Revolutions

Sermon Shabbat Vayera 5783

As you may know, I am preparing to ride the Tour de Tucson in about a week, the 100-mile bicycle extravaganza that tests your stamina and, um, zitzfleish.  I last rode the Tour, for the fourth year in a row, just before I realized that I needed back surgery.  Then they had to cancel the next tour, in 2020, because of COVID-19.  They did run the Tour in 2021, but I wasn’t sure I was up to the 100 miles yet, so I just went out for a 40-mile recreational ride after services that day, far from the madding crowd. 

But this fall young Leif Nelson-Melby asked me I wanted to ride the Tour with him—he has never ridden it before—and that was the inspirational encouragement I needed to head back out for the full ride again.  It’s actually great fun, if you don’t mind sitting on a bike for six or seven hours.  Now, to make the event a more beneficial experience for all concerned, we decided to encourage sponsorships of our ride to benefit Beit Simcha.  You can donate per mile, or just sponsor at a financial level you’d like on our website.  As we ride that day, you will help Beit Simcha ride on!

All of this is a prelude to telling you that when you are training for the Tour, or just going out for a recreational ride of three or four hours, there is a lot of time during which your mind requires entertainment, and I have become a podcast addict.  I particularly enjoy listening to history podcasts, and my favorite podcaster is a guy named Mike Duncan, and my favorite podcasts are his Revolutions podcasts.  Duncan, who previously recorded the entire History of Rome in podcast form, is a wonderful storyteller, and snarkily funny besides, and he makes the ride time float away.  He has narrated revolutions beginning with the English Revolution of the 17th century through the Russian revolution of the 20th century, with stops at the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, another French Revolution, some Italian and German Revolutions, the connected and convoluted revolutions of Latin America, yet another French Revolution, and the Mexican Revolution. 

Mike Duncan originally thought his Revolutions podcasts would run 15 episodes each of an hour, but when he came to the French Revolution he went 55 episodes, and then his series on the Russian Revolution was 103 episodes.  All of that was great for very long bike rides as I prepared for the Tour—but, believe it or not, I have now finished all of his past podcasts, and am listening to his new series on just what constitutes a revolution.  As usual, it’s interesting, entertaining, informative and thought-provoking.

Duncan posits two kinds of revolutions: political and social.  Political revolutions change the nature of a political system; it’s not enough to just replace one ruling elite with another one for it to constitute a true revolution, it must be an actual transformation of the kind and quality of the government.  You have to change not just the government, but the entire way that governing is done.  Social revolutions, on the other hand, change the nature of the way people make a living, the very structure of social organization of society, and how the different aspects of that society interact.  For a revolution to be truly great—that is earth-shaking—it must be both a political revolution and a social revolution.

For example, the American Revolution was definitely a political revolution, but it wasn’t really a social revolution.  The system of government definitely changed dramatically, and who was in charge was quite different before and after the American Revolution.  But the relationship between the different classes in society, and how they made their living and lived their lives, didn’t actually change dramatically at all. 

On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution was a very dramatic social revolution that didn’t really change the political order most places it occurred, at least not in any dramatic or sudden way.  You can make the same case for, say, the Scientific Revolution of the 20th Century, or the Digital Revolution of the early 21st century, the one we are in right now.  These are social revolutions that aren’t also political revolutions.

In contrast, the French Revolution—the first one, the big one with the Bastille and the guillotine and Napoleon and all that—was the both a political and social revolution.  The people in charge changed—a lot, several times at least, and a lot of the ones who had been in charge were, well, decapitated later—the system of government changed, and the social organization of society changed so dramatically that they even reinvented the way they measured distances and calculated time and years. 

While I think that these categories of revolutionary change are certainly accurate enough, I would also say that this misses an important category of revolution: the revolution in belief.  Now I know that this Revolutions podcast is primarily dealing with the early modern and modern worlds.  And it explores the ideas that shaped the revolutionary fervor of each and every one of these dramatic, truly society-shaking events, often over decades of changes.  Still, there is something missing when you explore the situation historically and sociologically without focusing on another crucial kind of revolution: the revolution of ideas and beliefs, what we might call a thought-revolution.

This thought-revolution can completely change the way that life is lived, because in truth a thought-revolution that is also an emotional revolution.  It occurs when a new approach to spirituality arises and transforms the way that people believe, feel, and live.  It’s exactly that sort of revolution that we have been exploring in the Torah portions of Genesis that we read here in the synagogue over these weeks in autumn, a spiritual record of the way that our own Jewish people transformed the world by insisting that there is just one God, and that only God is the true source of morality and ethics. 

In a world of polytheism, filled with multiple gods and contrasting systems of morality, this was truly revolutionary in every sense of the term.  No one thought that way, and the shocking idea that one God created everything and was the origin for the ethical structure of what we need to do to be good and to create a good society was totally alien to that world.  It eventually caught on, but it remained a minority belief system throughout antiquity. 

I was thinking about that with regard to the Torah portions we find ourselves in the midst of this Shabbat.  In last week’s portion of Lech Lecha Abraham heard God’s call and began a journey to the Promised Land and thereby he began a thought-revolution that still resonates today.  The idea that there is one God, and only one God, who has created the universe and who calls us to a covenant of righteousness and goodness, was unique when it came about in a world of many gods and multiple sources for ethics.  That quite revolutionary notion of monotheism, of the unity of God, creation, and ethics was shocking, and about as tiny a minority belief as you can imagine.  No one thought there was one God, let alone one source of morality back then.  

And, in many ways, it still is a minority position to take, in spite of nearly four thousand years of development of civilization.  In our own world today, the alienation from religious belief and practice, on the one hand, vies with the insistence that there is only one path to God that must be followed, or else...  The concept that one God of ethics is the source of a morality that anyone can follow, however he or she or they practice their religious experience, or don’t, is somehow still not a generally accepted belief in our society, let alone throughout the world.

This is made abundantly clear in this week’s Torah portion of Vayera in two quite different ways.  The first occurs when God decides to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and informs his covenantal partner, Abraham, of that intention.  Abraham argues with God—we Jews have been arguing ever since, of course—and insists that God be certain not to kill the innocent with the guilty, that a God of justice must always act justly; as he puts in, “HaShofeit kol ha’arets lo ya’aseh mishpat?  Shall the judge of the entire world not act with justice?”  In other words, the highest level of morality must be established by the highest source of morality.  The Jewish God is a God of universal justice, and that must be applied to all people.

That bargaining session in Vayera is one of my favorite portions of the entire Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible: in an attempt to save the innocent people of Sodom, Abraham negotiates God down from 50 righteous to just 10.  If only there were ten righteous in Sodom an entire city could be saved.  One God, one source for moral justice, held to the highest possible standard by one single human being, in covenant with God.

Of course, you don’t go to Sodom to find a minyan… Abraham’s argument doesn’t work in practical terms.  But in terms of inspiration, connecting us to the great ideals that are the core of Jewish belief, the essential need to stand up for what’s right and good and true, it is the model. Which makes the faith of Abraham, the belief in a God with whom we can be in covenant, who gives us the strength and courage to be truly good and to work to make our society good, still pretty revolutionary.  Imagine if people truly adopted the idea that acting well was the proper course in every situation because the God they were committed to required it?  Imagine if all of us—not just here tonight at Beit Simcha, but everywhere in society, everywhere in the world, were willing to challenge even God to hold to a moral standard of goodness and truth?

It's an aspiration, of course, and has been since the time of Abraham, all those centuries and millennia ago.  But the message that the God who created the universe seeks goodness from us, that our free-will actions can bring about positive change in the world, that we are committed—in fact, commanded—to act for justice in any and all circumstances--and that it is in all of our best interests to act well, that remains fresh and powerful.  And, well, revolutionary.  It’s Jewish, of course, but it’s also universal, and it can certainly help our troubled world now, as it did way back in Abraham’s time.  

And if we can not only espouse such an ideal, but choose to live it in our daily lives, when we might effectuate a true thought-revolution.  And move our society, and this complex, messy, troubled world, back towards a path of goodness and peace.  And wouldn’t that be a revolution to be proud of?