Sermons

S'lichot 5785

You can listen to Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below.

So, we’ve come to that time again, a time for reflection, for looking inwards, a time for questions – questions that might get neglected as we lose ourselves in the busy-ness of life, but questions that (reluctantly or not) we begin to sense pressing in on us as the New Year approaches.

Basic questions. What are we doing with our lives? What are we avoiding? What has happened to our dreams, our hopes, our vision? Are we living in ways that align with our deeper selves? What are we avoiding? What have we achieved this last year? Where have we failed? What are we avoiding?

You know the questions because they are basic – but only you can know the specific shape of them, the shifting weight of them, these questions you ask of yourself, and the ones you fear asking of yourself.

How do we orientate ourselves in this fraught, dementing, demanding, bruising world? We are fragile - physically, emotionally, mentally – and vulnerable, porous, things get inside us, get at us. We lose our bearings. Where is our compass? Which direction do we need to go? At times we feel lost in the midst of life. What do we need more of? Love? Confidence? Success? Friendship? Money? Motivation? Meaning? What do we need less of? Fear? Cynicism? Anger? Self-doubt? Self-criticism? Which way to go? Where is our compass? What are we avoiding?

Questions, the season of questions. Questions are religious acts, good questions, questions that take us nearer the heart of things – questions about our purpose, questions about our place in the larger scheme of things.

Questions – but what about answers? Where are they? Where do we find them? Where do we go, where do we look? Who will give us answers? Answers to comfort the aching heart.

Well - and this may surprise you - this evening, for once, I am going to give you an answer. One answer. An answer to the question about our compass, and where it is, what it is.

I would like to suggest that art can be our compass, our compass to the cosmos. Our inner cosmos, the vast world within us - and the outer cosmos, suffused with life and possibilities. Let me explain.

When I say that art can be our compass to the cosmos I am thinking of art in its widest sense. Visual art – you look at work by Van Gogh or Anselm Kiefer and you are in the presence of an intensity of vision, whether it’s into the natural world or our history, you can glimpse the glories and mysteries of the world we live in. The ineffable lightness and density of being. Through the immanent shimmering of this piece of art you enter a portal to transcendence, a window to the cosmos. Art can reflect – incarnate - divinity.

Musical art: Mozart, Bach, late Beethoven, transport our spirits into another realm, we are held in the embrace of a larger vision, we hear a deeper harmony encoded in, echoing through, creation; we are listening in to the cosmos, our little lives are held moment by moment, note by note, patterns emerge, portals that allow divinity to be present.

Literary art: language, words, arranged in patterns of sound and sense, and grasping after sense, they can transport us, they take us deep inside ourselves, they take us to new realms, to larger visions.

To see a World in a grain of sand

And a Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in a Hour.

Art, music, literature – humanity has created, continues to create, that which speaks from the soul and to the soul; and what speaks to the soul uplifts us, or consoles us, or stirs us to action, or stirs us to reflection: we can create meaning in our lives. We are blessed – like God at the beginning - with so much creativity: can we make use of what we creation gives us, and what we create ourselves?

Because our task is to make something out of what we are given. And each of us is given something to work on. So what is your compass to the cosmos? Where do you look? Nobody can answer that question for you. I can share with you the “fragments I have shored against my ruins” (so to speak). You will have your own anthology.

But I will tell you one other thing about art and the finding of a compass to the cosmos: it is not far off in the heavens, and you don’t need intrepid explorers to bring it back, it is very near to hand. One route to it is literally in your hands.

This machzor, ten years and two millennia in the making, is chock full of words, ancient and modern, poetry and prose - and illustrations, visual art - if you turn it and turn you will find not everything within it, but you will find clues, signposts, inspiration, to help you with those questions I spoke about just now.

The ideas, the language, the themes, of the machzor are a treasure house, they can return you to what matters, they can help re-calibrate our inner compass to the cosmos, our compass to the sacred, to holiness and the Holy One. The High Holy Days give us time and space to be with what this book contains and what it points towards, what it points each of us towards – and it will speak to each of us, whisper to us, if we open ourselves to it. Not every word, not every prayer, not every poem, or piece of writing, but something within it waits for us, for each of us, and it’ll be different for each of us. There is a doorway only we can go through.

A last word, to bring us down to earth. You may think, listening to me, that I am romanticising art – literature, painting, music – and I am, I have my reasons this evening, I want you to fall in love again, be re-enchanted, with what the human spirit has been inspired to create. But not all art, by any means, is a portal to, or an orientation to, the cosmos. You have to be discerning, to choose. Artists can be monstrous, can lead us into black holes. Hitler was a painter, Chairman Mao was a poet, Stalin was enamoured by opera, and Mozart. Not all art, or artists, can offer us what our souls need. Obviously.

So art might be a compass to the deepest and largest dimensions of being and we need that - but we also need something else, we need a moral compass. The machzor can help us with that. But how to find our moral compass – particularly at the moment – is a different issue, a different question. For another time, another sermon.