Happy 100th Birthday Rabbi Sidney Ballon!!! Would that he were here today in good health to hear these words. Would that we would have had an additional twenty-six years to hear his words. Taken much too early in his life, and certainly in the lives of those of us who loved him. It has been a source of some consolation to drink in the words he left on thousands of aging pieces of paper, and to have the privilege of sharing them with other avid readers. Even more so, having them share their memories of him with us.
For this special day, the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, I selected a Yom Kippur sermon from 1961. Sidney Ballon was a person of great intellect, logic, and discipline. These qualities were present even when he argued with passion for Jewish values, Jewish causes, and for the very survival of the Jewish people. Like certain rocks to which he refers in this sermon, that appear ordinary until viewed in ultraviolet light and then glow with color, this sermon reveals, perhaps more clearly than any other, not only his intelligence, but his spirit. He is seen in a different light herein. Even the title, The Wisdom of the Heart, seems to reveal a side of Rabbi Ballon that may have been ever present, but less visible at times—the sweetness of his spirituality.
May we find lasting inspiration in the experience of this day. May its recollection be a support to us through the year to come, and may we so live as to reflect a constant awareness of the reality of God among us.
Throughout the years Rabbi Ballon judiciously “recycled” sermons that he had delivered at previous congregations. Upon arriving at his semi-retirement position at Temple Beth Tefilloh in Brunswick, Georgia in 1974, he had his entire career’s archives at his disposal. Interestingly, when he dipped into his file of High Holy Day sermons this was the one he selected to deliver at his first and what became his only Yom Kippur there. Perhaps it was for the clarity, simplicity, and the power of the message: listen to your heart, and believe!
====================================================
There is no holy day on our religious calendar that is more emotionally charged than the Day of Atonement which we now observe. It begins with the awesome tones of the Kol Nidre[i] chant. It continues through a day of fasting, of solemn prayer and meditation on life and death. It ends in a spirit of deep humility with the concluding service of Neilah[ii]. And from beginning to end there is a feeling of being in the presence of what a noted religious philosopher has called the mysterium tremendum, a term which practically explains itself, the great mystery, the indescribable and unknowable power that permeates the universe. It was, indeed, after visiting a Yom Kippur service in a North African synagogue that Rudolf Otto[iii] conceived of the idea of the mysterium tremendum and wrote his book in which he called it the central factor of all religion. There is a touch of mystery inherent in Yom Kippur. Everyone present in the synagogue, I venture to say, senses it to some extent at least, and it is even possible to have one’s entire life changed by it.
One man whose life was changed by his Yom Kippur experience was Franz Rosenzweig[iv]. I wonder how many of you have heard of him. Franz Rosenzweig was a young German Jew with a brilliant mind. He possessed a deep knowledge of philosophy, but knew very little about Judaism. One day he came to the conclusion that he wanted to become Christian, and he was encouraged in this by several friends. But he decided to go about his in a strange way. He said he did not want to enter Christianity as a pagan, but rather like its founders as a Jew. He, therefore decided to subject himself to a Jewish experience in preparation for his becoming a Christian, and so on the High Holy Days of 1913 he attended services in a synagogue. His attendance on Yom Kippur was thus supposed to be a sort of leave-taking of this people, after which he was to be converted. He was truly converted on that day. It was however, a total conversion to Judaism. When the Neilah service had ended and the final cry of Shema Yisroel[v] was pronounced, Rosenzweig was wholeheartedly a part of the congregation, and he joined with them in this declaration of faith. He had been recaptured by the magnetic mood of the day, and sometime later in a lecture he said,
Anyone who has ever celebrated Yom Kippur knows that it is something more than a mere personal exaltation or the symbolic recognition of a reality such as the Jewish people—it is a testimony to the reality of God which cannot be controverted.
Rosenzweig in the years subsequent to this significant visit to Yom Kippur services became one of the most creative Jewish thinkers of the century, a Jew whose faith remained firm and unshakable, even through long suffering from the effects of a crippling paralysis, which caused his death in his early forties.
Another man whose life was profoundly changed by a Yom Kippur service was not Jewish at all but rather a young French Catholic who had been planning on entering the priesthood. His name was Aime Palliere,[vi] and in his autobiography entitled, The Unknown Sanctuary he tells us of a strange incident which occurred when he was seventeen, which kept him from fulfilling his plan. While he was on vacation in 1902, he just happened to be passing by a synagogue with a friend. His friend had heard that the Jews were observing a great festival that day and suggested they go into the synagogue. Palliere had been raised in a very religious atmosphere and a pious Catholic would not ordinarily go into a synagogue, but he, nevertheless, yielded to the suggestion. It was the time of the Neilah service, and that unique moment changed his life. Palliere tells us that he cannot fully explain what happened to him. He calls it an unfathomable enigma. Actually there was no sudden flash of transformation, but the effect of that moment influenced his thinking and feeling to such an extent that his whole life took a different turn. Palliere had no background whatsoever in Jewish matters. He could not understand the service nor interpret what was going on. It was for the moment a confused experience for him, but the electricity of the occasion communicated itself to him. What he sensed particularly, he says was the mystery of Israel as reflected in two characteristics that were revealed to him. One, he says, is the form of collective priesthood[vii] which is basic to Judaism, that is, the equality of all Jews. All Jews are priests. And two, the spirit of expectancy, the faith in the future, which is the special seal of Judaism. Judaism was an ancient religion, but he noted that it, nevertheless, did not look to the past, but in a living and dynamic manner still hoped for achievement in the future. On that day, he said, he first beheld the people to whom the nations had been ungrateful, who had survived despite all things. While the other great peoples of antiquity had disappeared from the face of the earth, Israel had been preserved for providential ends. Aime Palliere did not formally convert to Judaism, but his visit to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, the insight that he gained at that Neilah service, moved him to study Judaism thoroughly, to love it and to live it to the same extent as if he had, indeed, been fully a Jew.
We, who sit here tonight in this sanctuary, will probably not find the direction of our life so dramatically changed by this Yom Kippur service as were the lives of Rosenzweig and Palliere but even if we are not like them in that respect, I believe that we are like them in that we, too, on Yom Kippur sense something of the mystery of God and Israel. For us also Yom Kippur is a moment to truth when our emotions overcome our sophistication, when our enslavement to cold reason is temporarily suspended, when there is a surge of faith within us and we feel that somehow we have glimpsed something holy and meaningful, have drawn near to the sacred and divine.
And assuming all this to be true, I present you with a simple plea this evening. Believe in yourself at this moment, and do not later repudiate what you now feel. Do not think that this reaction to Yom Kippur is mere sentimentality or the result of nostalgia. Do not be ashamed of it or embarrassed by it. Do not reproach yourself for having been touched by the seemingly irrational, but rather accept these intuitions of the heart as a meaningful experience. Trust these intuitions of the heart as a clue to ultimate truth and allow the memory of them to sustain you in later moments when you may possibly be susceptible to doubt and questioning.
In this scientific age so many of us tend to disparage our religious emotions and to believe in only what we can prove by the logic of the intellect or the testimony of the five senses. But man’s intellect and senses do not necessarily tell us all that there is to know about reality, and the admonition of the poet[viii] is in order,
O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
In this scientific age we are so enamored of the achievements of man’s mind and the truly magnificent progress that has been made in adding to our knowledge of physical things, that even in religious matters intellectual proof is expected, and we ask, “How do you know, can you prove it?” But religious problems cannot be handled in quite the same way as the problems of the physical world. We cannot depend altogether on rational proof. We cannot prove in a scientific sense the answers to the religious questions of God and Immortality and Human Destiny and such. We can only, even as we do on Yom Kippur, stand in awe before the mysteries of life and place some trust in the revelations of the heart. This is not to say that reason is to be excluded from our religious searching. Certainly in Judaism reason is never repudiated, but reason must be supplemented and cannot by itself help us find our way.
Many are the mysteries which reason cannot now and never will be able to unravel alone. There is the mystery of why there is anything in existence at all. There is the mystery of our own individual, unique, never-to-be duplicated self. There is the mystery of what is life, what really is man who is able to conceive of beauty, goodness, and truth. There is the mystery of the universe, its order and regularity, its infinite space and there is indeed, the not insignificant mystery sensed by Palliere in the synagogue, that of the people of Israel who have lived through centuries of hardship and frustration, who have been able to recover from the cruelest tragedy imaginable and go on new achievements. Einstein once said that to feel the mystery of all existence is the fairest experience of man and “he who knows it not and can no longer wonder can no longer feel amazement is as good as dead.”[ix] But our intellect will not answer the questions this experience of mystery poses. The answers—or more accurately some small insight into the answers—can come only from the revelations of the heart. It comes as Abraham Heschel says, only in the feeling that all existence is embraced by some spiritual presence we call God, although we cannot always describe it or define it.
Prof. Henry Overstreet has told the story of how he once stopped at a collector’s shop in Tucson, Arizona where many kinds of minerals and stones were on display. In the course of his visit he was taken into a small room where rocks were laid out on shelves. They were quite ordinary looking rocks. Had he seen them elsewhere he probably would not have given them a second glance. But the man in the shop closed the door so the room was in total darkness and then turned on an ultraviolet lamp. Instantly these ordinary rocks become transformed and brilliant colors of indescribable beauty were seen upon them. It made him realize what hidden realities there are all around us not perceptible to our ordinary vision, but which need some special power to make them evident.
This day of Yom Kippur releases such a special power which enables us also to sense the presence of hidden realities which are not always evident to our senses, and just as the colors remained inherent in the rock when the ultraviolet was dimmed, so what we feel here tonight remains real and true though our emotions may wane when we turn again to our daily routine. May we find lasting inspiration in the experience of this day. May its recollection be a support to us through the year to come, and may we so live as to reflect a constant awareness of the reality of God among us.
[i] Kol Nidre, (lit. all vows) is an Aramaic declaration recited in the synagogue before the beginning of the evening service on every Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Though not a prayer, this dry legal formula and its ceremonial accompaniment have been charged with emotional undertones since the medieval period, creating a dramatic introduction to Yom Kippur.
[ii] Neilah, (lit. locking, as in locking the gates of prayer) the concluding service on Yom Kippur is the time when final prayers of repentance are recited.
[iii] Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) was an eminent German Lutheran theologian and scholar of comparative religion.
[iv] Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) was an influential German Jewish theologian and philosopher.
[v] Shema Yisroel (or Sh'ma Yisrael) ("Hear, [O] Israel") are the first two words a verse of Torah that encapsulates the monotheistic essence of Judaism: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one," found in Deuteronomy 6:4.
[vi] Aime Palliere (1868-1949) was a French Catholic, who became a Noahide, a non-converting adherent to Judaism.
[vii] Exodus 19:6, “and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.”
[viii] O World, Thou Choosest Not by George Santayana (b. 1863)
O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
[ix] Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1999, p. 5. “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.”
No comments:
Post a Comment