Freeing Holy Sparks
Kol Nidre : October 1, 2006/5767
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit

How was the world created? I know you’re familiar with the story in the Torah how, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, day and night, the plants and the animals and finally man and woman. But the Kabbalists, the Jewish mystics, tell a different story of creation. When Isaac Luria, probably the most famous and influential mystic in our tradition, who lived in Tsvat in the 16th century, told the story of creation, he had a different story to tell. He didn’t dispute the creation story in the Torah, but he believed that story hinted at another story. You see, Luria was plagued by a question and the question was: why is this wondrous, beautiful world so full of difficulty? Why aren’t our lives easier?

Isaac Luria was known as the Ari (Lion) (1534-1572) and this is the story of creation that he taught: Luria explained that God created the world by forming vessels to hold the Divine Light. This divine light was meant to radiate out, fill the world and illuminate everything around us. But as God poured the Light into the vessels, the light was so powerful that the vessels couldn’t contain it and with a huge explosion, they shattered and sparks of this divine light became imbedded into the world of matter. These sparks of the divine were now trapped in the material world; God’s presence was hidden and was unable to shine forth. It then became our task to free these holy sparks. This could be done by the manner in which we approached the material world around us. If we pick up a hammer to build a home for someone who is homeless, that liberates the spark of holiness imbedded in that hammer. If we take a piece of bread and say a blessing over it, expressing our thanks before we eat it, we free the holy sparks in that food. So too with our relationships: compassion and love free the divine spark between people. Jealousy and hatred obscure these sparks and hide God’s potential presence. Whatever we touch, whatever we eat, whatever we use can be approached with a reverence, with a desire to recognize and liberate those sparks of holiness. Through our actions, we can repair what’s broken in the world and restore the world to wholeness and peace. As many of you know, this is process is called “tikun olam,” “repairing the world,” and it is understood to involve all of one's actions – how one treats fellow human beings, eats, studies, prays, celebrates and works.

And while this story of the cataclysmic explosion and sparks of divine light is a just a midrash, a legend, from our own experience we know it to be true. In our own lives, we have experienced these emotional explosions, these cataclysmic breaks that change our lives. A person we love dies, or all of a sudden someone who was well becomes sick. People in a good relationship fight and encounter difficulty. We lose something important to us—a job, a friend, the home where we grew up. When Isaac Luria talks about the world exploding and coming apart, he’s not only telling a cosmic story. He’s telling stories about the price of love, the experience of loss, real challenges that we encounter as we live our lives. Here we gather on the holiest evening of the Jewish year. Yom Kippur is a holiday of reconnection, of using our minds and our hearts to repair things that have gone wrong over the past year. Tonight I want to use Luria’s story of creation and the hidden holy sparks as a jumping off point to explore how we work to bring wholeness into our lives. Where do we begin?

I want to start with a story of loss and love. It’s a personal story and a hard one for me to tell but it’s not an uncommon story. We all have people who we care about who have died. In the Song of Songs, the text says, “Love is stronger than death,” and while it’s easy to forget this when we feel intense grief, it is still true. When we have a deep connection with another person, that relationship nurtures the sparks of light within us and whether or not that person is here, those sparks continue to shine.

About five years ago, a really good friend of mine was hit by a car. He didn’t die right then but he died later, a result of the injuries of that accident. Dick was my teacher and mentor in Hillel work. He had been the rabbi at Yale for many years and then became the regional director of Hillel in Boston. He was my supervisor and when I took this job at Tufts, he was the person I called when I had questions. My first couple of years it seemed like I had questions every couple of hours. What do I do now?! Dick really knew the work, so his answers were full of practical wisdom and they were very, very helpful. Over the years, I got to the point where I didn’t have questions every day, but when difficult or complicated situations arose, Dick was the person I’d call. When Gail and I moved to Newton, Dick and I became running partners and I always looked forward to the talks we would have on our runs.

So when he went and died, the loss felt tremendous. Who would answer my questions? And then, after about a year, sometimes when I was running the same route by myself, I would mentally pose a question to Dick and I realized something amazing: after all those years, I basically knew what he would have said. In fact, I could almost hear him saying it. Not always, not in every case, but a lot of the time. He had been such a good teacher that the sparks of his wisdom, the way that he had of approaching problems, was now really part of me. And this doesn’t have to be as intense as when someone dies. The people who we love, our friends, our brothers and sisters, our parents – their love and care and wisdom has been planted within us and when we need that strength, those sparks of light when we feel like we are in darkness, those sparks of warmth when things feel cold, we can draw from them. You see, the boundaries between people are much more permeable than we think. Of course, that’s the meaning of the Shma, when we say that God is One. Understanding God in this world is understanding the power of oneness, that we are forever strengthened by the ways we are brought together in love, with those who touch our lives for good.

That was the first thing I wanted to tell you this evening. Here’s a second truth I want to speak about in regard to the holy sparks that live within us. Friendship makes these sparks glow. One way to understand God’s presence in the world is to look into the eyes of our true friends. We have all experienced how the acts of love and kindness and support that we give freely can fan those sparks within others. But this truth has a dark side as well. When we ignore a friendship, when we avoid dealing with the inevitable conflicts that arise between people, when we pretend that things are just fine (when in truth they’re not), then those sparks can dim and we feel cold.

I learned a misha from Rabbi Bill Hamilton in Brookline. It’s from maseket Sandhedrin in the Talmud. I mentioned this misha a couple of years ago but here it is in greater depth. This mishna, very simply, tries to answer the questions: Who is your friend and who is your enemy? A friend, the rabbis teach, is someone who you would include in your wedding party. Now, that makes sense, but the interesting part of this teaching is how this mishna defines an enemy. An enemy, the rabbis say, is anyone who you have not spoken to for three days because you have been angry at that person. (“Kol s'lo diber imo sh'losha yamim b'ayvah.”)

How often do we get angry after some incident and close ourselves off from our family or friends? It feels so painful to me when I hear someone say that they’ve stopped talking to some member of their family. Yelling at each other – that I understand. But not talking?! And in truth, there are times when we get angry or upset and we don’t completely stop talking to that person, but we pull back and put up a wall, or avoid them as we walk across campus. Or even worse, we smile falsely and pretend things are fine when they’re not. This mishna teaches that if we don't act quickly to clear up and reconcile an argument, we are in fact on the road to making them into an enemy. That's harsh language, but it underscores a point: we are simply not allowed to go off and stew in our anger. It takes courage and trust to talk to another person when you are angry at them, but our tradition teaches that we’re obligated to repair things that break in the world, to fix relationships that come apart, to pay attention when friendships meet obstacles.

The process of tikun, of repair that Luria addresses, is the responsibility of each of us. Maybe it’s not possible to make everything right, but on Yom Kippur, we’re obligated to look deeply within ourselves and consider how we might make the first move to rekindle those sparks of warmth and connection. When we fight with a friend, we ultimately need to think beyond who is right and who is wrong. We need to consider how we use our minds and hearts to repair that relationship.

Finally, I want to move from the sparks within ourselves and the relationship between us and our friends to our responsibility to our community, to our country, to the larger world around us. Now, I love reading the newspaper. On Sunday morning, a good cup of coffee, the New York Times, The Boston Globe, my kitchen table, a sesame bagel, some lox (sorry…) this is my idea of a good time. But recently, it feels like the news is so bad that I don’t want to read the paper the first thing in the morning. There’s so much that needs to be fixed, so much in the world that needs our attention. I’ve taken to getting outside first thing and going for a run, working on some project I care about, kissing my wife, before I can get the strength, sometime in the afternoon, to read the Sunday paper.

But when I get discouraged or depressed, I think about the students who I’m privileged to work with on this campus. I think about two students who had never been to Africa before but heard about this community I’ve been doing music research with in Uganda. So they decided that they would get together twelve laptop computers and go over and teach a group of high school students how to use them, tremendously increasing these student’s ability to succeed in school and maybe even go on to university. They did this very much on their own and their work had a profound impact on the lives of the students they taught. I think of Hillel projects like Read by the River, which works to promote childhood literacy with kids in Medford, and Moral Voices, which will bring Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nick Kristof, one of the true heros of Darfur, to our campus next month. And I think about students in LCS and the Tisch College and many, many additional projects on our campus who are fanning sparks of hope and love, who are committed to repairing the world even though they are realists and they understand that the task it great. But all of these people know that, as the Talmud teaches, they’re not obligated to finish this work but neither are they allowed to stand by and watch while sparks flicker and go out. These students know something else: when you work to repair the world, something in you shines more brightly.

I want to close with a story. I heard this story from my friend Alan Flam, who’s a rabbi at Brown University. I don’t know for sure but my sense is that this is a true story. It’s about a seven-year-old girl who came home with one of those science projects from school. You did this too. It was the project where they send you home with a watermelon seed and dirt in a paper cup and your teacher tells you to water the seed every day and eventually, you’re supposed to grow a watermelon. So the girl comes home all excited and her mother says, “that’s nice” and her dad says, “that nice.” But her grandfather, he really gets into this. And he tells her exactly how to water the seed: the dirt can’t be too dry or too soaked. But the most important thing is that she has to water it every day. He tells her, “You’re going to grow a watermelon! But it’s going to take a while before the seed sprouts and you have to remember to water it or you won’t be able to make the seed grow.” So the girl says, “Oh, I won’t forget. I’ll do it every day!” And she does this for a while but she’s seven and after a couple of weeks nothing is happening, so she begins to forget. When she sees her grandfather, he asks her, “Have you been watering the watermelon seed?” And she feels bad and says, “no,” she forgot and he encourages her whenever he sees her. So she starts watering the silly paper cup every day and then low and behold, after about a month and a half (an eternity in a seven-year-old’s life), there’s a little green sprout poking up through the dirt.

The girl is so excited and she keeps watering it and in a couple of weeks, it’s big enough for her grandfather and her to plant in the garden in the back yard. After they plant it together and pat down the dirt and water it again, the girl turns to her grandfather and she wants to say something very grownup. So she says, “Grandpa, thank you for teaching me how to water plants and how to make them grow.” And her grandfather looks at her carefully and says, “Sweetheart, I wasn’t trying to teach you how to grow plants. I was trying to teach you to have faith and believe in your own actions. If you have something you want, and you nurture it every day, your actions will bear fruit. I wanted to teach you that what you do can make a difference.”

On Yom Kippur, we confront the fact that we live in an unredeemed world. And we know full well of the darkness that can encroach upon our lives, on our relationships and on our world. Yet all around us, there are sparks of holiness waiting to be brought to life. We free those sparks when we remember the ways we have been touched by teachers, friends and mentors who have shaped our lives. We free those sparks when we rekindle the connections between friends and when we bring our energy and talents to repair a broken world that so need our attention. It’s in our power to free the hidden sparks of love, of reconciliation, of compassion, which is another way of saying that it’s up to us to determine how much God’s presence shines in the world. Everything in our tradition teaches that the new year is a time of strength and hope and the opportunities for connection, for holiness, are before us everywhere we turn.

May we all be sealed for blessing in the book of life.