Yom Kippur Sermon 5773, September 26, 2012: Is God Out of Style? Science and Religion Rabbi Eric Yanoff start love being your rabbi THANK YOU

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1 Yom Kippur Sermon 5773, September 26, 2012: Is God Out of Style? Science and Religion Rabbi Eric Yanoff Blue board, 3 circles, roll of fabric, pre-taped fad pictures, signs R. Akiba/Heretic/Skeptic, pre-taped white circles Shanah tovah. First, I need to start by sharing with you all: I love being your rabbi. And, though I said it last week, it was drowned out by singing and dancing and clapping and energy so I need to say it again: THANK YOU. I will never forget the experience of looking out at this room, when I asked you to just try to immerse, to let go, to manufacture joy and happiness and there you were, doing it. Dancing in the aisles, just enjoying being Jewish, as a part of our Jewish community, together. Thank you. Now, our learning together today is going to be very different from that experience. NOT that we can t enjoy one another, and smile, and appreciate being together but because if that were ALL we did, we would be selling Judaism short. It would be like taking a Ferrari to the market: A lot of flash and pizzazz, but not nearly pushing its true potential. NO: I believe that our Judaism IS about celebration and joy and energy but our Judaism is NOT ONLY about that. If our Judaism were just a carnival-like celebration, light and fluffy then it would not have been worth sustaining for the last 3500 years, and into the future. It would be a spectacle, that would need to be constantly outdone, constantly one-upped to keep our attention. It would be mostly a novelty item, a fad, not worth repeating, or engaging as a way of life. But there s more to it than that: Judaism has great wisdom, tremendous depth, intellectual stimulation and challenge in ways that answer the truly meaningful, truly troubling questions that we have about our lives, about our existence here on this Earth. It has happened many times to me as your rabbi, that someone comes up to me at Kiddush sorry to mention Kiddush today and says, Rabbi, I have a quick question A quick question that s the kiss of death. Because you are really smart people, and your questions are really good, really deep, deserving of much more thought and reflection. So whenever I hear, Rabbi, I just have a quick question it invariably ends up as one of those questions like, Rabbi, what is the meaning of life? Or, What happens when we die? Does Judaism believe in life after death? Or, Why do bad things happen to good people? Just a quick question. And so, it was not quite a year ago, when someone asked me one of these questions: Rabbi, I heard, I have a quick question. And here it was: Is God PASSE? That one stopped me in my tracks: Is God out of style? [PICTURES across and then tape to facade] Has God gone the way of pet rocks. Cabbage Patch dolls. (let me make sure I cover all my generations here) Zoot suits, leisure suits, Z Cavariccis. Pole-sitting Phone-booth stuffing. Phone booths, for that matter. Big hair. Big hair. Big hair Big hair - Does God belong up here? Is God out of fashion? Is God so last year? It s actually a good question not a quick question, but an excellent one. Especially this year, with all the coverage and anticipation of the discovery of the Higgs Boson better known as the God Particle. Now, I m not going to try to explain exactly what this elusive, so-called God Particle is whether we can discover that most elemental, indivisible force that explains the creation of the laws that govern our universe. But it has been a theory for almost fifty years. Basically, here s how a physicist explains the existence of the God Particle: Imagine a soccer game, where you cannot see the ball. You know, from the actions of the players, who can see the ball, from the bulge in the back of the net when there s a goal, from the reactions you know it s there, and you know it s the focus and reason for every other action on the playing field. That s the God Particle. Yom Kippur 5773 Sermon: Is God So Last Year? Science, Modernity, and Religion Rabbi Eric Yanoff 1 (of 5)

2 Now, the way it was portrayed in the media, a direct, scientific observation of the God Particle would be the ultimate triumph for Science over Religion. Science would have WON. God, and Religion would be relegated to the realm of alchemy, bloodletters, and elevator operators. That s what was at stake, when I got this question of Is God so last year. Now, it should come as no surprise to you that when asked the question Is God obsolete I come down on the side of NO. (Otherwise, I d be out of a job. It would be a slow day in the rabbi market when God went out of style.) But today, I m going to make the case that God, and religion, and Judaism in particular are not museum pieces, like the slide-rule and the transistor radio and watching television at the time it is actually broadcast. You ready?... Well, first: I should say that I m in good company here. Even scientists agree with me. William D. Phillips, a physicist, explains that, in order to scientifically prove that something exists, you have to set up an experiment that might result in the proof that it does not exist. So I may not be able to prove that God exists, or is still relevant today but you can t disprove it. Here s another way of understanding that: Do you believe in Love? Okay locate it. Like the God Particle show me the Love Particle, where Love is located. We can t yet it is undeniable that Love exists because we can certainly point to its effects in our lives: How we care for one another in ways that causes us to do things that completely defy self-interest. How we are willing to give up a bit of what we want as an individual, in order to be in a relationship with someone we love. How we, unavoidably, care more for certain people (the people we love) than for others whom we may not know. Just like with the invisible soccer ball [KICK] We know that Love exists because we see Love s EFFECTS. And that s how God exists, too: God even tells Moses that; God says [MIC], no one can see Me directly and live. Even Moses cannot observe God. The closest he, or anyone, comes to that kind of proof, is when God passes by and Moses is allowed to see God s wake, afterward. Or, in other words, even if he cannot point to God, Moses sees God s effect on the world, as God passes through. And even better than Moses, 1500 years later, Rabbi Akiba proved this point again. You know Rabbi Akiba he was named after a local day school, of blessed memory [PAUSE] Here s the conversation with Rabbi Akiba: Actually, can I get a volunteer to play the other part? Todd thank you!: (I ll be Rabbi Akiba.) [Todd, SIGNS Turn over heretic to skeptic] Todd: Rabbi, I just have one quick question: Do you have proof that God created the world? REY: Hmm.. Well, what are you wearing? Todd: Uh, Clothes. REY: And who made the clothes? Todd: A weaver. REY: REY: Remember, this was in ancient times so a weaver. I don t believe you. Show me proof. Todd: The skeptic looks at him like he s crazy. Don t you know that a weaver made it? REY: And you, don t you know that God created the world? Just as every house proclaims its builder, a garment its weaver, a door its carpenter, so does the world proclaim that God created it. Thank Todd. Yom Kippur 5773 Sermon: Is God So Last Year? Science, Modernity, and Religion Rabbi Eric Yanoff 2 (of 5)

3 It s like the prayer we offered last night at Kol Nidre where we recognize God as the Potter who moulds the clay, as the glass-blower who shapes his fragile work we know from the beauty of the creation that there is a Creator, a God, behind it even if we have never met the Artist in person, directly. So we cannot locate God but we know God exists. My earliest rabbinical memory was when my rabbi growing up, Rabbi Sidney Greenberg from the Temple Sinai Preschool in Dresher, Pennsylvania, told a story about a rabbi who offered a Hebrew School class a challenge: He held up a shiny quarter and said, I ll give you this quarter if you can tell me where God is. At which point, a precocious student, a hustler who had saved up some money by forgetting to contribute the quarter his parents had given him for the tzedakah box each week that month, fished into his pocket, pulled out four quarters, and said, Rabbi, I see your quarter and raise you: You say you ll give me a quarter if I can show you where God is? I ll give you this dollar if you can tell me where God is NOT. God cannot be located, or proven, or scientifically observed but God cannot be disproven either so we can t just walk away from the whole idea. Got it? So if God is then not irrelevant, or out of style, then we need to define God: What is God? So I m going to offer up a working definition of God, for today: God is everything that humankind does not or does not YET understand or know. I ll say that again, because it s important: God is everything that we do not or do not YET understand or know. That s why, sometimes, it feels like maybe God used to exist, way back when, when we KNEW less, in the stories of the Bible, even in the way we tell the stories of a couple of generations ago but science has taken over. All the things we used to believe were God things like miracles, or the weather, or other things that are now taken care of by technology and scientific advances It used to be that, for example, we didn t know where rain came from so we ascribed proper amounts of rain to God s blessing, and drought or flood to God s anger. Nowadays, we have satellites that can predict weather trends. Even when there is something medically wrong, we have a thousand tests that can, down to the molecule, pinpoint its origin as something other than God s will. I know this is going to come as a huge shock to you but I have a visual aid to demonstrate this idea: [BLUE POSTER demonstration] It seems, as we push out the frontier of all we DO know, that there is less room for God on the scene. It looks like, gradually, with each scientific advance, God s presence in our world shrinks. So is that it? Is God going out of style? Is there less room for God? NO I m happy to tell you that, much like Jell-O there s always room for God. (That may be the first time in Jewish history that God was compared to Jell-O. Bill Cosby, eat your heart out.) But of course there is still plenty of room for God, if God is defined as everything we don t (or don t yet) know or understand: Because any scientist worth his or her salt will tell you that the first realization that follows any major scientific discovery is the revelation of infinitely more questions and problems. When Niels Bohr discovered the atom, did he pack up and say, That s it there s nothing smaller, nothing more to learn -!? Each discovery uncovers countless more potential discoveries of what we do not yet know which we are calling God. If anything, at each discovery [PUT ON THIRD CIRCLE; UNROLL FABRIC] God does not shrink; God grows exponentially. Yom Kippur 5773 Sermon: Is God So Last Year? Science, Modernity, and Religion Rabbi Eric Yanoff 3 (of 5)

4 And here is my best job security yet: The whole system both our knowledge and our recognition of all that we don t know, that we attribute to the miraculous, to God the whole system is designed to never stop expanding. It s like my memory of watching my father teach my brother to swim. They get in the pool, my father is holding my brother, he prepares him and then, my father lets go. And my brother flails (I enjoy that a little bit ), but he is never so far from my father that he feels scared. He somehow maneuvers toward my father in the water and then, just as he s about to grab on what does my father do? [OPEN/Pause] He takes a step backward and my brother has to keep on flailing and paddling for a bit. It sounds terrible at first but really, it s the only way we learn: God is right there, just on the other side of what we already know. But every time we push outward God takes a step back, not to avoid us, but to encourage us onward. If my brother reached my father after a couple of seconds of flailing, he would never learn to swim. If we encompassed all of God we would never learn ANYTHING. [Take down fabric] This process has been going on since the first moment of human discovery, at the Tree in the Garden of Eden. And what is God s response? God says, Well, after eating of the Tree of Knowledge, humans now have a thirst for more discovery. That desire may actually enable them to find the Tree of Life and if so, they would reach divine status, there would be no space between God and Humans to grow. I can t let that happen. And THAT s why God closes them out of the Garden: God is, essentially, playing hard to get so that we will still have more to discover, more to learn, more to grow or in other words, so that we will have more purpose in our lives. That s why scientific advance is not a threat to God; science IS God. It s like the T-shirt I ve seen, quoting Nietzsche, who says, God is Dead God responds, Well, actually, Nietzsche is dead. Imagine the scientists at the Particle Accelerator saying, We ve just made a discovery we invented the God Particle. I imagine God saying right back, Oh yeah? A long time ago I invented SCIENCE. It s why I don t believe that evolution and similar scientific theories are a threat to the Bible or to God. Rabbi Arthur Green explains this by saying, The evolution of the species is the greatest sacred drama of all time. Evolution can be seen as an ongoing process of revelation. We discover; it reveals. It reveals; we discover. That s what this whole visual expanding frontier of what we know demonstration reflects an ongoing discovery, an ongoing revelation of all that is mysterious and wondrous in our observation of the world. When we discover all that we do not yet understand, we discover God. That s what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described as our higher incomprehension the best parts of all that we don t comprehend give us wonder, and wonder gives us an awareness of God in our world. There is still so much that is wondrous and miraculous about our world so much room for God. Even the classic miracles how many of us lament that we don t see a miracle of the scale of the splitting of the Red Sea any more? How many of us wish we could observe some miracle like that? But we DO witness such things! Couldn t we view the 1947 UN Partition Plan, making a Jewish Homeland for the first time after 2000 years of praying for that return to Israel as a diplomatic compromise, that rivals the splitting of the Sea? Or could we consider that the splitting of an atom is infinitely more precise and amazing than the splitting of the Sea? And even the splitting of the Red Sea: The Torah hints that it was weather-related, mentioning a strong east wind that caused what scientists know now is a completely explainable meteorological phenomenon, a tidal aberration that has been scientifically observed. That s all well and good but with the Egyptian chariots thundering down upon them, you have to give God credit for the timing, and all. I imagine the modern Moses saying, God, I know it s all scientifically proven and all but now would be a great time for a well-documented, meteorologically-explained tidal aberration. Yom Kippur 5773 Sermon: Is God So Last Year? Science, Modernity, and Religion Rabbi Eric Yanoff 4 (of 5)

5 God is still here, operating in our lives. In fact, again, my childhood rabbi, Sidney Greenberg, used to say, A miracle is God s way of staying anonymous. Of course we can try to explain such wondrous events in other ways but there is still something wondrous about it. It s what Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, one of the most revered modern Orthodox thinkers, said about miracles: They happen when the natural world, which we think we understand, is elevated to a purpose that has historical, ethical, moral consequences. And the trick for us, as Jews, is to not allow God to stay anonymous but to recognize the wonder, amidst all the science. And we struggle with this. You know, the original name for a cell-phone in Hebrew was Pele-Fone literally, Wonder-Phone or Miracle Phone. Think about it a connection, to anyone in the world, anywhere you were?! Unbelievable a true WONDER-Phone! And that was back when cellphones came with back-packs like Radar, in M*A*S*H! But nowadays, sadly, no Israeli says pele-fone they just call it their phone. Have we lost the pele, the wonder? Is seeing something as miraculous or divine so last year? God is not so last year rather, as we advance, God outpaces us, in evolving as well, into more that we do not yet know, more that we have yet to discover. Even science has recognized this. There is a well-accepted scientific theory known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which says that it is a scientific fact that we cannot know everything about a particle, all at once. When Heisenberg came up with this one, it produced an emotional firestorm, from decidedly non-emotional, rational scientists! But Heisenberg proved for science what we religion already knew: That, in addition to always discovering with every scientific advance just how little we know there will always be room for God, because there is a whole slew of questions that are, I believe, inherently unknowable. These are those not-so-quick questions: Maybe we know the scientific origin of life, but we have a lot of work to do on the purpose of living. Maybe we can answer the cause of death, but not what happens when we die. The fact that bad things happen to good people is not a proof that God is irrelevant but rather it is a proof that our world is difficult, maybe impossible, to fully comprehend and if we define God is everything we don t comprehend, then these mysteries are not a rejection of God but a proof of a Something (capital S ) beyond our knowledge. Maybe we can t define love, or God, - but we know that both exist, not by science, but by life experience. These are not quick questions. They are difficult, and they are worth struggling with. I m still struggling with these ideas. Like I said, I LOVE being your Rabbi because I get to dance with you in the aisles, and sing with you, and celebrate with you but also because I get to be challenged right alongside you, by these questions that matter, because they provide depth and meaning in our lives a depth and a meaning that never goes out of style. I pray that we have those opportunities to learn together, for many years to come. Keyn yehi ratzon So may it be God s will. And let us say: AMEN. Yom Kippur 5773 Sermon: Is God So Last Year? Science, Modernity, and Religion Rabbi Eric Yanoff 5 (of 5)