“The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious,

“The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious,
endlessly patient…” Part II
Rosh Hashanah Morning 5970

Last night we looked at the prayer which immediately follows the Avinu Malkaynu during the High Holy days. Later this morning we will hear this prayer sung by Lane. Please take a look at the prayer now on page 122.

The prayer reads “The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon.”

I mentioned last night that when this prayer is recited we are asking God to forgive us of our sins and misdeeds. However, I feel that in a way we are reliving two occasions in the Torah wherein this prayer is to be found. Last night I spoke of how the prayer is found after the incident with the Golden Calf and after Moses receives the second set of the tablets containing the Ten Commandments.

Let us now turn to the second time that the phrase (although not in its entirety) appears in the Torah and let us see what lessons we might be able to learn from this occurrence.

The people of Israel have been wandering in the desert. It had been a year since they had been liberated from Egypt. Being close to the Promised Land, Moses decided to send out twelve spies to check out the land. The twelve spies were men of renown, one representative of each tribe.

The spies return from the land carrying a cluster of grapes that was so large that it needed to be carried on a pole by two men. All seem to agree that the land is indeed a land of milk and honey, a land with good grazing and good agricultural potential.

From here, however, the twelve spies break into two groups. Ten of the spies say “The people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the very large men, giants, there. 29Amalekites dwell in the Negev region; Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites inhabit the hill country; and Canaanites dwell by the Sea and along the Jordan.”[2][1]

A commotion must have broken out. One of the remaining spies, Caleb, says, “Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.”

But according to the text: “The men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” Thus they spread lies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size ….. we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
Notice that they not only referred to themselves as grasshoppers, meaning that they viewed themselves as small and insignificant, but that they also said that they felt that others perceived them in such as way as well!

At this point, “The whole community broke into loud cries, and the people wept that night. 2All the Israelites railed against Moses and Aaron.
“If only we had died in the land of Egypt,” the whole community shouted at them, “or if only we might die in this wilderness! 3Why is the Lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off! It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!” 4And they said to one another, “Let us head back for Egypt.”

Last night, when God was giving Moses the second set of commandments, it was God who described himself as “merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon.” This time however, it is Moses who uses God’s words to ask God to forgive the people. God answered that he will forgive the people but only their children, and not them, will enter the Promised Land.

Now when you ask most people what, according to the Torah, was the worst sin done by the Israelites while in the desert, most people will answer that it was the incident of the Golden Calf which we discussed last night. However, according to the Torah, this reaction of the Israelites to the report of the spies is the very worst sin. We know this because the punishment is not merely a plague, but a declaration that because of their slave like mentality, they would not be able to enter the Promised Land. Because they were still thinking like slaves in Egypt, they were not worthy or prepared to enter the land as a free people.

This story shows that like slaves, they did not have three critical ingredients necessary to proceed. First, they had lost confidence in their own abilities even to the extent that they transferred their own lack of self confidence to others by saying that others too perceived them as grasshoppers. Second, they had lost their faith in God, the very God who had liberated them from Egypt with “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” Third, they had lost their vision as to what life in the Promised Land could be.

I would maintain that we are like them in that these are three sins of which many of us are guilty.

Many of us do lack self confidence. We do lack faith in our own abilities. Like the people in the desert, this is a great sin. Now in Judaism, sin is referred to as “het.” In modern Hebrew, it is the root to describe a missed free throw. It literally means “missing the mark” as though we were an archer who missed the bull’s eye on a target.

An earthly king came to a village and noticed that there were targets on the side of the barns of the building and that in the center of each target was an arrow. The king had never seen anything quite like this. He inquired as to whom the archer was for he wanted the marksman for his own army. The people of the village proceeded to inform him that the man that he was looking for was the meshugenah Yankele who went around firing arrows at barns and then painted targets around the arrows. Of course, at this point the earthly king lost all interests in Yankele.

The story intrigues me for two reasons. First of all, it shows me that one way to view repentance or teshuvah is to admit our wrong and then make the wrong into a right. This is turning something bad into something good. The arrows have been fired by us in a haphazard, helter skelter way, and now it is our task to paint the target around them!
Second, let us realize that unlike the earthly king, the heavenly king still desires that we be soldiers in his army. God still desires that we become agents of healing and repair. God still desires that we become (in Al Vorspan’s immortal words) “nudniks for justice!”

The second sin of the desert generation was that they had lost their faith in God. God had not only brought them out of Egypt, but it was God that had given them manna and protected them along the way. It is not easy to tell someone how to renew their faith in God, especially when, personally, I see the presence of God in so many ways. Recently, I have seen God’s presence in the mother who with a tear in her eye is trying to breastfeed her baby in an intensive care unit at the hospital. I see the presence of God in the son who stood by his mother’s bed constantly for two weeks until she drew her last breath.

I see the presence of God in the waves of the sea and feel it in the clear mountain air of the Blue Ridge or Rockies.

I see the presence of God in the way in which our young people cared for and nurtured the survivors who went with us on last year’s March of the Living. On that trip, one of our survivors, Rabbi Larry Berkowitz, was a survivor of Auschwitz. While we were standing at the steps of the gas chamber and crematorium number two, the steps from which people went down to change their clothes prior to gassing, Larry descended one of the steps and then said the following. “This is the place. This is the place where my mother and my younger brother and sister died. This is the step on which my mother saw her last bit of daylight or her last view of the moon and stars.”

In today’s Torah portion, an angel intercedes and acknowledges Abraham’s faith and prevents him from sacrificing his son. There would be no angel to rescue Larry’s mother, but less than five minutes later, Rabbi Berkowitz chanted the El Male Rachameem prayer for his mother, siblings and all of the victims and then led us in the Kaddish. It does not make a lot of sense to me even today, but at that moment I sensed in him some special meaning. Perhaps it was healing. Perhaps it was closure for him as an eighty two year old man who had been a sixteen year old adolescent with working hands in Auschwitz. I am not sure what it was, but even in that moment I felt the presence of God.

So I am not sure what the exact recipe is for getting back one’s faith, but I am convinced that getting it back can be quite important in helping us heal, in helping us to regain vision and in helping us to become healthy.
Recently my friend and our fellow congregant, Dr. Jim Adelman, loaned me a book entitled “How God Changes Your Brain” by Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman. For those who do not know Jim, he is a prominent neurologist in Greensboro and is really such an upbeat guy. I was visiting him as he was recovering from a hip replacement at which time he said to me, “Fred, you gotta read this book!”

Well, he was correct. The book is fabulous. The authors, both of whom are scientists and one of whom is a physician, demonstrate that functional brain scans show that certain positive things happen to our brain when we have faith in a loving God. Studies have shown that a belief that God will give us the strength and courage to face the vicissitudes of life may also improve our health, or at least the health of our brains. Our brains seem to me more dynamic than previously thought. Studies have shown that those who frequently pray or mediate are less susceptible to dementia and seem to be able to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s, apparently by actually changing the hardwiring of our brains!

Newberg and Waldman list eight ways to exercise your brain. They are, in descending order.

8. Smile

7. Stay intellectually active

6. Consciously relax

5. Yawn (though hopefully not during this sermon!)

4. Meditate

3. Aerobic Exercise

2. Dialogue with others

And the number one best way to exercise one’s brain is to have faith. In the words of Newberg and Waldman “Faith is equivalent with hope and optimism, and the belief that a positive future awaits us.” (p.164)

So today, let us not be like the Jews of the desert who when facing despair, lost their faith in a loving God. Rather as difficult as it might seem, let us maintain the faith that God can be a source of strength, courage and serenity and let us do so by looking for evidence of God’s presence in our world.

Finally, the third sin of the desert generation was that they had lost their vision of the Promised Land. A proverb in the bible states: “18For lack of vision a people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18) What the verse literally means is that without vision, there is anarchy. The word for anarchy used here ironically comes from the same root as the word for Pharaoh. In other words, one could interpret the verse to mean that without vision we are slaves. Without vision, we re-enslave ourselves.

Those who are facing tough times need not only to get their “groove” back, they need to regain their vision. Those of us in their families and in their community need to become agents who help those who need it regain their sense of their own personal Promised Land.

Above all, the passage is telling us that God desires that we envision a better future in order that we might work towards its fulfillment.

In Judaism, there is a concept called, “Yeridah le tsorech aliyah” which translated means, “We go down only to ascend.” The Psalmist says: “From the depths I cry to you,” meaning that from the depths I cry to God to help me ascend! Therefore, our attitudes need to be that there is no such thing as “down.”

Yes, there are times of despair for many of us, but the sages tell us that despair is an essential part of Teshuvah. Despair needs to give us the power to move toward change, to break through the chains of what is holding you down or back. Despair is a birth pang to something else.
You may have lost your job. You may have suffered financial set backs. You may be ill. You may be worried about your children, parents or another loved one. You may be dealing with a difficult time at work and all of these can cause you to despair.

Yet the story of the spies is one that tells us not to despair, but to have faith that although we are down at this moment, we are about to ascend at the next moment. It is because of this that I have always felt that a Jew is a pessimist with hope!

So if this applies to you, listen to the following phrase, learn this phrase and share it with someone who needs it. The phrase is: “Every setback is a setup for a comeback.” Listen to it again. “Every setback is a setup for a comeback.” Now say it with me: “Every setback is a set up for a comeback.”

So once again the three most serious sins in the Torah done by the generation of the desert were:
1. Loss of confidence in their own abilities.
2. Loss of faith in God and
3. Loss of vision as to what life in the Promised Land could be.

In just a few moments we will stand before the open ark and Lane will chant the prayer that Moses asked of God when he asked God to forgive the people of these three sins. As we hear this, let us remember that all too often many of us have been guilty of the same three sins. Let us ask for God to help us regain our confidence in our own abilities, our faith in God and our vision as to what our personal “Promised Land” would look like.

Moses in our story says to God “7Therefore, I pray, let my Lord’s forbearance be great, as You have declared, saying, 18‘The Lord! slow to anger and abounding in kindness; forgiving iniquity and transgression; ….
19Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to Your great kindness, as You have forgiven this people ever since Egypt.”

God’s answer is “סָלַחְתִּי כִּדְבָרֶֽךָ”
“I pardon, as you have asked.”

May God pardon us for losing our vision and faith and may we all be blessed with a renewal of faith and vision, a year of blessing, health and peace.

May God bless us with peace in our lives and the lives of our families, our congregation and community, our nation and our world.

Leshanah Tovah tikatayvu – May we be inscribed for a blessing in the Book of Life! Amen