Not in Heaven.

When I was a student at university in the late 1960s, the year of student protests,

psychedelic drugs, and the Beatles meditating with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a story went the rounds.

An American Jewish woman in her 60s traveled to North India to see a celebrated guru.

There were huge crowds waiting to see the Holy Man, but she pushed through saying that she needed to see emergently.

Eventually, after weaving through the swaying throng, she entered the tent and stood in the presence of the master himself. What she said that day has entered the realm of legend.

She said, Marvin, listen to your mother.

Enough already. Come home.

Starting in the 60s, Jews made their way into many religions and cultures,

with one notable exception, their own.

Yet Judaism has historically had its mystics and its meditators,

its poets and philosophers, its holy men and women, its visionaries and prophets.

It has often seemed as if the longing we have for spiritual enlightenment

is in direct proportion to its distance,

its foreignness, its unfamiliarity, we prefer the far to the near.

I used to think that this was unique to our strange age, but in fact Moses had already

foreseen this possibility. Listen to what he says in today's

Parish. Now, what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.

Loba Shama'amai. It's not in heaven so that you have to ask who will climb to heaven and get it

and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it. Lomeh Vahayam, it's not across the sea, so that you have to ask who will cross the sea to get it and let us hear it so that we may obey it.

No, the word is Karovhadava very near to you. It's in your mouth and it's in your heart so that you may obey it.

Moses, in other words, had an intimation that in future Jews would say that to find inspiration

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