Like many of you, I was intrigued by the news in August that planet Mars had this year come closer to earth than it had any time in the last 60,000 years. The last time our two planets were this close, astronomers told us, Neanderthals had roamed the earth. The next time won’t be until the year 2287, and then the year 2729. I looked at Mars in the sky with amazement, not just at the fact that I could see the red planet with my naked eye, but also with wonder at the fact that astronomers were able to tell so precisely how far away Mars is, and in what year it would actually be this close again. Mah Rabu Maasecha Adonai, I thought. How great is your Creation, O God. How extraordinary and miraculous the set patterns and predictable rhythms of our universe which are there for our inquiring minds to discover. Tohu va-vohu is associated with the sewers, it’s pas nit, but the palace is a structure – a place of order and grandeur, and of that we should be proud. We’re a tradition that gives “order” pride of place – our prayerbook is called a siddur and our festive meal on Pesah is called a seder. Absence of order is a negative -- in the book of Job (10:22), the place where we go when we die is referred to as eretz… lo s’darim, a land w/o seder, a land of chaos and disarray.

This negation of the primordial tohu va-vohu therefore leads to a new appreciation of the process of Creation itself. God’s creation involved a process of organization – day one, day two, day three, categories and structures being crystallized, simple creations leading to more complex creations, until what had been astonishingly empty was now extraordinarily full, and what had been utterly unformed was now ordered and organized and predictable. Tohu va-vohu, chaos, had been conquered.

Or maybe not so fast. Has Tohu va-vohu been completely eliminated from Creation? The Torah never actually says so, and if we look around at our often chaotic and unpredictable world and we examine our own equally chaotic and unpredictable lives, there are days when it seems that the primordial tohu va-vohu has managed to seep through into this seemingly well ordered universe of ours and make its presence acutely felt. In fact, even the science which we rely on to discover and transmit the immutable logical patterns by which the universe operates has come to admit, through something called chaos theory, that all is not as predetermined as we once may have thought. Newton’s laws, for example, were completely deterministic -- because they imply that anything that happens at any future time is completely determined by what happens now, and moreover, that everything now was completely determined by what happened in the past.

Physicists in our time, however, have noticed that the inevitable imprecisions in assessing any complex system make any reliable predictions about the future impossible. Even if we were to increase the accuracy of our ability to measure by a million times, it turns out that our ability to predict the future would be hardly any better than if our prediction had been made by random chance. The result: a chaotic system with no reliable way to determine outcomes in advance, which is why meterologists for example can’t predict the weather more than a few days into the future.

So there is chaos still in our world. Is this a flaw in God’s creation? Seems like it at times. It would be nice for us to be able to plan outdoor barbecues for next June without worrying about the weather. But perhaps God really intended for us to live not in a perfectly ordered and predictable world, but rather in a reality characterized by a dynamic between order and chaos, between predictability and unpredictability, between stability and change -- with our job as God’s partners in Creation being to ride the bronco, to bring order where we can, to tolerate or even revel in the inevitable chaos when we must. For as much as we may derive comfort from predictablility and resent its absence when we’re most in need of it, the alternative of a world where there were no surprises and nothing was left to chance, is not a terribly attractive prospect either.

For what is Yom Kippur about if not the possibility for change? The whole notion of Teshuvah, repentance, is predicated on the belief that a human being can change, can become different, can become -- as it were – ish aher, another person – what kind, we don’t know. If we have free will as our tradition maintains, then the choices we make and the course our life takes cannot be predetermined. I spoke on Rosh Hashanah about the things that we can do to help reinforce the boundary markers that keep our Jewish identity strong. I suppose it might be nice if there were a reliable recipe that would guarantee a Jewish identity – say, a spoonful of day school education, a dash of Israel trips, plus a cup of Friday night home Shabbat experiences – but that’s not how it works. Most of us can think of examples of kids who’ve had all three who end up abandoning their tradition, and kids who’ve had none of those advantages who’ve gone on to become great Jews. Now the system is not completely chaotic; these types of boundary markers do stack the odds in favor of a strong Jewish identity. But at the end of the day we don’t know how our kids are going to turn out Jewishly or any other way. There are just too many variables. That may be frustrating for parents, but this lack of determinism is what the whole system of teshuvah is based on. We can change; we can be different from what our circumstances and background might have suggested.

And of course, what is the messianic idea about if not the idea that one day the entire earth will be radically made anew, and everything will be different, and it’s our job to work each in our own little way toward making that change happen.

If the world then is characterized by a dynamic between order and chaos, what is the role of religion? Is our religion’s role to bea guardian of order and tradition or a change agent? Is our religion supposed to be cultural, or counter-cultural? Put another way, should religion be aligned with the forces of order, or chaos? In line with a long rabbinic tradition of answering difficult questions, I’m going to say “both.” I’d like to reflect with you on the dynamic between these two sides of our religion, looking at three examples which have been very much on my mind over the last year. Three very different examples, yet taken together, they are illustrative of how religion operates on these two tracks simultaneously. The first has to do with our reaction to personal tragedy and loss, the second with the same-sex marriage debate, and the third with the terrorist campaign against Israel.

First, in a well-ordered world overseen by a good, just, and powerful God, we would expect some measure of coordination between our deeds and our fate. We would expect life to be quite tidy as a matter of fact: You lead a good life, and the rewards of long years, health, prosperity, fulfillment, and family are yours. You die at a ripe old age, having retained your vigor and mental acuity till the end, and you’re surrounded by loved ones who care about you. You commit wrongdoing, on the other hand, and the punishments of disease and unhappiness and loneliness are yours. Everything would be very clear, and very predictable – like gravity.

Indeed much of Jewish tradition promotes this vision of our reality. The book of Deuteronomy which we’re just now finishing in the yearly cycle of Torah readings, maintains this correspondence between our deeds and our fate as a core principle repeated again and again. Psalm 92, the psalm for the Sabbath day, proclaims Tzadik Katamar Yifrah – the righteous shall flourish like a palm tree. When we hear the news of someone’s death, the tradition asks us to say Baruch Dayan Ha-Emet, “Blessed is the True Judge”, affirming our faith in the continuing good order and justice of the universe at a very vulnerable time. And of course much of our liturgy of the High Holidays is premised on the notion that God is judging us according to our deeds, and determining our fate accordingly. This is a very mainstream Jewish strategy for imposing a rational order on the seemingly inexplicable losses we experience throughout our lives.

And yet I don’t think it would take any of us very long to think of counter-examples from our own experience. People who, according to everything we as fallible human beings can see or understand, should have merited the blessings of the righteous, yet suffered or are suffering a fate which seems terribly unjust. Or alternatively, those who we observe committing terrible transgressions, who seem to prosper and live a life of blessing.

These incidents often have a corrosive effect on our faith in an ordered world. When they happen, we sometimes feel as if the forces of chaos are erupting back into the world, leaving in their wake a trail of utter randomness which can be terribly frightening. The order that we had grown to expect seems nothing more than a human construct.

Our tradition responds to these inevitable discrepancies in at least three different ways that I’d like to share with you: the first is to insist that what appears random and chaotic really isn’t after all, it’s just our own inability to understand that is getting in the way of our seeing the patterns and the order. Either there were misdeeds that we don’t know about, or the person was being prepared for a much better life full of rewards in the world to come – either way our faith in the inherent order of our world is shored up. It does make sense.

That strategy doesn’t work for everyone, however. We can’t always find a compelling explanation that helps us rationalize our loss. So a second way that our tradition responds to this scenario is by acknowledging that sometimes there just isn’t the correspondence that we’re looking for. This is a minority view in our textual tradition, but the books of Kohelet and Job certainly point us in this direction. Et ha- tzadik v’et ha-rasha yishpot ha-elohim “ God will doom both righteous and wicked,” Kohelet writes (3:17), “for in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other…man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing” (3:19). The random nature of who lives and who dies, who suffers and who prospers, is thus acknowledged by a canonical book in the Hebrew Scriptures. That this quote from Kohelet can appear in the same Scriptures as Tzadik Katamar Yifrah is an extraordinary reflection of the diversity of acceptable Jewish approaches to this problem.

But there’s a third approach to our problem which the tradition affords us, which is to avoid the route of explanations altogether and achieve the order we need when our world has been shaken by loss not through text or theology but rather through ritual. That’s where the mourning rites of our tradition become so useful – the shiva, the shloshim, the kaddish, etc. They don’t answer the Big Question, but they help us regain our traction when the whole world seems to be slipping out from under our feet. For ultimately, neither “explanation” really satisfies. Psalm 92 is saying there’s an exact correspondence between our actions and our fate, and our fate is therefore entirely in our hands. Kohelet is saying there is no order at all, no correspondence between our actions as human beings and our fate; we might as well be beasts because the course of our lives is so utterly out of our control. In fact, is our fate exactly commensurate with our deeds? Obviously not. But, can we have no effect on the course of our lives whatsoever? Is there no power that we have to make an impact on our physical, emotional, spiritual wellbeing? Is it all just chaos? Also, in my view, obviously not. We can affect our own fate, even if we can’t determine it. A life lived in accordance with the principles of Tshuvah, Tefila, and tzedaka doesn’t avert the evil decree, but it can help mitigate the roa hagezera, the evilness of the decree -- because those values can give us the strength to cope with whatever comes, with as much fortitude and dignity and humour as we can muster. No, we cannot say that order and predictability rule our lives, but neither does chaos, and our tradition, through its mix of texts and rituals on this subject, helps us to find that middle ground where truth lies.

The second area that I’d like to discuss regarding the tension in our tradition between order and chaos is the same-sex marriage debate. Obviously, I could spend an entire sermon and more just devoted to this topic, and that I’ve chosen not to do these High Holy Days. But this issue has been so much in the news over the last several months, and the subject of so much debate here at the shul, that I’d like to just touch on one aspect of it this morning, the aspect that relates to my theme.

One of the reasons why this issue is so emotional for people in particular as it relates to religion is that I think for many people, in an often chaotic, ever-changing world, religion serves as a rock of stability, something that they can hold on to firmly when everything else seems so slippery and when society’s values keep changing. And for religion to play that role is, I feel, largely a good thing. We do need a place to turn where not everything is relative, a place where we can learn some Capital T truths that cross continents and cultures and generations. We do need a community to lean on when we’re feeling a bit wobbly ourselves, and if the community itself is wobbly how can it support us? We don’t want our religion to simply ape whatever the latest fashion or trend in the society happens to be; if it did, religion wouldn’t actually be contributing anything at all.

Having said that, I also feel that that other aspect of religion, the revolutionary, counter-cultural aspect is also important. Religion’s purpose is to preserve and safeguard the traditional way of doing things, but that is not its only purpose. In constant tension with the impulse to guard the status quo is the impulse in religion to upend the status quo, challenge us to be different, or even better than we were. It wasn’t the desire to maintain the status quo that gave the children of Israel the courage to leave Egypt, it wasn’t the desire to maintain the status quo that has animated the messianic hope of the last 2,000 years. It isn’t the desire to maintain the status quo that lies behind a holiday, Yom Kippur, whose entire premise is based on the idea that we can change, we can grow, we can do better and be better. All these examples are reflective of the bubbling ferment that is as much a part of Judaism as preserving the solidity of the tradition. For the most part, these two roles coexist surprisingly well. We keep our traditions, yet we also allow change to infiltrate our Jewish lives, impelling us to change ourselves and from time to time, impelling us to change the tradition too. There are many examples of instances in which developments and insights and cultural shifts from the world outside have made a significant impact on Jewish practice, just as there are many examples where change has been consistently resisted. It’s not completely orderly, but neither is it utterly chaotic. If we ever get out of equilibrium to one side or the other, too rigid or too flexible, the Jewish organism generally knows how to rebalance itself.

Once in a while, however, an issue arises that forces us to choose – is this a moment to tack towards order, towards continuity, towards keeping the status quo, because the change being proposed is so radical and so undermining of tradition that if instituted the Jewish people would just skid off the road to chaos with no traction left to keep it from crashing? Or is this a moment to tack toward change, even revolutionary change, on the basis that that’s what were here on earth to do, to change ourselves and the community for the better, and that preserving an unjust status quo for the sake of continuity would ultimately make the tradition utterly irrelevant?

Many of you know that my own opinion is that this is one of those moments when I think that our religion should be on the side of change and what I see as progress, even if that takes us into uncertain terrain. But I understand why it’s so hard, when religion has that other authentic role of safeguarding and preserving the traditional way of doing things. I will be sharing my reasoning with the congregation in writing at a later point this fall. For now, I just wanted to take the opportunity to place this issue on the order and chaos map, in the hope that that might provide another way to think about the issue before us.

Finally, I’d like to talk with you this morning briefly about Israel, in this context of order and chaos. Today of course marks the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, in which Israel was caught napping while Egypt and Syria prepared for an attack in which close to 3,000 Israeli soldiers lost their lives. Today Israel is involved in another war, and for all the carnage and the horror of October 1973, today’s war seems somehow more reflective of the forces of chaos let loose in the world. At least 1973 involved battles between soldiers, something which has sadly been part of the order of humankind for as long as our species has been on this earth. That’s what armies prepare and train to do – battle other armies. That’s their purpose. When soldiers die in the line of duty, we mourn them of course, because each and every one is a human being, often with parents, children, friends, dreams, hopes -- all cut short. But still we can comfort ourselves that their deaths are part of this tragic order that humankind has set itself up with – soldiers fighting soldiers in the name of some cause, and lots of them dying.

Not so people taking buses, or going to a café, or to a Passover seder, or to a pizza parlor, or to a fruit market or restaurant. Women, children, the elderly, the handicapped, Jewish, Arab, foreign workers left wing, right wing -- blown to bits or maimed for life. By definition, terrorism involves the willed imposition of chaos by a malevolent force – it’s not your deeds that determine your fate, it’s not your inherently dangerous job as soldier that determines your fate, but rather whether you missed the bus or caught the bus; whether you decided to go for pizza or for falafel that day. How does one put this kind of randomness of fate into a framework of meaning? There is no conceivable order in which these deaths can have any meaning, no possible comfort for these deaths. 9/11 of course brought this particular kind of chaos to our side of the ocean in a massive way; Israelis have been living it for the last three years with no end in sight. This is a uniquely destructive chaos brought about by the willful intentional decision of other human beings, cheered on by a depressingly large percentage of their countrymen.

Some analysts attempt to find the order in terrorism by seeking to explain its root causes in poverty, hopelessness, powerlessness, or humiliation. Some explain it with reference to terrorism as a tactic – if the terrorists are successful in intimidating the population of Israel, they think, then perhaps the Israeli government will make more concessions in negotiations. Both of these attempts to make the inexplicable clear, to make the chaos more orderly because it fits into certain categories that we understand, fall short in my eyes. I understand that it must be awful to be a people under occupation. Roadblocks. Curfews. Security Fences. School closures. Arrests. Bystanders killed during army raids. There is nothing good about it; that must be acknowledged this Yom Kippur. We can understand why the Palestinians would want to be rid of it. In my own view, the occupation is not very good for Israel either. But I just can’t make the leap to terrorism, the deliberate decision to massacre civilians. The Palestinians were on the road to achieving an end to that very occupation before this suicide bombing campaign started, and they are now of course so much worse off than they were before. Hamas and Jihad and their supporters have no interest in negotiations. Rather, they use the free will that God has granted them as human beings to try to destroy all hope for their own people and for ours. In that, they haven’t succeeded yet but they are trying.

If I can’t find any order or meaning in the terrorist campaign itself, the only place I can find it is in the response to it. I am filled with the utmost admiration for Israelis who have managed to carry on with their daily tasks despite the terrorist threat to themselves and their families. Just going to work, school, and shopping is a defiant response of order to the chaos being inflicted on Israeli society by the ongoing campaign of terror.

What can we do here to help? There are many ways to express our rejection of terrorism and our support for the people of Israel. I’d like to mention two specific opportunities out of many that we have available to us to at this time.

The first is to go to Israel. The Narayever has its first ever mission going to Israel this December break, and we’re very excited about it. The focus of this particular mission is going to be on Israel’s south – the southern Negev desert and Eilat. Please do take a flyer on the trip, and consider signing up. Families and individuals are both most welcome. If you can’t go on the Narayever trip, think about going to Israel at some other time this year. We’ve got some flyers available in the back – they’re called “I Care and I’m Going”, and the Israel Government Tourist Office is anxious to help you make it happen. There is no greater statement of solidarity than going yourself to Israel, seeing the country firsthand and by your very presence saying that the terrorists will not win their campaign of fear and intimidation.

Second, whether or not you go to Israel this year, the opportunity to support Israel through Israel Bonds is always available to us here in the Diaspora. We’ve all read about how seriously Israel’s economy has been affected by the intifada. Lots of folks are out of work, and the needs are growing. One important way to help is through tzedakah, and Peter spoke about that obligation last night. Bonds are not tsedakah. They’re a loan to the State of Israel which is repaid to you with interest. We are providing information in the back about Bonds and you will get a letter in the mail after yontif. If you can, I urge you to participate in the shul’s Israel Bond drive this year, and in that way as well saying no to the terrorist campaign against our people.

Neither going to Israel nor investing in Israel Bonds is a reflection of a particular political stance other than Zionism itself. We all know that there is a diversity of views among the shul community, among the Canadian and wider Diaspora Jewish community, and in Israel itself over the territories, the settlements, the fence, the road map, Jerusalem, etc. Right now I’m not focused on those issues, as important as they are and as passionately as I myself may feel about them. I’m focused on figuring out ways that we can demonstrate our common opposition to the terrorist campaign against our people in Israel of the last three years, and thereby line up on the side of order and sanity in the world over chaos and anarchy and fear.

Tohu va-vohu. Emptiness. Void. Waste. Chaos. Akin to the sewers and dunghills upon which a palace is built, says Rabbi Eliezer. Its influence is still felt, even though it seemed to be vanquished at the dawn of Creation. This appears to be how God intended it, a world which is not as ordered and predictable as we might like at times, a world where we have the free will to choose between good and evil, a world where creativity and imagination can yield new things inconceivable in previous generations, a world where we can, through human actions and decisions, create structures of meaning and organized ways to respond as needed to the forces of chaos. When we face personal losses or tragedies, we experience a breakdown in the expected order of our lives, but we also come to appreciate the rituals of our tradition which are designed to help us, with time, restore our balance. When we confront challenging social issues, we patiently navigate the dichotomy between religion as a conservative social institution dedicated to preserving its traditions as a bedrock upon which we can lean, and religion as a counter-cultural change agent helping to move society to a new place. When we face the scourge of terrorism designed to uproot any semblance of order and normalcy in our civil society, we can find organized ways to respond which affirm that we will not surrender to such evil. No, we cannot predict the future. But this Yom Kippur, we pray that God may give us the strength to cope with whatever the new year brings, with honesty, humility, and faith. Gmar Hatimah Tovah.