The Holiness of
Glass Blowing – Part 1 –Be Alone, Be Powerful, Be Shaped©
Rabbi David
Baum, Congregation Shaarei Kodesh
Kol Nidre
5776/2015
This is the
holiest night of the year, and so the question I’m about to ask to begin my sermon
tonight may seem strange....but have you ever made anything out of glass?
I want to tell you about an experience I had this summer,
when I, a very inartistic person, made something out of glass that I now place
in my cabinet along with all our family’s Judaica – our kiddish cups, our
candle sticks, our challah and seder plates, and our havdallah sets.
This summer, while I was at Camp Ramah Darom[1],
I had the chance to learn how to blow glass. Let me set the scene for you that
day. It was a hot and humid day in
North Georgia, and I had just 29 minutes with a man who stood in front a fiery
furnace. The man looked at me, and
gave me a long metal tube, and said to me, “I’m going to need you to listen
carefully to what I’m about to tell you.
What you are about to do is not going to be easy, but you will create
something beautiful today. We only
have 29 minutes, so let’s get started.”
Tonight, I’m going to tell you why this thing I made out of
glass is holy to me, and I hope the lessons I learned when I made it will help
you find holiness on the holiest night of the year, but I hope to do it in less
than 29 minutes.
Here are the three main lessons I want to teach you tonight
are:
1. It’s ok, once
in a while, to be alone, actually, we need it.
2. Our breath has
tremendous power
3. We are delicate
and we are constantly being shaped, just like glass.
And there’s one other big lesson that I’m going to save for
tomorrow.
Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, but it was on this day thousands
of years ago that our people received a very special gift, a priceless piece of
art that we put in our cabinet.
Moses, our teacher, had a pair of tablets in his hands, the
10 Commandments. Can you imagine how he must have felt holding these tablets
literally made by God! Now, imagine
how he felt when he saw his people dancing in front of the golden calf. And so, he broke them, he broke these
tablets on the 17th of Tammuz, and he went back up the mountain for
40 days and 40 nights, and he made a new set of tablets. And today, on Yom Kippur, he brought
them down, the second tablets.
The Talmud tells us that Yom Kippur was the happiest day of
the year because we are forgiven for our sins and because Moses brought us
these new tablets it was a fresh start.
And here is what happened to Moses on this day, that Yom
Kippur, thousands of years ago. He
comes down with the second tablets, and Torah tells us:
And Moses had not known that the skin of his face had become radiant
when God was speaking with him.
And Aaron and all the children saw Moses, v’hinei, Karan Or Panav, and
here, the skin of his face was radiant, Va’yiru migeshet eilav – and they feared
to approach him, - Exodus
34:29 – 30.
I like to read these last words, and they feared to approach
him, in a different way. The
people see him, and he looks completely different. They don’t fear him, they are IN AWE of him, in awe of his
radiance.
Where does Moses’s radiance come from?
Moses was in a cave for 40 days and 40 nights– he was with
God, he was alone, but with God. Can
you imagine if this happened nowadays?
How many times would Moses have been interrupted by a call or a
text?
“Bzzzzzz (vibrating sound), hold on God, I have to take this
call.”
How many times are we truly alone? How many times are we with someone, and they are talking,
and we are thinking, “What’s going on on Facebook? Who will call me next? Oh, I forgot to text so and so.” It never ends, from the moment we pick our heads up from our
pillows to the moment we lay them down!
In the world of constant connectivity, we are never truly
alone.
As I sat with the glass blower in front of this kiln, and he
told me, I need you to focus, because this oven is really hot and you don’t
have a lot of time. I’m not going
to talk to you either unless absolutely necessary – think about yourself as
being alone right now.
It is not easy to be alone, sometimes, it can be scary to
hear our thoughts that have been dormant for so long, but in order to create
this glass cup, I had to be alone in my thoughts, and focused.
Admiral Richard E. Byrd was a famous American explorer who
received the Medal of Honor, the highest honor given out by the U.S. for his
expeditions to the North and South Poles.
In 1934, he manned an advanced weather base in the Antarctic, but he
insisted on being alone. Here is
what he wrote in his diary about this decision: “Aside from the meteorological and auroral work, I had no
important purposes. There was nothing of that sort. Nothing whatever, except one man’s desire to know that kind
of experience to the fullest, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace
and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are.”
Byrd led a very happy life, he loved being surrounded by his
family and friends. But, he was
put under a tremendous amount of pressure organizing all of these expeditions
to the North and South Poles because of fundraising and publicity. It gave him high anxiety and he was
overwhelmed. He writes that he was
spent, he was tired, and he had lost his way. His time alone re-energized him, he says he never felt more
alive.
The Rabbis used to do something interesting – before they would
daven, before they would join the minyan for prayer, they would meditate for an
hour in order to attain a Koved Rosh, a koved mind. Koved can mean heavy, or it can mean serious, or it could
mean honorable – a serious mindset.[2]
It teaches me
an important lesson: when we are
alone, we are able to take ourselves seriously, we are able to honor ourselves,
we are able to confront and overcome the heavy things in our lives. And we are able to appreciate the
beauty of the world.
We become
radiant!
Byrd wrote in his diary about his time alone, “I did take
away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive,
and a humble set of values…Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more
peace.”
Moses went back into that cave and he made a second set of
Tablets, not God. He was alone
with God for 40 days and 40 nights.
He needed that time to recover, to recharge himself, to find meaning and
purpose again.
On Yom Kippur, the Cohen Gadol, the high priest, had a very
special task – he had to go to the Holiest of Holy places, the place in the
Temple which contained the Ark of the Covenant which held these very same
ancient tablets, the Ten Commandments, and he said the name of God, alone. For one moment in the year, the high
priest had to be alone with God, and when he came out, our prayers tell us that
he had the same radiance on his face that Moses had.
Perhaps we can learn from this, perhaps we can give ourselves
at least one moment a year to achieve the highest degree of holiness. When we spend a little time alone, we
are better equipped to be better people in this world. So this year, I ask, if you can, to do
one thing – spend a couple of minutes being truly alone so you can gain
radiance and strength. Turn off
your phone, go for a walk, be present and with yourself so you can be radiant
this year. And just like the
people of Israel who looked at Moses and the high priest, in awe, maybe people
will look at you in awe this year.
And now, the
second lesson, which I could only learn by being alone, when I made this glass
cup, is the power of my breath.
The correct term for making a glass item is blowing
glass. You stand with a long metal
tube with the lava like gooey substance on the other end, and in order to make
something, you have to blow your air into it.
It wasn’t easy.
At first, you have to blow really hard to make the glass expand, but
then, you have to blow really softly lest you cause a hole to develop in the
glass, and all the while, you are turning and turning this metal tube. I went from being out of breath at one
point to having to barely blow just a minute later.
After I had blown successfully, the glass blower said some
very profound words, “Look at what your breath created!”
On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the creation of world and
humanity. God creates Adam in the
following way, “YHWH God fashioned Adam, dust from the ground, and blew into
his nostrils the breath of life, and the human, Adam, became a living
being.”
Without breath, things cannot come to life. God’s name in this line in Genesis 2:7
is Yud Hey Vav Hey. God has many
names, but one of the unique names of God for the Jewish people is YHVH – which
some say is an onomatopoeia, a word that imitates or resembles the source of
the sound that they describe – for example, the ultimate Jewish onomatopoeia –
OY!
If you say the word YHVH, it is literally a breath.
It’s the name of God that the High Priest may have uttered in
the Holy of Holies.
What does it mean to be made in the image and likeness of
God? We have the power of creation,
just like God does. The question
is, what are we creating when we use our breath?
It’s during this holiday, Yom Kippur, when we confront the
sins we perform, the realities we create with our breath. How do we repent and
seek atonement for them? We must
recite them out loud in the form of the Vidui, the confessional. It’s the third in a series of four
steps of Tesuvah, repentance. The
first two are internal – first we must regret our actions, to acknowledge to
ourselves that we’ve made a mistake; then, we have to stop performing the
actions; but then, we must confess out loud.
Why out loud?
Because when we give breath to something, it becomes alive. Then, and only then, can we complete
the repentance process by resolving not to do it again.
Our breaths create the realities we live in; they create who
we are. The question is, what kind of selves are we creating? This leads me to my third lesson: We are all delicate works of art, and
we are constantly changing, whether we like it or not.
In the Yom Kippur evening liturgy, the prayers we recite
tonight, there is a beautiful, powerful, and some would say scary poem called
Ki Hinei KaChomer –As Clay in the hands of the potter – one of the stanzas
states the following, “As glass in the hand of the glazier [gley-zher] who
shapes and melts it at will, so are we in Your hand, pardoner of sin and
transgression. The poet pleads
with God – use us creatively, not destructively! Let us become beautiful art in this world! Help us achieve our potential!
And the poet forces us to acknowledge – we are like clay, we
are like glass, but isn’t that a good thing? It means that I can change, that I can be become
better.
One time a woman was shopping for Thanksgiving dinner, but none
of the turkeys she found were large enough to feed her family. She asks a young
man stocking the shelves: “Do
these turkeys get any bigger?”
“No, ma’am,” he answers. “They’re all dead.”
Today, on Yom Kippur, we confront death head on – we are
rehearsing our deaths by wearing white, by abstaining from earthly pleasures,
but we are doing so alive, and breathing.
The Psalmist says, Lo HaMeitim Yehaleluyah, the dead can’t
praise God, and they also can’t change, but we can.
We grow firmer or more flexible in our attitudes. We develop
new skills and abilities. We grow in vision and we grow in confidence. We may
also change in negative ways if we’re not careful. We may grow more fearful,
more cynical or insensitive to others. We may even find ourselves becoming people
we don’t like very much.
Life is all about growing and changing.
If we’re dead, we won’t grow. But if we’re alive, we will.
The only question is, will you decide how you want to grow? Will you decide to
take responsibility for shaping your life? Because, if you don’t make a
decision about how you’re going to grow, life will make it for you. If you’re
not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are in the
process of becoming someone you had no intention of being.[3]
So my question is, not if you are growing and changing this
year, but how are you growing
the changing this year?
When you are faced with adversity this year, when someone
cuts you off in traffic, or you are hurt by a friend or loved one, and you are
alone, with just yourself, ask yourself the following question before you
act:
What would the
person I want to become do in this situation?
George Bernard Shaw once said, “Life isn't about finding
yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
Remember, as glass in the hand of the glazier [gley-zher],
who shapes and melts it at will, so are we in Your hand – God helps us create
ourselves, God helps us shape ourselves.
What kind of YOU do YOU want to create this year? Remember, God gave us God’s breath,
which allows us to constantly grow and change. It’s a gift – don’t take it for granted, keep shaping
yourself, keep creating the person YOU want to be.
Bruno Mars was right:
‘you’re amazing, just the way you are.’
You’re great now, you’re amazing. Actually, you might be the person you need to be right now,
so celebrate it.
But, with your next breath, you will change, and it’s up to
you to make the decision of how you want to change.
First, you need to work on YOU. You need a couple of moments to be alone with God so you can
become even more radiant.
Second, you have to realize how powerful you can be using
your breath.
And third, you have to have the wisdom to use that power to
change yourself, with God’s help, because you’re changing no matter what, so
why not be in control of that change?
Remember, someone else is waiting for you in the future – a
different version of you, but you can create that person, with every breath you
take.
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