The Purpose of a Sermon

Friday July 1, 2022

Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA

It is a great privilege to stand up here and give a sermon.  It is a privilege, and a huge responsibility. And to be honest, it can be challenging.  Tonight I’d like to share with you some of my experience with this part of my job.

Like all speech, all use of language, a sermon is an attempt to communicate.  Using words to connect, soul to soul.  Judaism teaches that this is possible; with words we can reach each other.  But sometimes it feels almost impossible.  Do you remember two years ago, in the first months of the pandemic lockdown?

That was such a strange time.  I think that most of us are blocking it out of our memory, but we do remember it.  We were all at home, alone with just our immediate family.  Some of us were completely alone. Week after week after week.   On Friday evenings at 6pm, we would gather virtually, on zoom, and call out to each other “Shabbat shalom!”  Then we would all be muted, and would hear Cantor Mark singing, and many of us were singing along at home, but we could not hear each other.  That was almost unbearable…but better than nothing.  Then it was time for the sermon.  I would read the text of my sermon from my computer screen.  So not only could I not hear anyone, I couldn’t see anyone either.  I would read the text of my sermon with as much feeling as possible, and look as often as possible at the tiny green dot at the top of my computer….the camera on my computer….hoping that someone out there would feel that I was making eye contact with them.

Giving a sermon is a strange form of communication in any case.  I talk and talk and really have no idea at all what any of you is thinking, what you are hearing, or whether you are listening at all!  But in that time of isolation, looking into that little green dot was demoralizing. 

Communication means giving and receiving.  And I was not receiving anything.

So I tried two ways of getting feedback.  First, I invited people to stay on the zoom after the service was over, to discuss the sermon.  To my surprise, many did!  25 or 30 people stayed on to tell me what they thought and to discuss the ideas.  In retrospect, it really was not that surprising; none of us had anywhere to go!  But as a result, I began to receive much more feedback on my sermons than I ever have before or since the lockdown. Now that we are back in person, once the service is over, we just want to get to the oneg. 

The other thing I began to do to get feedback to my sermons during the lockdown, was to post them on Facebook.  I had never done that before.  It has been a very mixed experience.

On the one hand, I get responses, almost immediately after I post them.  Likes and loves, and thoughtful comments, including from old Hillel students that I haven’t seen in twenty or thirty years, and even from friends from childhood that I have not seen or heard from in almost fifty years.  As well as from members of our community here who I rarely see in person, but who take the time to read and to respond. 

The very first sermon I posted on Facebook was in March 2020, three weeks before Passover, during the first weeks of the Pandemic.  In that sermon, I spoke to the storytellers of the future who will one day tell the story of the Covid-19 Pandemic.  I got choked up at one moment in the sermon, but I honestly had no idea whether or not the sermon was successful.  So I decided to post it on Facebook and see what happened.  Over the next couple of days, that sermon was shared over and over again, by many people I didn’t know, as far away as Malaysia.  When I saw that share, I wrote to the woman who re-posted it and expressed my appreciation to which she replied simply, “with internet, no borders.”

It felt profoundly meaningful to see people reading and responding to and sharing the sermon, about which I had been so uncertain. I had communicated! But as many of us have come to learn, there is a terrible downside to Facebook.  We come to crave those likes and loves and become desperate for comments and shares.  The truth is that I have never had another sermon come close to that first one.  The Facebook algorithm is a cruel master.  And when last month I posted on Facebook that I was launching a website with my sermons and other writings, among the nice comments from my friends, was one from a person I had never met, who simply commented “why should I care?” 

He's right.  Like all speech, a sermon is for connecting.  But this is an unnatural form of communication in which one person talks and talks, and everyone else just listens.  Why should he care?    

In this week’s Torah portion, Moses’ cousin Korach assembles a group of 250 leaders of the people who come together to confront Moses.  Korach delivers a brief but devastating challenge: “You have too much. This entire congregation is holy, and God is in their midst.  Why do you raise yourselves over the congregation of God?”   Moses is speechless, and falls on his face.  Eventually Moses regains his footing, but in his challenge, Korach touches Moses’ at his greatest vulnerability.  From the beginning of Moses’ career, at the burning bush, he asks God “why me?  I can’t speak.  They won’t listen to me.”  Korach knows Moses well and challenges him with the very question that haunts Moses: “Why you?  Everyone here is holy.” 

As I wrote in the congregational eNews a few days ago, I received an email last week asking me “what is the purpose of a Shabbat sermon?”  It was a respectful, sincere question from a member of our community who wishes that our Shabbat services could be politics free.  I honestly see both sides of this question.  On the one hand, I believe that the primary purpose of a sermon is to make a connection between the Torah and our lives.  And because the Torah tells the story of a people, many of the Torah’s stories are about how that people is formed, and how they make decisions and move forward or backward, and about leadership.  About law and justice and compassion.  In other words, much of the Torah is about politics.  On the other hand, like all of you, I cherish Shabbat as a day of rest, a sacred time, in which we step away from the conflicts and arguments of the work week.  I want Shabbat to be politics free.

Ultimately, I turn to Moses, our first rabbi and our greatest prophet.  Moses was the greatest of all our prophets because…according to the Torah… he was anav mikol adam.  The humblest of all men.  We can never forget that the world is broken.  It is broken, and our work is l’taken, to repair the world.  But we do not repair the world by shouting loudly that God is on our side.  The other side can shout just as loudly.  And the shouting match will leave all thoughtful people disgusted with both sides, each arrogantly claiming the right to speak for the Creator of the universe.  The prophetic voice is humble.  It knows that it does not know. 

 A sermon must be a davar Torah, a word of Torah.  And the Torah enters fully into every nook and cranny of our lives.  Love, jealousy, sex, violence, life, death, politics.  The Torah knows no “off limits;” the Torah illuminates all of our life.  But like our teacher Moses before the bush ablaze in the wilderness, we should approach the fire with restraint. With reverence. 

God called to Moses  from the midst of the bush, saying: Come no closer; remove your sandals from your feet for the place upon which you are standing is holy ground.  

When we come to this place, we do stand on holy ground. The purpose of a sermon is to remove our sandals, so that with the sensitive soles of our souls, we may feel all the pain and all the joy of being alive in this beautiful broken world.

Ken yehi ratson.  May this be God’s will.

Shabbat shalom.