Sermon Archives

The Age of Chaos, the Age of Torah, the Age of Mashiach  

“The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.” This famous observation of Hegel, the great philosopher of history, reminds us that clarity is only possible when the sun sets and we can look back at what occurred during the day. Think of Avraham and Sarah and every moment in Parashat Lekh Lekha. They journey to Eretz Yisrael and immediately there is a famine and they must leave. Avraham’s love for his nephew Lot leads him into trouble again and again and again. And the entire enterprise of transforming the world through knowledge of God remains tenuous and uncertain as Avraham and Sarah struggle to figure out who will inherit their mission and way of life. Even at the end of his life, two weeks from now, how much satisfaction and certainty did Avraham enjoy? While the nieces and nephews he left behind have large and growing families, Avraham has passed on his worldview to just one child. 

Only in retrospect can we appreciate all that Avraham and Sarah accomplished. In the moment, they lived with a great deal of fear and a great deal of loneliness. 

And they were not the last Jewish family to live with fear and to live with loneliness and to ask “how will it all turn out?”

“When is the happy ending that we have been promised?”

The Gemara in Tractate Avodah Zarah (9a) shares a timeline for Creation:

                    תנא דבי אליהו ששת אלפים שנה הוי העולם שני אלפים תוהו שני אלפים תורה שני אלפים ימות המשיח בעונותינו שרבו יצאו מהן מה שיצאו מהן

The School of Eliyahu taught: the world will endure for six thousand years. There are two thousand years of Tohu or chaos, two thousand years of Torah, and two thousand years of Yemot HaMashiach, the messianic era. Before you start calculating the end of days, the Gemara cryptically concludes:  בעונותינו שרבו יצאו מהן מה שיצאו מהן on account of our great many sins, those years that have been taken from them have been taken from them. That seems to mean that this calendar does not operate like clockwork and our own behavior has caused a delay.

But the Gemara continues to evaluate this schedule of existence to determine when each of these epochs begins and ends. When did the era of Chaos come to and end and the era of Torah begin? The first suggestion that the Gemara offers is, Matan Torah, the revelation of the Torah at Sinai. But that answer is rejected because the dates don’t work out. Too much time, more than two thousand years,  had elapsed between creation and standing at Sinai to receive the Torah. So the Gemara gives another answer. 

The age of Torah began, not with thunder and lighting and a nation trembling at the feet of a mountain, but when Avraham and Sarah began sharing their message of Emunah and Hessed, of ethical monotheism with their neighbors. When the Torah explains, in Parashat Lekh Lekha, that Avraham and Sarah traveled to Eretz Yisrael along with  הַנֶּ֖פֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר־עָשׂ֣וּ בְחָרָ֑ן the souls that they had fashioned in Haran, Midrash explains that Avraham and Sarah had been involved in including  others to their faith, Avraham converted other men and Sarah converted other women, and those people traveled with Avraham and Sarah on their journey. The age of Torah began, not when God revealed the Torah in thunder and lighting from the top of a mountain, but when Avraham and Sarah shared a Torah message with a neighbor. They were not necessarily giving shiurim in the town squares. Maybe they sat down for Turkish coffee with their neighbors and shared their beliefs and values and hopes.

Specifically, the midrash says that their tent was open to guests on all sides and after welcoming strangers into their home and serving a meal, they encouraged their visitors to recite a primordial version of Birkat HaMazon and in this way they gently invited others to see the world differently. 

And the Gemara continues and says that Yemot HaMashiach, the messianic age, will not begin with the birth of Mashiach or with his revealing himself to the world. Rather, the two thousand years of Yemot HaMashiach began when the beit hamikdash was destroyed. This is very counter-intuitive. Rabbi Baruch Halevi Epstein, the early 20th century author of the Torah Temimah commentary on the Humash explains that the destruction of the beit hamikdash represented the lowest depth of destruction and loss. Once the beit hamikdash was destroyed - once the exile began, once the destruction was total  and comprehensive, there was only one way to go, and that is in the direction towards redemption. 

Sometimes we feel alone. We see the world differently or we experience events differently from others around us. We might be alone in our family for practicing mitzvot the way that we do. We might be alone in our shul or school community for voting as we do. We might feel alone in the world for affirming a set of priorities that the rest of the world - or much of the rest of the world -  seems to discard. But I draw inspiration from Avraham and Sarah who shared their truth with those around them and finally, after two thousand years, brought the age of chaos to an end. The age of Torah was ushered in, not when the Torah was proclaimed from Sinai in a voice that could be heard from one end of the earth to another, with the clarity of  a banner newspaper headline and the clear strong voice of a cable-news anchor. Rather, the age of Torah was ushered in when a man and a woman turned to their neighbors to share a new way of thinking about God and a new way of thinking about humanity.

And in the course of most of our lives we all experience deep grief in the aftermath of a loss. The destruction of the beit hamikdash was only the paradigm for all the subsequent destruction and brokenness that exists in the world. But that destruction also marked a turning point. The day of destruction is also the first day of rebuilding. 

I have come to feel deeply suspicious of any stark binaries. They are often false dichotomies or they obscure truths that are far more important. I’ve said before that “Pro-Israel vs Pro-Palestine” is perhaps the most pernicious and deadly false-dicotomy and misleading binary in the world today. Some of you know how I feel that the binary of “did we get a minyan or not?” obscures information that is far more important for the religious vitality of our community (and if you haven’t heard me speak about that, please come next week to se’udah shlishit).

An election also leads us to think in binary and even manichean ways.  Children of light do battle against the children of darkness. One candidate wins and one candidate loses. And we should be suspicious as well of this form of binary thinking. Not because the stakes are small. But because the future remains unknown and because it remains in our capacity to shape the future. 

Whether the candidates you voted for won or lost on Tuesday, whether or not your way of seeing the world and way of being in the world seems to be on the ascendancy or embattled - no message or vision for the future, and no set of value,s is going to have an impact unless you share them with others. 

This past Wednesday evening a group at shul  learned that the Talmud provides that communities are allowed to tax their members to pay for civic improvements, like walls for a city, that are universally understood to be valuable, but that communities cannot compel members to pay for civic projects that they will not benefit from. In the Middle Ages, Maharam of Rothenberg described a mechanism for overcoming this seemingly intractable impediment to the ability of any community to function. If the householders of a community all make a pledge to deliberate together and share their opinions:

                                                                                                                                       ויקבלו עליהם ברכה שכל אחד יאמר דעתו לשם שמים ולתקנת העיר

for the sake of heaven and in the public interest, then they are empowered to vote and their decision is binding on everyone in the community. The deliberative process itself and every participant’s willingness to share their own opinions and engage in deliberations for the common good create a community empowered to take collective action. 

I felt great trepidation and reluctance to speak this morning. Like many of you I have such big feelings in the aftermath of the election and I was worried that if I share too much I will cross over into the sort of partisanship which most of us want to keep outside the walls of our shul. But the task for each and every one of us, and for me as well, is to find ways to share the core values and foundational principles that comprise our worldview and orient the way that we live. That does not mean partisanship. It does require courage and it does require trust. 

Avraham and Sarah left us a model on how the world can be changed and they left us a model for how one epoch of history can come to an end and how another one can come into existence. It does not take thunder and lighting and proclamations of truth from the mountaintop. It takes inviting friends and strangers alike to share a meal and a willingness to disclose our beliefs and our commitments and our hopes to those who may now be strangers but who may become fellow travelers and eventually allies who work together for a common vision.