Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon
September 20, 2017 – 1 Tishri, 5778

If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember it well. Or to be more precise, if you are old enough to have been watching television by 1971, you’ll remember it like it was just yesterday. Your TV screen fills with an image of a beautiful, fresh-faced young woman with blonde hair and dreamy blue eyes. She sings,

I’d like to buy the world a home,
And furnish it with love.
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtledoves.

The camera pulls back, and we see that there are other good-looking young people standing there, too. They’re from all over the world. There are Asians, and Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Europeans. Each is dressed in native garb, each is holding a bottle of Coca Cola, and each joins in as the song continues.

I’d like to teach the world to sing,
In perfect harmony.
I’d like to buy the world a Coke,
And keep it company.

“Coke is the real thing,” the song tells us, and we now see an aerial shot of hundreds of young people standing in formation on a hillside in Italy, singing to us about love and harmony, honey bees, turtledoves, and Coca Cola. [Watch the original video remastered.]

The ad caught on like crazy. The song – without the reference to Coke – soon hit the charts on its own in both the United States and Canada. A Christmas version of the commercial came out a few years after the original, and a Disney version starring Mickey Mouse was released soon after that. In 1991, there was a 20-year reunion featuring the original cast and their children. In 2006, the rapper G. Love recorded an ad for Coke Zero starting with the words, “I’d like to teach the world to chill, take time to stop and smile….” There was a NASCAR version that came out in 2010, and the year before last, it was featured in the series finale of the TV show “Mad Men.” Critics consistently rate this ad as one of the greatest commercials of all time.

It was, of course, an attempt to get TV viewers to purchase sugary brown soda water. But there was something about the way it was made that captured people’s minds and hearts. What was that something? What was the secret to the great appeal of this minute-long TV commercial?

To answer that question, it is important to remember that when the commercial originally aired, the Cold War was still raging, and the specter of nuclear destruction hung darkly over everything. The US was mired in an increasingly bloody conflict in Vietnam, people were killing each other in the Middle East, and everywhere violence seemed to flourish. Yet there on TV, we saw hundreds of young people dreaming about peace and love and harmony. The vision was as simple as it was silly: If we could all just sit down and have a Coke together, things would be great. From our perspective today, it sounds kind of foolish, but in 1971, the image of people all over the world connecting in love and harmony was downright inspirational

Of course, the folks at Coca Cola weren’t the first to provide the world with glowing visions of the future. In fact, we Jews beat Coke to the punch by centuries! “On that day, God shall be one, and God’s name shall be one,” we sing in our services – it’s a vision of the world coming together in unity under the umbrella of God’s oneness. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they study war any more,” proclaimed Isaiah, and we’re still singing the words today – “Lo yisa goy el goy cherev, lo yilm’du od milchamah.” “Each shall sit under his vine and fig, with none to make them afraid,” said the prophet, Micah.

Yes, for centuries, Jews have dreamt of the coming of the messiah, and the visions put apple trees and honeybees to shame. In fact, the English word messiah actually comes from the Hebrew word, mashiach. Other religions might talk about the messiah a lot more than we do, but we had the idea first!

Our tradition’s descriptions of the Messiah are both vivid and voluminous. I don’t have time to share all of them here, but I can highlight a few. The messiah, Jewish tradition says, is going to be a descendant of King David. The messiah, many texts predict, will reunite all Jews. And when they say “all” Jews, some of these texts really mean it, for many suggest that the messiah will reunite in the land of Israel all Jews who have ever lived. They suggest that there will be a physical resurrection of the dead – that the bodies and souls of deceased Jews will reunite, and that they’ll rise to live together in the newly rebuilt Jewish commonwealth. This, by the way, is the reason that traditional Judaism forbids cremation and embalming. Since our bodies will be resurrected, we want to keep them in a condition as pristine as possible so that they’ll be good to go when the messiah comes.

The vision continues. According to Judaism, the messiah will enable Jews to observe all the laws of the Torah, just like in the old days. Now remember, there are a lot of commandments in the Torah – fully 613 of them, to be precise. However, of those 613 commandments, 244 of them are impossible for us to keep these days because they’re about sacrifices, and sacrifices in Judaism are only to be practiced in the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Temple was last destroyed in the year 70 CE. When the messiah comes, our tradition tells us, one of the things that will happen is that the Temple will be rebuilt, and we’ll be able to practice sacrifices once again.

Most important, Judaism says that the Messiah will usher in an era of universal peace and justice and righteousness – a time during which, as Maimonides says, “there will be no hunger or war, no jealousy or rivalry.” It will be a time when, as Isaiah taught us, the lion will lie down with the lamb, even though, as Woody Allen added, the lamb won’t get much sleep.

The point is that when the messiah comes, according to our tradition, things will become really good – even better than apple trees and honeybees and Coca Cola, if that’s possible to imagine. When the messiah comes, then, for us Jews, things will become like they were in the good ol’ days, when we had a beloved king, and when the Temple stood and we could do Judaism the way we were really supposed to. More universally, when the messiah comes, the world will become the kind of place we know it can be – a place of peace, and justice, and kindness among all people.

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate was a terrific guy named DJ, from a little town in Eastern Kentucky – hillbilly country. I think I was the first Jew DJ had ever met. One day when we were talking in our room, our conversation turned to religion. At one point, DJ paused and said, “I don’t understand why you Jews don’t accept Jesus as the messiah.” DJ wasn’t trying to convert me; he wasn’t being hostile or adversarial at all. He was really just curious why we Jews didn’t accept something he’d been taught as a fundamental religious truth.

My initial inclination was to respond by saying “Duh! Of course Jesus wasn’t the messiah. Why would we believe that?!” But this wouldn’t have been a very constructive response to a perfectly legitimate question. To tell you the truth, I don’t really remember how I answered DJ that day…I just remember hemming and hawing a lot. At the time, I didn’t have the tools to give him a clear answer. Why don’t we believe that Jesus was the messiah? Because we don’t believe that anyone has been the messiah – at least not yet. And why don’t we believe that anyone has been the messiah? Because we read the papers; and we watch the news; and we look at the world around us; and whenever we do, we see that, although the world has a lot of good in it, there’s a lot that’s not so good there, as well. There’s war, and there’s hunger, and there’s nasty gossip, and there are all kinds of other evils both large and small – so many, in fact, that we can’t help but notice that our world is a fundamentally broken place. And these times in which we live are most definitely pre-messianic in nature.

Now, a few additional comments about the messiah in Judaism are in order. First, the idea of the messiah – particularly as it’s been understood in Judaism – is profoundly dangerous. For one thing, in Judaism, the messiah, as I said, will rebuild the Temple. Actually, to be more specific, some texts say that the messiah will rebuild the Temple, whereas others say that Jews will need to rebuild the Temple in order for the Messiah to come. But remember, that Temple can only be built in one place, and that’s on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, right behind the Western Wall. The problem, of course, is that these days there are some very important Islamic shrines that sit on the Temple Mount – the beautiful gold-domed Mosque of Omar (or the Dome of the Rock), and beside it the silver-domed Al Aqsa Mosque. In order for the Temple to be built, it would have to be at the very spot where those buildings now sit, so those Islamic shrines would have to go away, and to date there is no movement that I know of within Islam to destroy those shrines. In the mid-eighties, the Israeli police caught a Jewish religious extremist on his way to the Temple Mount carrying a backpack full of explosives – he was planning to blow up those Islamic shrines so that the Temple could be rebuilt. Can you imagine what would have happened if he had succeeded? If he had, Israel would have had about a billion quite understandably ticked-off Muslims on its hands, and the results would have been utterly catastrophic. But to this terrorist, everything was OK, because he was about to bring the messiah, so even if he was caught in the process – even if he was killed in the process, the messiah would soon come and make it all right.

In fact, more generally, if I can make you believe that I’m the messiah, or if I can make you believe that I truly speak on the messiah’s behalf, then I can get you to do practically anything. Like Jim Jones did in the 1970s, I could get you to drink poisoned Kool-Aid for me. I could get you to fight for me, and live for me, and die for me, and to do all kinds of horrible things in my name. And because you would see me as the saviour of the world, you would do it, and you’d be willing to tolerate any adverse effects from those deeds, because since I’m the messiah, and you were on my side, you wouldn’t have anything to lose.

Perhaps this is why our tradition has long been a little leery of too much messiah-talk. To be sure, the Talmud expresses this leeriness quite explicitly. If you’re planting a tree, the Talmud says, and someone comes up to you and excitedly tells you that the messiah has just come, what are you supposed to do? First, finish planting the tree, then go see what all this messiah stuff is all about.

In fact, Reform Judaism shares this leeriness about traditional messianic views. That’s why our movement since its inception has rejected the notion of a personal messiah. We Reform Jews have long looked forward not to a person coming along who can save the world, but rather to the coming of the Messianic Age. We see ourselves as working as God’s partners on behalf of Tikkun Olam, repairing our broken world, so that our people’s dreams of peace and justice can somehow come to fruition.

But even though this messiah idea is so dangerous, and even though many of us are so leery about it, the other thing that’s true is that it lies at the very heart of what it means to be Jewish. That’s because the possibility that the messiah will come along and perfect the world someday is what has long given meaning to Jewish existence.

Why be Jewish? Why bother with Shabbat, and keeping kosher, and Temple dues and all of the other obligations of Jewish life? And why tolerate the expulsions and pogroms and mass murder that always looms as one of the risks of being Jewish? It’s because we have the hope that all of these Jewish things we do will help bring about the fulfillment of our people’s great messianic dreams for the future.

Think of the world as a big wheel slowly rolling along the track of history. It began way down there with creation, and one day it will get way over there to messianic times, and in the meantime, we’re somewhere here in the middle. According to Judaism, whenever a Jew fulfills a mitzvah – whenever we light candles, or study Torah, or give to tzedakah, or keep any of the other six-hundred-and-some-odd commandments of Jewish life, we roll the world one click – one tiny step closer – to the fulfillment of our great messianic dream of the future. And, conversely, whenever we transgress one of those commandments, we move the world away from the fulfillment of that dream.

Our mitzvot bring the messiah, our rabbis taught, and our transgressions delay it. Each moment, we should imagine that the world is in balance, they continued – that collectively our deeds and misdeeds perfectly outweigh each other, so that what you do right now will determine whether the messiah comes. Right now, at this very moment, the destiny of the world is on your shoulders. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to do something good and sacred that will transform the universe into something good? Or are you going to do something petty or evil and ruin it for us all? You get to choose.

In this sense, Judaism is messianism. The very reason that we do anything Jewish is to bring the messiah. That’s why being Jewish matters.

Finally, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings here, but this great dream of ours – of universal peace and justice and brotherhood and all the rest? It’s probably not going to be fulfilled anytime soon…and to tell you the truth, it might not ever be fulfilled. Maimonides taught that a good Jew is supposed to say, “I believe in the coming of the messiah, and even though the messiah tarries, I still believe.” The wording there is important – we’re supposed to say that we believe in the coming of the messiah, not in the “caming” of the messiah. In other words, a Jew is supposed to believe that the world holds enormous possibility, that it can and will become better. And never – at least not for the foreseeable future – are we supposed to believe that the world is already a perfect place. As the scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz taught, in Judaism, the false messiah is the one who has arrived.

There’s an old Jewish story about a man named Mendel who lived in a small shtetl. There in the shtetl, Mendel’s job was to sit at the gates of the city and wait for the messiah to arrive, and for this work, Mendel was paid one ruble a week. At one point, a friend of his said to him, “Mendel, how could you do such a boring job, and for such horrible pay?” “Well,” Mendel replied, “the pay might not be great, but the work is steady.”

Even during the darkest of times, we Jews have always maintained the hope that things can and will get better. It’s that hope, that dream, that has given us the strength to endure our greatest challenges and our greatest difficulties.

My friends, in many ways, this is one of those dark periods. The smoke shrouding our city in recent weeks is in many ways an apt metaphor for the tenor of these times. These days, there are earthquakes, and hurricanes, and floods. The spectre of nuclear conflict is growing once again, and everywhere fear seems to be overtaking compassion as the primary motivating factor of humanity. Now more than ever, we need our people’s vision of a better world, and the realities of contemporary life call upon us to work for it’s fulfillment. Now more than ever, God needs us as a partner, to bring a better day for humanity.

The psalmist taught that when the messiah comes, hayyinu k’cholmim, we’ll be like dreamers. The great messianic dream of the Jewish people, you see, in in part the dream of being able to dream. That’s why that commercial was so popular. At a time when the very existence of the world seemed to be in peril, it helped thousands of people dream of a better time. It’s a lesson for us all. When people despair, we can’t always give them happiness, but what we often can give them is a dream of a better time. This is the great gift of Judaism’s messianic vision.

It is now Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year. Will this be the year that the messiah finally comes and makes things better for us all? Maybe, but probably not. Still, we can dream of a better world, and we can take steps to make that dream real. Picture a time of apple trees and honeybees, and lions and lambs together, and of peace, justice, and righteousness pervading the world. Dream it. Work to make it happen. You might not finish the job, but working together with the rest of us who share that dream, maybe – just maybe – we can make at least part of it come true.

Shanah Tovah.