God's Love is for Everyone

Sometimes, I set out to say one thing and end up realizing I’d rather say something else.  That happened to me when I was preparing to speak for this morning.

I was set to talk about the evolution of our relationship with God and our religious tradition – the trajectory from the innocence of childhood to the rejection of teen hood to the accommodations and willed innocence of adulthood.
 

I was going to do my best not to oversimplify, to indicate that each phase has its nuances, and ultimately to come to what it means to be ach sameach – utterly joyful, during the festival of Sukkot – given the arc of our psychological and emotional development over time.

And then I opened up the New York Times and saw the cover article about a young man who is severely cognitively impaired, who is leaving the hospital where he spent his entire life and about to enter a group home.

  

And I remembered a conference I went to where a colleague of mine was giving ideas for how to liven up the megilla reading at Purim.  He said that he would hold up signs asking people to shake the grogger in different ways that could be funny.

Shake the grogger like you’re an infant.  Shake the grogger like you’re a teenager.  Shake the grogger like you’re a surgeon.  And then, shake the grogger like you’re a schizophrenic.

I think I have a decent sense of humor.  But I didn’t think that last one was funny or appropriate and I told him so afterward.

When I was the assistant rabbi at a previous congregation, I got close with a family whose daughter, then in her thirties, was suffering from schizophrenia.  I visited her numerous times in the hospital.  It was exquisitely painful for the woman and her family.  I’m assuming my colleague hadn’t actually witnessed someone with this condition. 

V’hayita ach sameach!  Be utterly joyful!  Enjoy the change of the foliage, the reality of life’s vicissitudes, the pleasures that we recognize once we acknowledge our vulnerability – we say all that stuff, and it’s all meaningful to a point.

But the article, and my recollection of this woman, and my awareness of many people whose lives are wracked with some sort of pain, based on genetics or circumstance or some confluence of the two, shifted my focus.

So I decided not to give a sermon about navigating our own sense of joy, or any other aspect of our faith or tradition, over the course of our lives.

But rather, I decided to speak of the need for us to look beyond ourselves altogether.

We tend to marginalize people who experience profound pain, especially if the pain is chronic.  Few communities have a great track record welcoming people with cognitive impairment or mental illness.  Nor do most communities do well with people who exhibit chronic despair as a result of profound, sometimes multiple, challenges.

If people check most of their despair at the door, that’s one thing.  Bring too much of it in, it’s often another story.

The Torah’s commandment, v’samachta b’chagecha – you shall rejoice on your festival – doesn’t end there.  It goes on to say, “with your sons, daughters, male and female servants, the stranger, the orphan and the widow and the Levite.”

Rashi refers to a teaching that has God saying to the Israelites – “you make my four happy – the stranger, the orphan, the widow and the Levite (who had no land of his own) and I’ll make your four happy – your sons, daughters, male and female servants.”  Perhaps we can understand this to mean that an environment which strives to include those on the fringe of the household has a positive impact on the household itself.

On Simhat Torah, our 9^th and 10^th graders are going to welcome residents of the group home on Old Mill.  They’ll have dinner with them before the service and, if the residents are feeling comfortable with it, they’ll join the students and the community for our celebration.

In preparation for this, I asked the students to recall a time when they’ve felt excluded and they each had one.

We talked about what it might look like for us to help the people from this home to feel included.

I encourage everyone to come over and say hello to the teens and to their guests, our guests.  And should any decide to become a more regular part of the community, “they” become “us” and then they can perform the mitzvah of welcoming further guests.

There is the famous midrash about why we bring the four species – lulav, etrog, willow and myrtle together – that deals with each of them as representing a different type of person.

I’m going to riff on that for a moment.

Bringing all of us together means bringing all of us together - regardless of our cognitive capacity, regardless of our emotional state.

And what do we say when we’re holding the lulav and etrog together?  Hodu ladonai ki tov, ki l’olam chasdo.

The p’shat, the likely contextual meaning, is “Give thanks to God for God is good; God’s love lasts forever."

We can wonder about God and we can wonder about God’s love, and we won’t be the first.

I’m proposing the following take which concretizes the concept and gives each of us a role, my second riff.

It’s a linguistic stretch, so consider it a kind of midrash:

Hodu ladonai ki tov.  Give thanks to God for God is good; ki l’olam chasdo. 

God’s love is l’olam, for the world, the entire world.

God’s love, which WE deliver, is for everyone.

Let the despair and pain of others serve neither as deterrent nor, God forbid, as a source of amusement.

Wherever we might be in our spiritual and emotional trajectories, let’s not forget the Torah’s imperative that we welcome each other; that we learn to hold each other; that we learn to say, and to mean, and to work toward the reality that the love which animates and transcends us belongs to everyone.

As we hold the lulav and etrog together, and long after we put them down, let’s remember that God’s love is for everyone.

Delivered on Sukkot 5773 at Temple Israel of Great Neck