,

(05:32):
but that process didn't diminish my faith. Instead, it strengthened it.
How can miscarriages for a young couple, the death of
one's parent, and challenges for young children be anything but
hard moments in need of faith? In these difficult times
in my life and my wife's, I've reached deeply into
my faithfulness to find the teaching, the guidance, and the

(05:52):
way to understand what I can know and to have
faith in what I cannot know. Likewise, in times of
awesome moments, I'd never failed to see them as gifts
for which I felt obliged to express gratitude. The birth
of four children created unscripted words of gratitude, and the
birth of grandchildren created ecstatic joy. But so did overcoming sickness,

(06:15):
feeling optimistic after hopelessness, and finding faith again and again
and again with constant reasons do what our words of
things and praise. If Judy is an advertised on billboards
for a personal relationship with God, it would actually be
one of the most honest sales pitches in the history
of advertisement. Why because once you're here, rabbis can only

(06:39):
teach that God is one God, but rabbis cannot teach
how you must believe in experience or wrestle with God.
God is one, but God is yours. Someone once said
to me, I found God. As I recall, I responded, great,
Now that you found God, what are you going to

(06:59):
do with God? You see that's a Jewish response. Now
we wrestle with God. Now we debate. Now we come
closer with every shared experience in life. In his book,
God was in this place and I did not know it.
Rabbi Larry Kushner writes in the epilogue, I am the

(07:19):
God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebeccah. Do you
hear me, Jacob? And so the question becomes ours do
we hear God in our prayers? And in a book
that I wrote years ago called God of Me Imagining
God throughout our lifetimes, we affirm that the personal image

(07:42):
of the God of Abraham, the God of Sarah, the
God of Isaac, the God of Rebeccah, the God of Jacob,
the God of Rachel, and the God of Leah is
our God too in our own personal ways, not a
different God, but one God. But each of us experiences
God personally, and so I urge you to wrestle with

(08:02):
your God. What needs will you share, What hopes will
you dream? What thanks will you give? And what faith
will you muster? In all the ways that we experience
God or not, it is always surrounding us as questions
we are forced to consider, not because we are constantly

(08:23):
religious people, but because religion surrounds us. Maybe Judaism or
Christianity or Islam. It might be Sekh or Buddhist, or
maybe just a constant wondering about how faith works in
the world. And this itself is important and helpful to
us as we approach a sense of mortality and a

(08:46):
sense of meaning in our life, to consider that the
world was not created for our sake, but rather that
while we're here we can make a positive difference, and
that if there is something larger than ourselves to what
do we owe it? How to express gratitude for the
life that we've been given. Many faith traditions, whether they

(09:07):
are being dogmatic or not, would say that each of
us has a responsibility to the greater good around us,
and that might come from the long standing and sacred
texts of our respective faith traditions, or even secular humanism
that still teaches us to be good to others, to
help others in their need, and to appreciate the help

(09:27):
that the most vulnerable around us demand. It doesn't make
us necessarily religious people, but if we are religious, then
we too have to be discerning. What are the texts
and teachings that speak to us today, What are those
that spoke to our people a long time ago, but
our perhaps anachronistic, have no time or place in our

(09:49):
contemporary world, And which one stand out more than ever before.
For example, in the Torah, we're taught to leave the
gleanings of the field for the poor or the widow
the orphan, and in reality, none of us few of
us are actually farmers who have gleanings of any fields.
But we do have dividends, we have interest income, we

(10:11):
have unearned income, we have the money that we set
aside for special projects, and all of that are the
gleanings of our field, the extra that we can do without. Now.
The truth is that the gleanings of the field in
the past, we're supposed to be left so that others
can come and pick it up for themselves, so that
they can have a sense of dignity, not just to

(10:32):
be handed something, but to help themselves to it. Well,
we might be able to do it that way today,
but even if not, we can contribute to nonprofit organizations,
to food banks, to soup kitchens, to all kinds of
organizations that help people who have little. But what we
have left over that isn't part of our own need

(10:53):
for sustenance each day can be the gleanings of our
proverbial fields to help others. And then we discover that
the reason we do it might be motivated by something
that God commands us. It might be something important to
our respective faith tradition, or might simply emerge from our
own sense of motivation to do what our heart and

(11:13):
clients is to do for the sake of others who
need so much, wherever it might come. Is not a
measure of whether you are more religious or not, because,
as we often say, just do it because it is
the right thing to do, whether you are commanded or not,
whether somebody is watching or not. But as you wrestle
with your own sense of what is right to do

(11:36):
and to be, you are wrestling with the core of
your being. You are wrestling with the purpose of your creation.
And as you wrestle with it, you come into tune
with what it means to be a human being in
a very distracting and complicated world. And if through it
you find a sense of the sacred that is your
life and your deeds are set apart for a very

(11:57):
special purpose, which are not ordinary or mundane, then you
are tasting and experiencing what it means to be sacred.
In Hebrew we call the cut dosh holy. But what
does holy mean? It means sacred, and what is sacred mean?
It means set apart for very special purpose, and that's
what that deed, especially at this season, calls on us

(12:19):
to do and I wish that all the good deeds
that we did in the winter holiday season would extend
well beyond it throughout the entire year, and sometimes they do.
But even if this season calls on us to focus
deeply on what we are called to do now, it
is a set of examples, an exercise, a way of

(12:39):
modeling for us how the rest of our life and
all those who learn from us can improve and be
better for all people. I'm Rabbi David Lyon from Congregation
Bethisrael in Houston, Texas. To listen again or to share
this message, please do. Please find it at Sunny ninety
nine dot com. My podcast is Hard to Heart with

(13:00):
Rabbi David Lyon, and you can also find it at
the iHeart Radio app. As the winter holiday seasons come,
as office parties begin, I know it is a time
of celebration and you should lift that glass and eat
the food, and wear your sweater and enjoy the holiday,
wishing everybody what they need to hear, whether it's happy Hanukkah,

(13:24):
happy Kwanza, Merry Christmas, or simply happy holidays. Because we
don't always know what everybody's observing, we also must remember
in the midst of our gratitude and celebrations, what is
the gleaning What is left over for us to do.
I think in those special places we do find God's presence,

(13:44):
and maybe it will be for us, even if it
isn't in a dream to say God is in this place,
in this moment and I didn't know it. But it
isn't a matter of waiting for God to show up.
It's for us to respond to what we know that
must be done, whether we're commanded or not, find the
internal inspirational motivation to do what needs to be done,

(14:07):
especially at this season. And I think I believe that
you'll say, thank God, I made a difference for somebody
in the world, and that way we begin a journey
with God in our life that doesn't have to be
whole or complete yet, but simply information. And as you do,
I think you'll be able to open your eyes and

(14:29):
see not just optimism, but hopefulness too, which is a
part of every life and every hopefulness that a person
prays at this season, whatever religion or faith they observe.
Seeking more, something greater is a part of the human experience,
and I wish you well in it. For the sake
of joy and gratitude, and certainly each day greater peace.

(14:54):
Thank you for joining me. I look forward to being
with you again next time.