Why are you here tonight? Assuming nobody dragged you here, why did you bring yourself here tonight? At the risk of oversimplifying, let me say that there are two categories of self-motivated people here tonight—those who are seeking a spiritual experience, and those who are impelled to be here, because, simply, it is really important to them to be in synagogue on Yom Kippur.   

Now I realize that these two groups have a lot of overlap in them, but I want to address those who are here because it is really important to them to be in a synagogue on Yom Kippur. They—maybe you are one of them—are impelled to be here. I use the word impelled instead of compelled because to compel is to drive from the outside, and to impel is to drive from within. 

Why are those who are impelled to be here so impelled? Mainly it is because so many other people they know are similarly impelled. Jewish society as a whole is impelled to be in a synagogue on this night and day. There is a rare clarity of purpose on Yom Kippur that overrides all the reluctances of the rest of the year. What I want to explore tonight is how that inner sense of being impelled, and its societal reinforcement, are the essence of finding one's own definition of mitzvah.   

I want to leave you knowing two things after this talk:   

1. A mitzvah is not a "good deed". The word mitzvah means a "command". In English usage, derived from the Yiddish colloquialism, "a mitzvah" is a good deed, and that says nice things about what people think of the relative worth of Jewish commandments. But in Hebrew a mitzvah is a command.   

A bar or bat mitzvah, which mean "son or daughter of the command," is the Hebrew way of designating someone who is now obligated to Jewish law, as an adult. It is automatic at 13, the Jewish age of majority. One becomes a bar mitzvah, with or without a ceremony or a caterer, just as one reaches the age of adulthood in the US with or without a ceremony. And one does not get "bar mitzvahed," just as one does not get "adulted", or "adulterated," G0d forbid.   

To repeat, a mitzvah is not a "good deed". A mitzvah is a "command".   

2.   Every command comes from a commander. Who commands you? Are you impelled, or compelled, and to what, and by whom?  

Let me start with a reading from the New Testament, the Letter of Paul to the Romans, chapters 4 and 7. Why is a rabbi quoting the New Testament, on Yom Kippur of all days? Because, in many ways, the liberal Jewish view of a mitzvah is the same as the one Paul puts forth in Romans. I will selectively quote him, and I will first use the New English Bible translation, then change its use of the words Law to Torah, and commandment to mitzvah, to hear how Paul's words sound to a Jew:   

(Romans 4:3) "What does scripture say? 'Abraham put his faith in G0d and he accounted it to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:60.'   

(Romans 4:13-17) for it was not through law (Note: in Greek, this is nomos, or Law, but Paul is referring to the Torah, which is a Hebrew word meaning "Teaching") that Abraham, or his posterity, was given the promise that the world should be his inheritance, but through the righteousness that came from faith. . . . Torah can bring only retribution, but where there is no Torah there can be no breach of Torah. The promise was made on the ground of faith . . . for all of Abraham's posterity . . .for he is the father of us all, as Genesis 17:5 says: 'I have appointed you to be the father of many nations.'   

(Romans 7:7, 9-11) Except through the Torah I should never have become acquainted with sin. . . In the absence of Torah, sin is a dead thing. There was a time when, in the absence of Torah, I was fully alive; but when the commandment (the mitzvah) came, sin sprang to life and I died. The mitzvah, which should have led to life, proved in my experience to lead to death, because sin found its opportunity in the mitzvah, seduced me, and through the mitzvah, killed me." End of the quotes from Paul.   

Now what was Paul trying to say? His sermon was different that what I will try to say, but in many ways it was similar. Paul had taken his version of Messianic Judaism on the road, preaching it into the synagogues and the pagan temples of the Greek-speaking world. He was bringing people to what he had become to feel was the essence of Judaism, as interpreted through the eyes and heart of someone who believed that a Mashiach, an Anointed King of Israel, had come. Paul was preaching that Jesus was a spiritual king—for he had died before he could be anointed to be a flesh and blood king—to rescue people all from death and bring them to eternal life. The Greek word for Anointed is Christos. Christ was not Jesus' last name. It means Messiah/Mashiach.   

Paul took a different tack than the other disciples of Jesus who stayed in the land of Israel, and who saw this new belief in an anointed king of Israel as an addition to Jewish practice, and required all their adherents to be active practitioners of all the mitzvot, all the commandments, which Paul found so difficult to convince non-Jews to adopt.   

Paul had two large impediments in reaching out to non-Jews about a Jewish way of accepting Jesus. The first was circumcision. In order to become a believer in Jesus as a Jew, the Jewish disciples of Jesus still said that all males had to be initiated into Judaism through circumcision, which, prior to anesthesia, was extremely daunting to adult males as an admission rite. Additionally, in the Greek culture of the eastern Mediterranean, circumcision was deemed to be a disfigurement. The Maccabees had dealt with this tendency earlier, as many Jews of their time began to not circumcise their sons as well as to engage in a surgical reversal of circumcision to assimilate better into Greek culture. As a matter of fact, much of what I did not read to you from chapter four of Romans is Paul defending not being circumcised, for, as Paul correctly points out, Abraham was justified by his faith in Genesis 15, before he was circumcised, in chapter 17.   

The second set of commandments Paul had trouble presenting to potential converts were prohibitions against eating certain meats, which we call kashrut. As Jesus had been quoted, in Matthew 15:11, "A man is not defiled by what goes into his mouth, but what comes out of it. That is, Jesus, and then Paul, sermonized that evil and foul speech were the essence of kashrut more than evil food.

This last quote is set against one of the many scenes where "Pharisees," that is, Jewish legal interpreters, beset Jesus with legal questions, and Jesus is reported as taking the symbolic and spiritual approach to a certain mitzvah, in opposition to the simple understanding of it as a deed to do. So much so that Pharisee is seen in English as a synonym for hypocrite, as one who misses the spiritual meaning of an act while concentrating on the minutiae of the deed itself. This, too, has seeped into our Jewish self-definition, so much so that the average Jew here has the same disdain for the process and result of Jewish legal interpretations that the average Christian has. This is not to say that we are Christians. We would have to accept a whole lot of Messianic stuff to achieve that label. But the average liberal Jew does have the same appreciation of Jewish law as the average Christian does.   

Enough of the New Testament now. I only brought this up to show you that the people that Paul was preaching to are very similar to American Jews today. Not just because we live in a majority Christian environment whose philosophies, tendencies, and general vocabulary in English color our Jewish perspectives, but because the overwhelming number of us do not see Judaism as a system of musts and oughts and have-to's. At least, we do not treat "rituals" and "Jewish practice" as musts and oughts and have-to's. The passion of the prophets and the feeling of moral certainty we muster is usually confined to the social justice arena. In order to live in harmony with our fellow Jews and Americans, we adopt a live and let live attitude concerning their rituals, and a laissez faire attitude toward our own.   

We feel as if we know that there is a divine perspective on right and wrong when it comes to things like the death penalty and the need for philanthropy and social services, but we are positive that there is no such Divine requirement to have or celebrate a Sabbath or to eat or avoid certain foods. Most modern Liberal Jews, whether we know it or not, accept Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, who called all these rituals, "Jewish folkways." And folkways are just that, non-commanding ceremonies best appreciated from an anthropological point of view, and participated in with bemusement. It is akin to when I wear the green on St. Patrick's Day because I am of Irish heritage. I am one sixteenth Irish. Not motivating enough to be a mitzvah, but an engaging folkway I get a kick out of.   

In short, any rabbi who tries to talk to Americans about mitzvot as commandments will suffer the same fate as those Jewish supporters of Jesus who tried the same tack: they will be far surpassed in the number of adherents they raise by those who present Judaism as a series of optional folkways. Paul learned this, adapted his message, and, as related in Acts 15, Paul outmaneuvered his Jerusalem opponents, opened the door to a non-Jewish practice of Christianity, and his version of the religion took off like a rocket.   

Now there is another way that Jews agree with Paul, and that is that they often feel that the law makes you a sinner. How? Because no matter how we do a mitzvah, there is always someone who does it more completely, more stringently, more restrictively, and in greater numbers and with more regularity than you or I do it. Many of you have heard me compare this to the important rule of hiking that I learned in the Swiss Alps. This is the principle of "One Cow Higher." The gist of this rule is never to trust how clean the water of any stream might be, because no matter how high up the mountain you are, there is always . . . You can fill in the sentence. So the mitzvah is to purify all drinking water.   

The same goes for mitzvot. I call it the principle of "One Jew Higher." No matter how well we do a mitzvah, there is always "One Jew Higher," fouling the stream of Jewish practice with an intolerant swagger of self importance that makes us all feel as if we have to defend ourselves. This is as much a problem for me as it is for you, but I'm used to that. Still, we should not let this scare us away from doing our best or from doing anything at all. The mitzvah remains for each of us to purify the drinking water, that is, to recommit to the basis of the mitzvah, and not let a lame excuse or a venal person drive us away from trying.   

When traditional Jews disparagingly characterize Liberal Jews, they call us the "Jews who pick and choose," as if only we have adapted our practices to new philosophies and technologies. In the Reform rabbinical school we learned how the history of Judaism has been one of adaptation and evolution of practice, based on the socio-economic and philosophic trends and realities of the various places that we lived as a people. That is, all of Judaism has picked and chosen and adapted. But to what have we adapted? Is it to new senses of being commanded? That is, we as liberal Jews believe that egalitarianism is as much a Divinely revealed principle as any other, and therefore we are impelled to remove gender inequities from our practice. We also accept that democracy is a Divinely revealed principle, and thus we are impelled to amend Judaism so as to downplay or remove hereditary roles, such as the priesthood, and hierarchical ceremonies and roles, such as would be the case if we discouraged congregants from participating in the leading of these services.  

If we act on the basis of principle, then we are following the path of mitzvah. If we do not, if it is because we cannot muster up a sense of commandedness, then I agree with our critics that our core of Judaism is hollow and pointless.    What I want to do is explore with you the challenge to base your lives on a sense of commandedness. I hope I have alluded to why this would be important. If I haven't done that, then what I am about to say is not at all important, and here would be a good place to think your own thoughts.

    Let's look at page 1, the candlelighting. I want to explain that simple blessing, and what it means when we say it. I want to use it as the doorway to enter a more commanded sense of Jewish practice. It says:

Baruch Atah Ad0nai El0heynu Melech ha'0lam,

asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav vitzivanu

l'hadlik neir shel (Shabbat v'shel) Yom haKippurim

Blessed Y0u, Ad0nai, our G0d, Ruler of the Universe,

Wh0 consecrated us with commandments, commanding us

to kindle a candle for (Shabbat and) the Day of Atonements

Now, nowhere in the Bible will you find a command to light a candle for anything, much less for a holy day or Sabbath when lighting fire was forbidden outside of the Temple. Nowhere will you find a reference to a rabbi, or to a synagogue. These practices evolved out of our sense of commandedness. Let me tell you briefly how, going back to the issue of Yom Kippur candles.   

First, the Jews of their time, now lost in history, were faced with this problem: The Torah forbids lighting a fire on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:3). Still, the prophet Isaiah, in tomorrow morning's Haftarah, calls the Sabbath a "delight" (58:13, on page 103 of the Machzor, the third line of the third paragraph). Our ancestor rabbis asked, "How can the Sabbath be a delight if we have to sit in the dark and the cold?" Their answer: we will light fires and candles before the Sabbath and let them burn into the Sabbath, so that the candles will give light, and the coals will keep us and our food warm, and thus we will be able to delight in the Sabbath. And, our ancestors would add, let us acknowledge that this is G0d's will by ascribing to G0d this practice as if it had been mentioned in the Torah itself. From Shabbat Candles our ancestors added candles before all Festivals, too, and hence, Yom Kippur candles.   

What is important is that our ancestors treated both the prohibitions—the don't do's—and the enjoyments—the do's, as equally mandated. And Isaiah went a step further when he used the ritual mitzvah of fasting on Yom Kippur to launch a plea for all social justice mitzvot:    Is a fast like this the one I asked for?    A day for self-affliction, to bend the head like a reed in a marsh,    to sprawl in sackcloth on the ashes?    Is this what you call a fast,    A day to seek the favor of G0d?    Is not this the fast I ask for:    To unlock the shackles of evil,    To loosen the thongs of the yoke,    To send forth crushed souls to freedom,    To tear every yoke in two!    To distribute your loaves for the hungry,    To bring the poor wanderer home,    When you see the naked, clothe them,    When you see your own flesh and blood, do not turn aside!    Then your light will burst forth like the morning,    Your reputation for justice will precede you,    And the glory of G0d will follow close behind.    Most Liberal Jews mistakenly see Isaiah rejecting fasting in favor of social justice. Without the actual ritual fast his exhortation to social justice would be unintelligible. To Isaiah, both the fast from food and the fast from injustice are commands. One is lacking without the other.    Look at the candle blessing. Every blessing before a mitzvah says, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav vitzivanu, "Wh0 consecrated us with commandments, commanding us." This is based on our ancestor rabbis' reading of Exodus 19:6, which calls the Jewish people " a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation." And in what sense are we holy asked our ancient teachers? We are holy when we do G0d's commands, becoming a kingdom of priests, who are holy, and a holy nation. That is why the blessing praises G0d Wh0 consecrated us with mitzvot, with commands that are "holy", meaning "so special we take them very seriously."    When we say this blessing, hopefully now with understanding, we say that we have entered a sacred and special relationship with G0d and with each other as those who define ourselves as Yisra-El, wrestlers with G0d, otherwise known as the People Israel. When we light these candles, we acknowledge a sense that we are commanded to do it. If we do not feel commanded, we should eliminate the middle phrase, and say the blessing as follows:

Blessed Y0U, Ad0nai, our G0d,

Now leave out:

    Ruler of the Universe, Wh0 consecrated us with commandments, commanding us And add this: as we engage in the folkways of Israelto kindle a candle for the Day of Atonement.

    If G0d is also an issue, then start here:

We join together in the folkways of Israelto kindle a candle for the Day of Atonement.

    But let us return to those who would try to be commanded. What does it mean to be commanded to do this? Who is commanding us? The answer is that, on some level, we have to find our center on this. We have to acknowledge that there is, as a previous prayer said, that there be "sense in our persistence, and reason in our tenacity." The prayer was speaking of the enduring nature of the Jewish people. Here I mean it to imply that we commit to a rationale for treating Jewish practice as a transcendent imperative. In other words, our people as a whole, in our search for transcendent meaning, command me.

    How can the people command me? Here is a quote from a recent paper delivered by Professor Arnold Eisen on the subject of how our people as a whole can be the source of mitzvah: "The sense of collective obligation (here, read mitzvah) is alive and well among many American Jews, Steve Cohen and I, along with other researchers, have found. But its source is neither belief in Torah from God at Sinai nor the weight of inheritance from the past, but rather bonds formed with people one gets to know week by week. Something is owed the individuals whom one can count on to help out in times of trouble and whose faces on wants to see sharing moments of rejoicing. When such communities are experienced as vibrant, fulfilling, and caring, their members are led to exchange a measure of autonomy for the satisfactions of belonging..."

    The people of Israel itself is a self-correcting receiver of revelation. This is called the belief in the Body of Israel as the receiver of Progressive Revelation. That is, Sinai was the beginning of revelation, and it continues, even today. We evaluate the content of that revelation through the lens of the people as a whole.   

What keeps everybody from having private versions of Judaism that diverge so widely as not to be recognizable as a group anymore? The first answer I will give is that if Liberal Jews have not already dissipated from internal anarchy, there must be some limiting factor in all this. And there is: it is social pressure. But is social pressure the same thing as a Divine Command? It feels the same, as in the social impulsion to be in a synagogue on Yom Kippur.   

An example from astronomy. Have you heard of the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in the Southwestern Desert. It is based on the principle that many smaller telescopes operating together can operate as one large telescope when their data are combined. This is exactly the principle of Progressive Revelation to the Body of Israel. That is, each of us is an antenna, attuned to the frequencies of our experiences. When we join our observations together, we can tell what is noise and what is signal much better, so that we see the whole picture more clearly.   

But we have to be aware that we are listening. And we have to share our observations with each other. These telescopes are focused, that is, commanded, to observe the heavens in a certain way. If they rotated randomly under the skies, they would observe nothing, and their data would be drivel. Sure, by looking in one area, they miss other things. Fine. G0d has given other peoples the tasks of looking there. But we have a focus, and are part of the longest running experiment in heaven watching on the planet. It is our honor to be a part of this, and the better we do it, the more we honor ourselves.   

As Isaiah said:   

If you restrain your feet from Shabbat violations,   

From doing business on the day of My holiness,   

If you call Shabbat a delight,   

G0d's holy time worthy of honor,   

Honoring it by abandoning your customary ways,   

From doing business and making idle talk,   

Then you will become the delight of Ad0nai,  

  . . . your light will shine forth in the darkness,   

And your shadows will change into noon;   

. . . from your midst will step forth rebuilders of ruins;   

They will restore the foundations of old;   

You will be known as repairers of walls long breached,   

People who reclaim old paths to dwell in once more.   

In the end I command myself to be commanded, that is, I am impelled. Why? Because I feel that I am doing the right thing. How do I know it is the right thing? I do not know, but I act anyway, basing my practices and beliefs on my reading of how our tradition has interpreted what it is that we Jews do, compared with and informed by what I see other Jews doing.   

To recap, Paul preached to the same kind of people then that we are today, caught up in a non-Jewish world that makes it difficult for us to explain or live out a sense of Jewish sacred commandedness. We live among those who want a Judaism that does not mandate practice, but only suggests how to feel in the heart. That is how Judaism differs from American civil religion. We do not give of our time and resources for the purpose of tzedakah because we care. We do it because tzedakah means "righteousness." That is, we give tzedakah because it is a mitzvah to do the right thing, whether or not we care. If we give tzedakah because we ought to, because we are impelled to, then it is a mitzvah. If we wait until we care, it is charity, and charity is always an optional good deed, not a mitzvah.  

My challenge to us, myself included, is to recapture the sense of commandedness of our Jewish lives that will allow us to say these words, "Wh0 consecrated us with commandments, commanding us," meaningfully.   

I will end with the two things I told you I would end with:   

1. A mitzvah is not a "good deed". It is a "command".
2. Every command comes from a commander. Who commands you?