For as long as I have been the rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue, every Shabbat morning, at the end of the service, I conclude with the same closing benediction. The words are so hardwired into me that I know them by heart; you may know them by heart. My children, when they want to signal to their father, as only a preacher’s kids can do, that it’s time for me to wrap things up, will quote my line back to me.
So you can only imagine how disorienting it was when last Shabbat morning, after Adon Olam, after the bnei mitzvah kids recited Kiddush and HaMotzi, I froze – unable to retrieve the benediction – and in a moment of panic just blurted out, “Shabbat Shalom.” Rabbi Zuckerman pulled me aside afterwards, checking in and chuckling with me over my “senior moment.” Life moved on, but I have been thinking about it ever since. What was it that caused me to seize up to the point of forgetting not just any line, but my signature sign-off line?
The easy answer, of course, is the war. We all woke up last Saturday morning to news of attacks and counterattacks between America, Israel, and Iran. Whether it was last Shabbat or October 7th or the morning of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooting in 2018, there is a strain that comes with arriving at synagogue, leading services, and blessing bnei mitzvah, all while knowing momentous events are unfolding beyond these walls. In this case, it was a strain compounded by the knowledge that my own family, both actual and extended, were in harm’s way. Clergy are parents and children and siblings, too. This week has been a blur as Debbie and I have followed our daughter wending her way, like so many others, from Jerusalem to Amman and now, thankfully, back to London.
My distraction was no doubt compounded by a more mundane, and admittedly self-involved, factor: I had written a sermon, an excellent sermon, if I say so myself. The morning’s outbreak of hostilities rendered it obsolete. Into the dustbin it went. And, I still had to say something publicly about unfolding events of which I did not know the details and about which I was not sure how I felt. If I needed reasons to explain my “senior moment,” I had no shortage of them.
But what I know – and what many, though not all, of you now know – is that my head and heart were elsewhere last Shabbat for another reason entirely. On Friday afternoon, the clergy received word that our dear friend, colleague, and ever-present presence in our sanctuary – Ross Abelow – had been diagnosed with a terminal neurodegenerative disease.
Whether you are here every week or have visited only once, whether you are the synagogue chairman or an aufruf couple, it is hard not to know, and love, Ross. He is our ambassador of goodwill, our ubiquitous utility player, the first face of the community to so many. For those hearing this news for the first time right now, it is every bit as devastating as it sounds. While he is no longer receiving visits, calls, or texts, our hearts and prayers are with Ross and Ross’s family in his final months as they will be forever. For his family, for this community, for this world to be without Ross is a thought too much to bear.
This news that I am sharing with you this evening – news that was shared with synagogue leadership and staff earlier this week – was known by a small number of us at this time last week. The feeling I had then, the feeling many of you are experiencing right now, was a tsunami of sorrow and disbelief, more questions than answers, anger at the unfairness of it all, and bewilderment at a world in which this can happen, and a God who can let it happen. Trying to find faith – and for me, to publicly champion faith as my own faith reserves are depleted – together with everything else going on in the world, had brought me to my breaking point, and it is no doubt why I froze up.
If there is a low point to the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings, it is this week. Fearing that Moses has abandoned them, the newly freed slaves fashion a golden calf. Typically, our focus is on the events leading up to their sin, or, alternatively, on Moses’s tablet shattering response to the Israelites’ idolatry. This evening, it is the scene that follows – the exchange between Moses and God – on which I would like to focus.
It is not just the Israelites, but Moses himself and the relationship between Moses and God that are at a low point. This stiff-necked people, for whom Moses risked all before Pharaoh, and whom he led through the sea to freedom, has, by way of the golden calf, turned away from God. And God, who from the burning bush onward had prodded Moses to lead the people, has now lost faith in them, coming a hairsbreadth away from wiping them out before Moses interceded. Moses’s despair, his self-doubt, his questioning of God, Israel, himself, and everything is a deeply human and raw moment for our great leader. You have told me, Moses cries to God, to lead these people, but you have not made yourself known to me. You have singled me out, Moses laments, but I know not your way. “Show me your presence!” Moses demands. Emotionally, spiritually, theologically, Moses is curled up in the fetal position. In that moment when he feels most alone, when God feels most remote, he calls out for the divine presence, he seeks God’s face,
To see God’s face, to experience the radiance of God’s presence, is the greatest blessing of all. When we bless our children, we invoke it and pray for it: “May God’s face turn toward you and be gracious unto you.” The blessing is aspirational, something we strive toward. A promise of spiritual wholeness, light, and divine presence.
And there are times, as in the case of Moses, or us right now, when the divine face is hidden. The rabbis of old coined the term hester panim. Hester, meaning “hidden,” and panim (like Yiddish punim) meaning “face.” There are times when – unable to explain our pain and unwilling to abandon belief altogether – we are left with the humbling realization that the will and ways of the God in whom we believe remain ever beyond our grasp. As Jews, we do not believe, as Alexander Pope once wrote, that “Whatever is, is right.” There is absolutely nothing right about what Ross and his family, and all of us, are experiencing. The only honest statement we can make is that there is far more that we don’t know about God than we do know and that the divine face, the divine will is forever hidden. It is a state of affairs that always holds true, but especially so when we are faced with tribulations. To search for a God who remains hidden, to seek God’s face while knowing it may never be fully revealed, this is the theological thread that stretches from our Torah reading to the Holocaust-era inscription discovered in a cellar in Cologne to today: “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I do not feel it. I believe in God even when He is silent.”
No one, not even Moses, is granted the privilege of fully knowing God’s will. As God tells Moses in the very next verse, no one may see the divine face and live. There are wounds in this world that lie beyond explanation and beyond comfort. And yet God offers Moses a path forward: a step or, more precisely, two steps that speak to our present moment. First, God instructs Moses to station himself in the cleft of the rock. From there, the divine presence will pass by, near enough to be felt, yet with God’s hand shielding Moses, concealing the divine face from sight and thus protecting him. And then, as the divine presence passes before Moses, God proclaims the Thirteen Attributes: “A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness, forgiving iniquity,” and so on and so forth.
The shadow of God’s presence and the revelation of God’s attributes – together they form a single, coherent theological statement. My face, God signals, will forever remain hidden. But my presence is ever-present. And, in the face of an unknowable God, I have nevertheless given you a path to bring holiness into this world, to be Godlike in your deeds. When you are kind, when you are gracious, when you are slow to anger and forgiving, when you greet another person with a smile – when you are all these things – you are, in no uncertain terms, imitating the divine. You may not see the face of God itself, but you may encounter the face of God in another person. As Emmanuel Levinas wrote: “The face of the Other is the trace of God.”
This week I officiated at a bris for a family whose child came into the world not without serious risk and serious setbacks along the way. I have named more babies than I can count, but when I looked at that mother holding that baby, I nevertheless lost it. I cannot see God’s face; none of us can – not ever, and certainly not this week. But I open my eyes and I see the face of God all around me. And it is not only rabbis naming babies. Each one of us, in our own way, is empowered and obligated to identify the face of God in one another. We are all partners in that sacred task. Even when, especially when, we cannot find the face of God, we can find God in the face of each other.
Ross, I know you are watching this, my friend. We just sat together and welcomed Shabbat with the blessings. I am not going to make you into a saint. You and I know far too much about each other not to know that we are grateful that sainthood is not a Jewish thing. But I will say this, and here I speak for everyone in the PAS family: there is simply no one who better exemplifies the simple and altogether holy act of greeting the face of another as the face of God than you. Those who have been part of this community for generations and those visiting for the first time, those who carry titles and status and those who arrive quietly and without recognition. Each person created in the divine image, every person – no matter our flawed humanity – of equal and infinite worth. For all the prayers we recite in this room, for all the reaching we do toward the heavens, you, Ross, remind us that God is never further away than a warm smile, a hearty laugh, and an all-embracing welcome. You are loved. Your family is loved. And you are in our hearts and in our prayers tonight and always.
I couldn’t remember my line last week. I remember it now. It is from Adon Olam. It is the last line a Jew recites at the end of a service, at the end of the day, and – when the time comes, for believing Jews – at the end of life:
B’yado afkid ruhi, b’eit ishan v’a·irah;
v’im ruhi g’viyati, Adonai li v’lo ira.
I place my spirit in God’s care when I wake as when I sleep.
God is with me I shall not fear, Body and spirit in God’s keep.
Please rise as we pray for the comfort of Ross Abelow, Reuven Menachem ben Moshe Leib v’Rachel.