I know that the world is a place of contradiction. If I did not, why would I, one who does not define my self as a believer in God, come here tonight to pray with my fellow people. It is to be with them that I have come, it is because I believe in them, in us, and in what we can create and in what we can destroy that I am driven here out of a feeling of need to be with and to worship with them. If it were merely out of habit or out of guilt, I should quickly abandon this practice. Although every day is a day for appreciating the wonder of the world, although every day is a day for fighting the good fight to perfect the world, although every day is a day to meditate and to struggle, we also need times set aside to come together as a community and to pause and celebrate our struggles and meditations. At this moment, I am gathered here with others saying prayers apparently addressed to a transcendent God. Everyday of my life I employ traditions of speech which at the same time reflect and yet do not reflect the reality I understand before me. In the morning I say "the sun rises" and at evening I say "the sun sets", knowing very well that the sun neither sets nor rises, and that it is the earth which is rotating. I use these words, nevertheless, because they describe the feelings of dawn and dusk. In the same way, I can still pray to the Eternal Power of our parents in the Amida, because no matter how mistaken (from my particular point of view) was the content of Abraham and Sara's belief, I yet appreciate the power of their belief and what it accomplished through time.

And I cannot consider myself superior to those who call their belief a belief in God just because they believe in something without proof. Even though I do not define my belief as they do, that does not mean that what I do believe in is any more probable and requires any less of a leap of faith. That is because I may be making an even greater leap of faith than they are. After all, I believe in people, and I act as if we have a hope for the future; and during a time of possible nuclear annihilation, such a belief may have even less foundation than a belief in God.

And so tonight and today I will allow myself to say that the sun sets and rises and allow myself to say "Adonai" and "Shechina" not because they are the real things of the universe, but because they are real symbols of eternal powers in which the universe is one, and because these names reflect the feelings of awe generated by the contemplation of the infinite and of the infinitesimal, feelings generated in contemplation of and interaction with the cosmos, with people, with art, and with history which is yet ours to make or to end.