Rosh Hashanah Day II Sermon: When Archery is Not Your Thing with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

Years ago, I was talking with our preschool learners, 3- and 4-year-olds, about God. Not sure what I was thinking that day. I was a young rabbi, fresh out of the Seminary. So I turned to very young learners and asked: have you ever seen God? As you might predict, it did not go well. There was a long, awkward silence. Nobody raised their hand. Nobody said a word. I did not know how to get out of this jam. And then mercifully one child at last, sheepishly, raised her hand. I have seen God, she said. You did? You saw God? When did you see God? I saw God at Logan Airport when we came back from vacation. Logan Airport? Where at Logan Airport? In the bathroom. In the bathroom? How did you see God in the bathroom? I was on the potty. When I got up from the potty, God flushed my toilet.

How do we see what we see? How do we know what we know?

In his new book How to Know a Person, David Brooks offers the following thought experiment. Imagine that you are in a bedroom with your eyes closed. You are instructed to open your eyes and describe what you see. There is a chair, a bed, a desk, a window, a painting. If there were, say, ten people asked to describe the contents of this bedroom, would we expect that we would get a broadly consistent picture? After all, aren’t the people in this thought experiment just capturing objective reality? A chair is a chair. A window is a window.

But different people see differently. Different people see different things. The designer in the bedroom notes the interior decorating. The security specialist notes the window and the areas of vulnerability. The artist is focused on the painting. The personal trainer on whether there is an area in the bedroom for planks, burpees and pushups. We don’t only see with our eyes. We see with our whole soul.

This is our issue now. Whether it is the hard news of the day, or events in our own families, we may look at the same thing, but we see different things based upon our different experiences, beliefs and values.