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God’s in Charge: Parashat Chayei Sarah, 5786

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Sermon Delivered at Greater Centennial A.M.E. Zion Church, Mount Vernon, New York

Sunday November 9th, 2025

The following joke was funny between 1976 and 1996 and only for a select audience, so you could say that this is very “inside baseball” but here goes.  

A man goes to his rabbi and says, “Rabbi, I don’t know what to do.  The first game of the World Series is next Tuesday and it’s the same night as Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement).” 

The rabbi says, “Well, isn’t that why they invented the VCR?”

And the man says, “You can tape Yom Kippur??!”

Like I said – very inside baseball.  But, naturally, since the Dodgers’ big win last Sunday, baseball has been on my mind. Throughout the season and postseason, and even after the Series, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the so-called “inevitability” of the Dodgers winning.  Sportscasters and fans united around this theme of inevitability, which stems from the club’s star power (including Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman), its unmatched payroll (over $300 million!), and its back-to-back dominance after their 2024 title.  Despite a grueling back-and-forth seven-game tug of war, and a nailbiter finish, immediately the “i” word started coming up again.  A New York Post column by Joel Sherman cemented their status, opening with: “They were inevitable. Indomitable. And now indisputably historic” (November 2, 2025).

Inevitable comes from the Latin, meaning “unavoidable.”  Something is fated, predestined, meant to be.  In Yiddish we have a similar word, bashert — when an outcome is more than random chance but rather, inevitable.  Bashert is typically used to describe a person’s soulmate, life partner, the perfect match, the right one. You can refer to that special person as your bashert, your meant-to-be.  And the classic Bible story illustrating bashert is found in the reading from Genesis that Jewish communities all over the world are studying this week.  

In Genesis Chapter 24, Abraham sends his trusted household servant, Eliezer, in search of a wife for his son Isaac, who apparently cannot be trusted to find a wife on his own.  Abraham, like many an anxious Jewish parent, can’t stand thinking about his beloved son spending his poor life alone, so he needs to get him “all boo’d up” and commissions Eliezer to find Isaac’s bashert.  

But how to find just the right one?  The servant travels off to Abraham’s native land and pleads for God to get involved:  “O Lord,” he prays, “God of my master Abraham, grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Abraham.  Here I stand by the well, as the daughters of the townspeople come out to draw water.  Let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’—let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac. Thereby shall I know that You have dealt graciously with my master” (Gen. 24:12-14).

Eliezer knows he has spotted the right one NOT when he meets the hottest girl in all the land, or the richest, but rather when Rebekah emerges at the well and sees a tired stranger and his thirsty flock, and stops to give them drink, camels and all.  Do you know how long it takes to water an entire flock of camels?  Did you know that a single camel can store enough water to survive for six or seven months in the Sahara desert without drinking?  But I digress.  

What identifies Rebekah as the right one for Isaac is her kindness, her generosity, her inner beauty: her compassion, patience, and strength of character.  Eliezer takes her back to Canaan to meet her groom.  When Isaac sees her, he is floored, because she is also hot.  But honestly, Rebekah’s qualities, inner and outer, matter less than the fact that God has preordained her to be Isaac’s bashert.  Even her father, Laban, sees it plain as day:  “The matter has been decreed by the Lord,” he admits; “we have nothing good or bad to say about it” (Gen. 24:50).  

When I studied this passage in seminary, our professor of classical Bible commentary, Rabbi Dr. Ed Goldman, would ask us rabbis-in-training:  “And what does this story show us?”  Like generations of rabbinical students before us, we had heard his answer so many times that we could respond in unison:  “The inevitable, inexorable, unfolding of the Divine Will.”  

Put another way:  we human beings like to think we’re in charge, but make no mistake: God’s in charge.  “The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.”  Inevitable — it’s unavoidable.  And “inexorable” — also from the Latin, meaning, “it can’t be prayed or swayed away.”  “Thy will be done.”  If God wants something done, it’s gonna get done.  God’s in charge.

Dr. Goldman saw this theme all over the Book of Genesis and in fact called it the theme of the Bible itself.  The creation of the world?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Adam and Eve eating the fruit, getting kicked out of the Garden, and starting the journey of humanity on the wrong side of Eden?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Jacob dreaming a ladder connecting Earth and Heaven?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams and freeing himself from the prison-house?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  A band of Israelite slaves escaping Pharaoh’s tyranny?  Not prayer, not good planning, not even Moses’s clarion leadership but–say it with me–The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  

I have to admit that the older I get, the more I find affirming that, despite all our human toil and travail, at the end of the day, God’s in charge, and what God has in store for us, no human being can hinder.  The great masters all arrived at this same conclusion:

  • Isaiah 14:27: “For the LORD Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart God? God’s hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?”
  • Proverbs 19:21: “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”
  • Job 42:2: “I know that You can do all things; no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.”

God’s in charge! 

Many years ago I was summoned to the hospital bed of a beloved member of my congregation for the recitation of Vidui, the traditional deathbed confessional, the Jewish version of “last rites.”  I took Don’s hand and we prayed:

“I acknowledge before You, Lord my God and God of my ancestors, that my recovery and my death are in Your hands. May it be Your will that You heal me with total recovery, but, if I die, may my death be an atonement for all the errors, iniquities, and willful sins that I have committed…”

And so on like that, until Don shut his eyes and his breathing became very slow.  I embraced his grieving family and said, “I’m going to part company now, but you can call me when he passes and we’ll prepare for what comes next.”  

The next morning the phone rang.  It was Don.  “Still here, Rabbi,” he said.  He would go on to enjoy another five good years.  The inevitable, inexorable, unfolding of the Divine Will.  God’s in charge.  

It’s useful wisdom to keep handy these days after Election Day, through all the storm and stress we have made of our current political situation, and the seemingly endless array of flawed leaders we have entrusted with tremendous authority.  It’s useful, when voters elect the person we fear or detest, to remind ourselves: Elected officials come and go; even kings and queens are made of flesh and blood; but God’s in charge.

It’s especially useful wisdom to keep handy when things don’t go our way.  Rabbi Jonathan Slater, a great teacher of Jewish wisdom and spirituality who lives here in Westchester, taught me that when things don’t go our way, the best we can do is say: “That was unexpected! I wonder what will happen next?”  And get ready to move forward on whatever path God has set for us.

Now I could end here and you would say:  “That was unexpected!  I wonder what will happen next?”  But bear with me.  There’s one more thought coming.  Because even in a world where God’s in charge, we human beings still have a lot of work to do, and our actions really do matter.  

Almost two thousand years ago, the earliest Rabbis recognized this paradox of our existence.  They put it this way:   

Everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is granted.  

And they added:  The world is judged with goodness.  And everything is in accordance with the bulk of [one’s] deeds (Pirkei Avot, 3:15).

In other words, God’s in charge… but God needs us to take charge, too.  Human beings were brought into this world not randomly, not to suffer the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it (Hamlet, III:1), but rather, to make a difference.  

Given that so much of life attests to the “inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will,” we still have choices about how to respond, and our choices matter.  

When bad things happen in our lives, we often ask, “Why?” “Why is this happening to me?” when instead we could ask, “Now what?  Now what must I do?  Who  must I become?” “How would God wish for me to show up, given what has happened?” 

It is true: much of life is inevitable–unavoidable; inexorable–cannot be prayed away.  But life is about more than just what happens to us; it is also about what we choose to make happen in our lives and in a world that desperately needs more good deeds, more love, more compassion and more justice.

So back to the Dodgers.  Was their big win inevitable?  Listen to what sports writer Hannah Keyser had to say:

“Ultimately, the series crowned a credible champ not just because the Dodgers were favored for months, but because, in the end, they had to scratch and claw their way to the top. Just because their victory was projected doesn’t mean it was easy or predictable (The Guardian, November 2nd, 2025, emphasis added).”

The last word goes to an old saying.  No one knows who first said it; it may have been a Catholic Saint because it ended up in the Catechism; but you can also find it in the Reform Jewish prayer book. 

Remember these words well, and may God bless us as we strive to join righteously and joyfully in the inevitable, inexorable unfolding the Divine Will:

Pray as though everything depended on God.

Act as though everything depended on you.

Amen.

How We Get Across: Pesach 5785

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Sermon for Shabbat / Chag Pesach (Day 7), 5785, Friday April 18, 2025

Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

In life as in literature, crossing a body of water often heralds a moment of transformation.  

The Greeks whispered of the River Styx that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld, where the ghostly ferryman Charon would transport the souls of the dead on their voyage to the hereafter.  

In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar and his army crossed the Rubicon, a shallow river in Northeastern Italy that protected Rome from Civil War.  His crossing was considered an act of insurrection.  There he declared, alea iacta est:  “The die is cast.”

We remember George Washington crossing the frozen Delaware the night after Christmas, 1776, in his surprise attack on Hessian forces in Trenton, New Jersey.

The runaway slave Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio River at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s own verse:

So over the roaring rushing flood,

From block to block she sprang,

And ever her cry for God’s good help

Above the waters rang.

And God did hear that mother’s cry,

For never an ice-block sank;

While the cruel trader and his men

Stood wondering on the bank.

A good man saw on the further side,

And gave her his helping hand;

So poor Eliza, with her boy,

Stood safe upon the land.

All of us Jewish Americans find a water crossing at the heart of our family’s story, whether in persecuted flight across the Atlantic or as pioneers or entrepreneurs; the huddled and the hopeful.

And of course water crossings figure prominently in the Hebrew Bible:  Noah’s ark-bound journey from a world doomed to a world reborn; Jonah’s aborted flight across the Mediterranean to escape the prophet’s call; Joshua’s triumphal march across the Jordan River, carrying the Ark of the Covenant.  The Bible even tells us that before he started making house calls at Passover, Elijah’s final earthly act was to roll up his cloak and touch the waters of the Jordan River with it; the waters divide to the right and the left and Elijah crosses over on dry ground, together with his apprentice Elisha (cf. II Kings 2:11-15).

This last scene, of course, echoes the greatest water crossing of them all, in the Bible and indeed in all of literature: the Torah reading for this seventh day of Pesach, the crossing of the Red Sea.  A moment of transformation: entering the water as slaves, the people emerge free men and women on the other shore.  

Of course, they had no choice, no way to retreat.  With the Egyptian army in hot pursuit, the Israelites arrive at the water’s edge.  Then, the Torah tells us, the Divine pillar of cloud and fire positioned itself behind the Israelites, in front of the Egyptians, forming a barrier that prevented the Egyptians from moving forward.  But it also presumably prevented the Israelites from moving backward (Cf. Ex. 14:19-20).

Here, the famous midrash inserts brave Nachshon ben Amminadav, who entered the Sea unbidden (Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, 14:22).  The waters reach his ankles; the Sea continues to rage.  He goes in up to his knees, his waist, his chest… the Sea closing in over him.  Only when the water reaches his nostrils does the Red Sea part and our people enter on dry land.  Presumably the Rabbis who wrote this legend wanted to instill a lesson of faith, faith in the face of an insuperable obstacle, but I say Nachshon had no choice:  with fire and cloud and an army behind him and nothing but open Sea ahead of him, where could he turn?  I am reminded in an uncomfortable way of those terrible images of the World Trade Center jumpers on 9/11, those helpless victims, with cloud and fire billowing behind them and nothing but the open blue of sky in front of them.

Life hands us experiences over which we have no choice.  Time moves in only one direction and we must walk forward, sometimes into a Sea of grief and sadness.  And I do not know why it is so, but there are years in our life that take more than they give, so that over time each of us becomes threaded into a common web of human experience, the kinship of bereavement, the universal society of every generation that must lay to rest the people we love.

I have walked alongside many—maybe even you and your family—in that Sea of grief and I always emerge with cause to marvel at the faith to keep moving forward, whether by choice or consequence.  And I do not know why it is so, but instead of drowning in tears I have always found that just the courage to enter the Sea causes the waters to part a little bit, that by going through the process of bereavement, an encounter with death becomes a little bit easier to bear.  

Jewish tradition recognizes that human grieving passes through stages and therefore our reckoning with it must also take the form of a journey of stages.  Even before a person enters shiva, one is called Onen, a state in which one remains from the time of death until the time of burial when shiva properly begins.  

Rabbi Maurice Lamm whose book The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning provides the definitive writing on the subject, observes: 

“The onen is a person in deep distress, a person yanked out of normal life and abruptly catapulted into the midst of inexpressible grief. He is disoriented, his attitudes are disarranged, his emotions out of gear. The shock of death paralyzes his consciousness and blocks out all regular patterns of orderly thinking. ‘The deceased lies before him,’ as the sages said and, psychologically, he is reliving the moment of death every instant during this period.”

The Onen is like Nachshon before entering the Sea, trembling on the water’s edge.  

But then the ritual begins:  the family is gathered; a rabbi or cantor or caring officiant summoned; the funeral arranged, the loved one’s story told, the act of k’riah performed, tearing a black ribbon or piece of clothing so that grief finds its way from inside the heart to outside the breast, a badge of love and loss, of honor and hope.  

Sometimes when I walk with a bereaved family down the long aisle of our sanctuary, a sea of mourners and friends on either side, I think of the Israelites marching through the Red Sea and I feel comforted.  It happens again, when leaving the grave, custom invites those gathered there to form two rows in order to allow the mourning family to pass between them and feel their shelter and support.  How like the Israelites passing through the Sea, I sometimes think, and what a necessary miracle of faith to place one foot in front of the other, in that awful moment of leaving a loved one to rest.  

Oftentimes in the rituals of bereavement I share words of the 23rd Psalm, as we will in tomorrow morning’s Yizkor service.  Even before the famous line, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” we read a little epigram:  “Mizmor L’David:  A Psalm of David.”  According to Jewish tradition, the Psalm was written by King David.

My friend Rabbi Les Gutterman has observed that “kings, now as then, have many privileges and prerogatives.  One they have never enjoyed is exemption from sorrow.  Death has a passkey into every home in the community including the royal palace.”  King David buried his son Absalom.  “Thus he says, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.’  One must walk through that valley.  We cannot run.  Bereavement sometimes comes quickly.  Healing is always a slow process.”  Shakespeare said it well:  “What wound did ever did heal but by degrees?” (Othello, II:iii).

Like the Nachshon and the Sea, the Psalmist cannot escape the Valley of the Shadow. It has an entrance no one can avoid.  The only way across the Valley, the only way across the Sea, is through.  And on the other side, we emerge transformed.  We discover that love does not die; people do; and that our loved ones may leave our world but in so many ways they never leave us, for we have been changed by them; and who we are—the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act, the way we move through the world—integrates the memories, the gifts, the holiness and the love that our dear ones gave to us.  And that is why we have Yizkor, not only to remind ourselves not only of how our loved ones lived, but also to acknowledge and even celebrate how we have been transformed by their lives.

When the Israelites came to the Sea, the guiding presence of God’s pillar of cloud and fire retreated from in front of them, to behind them, leaving nothing but the Sea before them.  

Rather than as an abandonment from on high, it is possible to understand this maneuver as a tender demonstration of God’s love.  I think the Torah wants us to know that God had their backs, as it were.  The only way across was through.  They walked into the Sea—a Promised Land before them, God’s gentle presence behind them.  

So May our Shepherd in dark valleys transform our cherished memories into sources of healing and lasting blessing.   Amen.