Empathy and Sympathy

Rabbi David Starr

Rosh Hashana 2019/5780

 

I go to work five or six times a week, day or night, at my favorite local coworking space, the Village Works in Brookline Village. As I write these words, across the table from me sits a Muslim woman wearing a hijab. Witness the greatness of America: a country that ingathers rich and poor, Jew and Muslim, white and every other color of the rainbow, varieties of gender and sexual orientation, spelling a commitment to freedom, the reality of difference and our acceptance and embrace of it as positively good and enlarging. No matter how uncomfortable such varieties may sometimes make us.

Less good remains the fact that I may not speak with this woman. I may never learn her name or anything about her. Except on my bad days I’m pretty social: I like people and I enjoy meeting them and getting to know them and talking with them beyond idle chit chat. But not this woman. The why matters for the moment less than the event: an opportunity to reach across and to connect I fail to seize. A little less knowledge, a little less warmth, a little less compassion and kindness, a little less love in the world because fear of another overcame all of the things my parents taught me about kindness not as an idea but as an act. I it. Why my failure?

The force of this holiday and this season stems from the overwhelming truth of how often we blow it in life. We fall short: we let ourselves down, those we love, those we barely know, our families, our communities near and far, God. It is not easy to be good, to do the right thing.

And it may be even harder to admit those sins hold ourselves accountable. We prefer the shame of silence and coverup to confrontation and honest talk. Sin is easy. Truth is hard.

And this desire and practice of avoidance of pain causes a different sort of pain, because rather than focus on our power, what lies within our control to fix, namely ourselves, we choose to obsess over the chaos, the random, the accidental, the absurd. Why someone dies in a car accident, why someone gets sick, how can a just and loving God allow such things? Instead we ought to say: God decides whether we’ll live another year, but we decide what we’ll do with the gift of that year, if we’re lucky enough to get it.

That’s the secret sauce of the HHD: their/our confrontation with mortality. These three days we ponder what it means to say: thank God I’m alive, now what am I going to do with that o basic a cosmic fact via contemplation of our past and wonderment and aspiration for the year to come.

That’s how our life intersects with the theology of the mahzor. Our prayers proclaim today’s a Creation day, and we recoronate God as the creator of the universe. Our confrontation with life and death and the quality of each day keeps bringing us back to the fact of itselfand hopefully to God as life’s ultimate author.

But the holidays aren’t an intellectual exercise in which we ponder the cosmos and the grand philosophical questions of reality. As a great critic said of a Jackson Pollock painting in the early 1950’s, it’s not a painting, it’s an event. It’s about the doing, the process, the action, what happens, what changes, not just the material thing itself. So yes to philosophy but above all yes to action, to regret and contemplation and fear and gratitude giving way to…what exactly?

It was so much easier to answer this question when we had a temple, a real sanctuary in which we believed God dwelt. We did what came naturally: we went online and sent flowers via Amazon, or a book or whatever, rather than taking the time to pick up the phone. uch less visitinguch less breaking through the surface talk. laughing and crying and sharing and grieving. We delivered a sacrifice to God. It cuts both ways: words can be cheap and a material present may mean more, just as a material gift never takes the place of real love.

Like smart innovators the Sages took a traumatic event and saw opportunity rather than risk: R. Joshua cried that we’re lost because we have no Temple, no place to atone for our sins. Rabban Johanan disagreed: yes we’ve lost the material sacrificial option but we’ve gained a better way to God, we can double down on acts of loving kindness. “For I desire mercy not sacrifice.” said Hosea (6:6). Not a painting but an event, a commitment to a process that will go on…

But even the idea of loving kindness feels too big somehow: HOW shall we perform such acts? Where, when, with whom? Which brings me to the most granular and therefore most difficult act of all in this season: repentance. Asking for and granting forgiveness. So hard to reflect truly, to dilate on one’s mistakes. We cannot grieve our losses much less those we may cause others. Contemplation–regret–resolve to repair–confrontation and apology–not making the same mistake again. So hard to confront oneself and one whom I hurt. To feel their pain not just to feel my own regret. To avoid the narcissism of turning even that into “it’s about my faults” rather than “I hurt you. How are you doing? What can I do to help you now?”

To me the most powerful text that shows how intimate, how close, yet how so hard change can be I find in the Rambam, in his Hilkhot De’ot (laws of human dispositions). He wrote an entire section on the sinner that instructs him how to repent—Hilkhot Teshuva—here he instructs the wronged party on what they should do.

He teaches that one who has been sinned against shall not remain in silent hate against the sinner, but instead must screw up his nerve and confront the offender and say to him: “Why have you done this to me, why have you sinned against me in this fashion?” Hopefully this leads the sinner to repent and to ask for forgiveness, in which case the victim must forgive. Justice can beget mercy but justice requires first remembering and recounting one’s .

That requires such bravery: to recall and likely to rip off the scab of one’s wounds all over again i.e. experiencing a kind of double grieving—the original encounter and the subsequent grieving of it. Standing before the assailant all over again. So so hard. It’s not easy to be honest and it’s not easy to take the step sometimes of throwing off the powerlessness of being the victim and making oneself the subject rather than the object. The question the victim asks may be an accusation reflecting one’s need for justice but also one’s anger that demands a crying out, but also it may be one of genuine curiosity: tell me why you did what you did because that will help me empathize with you and thereby forgive you. It is easy to sin. It is easy to hurt someone else. It is easy to be hurt, and to try to throw dirt over open wound. It is far more difficult to confront one’s sin the pain of another purchased via honest talk and active listening.

Politics at its hardest is a public form of many of these feelings and behaviors. Historians and policy analysts speak of the centrality of empathy in true leadership: the need to understand one’s colleagues and especially one’s opponents and to empathize with them. JFK sought to defuse a potential nuclear war over Cuba not by backing Khrushchev into a corner and humiliating him but rather by understanding his position and trying leave him with options. How do we understand others their thoughts and feelings and actions? We serve our goals better by analysing the needs of the other.

Let me be clear: empathy demands much more than sympathy. Sympathy, the dictionary tells us presumes affinity, an alikeness and a prior relationship of accord and even loyalty, which then makes sharing intuitive. We connect to another because we already possess a mutual or parallel susceptibility.

Empathy demands much more. To possess the capacity to understand, to be aware of and sensitive to the feelings and thoughts and experience of another without those being communicated explicitly—that’s really hard. Because the key word/concept there is another i.e. someone separate apart different. No intuitive bond exists, no prior relationship. Connection must be forged; inertia alone isn’t enough.

Yossi Klein Halevi tells the story of a trip close to three hundred Arabs and Jews took to Auschwitz. An Arab warned a friend not to go: “You’ll lose your victim status by going.” A Jew advised his friend, “You’re giving away our history by going to Auschwitz with Arabs.”

They went anyway, and they came closer together. Auschwitz remained for Jews a deep Jewish wound but they expanded to make room for sensitivity to the losses of others. Arabs discovered the emotional and historical truth of Jewish sorrow and rage beside their own. This work required honesty and openness. One older Arab woman addressed the Jews in the group and confessed, “From the moment I first met Jews I loved you; but you didn’t seem to want me to love you.” Perhaps we don’t: connection is scary. It forces us out of our groupiness, and that’s a hard adjustment. At the very least that’s how Jewish insularity can be experienced by outsider.

Maybe that’s why I sit here now so close yet so far away from the woman with the hijab. Maybe it’s all or mostly about my Jewish baggage: The love and pain of Jewishness on so many levels. A prior belief in our destiny that we now question. The burden of our history and of our fate. The frustration of accepting the jewish choices we made and the regrets about those we avoided. Lots to accept and to grieve. And yes the pain and anger we feel toward others who fail to understand us and refuse to treat us as unique and equal and precious. And our tragic inability to do the same vis a vis others. It’s not easy to see every non-Jew and silently wonder: in the Holocaust would they have hidden us? Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves: would we have hidden them?

That’s really what God wants us to do in our world: empathize. Connect to the other— someone actually different. In some real sense everyone is or can become the other, because we’re all so alone or feel so isolated so often. That’s the work. R. Yitz Greenberg teaches us that to treat another as created in God’s image means recognizing their infinite worth, them as equal to us, and cherishing their uniqueness. Equality and uniqueness don’t really go together at least not easily: we’re much more likely to grant equality to those similar to us; the real test is when they’re not like us. That’s hard. Not just recognizing and appreciating, but connecting to the other.

So as I sit here trying to write this talk I just tried to do that, in a small way, just now. I screwed up my nerve and introduced myself to the woman with the hijab. Not so brave, I chose a safe route:

“Hi I’m David.”

“Hi I’m Kara.”

“Would you like some chocolate?” “No thank you.”

But the ice broke at least a little between me and Kara. Chocolate is universal so it’s a good start. Pity we cannot say that yet about love. But it’s a beginning. To be continued.

Shana tova

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The Jewish People and I

Yom Kippur 2016

Rabbi David B. Starr

 

I enjoy teaching much more than preaching, which you may already have guessed.  I don’t like feeling that I’m trying to persuade you of something, rather than sharing problems and trying to work through them and knowing that in the end we may find the questions more interesting and compelling than the answers.  That’s probably what made me only a so-so salesman (I worked my way through college selling auto parts on the phone).

So today I want to discuss a great love of mine, something that changed my life, something about which I think and care on a daily basis:  which is you all, and more broadly, the Jewish people. The Jewish people means what to me?  What are the ideas contained in the notion of peoplehood generally and Jewish peoplehood specifically that I think matter?

I will tell you personally that peoplehood has and continues to be one of the most important ideas and truths in my life.  And it has been a gift to me, something that saved my life.

The first thing that I would say about peoplehood is that it feels natural; it comes from a deep place.  We like being with people with whom we can talk.   And that includes people we don’t know personally.  For me as a child that meant being with my elderly relatives at my grandparents’ home on Columbia Terrace a few blocks from here, listening to their stories about Europe.  That was about people I knew, and people I only mythically knew.

That sense of tribal belonging never left me.  And that sense of the power of Jewish history, the story of it all, is the second thing about peoplehood.  It’s about history.  Our history.  And that history contains great drama.  Stories of my great uncle who participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution.  Stories of immigration.  Of bravery.  Of commitment.  Making lemonade out of lemons.  Lots of amazing stories.  Something vaguely wondrous about it all even though these were hard stories of suffering and death too.

When my family moved to Mpls when I was thirteen I felt quite cut off from that extended family and their stories and that history.  It felt lonely.  My father died and my mother fell ill and the hardship and loneliness was brutal.

And then I got lucky.  I made friends with a few Jewish guys my age.  And they took me to synagogue.  And I found community.  An actual community.  A place, a space, a place to be, a place that welcomed me, took me out of my private misery.  And that’s the third thing about peoplehood:  it’s about community.  Many of us here don’t live near family.  We are each other’s families.  My friends in Israel who’ve made aliyah speak of that all the time:  the importance of community when one has no family nearby.

Through the synagogue I made my way to two of Judaism’s most precious ideas:  God and Torah.  I began to study a bit, began to explore this incredible religion and culture and its book and the ideas contained in them.  Ideas about the world, ideas about people, ideas about above all what it means to try to dedicate one’s life to something higher.  And that eventually pulled me to the rabbinate.  And make no mistake the rabbinate is about one big thing.  My colleague Morris Allen tells the story of the rabbi who felt burnt out.  Felt like a failure, striking out far too often, not reaching his congregants.  He told a congregant—someone who sold blinds and curtains for a living—how he felt that maybe it was time for him to leave the rabbinate.  His friend Sam turned to him and said, “Herschel, I sell window treatments for a living.  I never touch a person’s soul.  Every day you have an opportunity to touch a person’s soul and to connect that soul to God.  I would give anything to have your job.”   Through community I found my soul, by beginning to find Torah and God, a life dedicated more to holiness, to trying to walk in God’s ways, to helping Jews make their lives holy by doing so.

So I feel blessed many times over. Because what began for the little boy listening to old people with funny accidents telling stories about far away times and places brought me to this place now.  And that’s really all about serving the Jewish people, as in some modest sense a payment for services rendered, a payment for the gift of belonging and history and ideas and actions that the Jewish people gave to me, give to me on a daily basis.

That sense of service to me dovetails with what my parents tried to teach me about being an American.  You’re a citizen, they said.  Citizenship entails privileges and obligations.  Much is given and much must be given back, that is the nature of citizenship.  And to be a good citizen requires commitment to the body politic, to be educated, to think about the public welfare, to confront the great issues of the day, to choose, to decide, to commit, to sacrifice one’s own private welfare sometimes for the sake of the public good.  The question is what does it mean to do that for the sake of the Jewish people?  What does it mean to be a citizen of the Jewish people?  What does Yom Kippur tell us about that?

So what about Jewish peoplehood?  What exactly does it give to us beyond what I’ve already mentioned re. a place to go and a sense of belonging?  Here are a few thoughts.  First of all, it gives us a sense of mystery and history.  Every generation interprets Judaism for itself.  And practices therefore its own Judaism, rebutting the notion of a uniform content.  And yet there is something living, something ongoing, and something about the people and its history that binds us. Something miraculous about the fact that we continue to exist. We aim to understand and identify with the great heritage of the generations even as we know that each of us, and every generation, needs to take from that great past something that speaks to our own hearts.

Yom Kippur speaks to us as individuals, as beings confronting our mortality and morality, but it also speaks to us as Jews.  The great Spanish sage Nahmanides believed that the source of the command for teshuva was to be found in the story of the Jewish people itself.  Adam and Eve were exiled for their sin.  So too Cain.  So too Israel to Egypt.  Moses tells the children of Israel on the eve of entering the Promised Land to return to God, to return from the sin that brings exile, to recover from national decline, to be restored, to enjoy a new beginning.  Teshuva signifies a spiritual return of the people, and a physical return too to their land.  Teshuva isn’t just ethical it’s also historical:  the state of the people’s soul tied to its life in the world.

It is remarkable and exceptional that our people choose not to remember its heroic national deeds but rather its failures.  The Hebrew Bible contains our people’s memory, so much of which flows through recounting our need for God, our need for self-reflection, our need for change, and above all our faith that God acts in our history.

Yom Kippur also tells us repeatedly that we cannot do the work of repentance alone, that we need community; we need each other, to be here together, to change.  It’s easiest for us to think atomistically individually privately about liberty as freedom from, the freedom to be me, the freedom to be left alone.  But being left alone means a cold universe.  Warmth requires bonds of affection that we must build together.  That’s community.  Together we build strong structures we couldn’t manage alone.

Moses teaches us to stand together at Sinai, to become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.  Under God’s sovereignty we become in effect a republic of free and equal citizens held together by a covenant that is moral.  We’re supposed to live out God’s ways, transforming ourselves by transforming the world.  We cannot do that alone:  we perform that in community.  We confess our sins as a community.  We beseech God for mercy as a community.  We may come here as individuals but we leave as a community.

The rabbis changed Yom Kippur from its biblical temple-centered purity rituals like the scapegoat being sent off into the wilderness, and the Kohen Gadol entering the Holy of Holies, and atoning for all of us as well as for Himself and his household, to a revolution in the life of the spirit.  That revolution involved reinventing and rebuilding a landless people and making them portable by creating a Torah culture.  That culture involved performance:  doing commandments, but it also involved our minds.  We study God’s word, His love letter to us, and observing His law.  We read the prophet Isaiah who moralizes the notion of affliction, yoking ethical commitments to ritual ones.  We read Yonah who reminds us that mercy and repentance always stand as possibilities for us and for everyone, Jews and non-Jews.  The notion of change and transformation and growth become universal and particular.  Out of law comes our narrative, our story of what we must do.

Torah is fixed: we perform rituals.  Torah is plastic: we read God’s word and make meaning from it, meaning for us, meaning by us.  That process of meaning making helped us become the first globalists, moving from Israel to Babylonia to North Africa to Europe to the West and so on.  It not only sustained us but it constituted radicality, a revolution in rooting us not just in the place and time we lived in but in a meta-place, the Torah.  Yom Kippur reminds us of Torah when we recite the martyrology, a moving elegy for the rabbis who made the ultimate sacrifice for not just Torah but for us, the citizens of the Torah.  The rabbis constructed a political religion:  one that counter posed the Jewish people and its spirituality to that of the Roman Empire.

And finally we come to God.  Yom Kippur after all is all about God.  God as Creator, God as melekh, as sovereign.  God considers us as His people today.  He judges us together.  He dispenses mercy collectively.  He welcomes our collective repentance.

The God of Yom Kippur fills us with awe and wonder.  We fear for our lives yet our prayers tell us that God created us loves us and sits on the throne of mercy, forgiving us.  He reprimands Jonah when he insists upon justice for the Ninevites rather than mercy.  The God of Yom Kippur is a King, but no limited flawed flesh and blood sovereign.  God remembers us his lost forlorn children, in this season of exile bidding us to return to Him, called to help Him run his kingdom.  God is also our loving partner:  I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” “ani le’dodi v’dodi li” spelling in the Hebrew the acronym Elul, this penitential season.  God and Israel return to each other in this season after the trials and separations of the year.

That image of a rebuilt reconsecrated marriage we find in the rabbinic understanding that on Yom Kippur Israel received the second set of tablets, concluding the forty days that Moses spent at Sinai arguing with God not to destroy his partner Israel over the infidelity of the Golden Calf.  God promises Moses via the Thirteen Attributes that Israel can find forgiveness.  That’s why we say those words over and over again.  Moses came down with the second set once he knew God had forgiven Israel.

What does it mean that Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the year—commemorates the second tablets?  Art Green teaches they equal a renegotiated marriage between God and Israel.  And that renegotiation principally involves God learning that He needed to treat Israel differently.  The first set God wrote.   He did all the work.  He made all the demands.  Too much God and too overwhelming for Israel.  They freaked out because they couldn’t handle the severity of the demands.

The second set?  God tells them to make them themselves.  And then He will join the effort writing upon them.  A joint enterprise.  A covenant. It’s a holiday of powerlessness re. life and death but a holiday of power re. our ability to make meaning out of our freedom, out of our lives, to decide how if not whether we shall live.  That deliberation involves each and every one of us, as individuals, as Jews, as members of the Jewish people.

For most of us our Jewish roots run deep, deeper than we realize, native to us and hard to identify.  We sometimes struggle to reconcile those feelings of tribe with other claims of our common humanity.  But we ought to recall that love is particular:  we love specifically, some more than others.  Intimacy demands those sorts of choices and distinctions.  As Isaiah Berlin said of his own love for the Jewish people:  “I have never been tempted, despite my long devotion to individual liberty, to march with those who, in its name, reject adherence to a particular nation, community, culture, tradition, language—the myriad strands that bind people into identifiable groups.  This seems to me noble but misguided.  When people complain of loneliness, what they mean is that nobody understands what they are saying.  To be understood is to share a common past, common feelings and common language, common assumptions, the possibility of intimate communication—in short, to share common forms of life.  This is an essential human need.”

Peoplehood spells out this message:  you are not alone.  You are loved.  You are included.  Your life story is part of a larger story, a history and a destiny. Your life has meaning in the context of a transcendent God making a people pledged to His service by pledging ourselves to making holy this amazing world we received.  Heschel spoke of God in search of man:  God being present and we ask ourselves in response only one question:  are we?  I would say the Jewish people are present for us today.  We in turn ask ourselves only one question:  are we present for the Jewish people?

 

Shanah tovah

Gmar hatimah tovah

 

 

Hope and Forgiveness

Rosh Hashanah 2016

Rabbi David B. Starr

 

I promised myself I wouldn’t talk about presidential politics today and I plan to keep that promise.  Mostly. But I want to reference public affairs a bit because it helps us understand something powerful about what Judaism teaches us on these most awesome of days. A friend of mine told me he’d like to hear today about hope: how important it is and how hard it is sometimes to hang on to it, which makes it that much more important.

I think it’s fair to say that when we look around the world plenty of questions concern us and worry us about the future:  terrorism, climate change, radical states plunging into sectarianism and spiraling out of control violence, income inequality, global health problems, to name a few. Here at home the bitterness of the political divide that stymies good government in Washington and the nature of this presidential campaign frustrate many if not most Americans. One of my teachers recently wrote a book about the twin features of American life—healthy political partisan conflict and a shared commitment to egalitarianism—but it feels like the nature of partisan warfare has gotten out of hand and it’s unclear how we’ll manage socially the increasing inequality and weakness of the middle class. For all of those reasons to paraphrase Emily Dickinson hope may be that thing with feathers but that winged creature may be flying the coop leaving us here on the ground glum about our prospects.

Judaism fundamentally isn’t a manual for politics so I’m not going to deploy it to solve these large and important problems.  But it is a teaching for holiness:  how to live personally and inter-personally and communally and that I would argue might help us retain some hope about what we can do with our lives, and how our lives matter.  Because in many ways we fear those problems because they destroy or at least challenge a core value that we cherish:  our freedom.  Natural problems rob us of our physical freedom potentially via disease etc.  Political problems threaten our external public freedom.  Religious fundamentalism challenges our spiritual freedom.  And so on.

And Judaism is all about freedom.  To be created in God’s image is to live freedom.  To possess will.  To create.  To choose.  And the YN talk incessantly about the project of being free, what it is, what it requires of us, by talking about the importance of teshuva:  of repentance, of forgiveness, of change.  All of that presumes our freedom to change, to grow.  Our hope begins right there, in our ability to change.

To toggle back to politics for a moment:  the world, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel lost this week one of the great advocates of hope in our time:  Shimon Peres.  Peres embodied Zionism as hope: a belief that Jews could govern themselves, the conviction that Jews could speak Hebrew and create a new kind of Jew, the commitment to creating a society both moral and technologically advanced that would give great benefits to its citizens and to its neighbors.  To his last days he never stopped believing in Israel as a beacon of hope for what politics and society can accomplish to make this world a more just tolerant progressive place.  And that all begins with the courage to change and to hope that the future will be better than the past.

Yet it’s hard to change.  And therefore it’s hard to hang on to hope.  We know that.  We possess qualities that stymie us.  We’re prone to anger.  To jealousy. To covetousness.  I’m just listing some of my personal favorites.  We construct narratives that assume we have fixed stories, fixed personalities:  “I can’t change because my father died and my mother was sick and they ruined my life” and so on.  Freedom is a project that takes tremendous work to nurture and many of us just lack the energy to stick with that project.  We fear the challenge of looking at the structure of our life, the deepest aspects of ourselves.  We tinker with what we do and we avoid the question of who we are, the question of our character.

So I want to share with you some rabbinic texts that furnish us with some values and some language that might give us the hope that we can change, that we can make our lives better, that we can manage our at least domestic worlds with more grace and dignity, and that in some at least subtle sense might make a difference in the way we manage public conflict and public affairs as well.

The rabbis ask the question:  when should we forgive someone who wrongs us?  Forgiveness at the very least involves the technical level of restitution where appropriate, but what about other levels of the relationship.  Maimonides famously teaches what I think most of us know, namely that forgiveness not stubbornness follows the guilty party first apologizing for their behavior.  So far so good:  each party carries an obligation—the sinner that of restitution/apology; the victim the obligation to forgive.

But interestingly Maimonides adds a 3^rd obligation.  Our third text reads “When a person sins against another, the injured party shouldn’t hate the offender and keep silent…but it is his duty to inform the offender and say so to him, “Why did you do this to me?  Why did you sin against me in this manner?”

That third obligation carries tremendous risks for the wronged party.  “I’m making myself vulnerable all over again.  I want to revisit my hurt, what you did to me; I want you to know that so that you can apologize.”  This we cannot do in the most egregious of situations where one has an obligation to oneself to protect oneself because opening up this line of dialogue might be irresponsible or dangerous.  But Maimonides is saying in a more normal context we must try to reengage with the person.  Why?

We might hear these words as berating:  WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME?  But a wiser view might be, “I’m inviting you to be introspective”, asking the sinner to be vulnerable too, along with me.  I’m inviting you to explore what you did so that you can change more deeply.  Rather than saying “I’m sorry” and “I won’t do this again” I can think more deeply about who I am.  I—the guilty party—can think more deeply about having the freedom to be different.

It’s hard to confront those who wrong us.  It takes guts.  We may also want just to avoid conflict and or give them the benefit of the doubt, which calls into question the wisdom of Maimonides’s approach.  Perhaps we should judge the other for good and leave it at that.  But Maimonides teaches us something that may be deeper wisdom.  When you invite someone else to ask himself or herself why they did something you’re taking their freedom more seriously. You assume the other person can grow; they can look at themselves and change.  You believe they have that capacity.  We see this in healthy families where people hurt each other but people tell each other things.  They take some responsibility by communicating feelings for the capacity of others to grow.  If we can’t have conversations with others about the past how can we be free to change in the future?  How can we help others to change?

Who must we forgive?  The first two texts disagree.  The first text found in the Mishnah says we forgive only those who apologize.  The second text from the Tosefta says we forgive even those who haven’t apologized.  That we let go of resentment so that we can pray for them.  How do we know then how to proceed?

Consider the possibility that the Mishnah sees the world through the lense of justice:  forgiving someone may be misguided and problematic.  The world requires moral accountability and we must uphold standards of behavior that involve the notion of deeds carrying consequences.

The Tosefta on the other hand views the world through the prism of mercy.  We forgive and do so eagerly because we want to imitate God and God wants to grant us mercy.  So which one is it?  Judaism asks me to embrace justice and mercy.  I can tell us only that there exists no code of law for this.  We all live with the tension of applying justice and mercy in the way we think of all sorts of issues in our lives and in the world.

Judaism gives us a language to confront what is actually a dialectic with no synthesis.  We must navigate between these two poles.  Religion works best when we realize it can give us ideas and language rather than always offering clear answers.  Perhaps we’d have a healthier politics if we approached the great issues of the day with some humility around JUSTICE AND MERCY.  Here the Tradition invokes the most evocative language of all:  even God cannot decide upon which throne to sit:  that of either Mercy or Justice.  It’s hard to know what to do. We have principals and ideas but those still beg the question of final answers.  We have as human beings and as communities to find a way to hold multiple answers at the same time.

Finally consider the hardest question of all about forgiveness.  Something that often times fills us with heartbreak and hopelessness.  We may be able to forgive. But we cannot always reconcile.  Forgiveness and reconciliation aren’t the same things.  Sometimes reconciliation lies beyond our grasp.  Someone dies and we can only forgive them.  Some actions devastate relationships preventing reconciliation.

Judaism teaches that forgiveness is real even if it’s not coupled with reconciliation.  Because we value freedom so deeply, as something so fundamental to being a person created in God’s image.  And freedom is more than external and political and physical; our inner freedom matters too.  Our freedom from the demons that oppress us.  Our personal Egypts.  I’m obligated to nurture my freedom and it carries value even when it leads not to reconciliation.

Because there is no such thing as freedom that exists purely inside of myself.  Someone who cannot reconcile with one’s parents takes what one learns from that experience, forgives them, and enters into other relationships and makes those better, loves others, cares for others, allows others to love and care for them.  We forgive people who wrong us not because we can restore all relationships but sometimes for the sake of other relationships.  When we lay down our hurts we can become free to give to others.  We travel a hard road to freedom because freedom isn’t given it must be earned over time.

Two Vietnam veterans met one day at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.  Talking they realized they’d both been POW’s held in North Vietnam:  one for five years, the other for six years. One asked the other:  have you forgiven them yet?  The other responded:  I’ll never forgive them.  To which the other said, “I see they’re still holding you.”

We often remain imprisoned by wounds we still carry.  They still hold us.  As I end I want to bring us back to our shared lives as Americans.  To our divisions.  I want to suggest that we find someone in these days of awe to forgive.  Or at least to talk with and to understand.  Someone with whom we disagree.  Or someone who wronged us.  Someone who we may wrong in some way by dismissing them and their point of view. I would suggest that hope begins here, with the act of turning toward another.  Having a vision of freedom for us and for them, and a vision of concern not just for us but also for others.  Each requires the other to exist in a real way.  That is our way forward.

 

Shanah tovah.

 

 

 

 

 

 

KI is growing! We are expanding our youth offerings in response to feedback from last year. Join us for multiple youth service options to celebrate the Yamim Noraim/High Holidays together. We are offering age-appropriate prayer options and hope all children will now be able to attend an option that is well-suited for them. To provide additional flexibility, we are also running the same Nitzanim and Mini-Minyan services twice consecutively.

We also will have a separate teen service led by Jacob Cytryn who joins us from Camp Ramah Wisconsin, and Elizabeth Bonney-Cohen, KI Rabbinic Intern. They will be facilitating conversations that relate traditional and modern sources to topics relevant to their lives.

We anticipate having approximately 2,500 people at KI (including Congregation Mishkan Tefila, Washington Square Minyan, and Minyan Shaleym). We welcome the abundance of children who will be here. In order to support a positive, joyful, and safe experience, we request that children who are outdoors be accompanied by an adult.

In addition to the outdoor break-space in the garden area near our office entrance (weather permitting), we will also provide an indoor break-space for young families to make holiday-friendly craft projects, read, and play quiet games at 12:00 PM in Novakoff. For older kids and teens, we will also have a break-space in the library after 12:30 PM.

We look forward to celebrating together. Shana tova u’metuka to you and your family!

Warmly,
Shirah Rubin and the KI Staff

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Below is the full listing of Yamim Noraim/High Holidays youth offerings:

Embarrassment and Riches

Yom Kippur 2015

Rabbi David B. Starr

Many years ago a colleague gave me advice I’ve been trying to follow ever since.  Discussing parenting specifically but really life generally, he said, “I try to teach my kids that actions have consequences.  If they can learn that they can be successful in life personally and professionally, if not they’ll probably fail.”

Most of us fail.  A lot.  Michael Jordan liked to say “I missed more than 9K shots in my career.  I’ve lost almost 300 games.  26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.  I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.”  We on the other hand too often handle our failures only occasionally with grace and good humor and understanding and some compassion for ourselves.  More often we double down on ourselves:  we fail at something then we castigate ourselves about failing.  Awesome.  Alternatively we guard ourselves from these bouts of self-loathing by avoiding responsibility.  The dog ate my homework.  The teacher or coach stunk.  I hate my parents.  My boss is a jerk.  No one understands me.  On and on we go on dizzying flights from accountability.

But such avoidance never works.  Life metes out its own punishment.  Parents need not ground the kid who goofs off in high school; they get their come-uppance when they get those college rejection letters.  Whether or not we choose to learn the right lesson about who’s responsible for what, life has a way of settling accounts.  As Yehuda Amichai wrote,  “And I said to myself:  Everyone is attached to his own lament as to a parachute.  Slowly he descends and slowly hovers till he touches the hard place.”  Sooner or later life’s gravitational force pulls us down to the hard place.  Reality.  Responsibililty.

We all of us need to find and hunker down in the sweet spot between denial and self-loathing.  Our hierarchical culture makes it hard:  it measures so much of what we do, arranging our lives around metrics spelling out our worth status and rank:  so and so went to Harvard.  So and so took a rabbinical degree here and a doctorate there.  Who of us could turn down admission to an Ivy League school secure in the knowledge that the brand often outstrips the reality, that another school actually fits us better?  When can we climb off all of the treadmills that we hope will yield us yet another of life’s prizes?

We live in and benefit from this society’s fixation on expertise.  Rationalism, creativity, technology, all depends upon and reinforce our desire for mastery over God’s universe.  Fill up the universe and dominate it, charges God to Adam in Genesis.  And we do so with gusto.

Religion or at least religiosity should cultivate higher virtues.  I love the story about the rabbi who felt like a burnt out case, someone just not helping enough people changing enough lives and he told his shul president that he felt like quitting.  The shul president just looked at him and said:  I sell window treatments.  I don’t change anyone’s life.  Every day you have the chance to touch someone, to help someone, to transform his or her life.  That’s touching holiness.  But each and every one of us can do that, whether in our personal or professional life.  But instead, as Rabbi Soloveitchik once lamented, the need to succeed plagues even religion:  we need it to be excellent.  “Western man diabolically insists on being successful.  Alas, he wants to be successful even in his adventure with God.  If he gives of himself to God, he expects reciprocity.  He also reaches a covenant with God, but this covenant is a mercantile one.  In a primitive manner, he wants to trade favors and exchange goods.” [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][Lonely Man of Faith, 71]

But once a year we get off of life’s assembly line of running after the next new new thing, the next thing that we tell ourselves we not only want but that we need or even crave.  Once a year we take the time to confront our failures.  That day’s today.

Today we try to revision and reengineer ourselves a bit.  We try to construct a dialect of shame and appreciation, regret and joy.  We look inward not to go dark, but to try to change, not to live at the extremes but to find a golden mean of mercy and of judgment regarding our lives and the lives of others.

YK in the words of Rabbi Sacks is “what it means to be me, this unique person that I am.”  The holiday “makes us ask, what have I done with my life?  Whom have I hurt or harmed?  How have I behaved?  What have I done with God’s greatest gift, life itself?  What have I lived for and what will I be remembered for?”

But the road to the answers to those questions principally involves coming to terms with finding what Heschel called embarrassment.  This most awesome of days tells us:  you’re standing exposed, before yourself and before God.  We suffer because we fail, and we compound that suffering by lying to ourselves and to others because we fear admitting our brokenness, our losses, and our sadness.  “Everybody looks proud,” wrote Heschel, “inside he is heartbroken.”  Yom Kippur exists to help us plumb the depths of our human suffering and to see how and whether we can make our suffering into a religious experience, one that in the end uplifts us, perhaps by taking our pain and leading us to let go of some of our anger, to curb our embarrassment about what it means to be human and complicated.

Consider Rav Kook’s Four-fold song and think about applying this as a benchmark for acknowledging our embarrassment. Where do we fall short in treating ourselves with dignity, our bodies, our minds, and our spirits?  We owe ourselves an obligation to be good and that begins with being good to ourselves.  Where do we embarrass ourselves with others?  Often we treat the stranger or the casual acquaintance better than our loved ones who literally have to pick up our dirty laundry and psychic trash.  And we all get that:  my Gann class shared confessions the other day in a circle of trust moment.  Pretty much every student regretted the way they treat their parents and or siblings (unfortunately no one mentioned disregarding their devoted teachersJ

Embarrassment should not obscure the good; it should reveal it even more sharply precisely by showing us our failures in the light of our triumphs.  And the ability to feel embarrassed reminds us that life remains messy and chaotic and the pieces don’t add up and living in a morally serious way demands acknowledging that not all propositions fit together yet they remain true.

And as Jews we know this all too well.  As a community with its own history of wandering we can shoulder plenty of embarrassment about what we’re doing or not doing about the refugees.  As a community with its own sensitivity to civil rights and justice what are we doing about the continuing challenges of race and class in our country?  What about the way we talk fight non-listen to each other on issues like the Iran deal.  About the fact that our beloved Jewish state as wonderful and amazing as it is continues to occupy another people?

Beyond community lies the world God created and graced to us.  Pope Francis’s visit reminds us of his urgings to express our gratitude to God for the gift of life embodied in this glorious world and the importance of us working harder and being smarter about stewarding that gift.  We embarrass ourselves by our greed and inability to acknowledge the impact of our choices on the air we breathe and the water we drink and the like.

In the end we all recognize that without failure, without the capacity for feeling embarrassed by ourselves we cannot fully utilize our freedom and grow.  Lou Piniella, a long-time major league baseball player and manager once pronounced sentence on a young ball player.  Watching a rookie pitcher struggling with failure in spring training, Piniella concluded:  “He’s not going to make it:  he’s not comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

I want to share an Amichai poem with you about what and how we learn to grow.

The School Where I Studied

I passed by the school where I studied as a boy

and said in my heart:  here I learned certain things

and didn’t learn others.  All my life I have loved in vain

the things I didn’t learn.  I am filled with knowledge,

I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge,

the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, its pests and parasites.

I’m an expert on the botany of good and evil,

I’m still studying it, I’ll go on studying till the day I day.

I stood near the school building and looked in.  This is the room

where we sat and learned.  The windows of a classroom always open

to the future, but in our innocence we thought it was only landscape

we were seeing from the window.

The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones.

I remember the brief tumult of the two of us

near the rickety steps, the tumult

that was the beginning of a first great love.

Now it outlives us, as if in a museum,

like everything else in Jerusalem.

Life schools us, inside and outside of the classroom.  YK teaches us that to err is human, and that true learning requires acknowledging our mistakes, growing through our embarrassment, and making amends where we can.  As Rabbi Sacks writes in his Mahzor, “Forgiveness breaks the irreversibility of the past.  It is the undoing of what has been done.  Repentance and forgiveness—the two great gifts of human freedom—redeem the human condition from tragedy.”

Amichai reminded us that we play catch up pretty often, only later realizing what earlier episodes meant.  Jonah the prophet protested that people could not change.  And we inevitably wonder if oftentimes it’s too late to change.  We need to commit to feeling embarrassed not as a substitute for self-trust and desire to change, but as a necessary ingredient for faith in ourselves and our ability to overcome greed selfishness insecurity and the all the rest at any moment in our life.

We cannot go back in life.  The gates of Eden lie locked and closed to us, innocence and childhood go the way of all flesh as we grow into maturity.  But adulthood offers us the possibility and necessity of grappling with deeper challenges of hurt, of loss, of doubt and anger, and teshuva speaks to us that we can forgive and be forgiven, even if we cannot go back and undo what was done.

When we fall on our faces, when we recoil with embarrassment at our shortcomings, God comes to us.  Not to redeem our world, or us, in any ultimate sense, but for another year.  That’s why today is the Day of Awe.  We stand in God’s presence.  We stand drenched in regret.  And the compassionate and gracious God keeps on keeping on with us, loving us, forgiving us our sins and misdeeds, and cleansing us.

What begins with the missed shot, the struggle, the failure, and gives way to embarrassment and frustration, can end in a higher, better, more loving place.  As my colleague and teacher Rabbi Art Green wrote, “ We are born to be God-seekers.  The soul quests after God in the same way that trees grow in the direction of sunlight, pulled by an inner force that tells them to reach out toward what they need, to attain their nourishment.  Their very lives depend upon their ability to respond to this inward call.  “As the deer pants after streams of water, so does my soul long for You” (Psalm 42:2).

Keep trying.  Keep failing.  Keep regretting.  Keep growing toward the light.

 

Gmar hatimah tova

 

 

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Over-Promise and Strive to Deliver

Rabbi Rachel Silverman

G’mar Chatimah Tova

My husband Josh has a theory regarding chores: he believes that if I don’t expect
him to do something, I will be impressed when he does it – and that will make him
look like an amazing husband.

Time and time again, he insists that he is not going to accomplish a given task. “I’ll
do it tomorrow,” he says; or “It’ll be done by the end of the weekend. < pause >
Next weekend.” But I can’t count the number of times that I’ve left the house and
returned to find that he’s built a bookcase, put together a stroller, cleaned out the
garage, or cooked dinner – all while insisting that he wasn’t going to do it. Sure, it’s a
little odd… but it’s endearing that he goes to great lengths just to see the surprised
and grateful look on my face when I see all that he has accomplished.

Josh’s favorite trick is to casually remind me that we need to empty the dishwasher.
We’ll have just finished dinner, and as we’re getting ready to load the dishes, he’ll
say, “oh shoot, it’s still full, I forgot to unload it!” I groan and open the dishwasher
door… to find the dishes unloaded, and a goofy grin on his face. Of course, I have
my own version of this trick: I never let him know that I’ve caught on, so he keeps
unloading the dishes!

All that is to say that Josh’s theory is an example of the concept, “Under-promise
and over-deliver” – appropriate in business, but just as beneficial in a marriage. After
all, it’s human nature to be pleasantly surprised by an unanticipated gesture of
goodwill or kindness – and those acts go a long way in a relationship.

---

 

On Yom Kippur, though, our instinct is to do the complete opposite. Rather than
being realistic about what we can and cannot do, on Yom Kippur we’re encouraged
to swing the pendulum in the other direction – to over-promise, even though we
know that there is no way we can accomplish everything we say we will.

All of this promising started tonight, as we ushered in the holiest day of the year
with the annual annulment of vows – Kol Nidre.

Kol Nidre has vexed rabbis for generations. While most have given up trying to
evict it from its current leading role on erev Yom Kippur, it’s not for lack of trying.
The nearly 2000-year-old paragraph isn’t even a prayer; it’s a strange legal formula,
written in Aramaic, that turns the sanctuary into a courtroom. Previously, the
prayer-that-is-not-a-prayer annulled all vows “from last Yom Kippur to this one.”
However, that was halachically problematic for many reasons – not least of which is
that this is not actually the Jewish legal process for annulling vows! So in the 12th
century, Rabbenu Tam (Rashi’s grandson) changed it from the past tense to the
future tense so that it instead annuls vows “From this Yom Kippur to the next Yom
Kippur” – even before the vows are made! His modification placated some of the
criticism; and the new form was widely adopted. It’s the one we heard tonight.

Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, a teacher of mine at JTS, describes it this way: “ What is, for
many of us, Yom Kippur’s highlight is, in most of its present formulations, a less
than coherent legal formula of questionable efficacy.” So why do we continue to
insist on its place in our service?

There is a magical aura to Kol Nidre; it is a moment in time that is neither last year
nor next year. Author Sydney Taylor describes the gates of Heaven being open wide
enough to see the angels passing by. The music is from the time of the Crusades.
The Shalichat Tzibur recites the paragraph three times, almost as if it is an
incantation with mystical qualities – chief among them the power to cleanse us of
our commitments before we even make them.

We put our faith in the words of Kol Nidre , in the hope that it will wipe our slate
clean and allow us to start anew with God. We know we’ve made mistakes over the
past year – and we know we’ll make them in the coming year – so we cling to the
opportunity to erase them magically from our record. We acknowledge our deep fear
that even our best intentions will not be enough – even as we seek reassurance that
God will still love us.

Kol Nidre itself, and the entire experience of Yom Kippur, acknowledge this
vulnerable truth: for most of us, the distance between who we are and who we
ought to be, who we want to be, is vast. This day offers us a moment to accept who
we are, struggles and failings included.

---

 

Tomorrow night, as the gates are closing, we know that we will be forgiven; after all,
that’s God’s job. The verses immediately following Kol Nidre read:

 

“The entire congregation of the people Israel shall be forgiven, as well as the stranger who dwells among them, for all have erred.”

And then: ויאמר ה׳ סלחתי כדברך – “Adonai replied, I have forgiven, as you have
asked.”

The text tells us that forgiveness from God is a foregone conclusion – yet Kol Nidre
is the still most widely-attended service of the year. For a People that is chronically
late, tonight we were remarkably on-time. Like Opening Day at Fenway, it’s only the
first of many – but we feel compelled to experience the specialness of the initial
moments. 25 hours of fasting, praying, singing, begging, and soul-searching will
leave us feeling forgiven by God – yet it is still Kol Nidre that draws us in as we
begin the annual gut-wrenching process of praying for our lives and our souls.

We come back to this place – this liminal time and space – year after year, because we
make all sorts of vows over the course of the year. Some of those vows are explicit,
others implied; some for ourselves, others for the world; some are made with
specific intentions, and others without considering the ramifications. We want all of
our vows to be meaningful, even if we don’t always know how to make them so.
The opportunity for self-reflection on Yom Kippur allows us to recalibrate our
internal compass, and ask some of the hardest questions of our lives: What have I
done with the past year? Who have I hurt or harmed? What have I lived for and
what will be my lasting legacy?

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Which brings me back to the dishwasher. The act of exceeding expectations is
wonderful. Everybody wins when you beat an important deadline, donate more than
you pledged, or surprise your loved one with something that makes their life easier.
But God isn’t interested in promises – God is interested in deliverables – proof,
results, and success.

Tomorrow morning’s Haftarah makes it extremely clear that the fasting and
promises from today are not enough:

 

5. Is this the fast I desire, a day for people to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the
head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day that the Lord
finds favorable?

6. No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke to let the
oppressed go free; to break off every yoke.

7. It is to share your bread with the hungry, to take the wretched poor into your
home; and to clothe the naked, and do not ignore your own flesh.

It is not enough, God says, to speak the words that we think God wants to hear. It is
not enough to make promises to ourselves, either; instead, we must put our money
where our mouths are and truly help people.

This is very difficult; after all, the Book of Life is closing in 25 hours, and it’s much
easier to convince ourselves that our prayers alone will “seal the deal” than it is to
commit to living a more generous lifestyle. It is much easier to over-promise and
deal with under-delivering later, than it is to figure out the process of actualizing
those promises, particularly when our pledges are grand in scope.

In an essay on Kol Nidre, Dr. Erica Brown acknowledges that we don’t always make
good on our promises. “Empty words are sometimes all we have,” she writes.

A year ago, we made promises, we aspired to something, we expected that by
this year, things would be different. But here we are again, promises unkept,
aspirations unfulfilled, remembering the words we said last year.

This is the paradox of Yom Kippur – each year, we atone and promise to do better,
without really believing that we can.

---

 

Rabbi Milton Steinberg offers a perspective on how to reconcile the dichotomy
between what we want to do and what we actually believe we will do. “What if,” he
asks, “every year you say you’ll change, and every year you don’t?” He concludes
that logic dictates that we have only three choices: give up, lower our standards, or
try harder.

For the sake of our People, we cannot give up.

For the sake of ourselves, we cannot lower our standards.

So we must try harder.

Judaism is an aspirational religion. We continue to strive towards perfection, without
the expectation of actually achieving it. It’s important to know, Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks says, that God does not ask us not to fail . God asks us to acknowledge our
failures, repair what we have harmed, and move on, learning from our mistakes and
growing.

One of the ways we do that, of course, is through tshuva , t’filah , and tzedakah .
T’shuva – cultivating a spiritual life and returning to Torah. T’filah – cultivating
gratitude and connecting with transcendent values. And Tzedeka – cultivating
generosity and pursuing justice.

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An ethnographic study of pediatricians & pediatric specialists showed that physicians
need to recognize and acknowledge times when they made a mistake that resulted in
harm coming to their patient. On a recent episode of the NPR podcast “On Being,”
Dr. Louis Newman, the author of “Repentance: The Meaning & Practice of
Teshuvah,” discussed the results. Owning responsibility, he said, helps the doctors
avoid making the same mistake again – but it is crucial that the doctors have a safe
place in which to reflect on these errors and process them.

Like those doctors, we too require a safe space for reflection and processing. For us,
that safe space is the Aseret Yamei Tshuvah , the Ten Days of Repentance that
culminate in Yom Kippur.

Dr. Newman concludes:

The ultimate benefit of doing teshuvah is that it offers us a way to overcome
our past precisely because we have confronted and taken full responsibility for
it. It enables us to escape the sense of guilt, in some cases even the despair
with which many of us live. In its place, we come to live with self-acceptance
and hope, because we know that moral renewal is always a possibility.

Whether we are contemplating teshuvah in the personal realm or on a global scale,
the process is the same. We must acknowledge our past actions, understand their
impact, and formulate a plan for how to act differently in the future.

---

 

We face a great many problems today, on scales ranging from local to national to
global. On Rosh Hashanah we talked about the Syrian refugee crisis, as well as the
plight that low-income parents face without enough resources to keep their infants
in clean diapers. We heard from congregant Lori Silver about CJP’s efforts to reduce
poverty in the Boston Jewish community. And we briefly touched upon the Black
Lives Matter campaign, inequality in Israel, and the rising anti-Semitism in the world.

There is no easy solution to any of these problems; even the issue of a diaper
shortage among low-income families cannot be solved without addressing the
systemic problems behind it. But just because we can’t fix something on our own
does not mean that we can’t chip away at it.

Tonight, we will sing Mi She’ana, a prayer that recalls instances when God answered
our ancestors in their times of need, and begs God to answer us too. In each
example, the individual took action based solely on faith – they took one step
forward, then another, believing that they were doing what God wanted. Instead of
simply asking for help, they let their action be their prayer. We may live in a time of
more man-made “miracles” than divine, but that is all the more reason why, like
Nachshon ben Aminadav bravely walked into the un-parted sea, we must take the
first steps towards fixing our world – and have faith that God will help us along the
way.

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Doing teshuvah does not undo or change the past. And yet, repentance is precisely
the process by which we can – in the moral realm, if not in the physical realm – go
back to the deed, find what led to the transgression, and shape a different future.

Just as we evaluate our personal flaws, we must assess our societal flaws, recognize
our own role in them, and take steps to improve. This year the Black community in
America has successfully drawn attention to a problem which is NOT new – the
systemic devaluation of black lives and black achievements in America.

Nothing we can do or say will lead to us sitting here next Yom Kippur,
congratulating ourselves for eradicating racism. But Rabbi Tarfon taught:

It is not your responsibility to finish the work [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][of perfecting the world], but neither
are you free to ignore it (Pirke Avot 2:16). In the spirit of over-promising and striving toward
significant change, we should be able to look back next Yom Kippur and know that
we did all that we could to move our society forward.

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To that end, I’d like to share four ways that we can move the needle on this
problem.

The first is the easiest: after Yom Kippur is over, go home and Google “how white
people can be allies to black people.” African-Americans are feeling more
empowered to make a change in our country than they have felt in decades. It is not
our job to dictate how that change happens or what that change looks like; instead it
is our job to magnify their voices and help them be heard.

Second: know what privilege is, know what YOUR privilege is and use it to
help those who don’t have it .

Privilege means being a part of a group that has special rights, advantages, or
immunities not granted to non-members. In many cases, this is not due to any action
taken – it is simply afforded because of accident of birth. There are many types of
privilege we each may carry: white privilege, male privilege, educated privilege,
financial privilege.

The key to privilege is this: most of us walk through the world generally unaware of
it. We notice it most when we are on the outside – which, for most of us in this
room, is rare. Knowing our privilege means noticing when we’re using it – without
any effort on our own part – and when others don’t have it.

Elie Wiesel wrote, “When the life or death – or simply the well-being – of a
community is at stake, neutrality becomes unacceptable, for it always aids and abets
the oppressor, never his victim.” Using your privilege to help means (A Passover Haggadah; As Commented Upon by Elie Wiesel – page 7-8)
noticing racism where you might have naively turned a blind eye before – and whenever possible –
even if it feels a little scary – saying something to stop it. Staying silent when you
witness oppression is the same as supporting it.

And third – use your influence. A Senator can work to remove sentencing laws that
disproportionately affect black men. A manager can make sure that she interviews
qualified minority candidates for an open role. A rabbi can connect her congregation
to churches with many black congregants to encourage Bible study and socializing.
We each have our own strengths and spheres of influence where we can help work
against some small piece of the systemic racism that’s been in place for centuries. It’s
your job to figure out how you can do your part.

Finally, we have to stop the phrase “all lives matter.” Yes, we are all created
B’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image. But if all lives were treated equally, America’s
prison population would not be 60% black – four times their representation in the
country as a whole. “Driving while black” would not make you five times more
likely to be pulled over. And black students would be graduating from high school at
a rate better than just 68% – which only shows how America’s racist past still haunts
us today and perpetuates the cycle of inequality.

We did not create this reality – but we ARE responsible for working to change it.

---

 

Kol Nidre allows us to dream big. It empowers us to make grandiose vows to
ourselves over the course of the next year, knowing we have permission to not fulfill
them completely. But in this case, it’s not enough to say we want to do something,
and ask for God’s help – we have to take the first step. And then the second, and the
third, and keep on moving forward, having faith that the best way God can help is
by inspiring similar actions from others.

 

 

It is not our task to finish the work – but we ARE responsible for making the world
a little better every year.

You may recall the story about the village that was asked to fill a giant barrel with
wine in advance of a celebration. Each villager thought, “If I contribute water, and
everyone else brings wine, then nobody will be the wiser.” And of course, the
celebration was held with a giant barrel of water.

---

 

Each of us will spend the next day in two spaces simultaneously. Physically, we will
be in this room with each other; spiritually, we will be secluded, deep in a private
conversation with God. This is the crux of how we can each – as individuals – solve
the problems that plague the world, our country, and our community. We must
acknowledge that in some way, we have been bringing spiritual water to Yom
Kippur year after year. We have promised to do things for ourselves, for our friends,
for our families – but neglected to recognize that we do not live in a vacuum. The
world around us needs our attention too.

Spend the next day digging deep into your soul, and searching for the spiritual
equivalent of wine to put in the shared barrel. Individually, our contributions are
small; together, they are how we can repair the world. All that we are able to give –
that’s all God asks of us, and it’s everything we must ask of ourselves.

G’mar Chatimah Tova.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Yom Kippur 5776 – “Be kind to yourself and forgive”

Rabbi Bill Hamilton

Dr. Oliver Sacks, of blessed memory, was one of our generations most gifted scientists and masterful storytellers.  Mere days before his passing last month, he shared a touching personal testament which revealed the fruits of forgiveness in a Sunday New York Times piece that he called Sabbath.  Having been raised in an orthodox London home, when he was eighteen he confessed his attraction to boys.

“I haven’t done anything,” I said (to my father), “it’s just a feeling — but don’t tell Ma, she won’t be able to take it.”  He did tell her, and the next morning she came down with a look of horror on her face, and shrieked at me: “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.”

This ruthless condemnation revealed religion’s raw capacity for bigotry and cruelty and caused young Sacks irreparable damage.  Having struggled early on he would eventually discover his vocation and calling in medicine.   But all his life he remained shaken by that trauma and at a distance from the Sabbath and from faith’s compatibility with reason.  Yet more recently, following a touching family visit to Israel, he would express tender appreciation for both – grateful for the greater acceptance of his partner Billy – and especially moved by the beauty of the traditional Shabbat.  Being so forgiving brought him to a serene place of rest just days before he drew his last breath.

This Yom Kippur I want us all to embrace forgiveness.  It is a simple word that feels familiar but it is often misunderstood.  Too often we link it to saying I’m sorry or to repentance or to atonement.  But forgiveness is different.  Forgiveness means deciding to do something that does not come naturally or easily.  When we forgive, when we let go of a completely valid grievance, we are refusing to remain captive to ill-will.  When we do so, we purposefully decide to part-company with the past.   As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “Forgiveness is an action that is not a reaction.  It breaks the cycle of stimulus-response, harm and retribution, wrong and revenge.”  It frees us from the entrapped world of cause and effect.  So much of life is about reacting to what happens to us.  Like the boy who complains to his father about his sister, “She started it when she hit me back.”

There is nothing gratuitous about forgiveness.  In Judaism, it is not automatic absolution.  If fact it may be one of the hardest things in life we ever do because our negative emotions may be completely justified and even objectively correct.  But the rewards and blessings of forgiving others can be liberating and breathtakingly moving as Oliver Sacks demonstrated.   When we embrace forgiveness, we divest ourselves of negative energy that pollutes our generosity and compresses our gratitude.  Quite simply it is a favor we do for ourselves.  It is not an exoneration of the selfish act, an excusing of the immoral deed, or the free pass for the criminal wrongdoing committed against us by another person.  It is something we do because we deserve better, especially when they don’t.

Of course it needs to be said that forgiveness can be a very bad idea when the circumstances for it are wrong.  Those, for example, who are engaged in purposeful cruelty or evil, of course, don’t deserve it.  And it’s also not a good idea when a wrongdoer shows no sign of remorse.  In the past I’ve suggested that it might only be worth considering letting go of a grievance with an unrepentant wrongdoer if that person looms too large in your life, making you continually feel bitter and wounded. They don’t deserve such power in your life and living well by letting go may be the best way to take away their power.

But the real reason I feel the urge to encourage us to embrace forgiveness this year is that I sense that we’re too stuck, too set in our ways and beliefs and our relations with our ideological adversaries for our own good.  No matter what we thought of the Iran Deal, when we think of the rancor, the vitriol generated by both sides, demonizing those who supported the plan and those who rejected it—not the substance of it, but the hate campaigns against them personally, one wonders how you can recover from that level of venom.

How can forgiveness help us get unstuck?  The day of Yom Kippur in and of itself helps to facilitate, enable, and make forgiveness more achievable. This is because Yom Kippur’s atmosphere makes the urge to forgive feel like it came from somewhere else, like it was the initiative of neither the perpetrator nor the victim.  Sometimes we’re waiting to see who will make the first move toward reconciliation.  But Yom Kippur, the day itself, makes us all sit here and talk about an incident that occurred four months ago when you lied or I made you cry.  The sheer solemnity of the day pushes to the front and center those festering slights that we can’t seem to bring up but that have been eating away at the trust and love we once had for each other.  And as we seek God’s forgiveness of us.  We would do well to earn it by showing that we know how to demonstrate it in forgiving another.

Two stories we read on Yom Kippur can help toward this end.  The first, the story of the scapegoat, models it by helping us recall the first biblical example of one person forgiving another.  The second, the story of Jonah, gives how-to advice that can guide us.

Tomorrow morning’s Torah reading tells of two goats (se’irim) that are central to the Yom Kippur atonement ritual.  Why two goats?  One is sacrificed to God while the second is sent into the wilderness carrying off the sins of the entire People from that year.  It is also possible that the twin goats symbolize the Torah’s first twins, Jacob and Esau.  Their struggle and strife is the defining dimension of their relationship going back to even before they are born.  Why connect Yom Kippur’s goats with them?  For one thing, Esau is described as se’ir, the same word as the one used for goat.  More significantly, the key Hebrew word meaning atone, k p r, occurs 23 times in Leviticus chapter 16 which describes the Yom Kippur ritual (which is where this Holy Day gets its name).  That root only appears one time in the entire book of Genesis in the context of atonement, just before Jacob and Esau reunite after more than two decades of hostile estrangement.  Jacob is terrified that Esau still seeks to kill him after his having deceptively and cold-heartedly obtained his blessing from their father Isaac, so he seeks to pacify Esau (achapra panav) by sending gifts ahead.  But the real hero of their reunion is Esau.  Rather than being vengeful, Esau embraces Jacob signaling the first biblical occurrence of forgiveness when he peaceably and lovingly reunites with him.

What does this have to do with forgiveness today?  Curiously, the rabbis associate Esau with Rome and Christianity.  I find Esau’s forgiving embrace of Jacob to be utterly compelling this year in particular for two reasons.  First, it was 50 years ago that the Second Vatican Council embraced a more inclusive approach to other religions like Judaism – our friend and teacher Rabbi Gilbert Rosenthal has recently published the definitive compendium of essays in honor of this year’s Jubilee.  Back in 1965, Vatican II affirmed the permanence of God’s covenant with the Jews. This completely reversed the replacement theology that had vilified Judaism ever since the founding of the Catholic Church.

The other reason why the Bible’s first moment of forgiveness between Esau and Jacob feels so timely, of course, is because of the coinciding of Pope Frances’ arrival with Yom Kippur.  Beyond the Pope’s remarkable positions on climate change, global capitalism, and the plight of migrants, he continues to build upon the penitent embrace of Vatican II when he said of us, the descendants of Jacob, “Through the awful trials of these last centuries, the Jews have preserved their faith in God. And for this, we, the Church and the whole human family, can never be sufficiently grateful to them.”  As good friend and writer James Carroll clarified, “Jewish preservation of faith, of course, presumed an ongoing Jewish rejection of claims made for Christ. What Jews were condemned for across centuries, that is, they must be thanked for today.”  Never has the healing embrace of Esau and Jacob, represented by Yom Kippur’s two goats, been more vivid.

Yet even being able to visualize the power of forgiveness does not make personalizing it easy.  Beyond the fact that forgiving can carry risk, feel wrong, and be extremely difficult, it can also seem impractical, unjust, and simply unhelpful.  But by far the deepest reason why forgiveness remains so remote for so many is captured in the words of the great American writer James Baldwin who once said, “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”  And why in the world should I put myself in a position to experience more pain when I am already the aggrieved party?

I’ve spoken about letting go as a favor we do for ourselves often in the past.  Some of you may recall how one year the day after Yom Kippur when I had delivered that message, I frustrated woman came to see me.  “Two decades ago my ex left me and the kids for a younger woman.  For twenty years I’ve had to work three jobs just to pay the bills, the kids have had to wear hand-me-downs, and they haven’t been able to go to movies with their friends.  You expect me to forgive that —- for what he did to us?!”  After taking a deep breath I said, well,I do want you to forgive by letting go.  Not as an exculpation of what he’s done.  What he did was selfish, cruel, completely immoral.  And that is precisely why just as he no longer has the right to live in your home, he no longer has the right to go on living in your head.  For twenty years you’ve been walking around with a hot coal waiting for a chance to throw it at him.  Meanwhile it has been burning a whole in your hand.

More recently a member of our community and I were talking about the challenges of letting go.  “I’ve heard you speak about letting go a lot over the years and it makes a lot of sense” he told me.  “The problem is that adding pain to wrong, just doesn’t work.  Aren’t we supposed to hold people accountable?  Isn’t the notion that actions have consequences at the core of the whole High Holy Day period?  People shouldn’t be inscribed in the Book of Life without earning it.”  But then he continued, “I did however hear a more compelling reason why letting go, even when it feels wrong and scary and hard may be worth considering.  My buddy told me he is often motivated in life by the words next time.  What do you mean, I asked him, next time?  Next time I do something I regret, something I wish I could have back, I imagine I’ll really hope that the person I’ve hurt or angered will find her heart open to my contrition.  So I figure, I may need to bank some of this myself.  I certainly should know what it takes to do what I hope somebody else will do for me some day.”

Perhaps, I thought.  Even more than the approach of choosing happiness over righteousness,  even more than urging us all to walk out of this room tomorrow night feeling lighter having let go of a festering grievance, perhaps we’ll be in need of just such a favor from another person some time soon.  We’d be standing on much firmer ground if we had personal experience with what we’re desperately seeking from another.

The second story we read toward the end of Yom Kippur is the story of Jonah.  Jonah is the most unlikely model for championing God’s endless propensity to forgive.  He flees away from his prophetic task. He doesn’t want the Assyrian residents of Nineveh to be forgiven.  And he is unhappy even after his mission is successful.  Every other character in the book seems more aligned with God than Jonah is.  My friend and teacher Erica Brown pointed out two key phrases uttered by those least likely to be our teachers that she is taking note of this year.  The first is ulai meaning perhaps and it is uttered by the Captain of the ship Jonah is using to flee from God’s service.  The desperate sailors realize that Jonah asleep in the bowels of the boat, is the only passenger to fail to pray in effort to calm the violent storm threatening their survival. Perhaps this enigmatic soul will have some success where the rest of us have not.  I love the word perhaps (ulai) because it melts categorically dismissive certainty.  The other unlikely teacher is the King of Nineveh, whose metropolis stands to experience the same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah unless they heed Jonah’s prophetic warning and embrace full penitence. The King says two words which are also compelling, mi yodeah meaning who knows whether the thousands under his rule might just find merit and truth in turning toward the God that Jonah represents.

The sentiments, who knows (mi yodeah) and perhaps (ulai), not only indicate curiosity and humility, they also help us consider next time.  Perhaps showing favor to another who doesn’t deserve it will make more credible my hope for the same generosity of spirit next time when somebody else might feel that I don’t particularly deserve it.   The wise words of the Captain and King may prove prophetic.  Expressing perhaps, or Who knows might just expose us to the worthiness of electing to forgive, making us more worthy next time of being forgiven.

Rabbi Harold Kushner recently wrote, “Forgiving is the identifying marker of the stronger party to the dispute.  Be kind to yourself and forgive.”

Oliver Sacks’s reflection on the Sabbath suggests one final thought for me.  It is the day of the Sabbath, in and of itself, that intoned a chord of tranquil togetherness that made possible his making peace with his life’s work and the good he sought to do with his limited time here on earth.  As the Sabbath day itself helped to impel this shift in his perspective, so too today for us, this Sabbath of Sabbaths, invites us to let go.  His example of how to live and how to die became immensely powerful.  He taught us that it’s never too late.  Yom Kippur, this day in and of itself, reminds us that, when it comes to forgiving and letting go, it’s never too soon.

Making space for them in order to be us

Rabbi Bill Hamilton

Two fundamentalist Jews are discussing the kind of person the world needs to bring ultimate redemption.  “In the whole world” one of them begins to pontificate, “there are just two kinds of people, us and them.  There’s no point in talking about them, so lets talk about us.  And in the whole Jewish world, there are two types, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim.  There is no point in dwelling on the Sephardim.  And among Ashkenazim, we really can break it down to two kinds, the Hasidim and the Mitnagdim.  No point in talking about those Mitnagdim, so let’s focus on the Hadisim.  And among all the Hasidim, you really just have the Lubavitch and the Satmar.  There is no point in talking about Satmar.  And among the vast Lubavitch movement, you have the Chabad Hasidim who do great work but only go so far with their wisdom. Then you have the gifted Chabad Maskilim who penetrate the depths of every word the Rebbe ever spoke.”  He concludes, “That leaves you and me.   And you know how little you know.”

Dogmatic religion has earned its reputation for being narrow and exclusionary.  At its best, healthy religion is the strongest catalyst in history for generating group cohesion, thanks to its rituals, stories, life-cycle events, and redemption aspirations.  The problem is that whenever you create really strong US group-identity, you also create a THEM made up of those outside the group.  And religions are notoriously poor at being generous to the THEM, to the outsider, to those who do not share their core beliefs, behaviors, or particular dreams for salvation.  As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, religion that binds also blinds.

As we enter 5776 and we think about the biggest challenges facing our world today, the hostile disregard for the ‘other’ would be at the top of my list.  Whether the ‘outsider’ is of a different race, religion, gender-orientation, or political persuasion, the absence of empathy for the other, of generosity toward the person who is different from myself is becoming increasingly toxic and lethal in today’s world.  Religiously incited violence, particularly by fanatics like ISIS, bring a weekly stream of barbaric monstrosities across our twitter feed.

Religious Intolerance can’t only be fought militarily and politically, its also needs to challenged religiously.  Let me ask you, If you could design a religion in such a way that would make it more generous to THEM, the OTHER, to the OUTSIDER or STRANGER, how would you do it?

Imbedding empathy for the stranger into our founding story is a good start.  Every religion has a founding story.  Some faiths are born out immaculate conception, others from heroic battlefield victories, and still others from ascetic prophetic devotion.  It surely is no accident that our founding story situates us as strangers in a strange land, who are brought forth from slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt, and Judaism never stops reminding of this historical fact and its implications for commanding selfless conduct toward societies ‘least, lost, and left out’.

Yet this is not enough.  Principled empathy for the outsider will not be able to withstand the intense feelings of a circumstance, like anger, frustration, or fear.  Croats, Serbs, and Muslims, Tutsis and Hutus, coexist peaceably until they are caused to feel anxious or afraid.  There must be something more, something more capable of instilling a deep and enduring prioritization of the plight of the other.   Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has written an important new book which confronts religious violence, Not In God’s Name, which you will all be receiving a complimentary copy of as this year’s Library of Gratitude selection.  In it he posits the radical concept of role reversal.  What is role reversal?  It causes you to imagine yourself actually as the other.

Rabbi Sacks tells a story about an ultra-nationalist party in Hungary that is neo-Nazi, racist, and virulently anti-Semitic, having secured 20% of the vote in 2014.  It consistently accuses the Jews of being at the center of a cabal of western economic interests seeking world domination.  A few years ago one of its rising stars, Csanad Szegedi, had been widely spoken of as its future leader.  Until one day in 2012.  That was the day Szegede discovered he was a Jew.

Some rivals from his party had been investigating his background for something that might damage him.  They discovered that his maternal grandmother and grandfather were Auschwitz survivors.  Spreading rumors brought this alarming discovery to his attention so he decided to check it out.  When his Szegedi’s mother was fourteen, her father told her the secret but insisted that she never reveal it to anyone.  Having learned the truth about himself, he resigned from the party and went to visit the Chabad rabbi, who at first thought he must have been joking.  Yet after many months of classes, he underwent circumcision, and today attends synagogue, going by the name Dovid.

When he first admitted the truth about his Jewish ancestry, one party leader urged him to shoot himself.  Another urged him to make a public apology.  It was this comment that made him say, “Wait a minute, I am supposed to apologize for the fact that my family was killed at Auschwitz?”  This realization changed his life so dramatically that today he is devoted to defending human rights.  He says, “I am aware of my responsibility and I know I will have to make it right in the future.”  Szegedi is the anti-Semite who discovered that he himself was a Jew.

This true story is perhaps the most extraordinary story of role reversal I know.   Most stories of us imagining ourselves as the other are far less dramatic.   The most captivating picture of this phenomenon is on the bottom back page of your Rosh Hashanna leaflet, where two Palestinians are engaged in sheltering and securing to safety a terrified Israeli police officer who had become isolated and was being stoned by angry villagers amidst unrest earlier this summer in the disputed territories.

The capacity to literally imagine oneself as the other holds immense power.  It can instill deep generosity of spirit.  And, it is not simply a twenty-first century phenomenon.  God’s Torah actually understands it quite well.

I want to show you something fascinating about the emotional energy in this morning’s Torah reading.  You may recall that Sarah demands that Abraham send away Hagar, her handmaid, and Hagar’s son Ishmael.  This distressed Abraham greatly (vayeira Avraham) yet God compels him to follow Sarah’s instruction.  Now wandering with no more water or food, Hagar cannot bear the agony of watching her child die, so she places him at a distance and begins to weep herself to death.  An angel appears, encouraging her to retake the hand of her son and until now unseen resources save them.  Where is the emotional energy in this story?  With whom do we empathize more, Sarah or Hagar?  One of Rabbi Sacks’s most profound insights in his new book is that, throughout the Genesis stories wherein one sibling becomes the carrier of the covenant, the are counter-narratives that not only do not reject the unchosen biblical figure, they actually draw our emotional empathy toward such figures.  When Jacob supplants his brother Esau, deceitfully obtaining his blessing from their blind father Isaac, empathic readers identify far more with Esau’s having been wronged than with Jacob and Rebecca’s cleverness.  The same is true for Leah’s unloved plight vs. Rachel, and on the first day Rosh Hashanna, this counter-narrative comes through in vivid and searing terms with the plight of Hagar and Ishmael.

Indeed, the stories of sibling strife that so often make us uncomfortable in Genesis are intended to do so!  God imbeds emotional role reversal into the Genesis stories, to give us a sustained tutorial in its transforming power, literarily schooling us into becoming more generously sensitive toward the plight of the stranger, the other, the one who is different from who we are.

And there is more.  Beyond imbedding empathy for the outsider in our founding story, and the sustained tutorial in role reversal, Judaism makes being a stranger part of our destiny too!  I had never before noticed this, but Rabbi Sacks’s book points out something very surprising about the way King David blesses the People at the peak of the Jewish People’s Commonwealth strength and historic power.  “Praise be to you Lord, God of our father Abraham, from everlasting to everlasting…We are strangers and temporary residents in your sight.”  Even at home, even in our own land, the mightiest leader King David from whom the messianic line will descend, even he makes conspicuous the notion that we will always identify as and with strangers.   This does not mean that we don’t have a home in Israel. Of course we do and we are blessed beyond measure to have a share in building and strengthening that home today.   It rather means even when we are home, we must do all we can to make strangers feel at home.

This is not a call for radical universalism.  Being true to our particularity is the key to our authenticity.  And we are destined to be ambassadors of a religion that teaches the world what generosity to the OUTSIDER should look like.

Why? Not merely because such generosity is noble.  But because the Bible points out again and again that strangers can prove to be much more than they appear to be.  Ruth turns out to be more than an alien.  Tamar is more than a prostitute.  Moses is more than just another Egyptian.  And Abraham’s three visitors are so much more than ordinarily guests.  Strangers can turn out to be angels.

There is, of course, a critical caveat to this immensely significant assertion.  Not every stranger is an angel.  Often enough the other does represent a danger and is a lethal threat.  Not long ago an Egyptian cleric broadcasted the following:  “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them?  Of course not.  We will never love them…They are enemies not because they occupy Palestine.  They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth.”  Those who are radically other and violently other can turn out to be the killers they purport to be.  And killers must be stopped militarily without question or hesitation.  Our Jewish People must never again be brought to a precarious historic need to  outsource our safety or survival to others.  The IDF’s job is to look after us.  Ours is to look after them.

It’s easy to tell the difference between dangerous strangers and innocuous ones.  The real issue is to not let the bad guys cause us to despair over all strangers.  Bad strangers do not make all strangers bad.  If we only look at the really BAD THEM out there, then we ignore the THEM we need to recognize it order to truly be US.

Yet precisely because of pervasive threats, particularly from an emboldened Iranian regime now enjoying complete hegemony over the most volatile region in the world, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented series of Jewish terror attacks.   Whether the coarsening of the souls of Jewish extremists has been as a result of the contagiousness of the bloodthirsty habits in Israel’s neighborhood, or whether it has been propelled by crude misunderstandings of some of our Bible’s harder texts, dehumanizing rhetoric and violence against Arabs clearly violates the spirit, letter, and essence of God’s Torah.

I want share something fascinating in grammar – thats right grammar.  There is such a thing as a contronym – where a single word has two meanings that are opposite meanings.  Cleave means both to adhere and to separate.  Bolt means both to secure and to flee.  The Hebrew word meaning to recognize as familiar and to be a stranger is the same word l’hakir and nochri.  This summer in Israel I learned something even more remarkable, there is an in between form of this word makkar which means acquaintance.  Someplace in between alien and family is someone with whom I have an association.  This middle category is what we should strive to grow in a world that can only imagine US and THEM.

I had coffee a couple of weeks ago with our local Catholic Priest, Brian Clary who had just returned from his first visit to Israel as part of an Interfaith Clergy Mission sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council.  His group experienced what may have been the single worst day in Israel’s 67 year history for an outsider seeking to get a positive impression of ‘the real Israel.’ Having begun their morning visiting the Galilee Church that had been partially destroyed by an arson attack weeks earlier, they found themselves marching in the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade mere meters away from the terrorist attack that wounded several and took the life of Jerusalem teenager Shira Banki.  Before they went to sleep that night, they learned about terrorist arson that led to the murders of three members of a Palestinian family — Reham, Sa’ad and 18-month old Ali of Duma, a village north of Jerusalem.  And while Father Clary was generously understanding, I am still reeling when I consider the ugliness of that animated that day for him and his group of first-time travelers to Israel.

We do need to labor more tirelessly to keep faith with our Torah’s lessons.  In hard times, we need something even more than empathy, role reversal, and an eternal commitment to making the stranger feel at home, we need memory wherein we take our history personally.   Today, Rosh Hashannah is dedicated to memory, known as yom hazikaron, remembering our purpose, repositioning ourselves to answer our calling.  Who are we?  What is our life purpose?  Me Chayeinu?  We ask this question personally and we ask it as a people together with Jews in Shuls throughout the world.  God remembers.  So do we.  The Torah is not fundamentally a book that esteems knowledge, wisdom, or emotion.  It’s primary value is memory.  Again and again the trajectory of Torah memory is toward the stranger in our midst, hager hagar b’tochechem.  Not merely because we once were, but also because, in bringing out their dignity, we become more hospitable to reciprocated generosity.

A few years ago the worlds attention was on Egypt, to Israel’s south and the Arab Spring.  This year, attention is increasingly drawn to Syria, to Israel’s north and the blood soaked country of which now finds more than half of its 22 million citizens fleeing for the their lives.  We know them.   We know the difference between refugees fleeing from violence and migrants seeking opportunity.  We cannot and will not be indifferent to their plight.  To those who claim that we should suspect them because of their ethnicity, that they might join forces with the ominous wave of antiSemitism washing across Europe today, I would point out the following.  First, Israel has already treated medically and saved more than one thousand wounded Syrians at field hospitals in the Golan Heights.  Second, I would remind us that it was a Muslim cashier at the kosher food market who saved the lives of twenty Jews amidst the terror attack in Paris this past January.  The stranger, nochri, need not become ‘familiarly recognized’ l’hakir, in order for her or him to become a makkar a life-saving or life-saved acquaintance.

Some of you may have recently read about a Syrian refugee Shadi Martini who now resides in Washington DC.  This summer he became aware of an exhibit depicting four years of Syrian suffering at a place called the Holocaust memorial in DC.  Growing up in Syria, he had never even heard of the Holocaust.  Now, having wandered from the Syrian exhibit throughout the rest of the Museum, he was stunned and horrified by what he learned.  Martini wrote in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, “As a Syrian who was forced to flee from horror, I’ve joined forces with Jews, including descendants of Holocaust victims, and people of all different religious beliefs who have forged the nonprofit Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees. With them, I’m knocking on doors, talking to anyone who will listen, to get more relief for the Syrian people.”  KI has proudly joined forces with this Multifaith Alliance as well.

This Rosh Hashannah, may we resolve to prove capable of reclaiming the Bible’s original intent for that generosity toward the other.   We may just discover that strangers can prove to be angels.  Yet even if they become little more than acquaintances, we’ll still have achieved something significant by being authentically the US God urges us to be.  Most importantly, we’ll become agents for making religion return to its real task, that of changing lives.  Rather than specializing in US vs. THEM, we will prove faithful to Judaism’s highest purpose, that of generating goodness, that of generating kindness, and that of generating love in the year we have just begun.  May our efforts make it a Shana tova for all.

Sacrifice and  Joy

Rosh Hashanah 5776

Rabbi David Starr

 

Years ago I served a synagogue in Great Neck NY and a congregant once trusted me enough to discuss his life and his family with me.  The man lamented to me that his college age son told him he considered him spoiled, after frequent forays into his father’s closet filled with all manner of shirts and ties and suits and accessories and I know not what else.  He wanted to know what I thought his son truly felt about him.

I replied perhaps your son in his youthful idealism and desire to figure out what matters in life thinks your life lacks sacrifice.  You’re wealthy:  rich in material possessions, rich in health, rich in family.  You have plenty of everything.  You lose something you just replace it.  A rug gets ruined you buy another one.  And you’ve never sacrificed.  You’ve never had to commit to something that involved giving something else up, chosen one course knowing in so doing you’d lost something else that you made a choice for which you’d suffer.

At an early age the son understood a crucial lesson in life:  choices tell us and the world who we are, and the most important choices involve hard decisions.  The metaphor therefore is one of scarcity rather than plenty.  Lest you think I’m engaging in class warfare by attacking the wealthy for never having to make hard choices, think again.   Many of us who’ve suffered major losses also didn’t choose that path, but rather events conspired to deprive us of our wealth, our health, parents, partners, siblings, or God forbid children, at far too early an age.  As a young lieutenant from Brookline in the U.S.  Navy said in WWII when someone asked him  “Mr. Kennedy, how does it feel to be a hero?” JFK replied, “It was involuntary.  They sank my boat.”  Most of us aren’t heroes, and the truth is we’re not sure for what we’d be prepared to sacrifice something precious other than for our immediate families.

The question of sacrifice hangs over our observance of RH.  Today we read probably the most famous story in the Hebrew Bible, the binding of Isaac.  Rabbi Moshe Leib once said:  “The way in this world is like the edge of a blade.  On this side is the netherworld, and on that side is the netherworld, and the way of life lies in between.”  How do we learn to live in that in-between space, celebrating the grandeur and sheer blessing of living even as we know that life lasts but for a moment seemingly, and that much of our life may be filled with pain and suffering and that the life of the world may be filled as much if not more with ugliness and injustice as beauty and decency?  What precisely connects the idea of sacrifice and the celebration of the world that RH reenacts?  Is it possible that this is a day both of fear and joy?  Darkness and light?  Of judgment and celebration?

The BI story confuses and scares and appalls us.  We think of sacrificing for our children, not sacrifices of our children.  We cannot most of us relate to scenarios involving such extremes that fuse the two typologies, as in the tormented parent in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved who kills her child rather than let her be recaptured into slavery and in so doing sacrifices part of herself.  Make no mistake that in committing to offer up his son a part of Abraham and Sarah perish, in addition to what a toll the trauma took on Isaac.

It sometimes and maybe often feels like we live as Isaac, offered up on the altar of Jewish history, a people consigned to times and places of madness and malevolence, whether it be ancient Rome or Muhammad or the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella or the Russia of the Tsars or the madness of Hitler’s Germany, or the rantings of the mullahs in Teheran.  We all of us ask ourselves:  why?  Why us?  Why the ceaseless hatred?  Why the obsessive preoccupation of the world with a people most people don’t even know?

That question however understandable matters less than the real question we all ask:  what is the point of living a Jewish life?  Just to outlast the anti-Semites?  I don’t think so.  What is the sacrifice for?  If it’s for nothing good than what sort of sacrifice is it?  Even as horrific a story as the BI told a larger tale:  God tested Abraham to see if he understood that beyond love and family and the immediate could he serve his Creator, as morally problematic as we might find that.  What is the larger sacrifice and the meaning of that sacrifice that RH teaches us about being Jewish?

It ought to be acknowledged that Judaism teaches that sacrifice and love and stress go together and we need to accept that fact and deal with it.  Like many of us my email inbox clogs up with messages from providers about all sorts of valuable and ridiculous urgings for me to improve my life.

Here’s one from the Cleveland Clinic Wellness folks:

How will I fulfill myself, just for today?  Some ideas of fulfilling activities:

Have coffee with a friend or just talk on the phone

Go outside and play with your pet

Watch the clouds

Get up from your desk to gaze out the window

Listen to your favorite music

Take a walk at lunchtime

And yes to a relaxation practice.

Those all sound great and valid and worth doing.  Will they add lots of meaning and purpose to our lives?  Probably not.  Jews take a different path.  Consider the person who makes an appointment to greet the new head of the local day school, and ends up offering to join the board.  Or the person who gets up in the morning to help make a minyan at 6:45, or the person who organizes meals for bereaved families, or the lay leader who goes to Israel in the middle of last summer’s war.  That’s how Jews relax:  by adding stress.

So here are some ways we can add holy stress to our lives, ways that we can embrace the span of our years, the amazingness of living.  First, relationships.  The theme of relationship stands at the center of RH.  It in some way effectively if subtly undercuts the harshness of the central metaphor of God as Judge and King, inscrutably passing sentence upon us.  Rather we make two moves:  we draw inward to ourselves, working hard to think about who we are, what it would mean to discover our best self and to try to be that person, and then we move outward toward God, toward accepting the grace of His gift to us, our lives and His acceptance of who we actually are.

Cultivating a better relationship with ourselves means both pushing ourselves and accepting ourselves, sometimes trying to be our best selves, doing the best we can, sometimes just doing what we can.  As James Baldwin observed, “Our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.”  We all can let go of some anger, learn how to use our pain and disappointments to help us appreciate what we have as much if not more than what we’ve lost.  We can learn to deploy the hurt for the sake of finding and making the good.

Cultivating our relationships with others matters too.  There too we sacrifice:  we open ourselves up to a world of hurt when we allow ourselves to care for another and for them to gain access to our deepest hopes and fears.  In his critique of Gandhi’s asceticism George Orwell nailed it:  we may not choose to sacrifice for some loftier ideal but instead we sacrifice for the sake of friendship and love:  “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.  No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”

As in the argument between Hillel and Shammai about lighting the Hanukiah:  should we increase or decrease our lights, here too we can choose to see RH as about fear and darkness and a counting down toward our mortal end, or we can embrace our increased years, the amount of light we kindle, the accumulated wisdom that we can bring to changing our lives and the life of our world.  So I end with a bit of Heschel, and a poem of Marge Piercy.  Each reminds us that the Jewish way embraces our mortality and our fear but calls us to go beyond those narrow places and to seek the light and the love, to seek to find something for which to sacrifice and to serve.

First, embrace your personhood:  Your presence in the world, you are never a nonentity if you step up.  Heschel wrote:  “Being a Jew makes anonymity impossible.  A Jew represents, stands for, proclaims—even in spite of herself.  The world never sees the Jew as an individual but rather as a representative of a whole tradition, of a whole people.  A Jew is never alone.”

That whole tradition comprises what?  And therefore makes of each and every one of us what?  Heschel tells us who we as Jews are:

“A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.”  We must know and not forget injustice, even if we cannot always know how to respond.   Heschel continues:  “A person in travail with God’s dreams and designs, a person to whom God is a challenge, not an abstraction.  She is called upon to know of God’s stake in history, to be involved in the sanctification of time and in building the Holy Land, to cultivate passion for justice and the ability to experience the arrival of Friday night as an event.  We aim to experience God in our world, the sacred and mundane, in time and in space.”  Heschel concludes “A Jew is one who knows how to recall and to keep alive what is holy in our people’s past and to cherish the promise and the vision of redemption in the days to come.”  We all of us need to tell our stories, to remember our past and look to our future.  What are we without our memories?  Our guilts, our fears, our good times, our hopes?  Our celebrations and commitments and risks and losses all jumble together inside of us, as they should.  But our forms structure us enabling us to move forward, to live a life of service and meaning.

In a memoir of his years at prep school, the writer Tobias Wolf recalled when Robert Frost paid a visit to the school, and the almost stereotypical tweed garbed English instructor challenged Frost to consider the inherent limitations of the poetic form as a barrier to feeling and meaning.  Frost gazed at the overeducated and under wise teacher and counseled him about the difference between structure and sentimentality, “I am thinking of Achilles’ grief,” he said. “That famous grief . . . that terrible grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only really exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe sort of cry, sincere maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance, but you don’t have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry. Does that answer your question?”

Judaism provides us with the forms to create, to build, and to transform the world and ourselves—Minyan, community, Shabbat, foodways.  The Mahzor, these holy days, constitute some of our most powerful forms to remake our lives.  Embrace them.

I close with a poem by Marge Piercy on the birthday of the world.  Rather than celebrate solely with brisket and cake and candles, we choose a different way of marking this great occasion.

 

On the birthday of the world

I begin to contemplate

What I have done and left

Undone, but this year

Not so much rebuilding

 

Of my perennially damaged

Psyche, shoring up eroding

Friendships, digging out

Stumps of old resentments

That refuse to rot on their own.

 

No, this year I want to call

Myself to task for what

I have done and not done

For peace.  How much have

I dared in opposition?

 

How much have I put

On the line for freedom?

For mine and others?

As these freedoms are pared,

sliced and  diced, where

have I spoken out?  Who

have I tried to move?

 

In this holy season, I stand

self-convicted of sloth

in a time when lies choke

the mind and rhetoric

bends reason to slithering choking pythons.

 

Here I stand before the gates

Opening the fire dazzling

My eyes, and as I approach

What judges me, I judge

Myself.

 

Give me weapons

Of minute destruction.  Let

My words turn into sparks.

 

Shana tovah

Gmar hatimah tovah