Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5767
Captain Roee Klein, held the most senior rank among those who fought with him in the Lebanese town of Bint J'bail during this summer’s war with Hezbollah. In the heat of battle, he discerned that a grenade had been thrown in the direction of his men. Since he realized that he was no longer able to prevent himself from being injured by the grenade, he jumped on it so that his body would block most of the shock and save the lives of his men. His sacrifice bore its hoped for fruit. Those of his soldiers who were spared relate that he cried out "Sh'ma Yisrael" at the moment he jumped on the grenade. Roee Klein, a true hero in an era that admires anti-heroes, was buried on his 31st birthday. It is said that he was an excellent saxophone player and a brilliant thinker who completed a degree in Engineering with distinction. He traveled with his friends around Africa, he had a rolling laugh and all who knew him describe him as a gentle and peaceful soul.
When I shared this story with a friend a couple of weeks ago, he shook his head and said, “Such a tragedy, for this brave soldier and for so many of the maimed and wounded from northern Israel and in Lebanon. Millions displaced. Thousands of rockets rain down on Israeli cities. All for what? In the end, just to bring the UN back to Lebanon.” He lamented “the whole situation is so tragic.” Tragic in the futility of trading in bloodshed. Tragic, on a grander scale, that so many must die for Israel to live.
But there is something about the classical definition of tragedy that is foreign to Judaism. For the ancient Greeks, tragedy meant an absence of control over one’s destiny. Try as you might, you cannot change your fate. Judaism has no such concept. In fact, I find it fascinating that no Hebrew word for tragedy was ever coined in our lexicon. If ever a people could lay claim to tragedy, given how much of our people’s history has been written in tears, it would be the Jews.
The core reason why Judaism repudiates the concept of tragedy is that, in placing absolute value on human free will and responsibility, Judaism boldly asserts that we can change our fate. Historically, Judaism went to great lengths to distance itself from a Greek worldview espousing preordained destiny. No matter how far Oedipus would have roamed, he still would have killed his father and wedded his mother because it was foretold by the Oracle at Delphi. By contrast, the Torah begins and ends championing human free will. Free choice is so important, that it is the Torah’s opening and closing message - from Adam and Eve’s choice to eat from the forbidden fruit to Moses’ counsel at the close of Deuteronomy that we ‘choose life.’ And biblical prophets also repudiate tragedy. The future they saw was neither inescapable nor final. From every sin there was atonement, from every exile there was return. A major difference between the Greek oracle and the biblical prophet - an oracle predicts; a prophet warns. If an oracle’s prediction comes to pass, it has succeeded. If a prophecy comes to pass, it has failed – because prophets proclaim the need for a U-turn, warning that we’re headed in the wrong direction.
So central to Judaism is the power of freedom, our national founding story is about going from slavery to freedom. So central to these High Holidays is the power of freedom, virtually every page of the prayer book says something of critical importance – even if our ultimate fate is beyond our control, the charting of our course while we’re here depends on our choices.
How does this work in our lives? When something bad happens, we ask two questions, first ‘Why did this happen to me?’ and second ‘What then shall I do.” The first question ‘Why me’ is an important one. It weighs in on us, and even as we cannot really be answered, we move to the second question ‘What then shall I do?’ These two questions are different in every way. The first focuses on the past, the second on the future. When I ask ‘Why did this happen?’ I see myself as an object. When I ask, ‘What then shall I do?’ I see myself as a subject. The first question is passive, the second is active. In the first I search for someone or something to blame. It the second, I accept responsibility. When I do that, a profound human dignity is born.
Those who get stuck on ‘Why me,’ tend toward a stance that yields ‘tragedy’ and produces blame. Classical Judaism offers us a way to focus more on the ‘What then shall I do’ question. In the literature of medieval Jewry – the age of blood libels, massacres, expulsions, inquisitions, ghettos and pogroms - I am struck by how little anger there is. In the dirges and liturgy from this period, we find anguish and pleading for better days, but so little hate, rage, or desire for revenge.
We have always seen responsibility as a profound privilege, because it becomes an invitation to literally partner with God. We partner with God by adding goodness.
Abraham alone makes a covenant with God, but we can all make ourselves partners with God. Abraham’s most dominant characteristic in our Torah readings for Rosh Hashannah seems to be that he is the subject rather than the object of the world around him. From the instant God calls him, Abraham goes forth, rushing out from his tent to greet his angelic messengers, preempting danger in Egypt for himself and Sarah, pleading the case for Sodom and Gomorrah. Even for things he doesn’t particularly want to do like banishing Ishmael or binding Isaac, Abraham appears proactive. God calls Abraham often, the first time Abraham calls on God – launching the conversation from his end – is when he is tormented by the dilemma of banishing Hagar and Ishmael. And for the agonizing mystery of the Akeda, Abraham arises early to saddle his own donkey. Abraham is the hero of ‘what then shall I do?’ Yes he is a man of faith, a contrarian in every way. But on a more fundamental level, he is a man of action, bringing events to the world rather than waiting to see what the world has in store for him.
As was the case for Abraham’s troubled role as parent, so much pain in our lives is unfairly dropped at our doorstep. Yet because Abraham is on the receiving end of a covenant with a single, solitary God, a key aspect of monotheism helps to construct a tragedy-free world view.
In monotheism, both good and bad come from a single source, so there was no way the Jewish people could blame an alien force for their troubles. Israelites did not see themselves as hapless victims of a hostile power. By and large, they did not give themselves over to self-pity, anger, resentment or rage. If they saw themselves as, in part, the cause of their troubles, they therefore had it within themselves to put things right.
This helps me understand a bit more something I struggle mightily to understand – why we prefer feeling some guilt to feeling totally powerless. I’ll never forget a visit I had years ago with a congregant who had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, giving him no more than two years to live. I did everything I could to try and convince him that he was not being punished for passed sins, this is central to my theology – especially in a post-Holocaust world. But I failed and he left my office still feeling somehow responsible for his devastating diagnosis. I didn’t realize then, what he was really tying to say. He was saying, ‘Rabbi if you’re trying to tell me that this was completely random, that I did nothing to deserve it, then you’re telling me that nothing I do matters because nothing I did mattered.’ I wasn’t listening to what he was trying to teach me. He was trying to say ‘Rabbi, I appreciate your trying to salvage God’s being on my side – and not the deliverer of this terminal illness – but that’s not necessary. And, in fact, it’s unhelpful. Because the brilliant nuance about monotheism is that the same God whose world afflicts can heal, and that when the cause of my troubles is located within me, then I am empowered to put things right.’
When calamity strikes, it is easy to feel singled out by fate. Many of us naturally do feel this way. But the High Holidays message of freedom and responsibility, a focus on “What then shall I do” eases us from blame to penitence, from tragic victim-hood to transforming a stumbling block into a stepping stone. Ever since Abraham, our people has by and large embraced this culture of penitence rather than blame. Even after the Holocaust, survivors sought to affirm life rather than remember death. They built schools, not museums. They built communities, not memorials. They encouraged their followers to marry and have children, not only to grieve.
I read a story earlier this year about a patient who undergoes a test in a doctor’s office is running on a treadmill. He asks the doctor, ‘What are you testing, how fast I can go, or how long I can keep running?’ The doctor says neither. What I am testing is how long it takes, when you’re finished, for your pulse to return to normal.’ From this we learn, that our health isn’t measured by our strength or our endurance, but by our ability to recover.
Throughout our people’s history, suffering was an urge toward renewal. We have survived, recovered, and turned tragedy into creativity time and again.
The re-establishment of our people in their historic homeland, is of course, the most potent illustration of a national ‘what then shall I do’ response to the decimation of European Jewry in the Holocaust. It is about our people’s re-entry into history as subject rather than as objects of contempt for the prior two millennia. This summer’s painful war with Hezbolla has served to teach us that the war for Israel’s existence that began back in 1948 has not ended.
It continues unabated not only on Israel’s borders, but on college campuses, in European academies and cocktail parties, and on the pages of modern-day sequels of the bestselling Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Becoming a subject of history, more than just an object of history, is not so simple. The world seems unwilling to permit such a complete transition from one to the other – so we retain elements of both.
I recently had a frank conversation with a Muslim Imam who challenged, ‘You can’t keep fighting against ridiculously implausible odds forever. You can’t kill all your enemies.’ Our enemies want us to despair. They want us to be practical. And this is precisely where they don’t understand Judaism’s repudiation of tragedy. They want Israel’s existence to be more than a flawed experience of twentieth century statecraft. They want Israel’s existence and destruction to be understood as a fated tragedy. And this is just where they get it wrong. They focus on a final ending, a destined, determined solution. And Judaism’s repudiation of tragedy is all about setting aside destined endings and focusing on present challenges and opportunities. We don’t ignore where we’re headed, to do so would be entirely irresponsible. But we don’t let where we’re headed weaken our capacity to be at our best, even to surpass it, thereby perhaps altering where we’ll be heading as a result.
And yet, life is never so simple. We can’t all be subjects of our personal life histories like Abraham was. But we can matter nonetheless. Some years ago I saw the film About Schmidt in which a Jack Nicholson plays a 66-year old retired insurance salesman from Omaha who, following his wife’s death and an estranged relationship with his daughter, is forced to confront the meaninglessness of his life. The one positive thing Schmidt does in retirement is adopt a 6-year-old Tanzanian child, Ngudu, by sending him a monthly check and note about himself. Near the end of the film, Schmidt is overcome by a sense of failure – with life having dealt him one disappointment after another – when he receives a note from Tanzania and the nun who is looking after Ngudu. Inside is a drawing showing two stick figures, representing the boy and Schmidt. They are holding hands and the sun is shining. As Schmidt realizes that he has done some small good with his life, he begins to weep – overwhelmed by the good he might have done but did not, and by the single act of charity he might not have done but did. The films daring assertion: a single moment can retroactively flood an entire life with purpose.
The one reality that always trumps free agency is the inevitability of death. I had a thoughtful conversation about mortality with a Bat Mitzvah student early this year. In the speech she was preparing, she remarked that eating from the forbidden fruit was a sin against God. I said, ‘Was it really?’ We wondered together, ‘What if we consider Adam and Eve’s decision to eat the fruit to be their first exercise in free will, but not see it negatively?’ The punishment God promises is ‘on the day you eat from that tree, you shall die’ but this is not literally what happens to Adam and Eve. Instead, since they go on to have kids and life a good while longer, it is understood to mean – on the day you eat from the fruit you will become mortal – i.e. you will start aging, grow old and eventually die. Until then, they lived in paradise and eternity. Put differently, God in effect says oh-so-subtly, ‘On the day you first elect to exercise your free will, you will simultaneously become mortal and begin living in this world. I had never before noticed, but the text is saying that free choice and mortality are coterminous. And one more thing, we concluded, since freedom enables partnership with God, it not only is not seen as a sin, it actually signals the first use of a gift with which we can make ourselves partners with God.
The same passage is read so differently by Christians. For them it testifies to our inherent condition as sinners, from which we require redemptive grace. For a Judaism that champions freedom and its responsibilities, it introduces us to the divine gift that launches the possibility for partnership.
I find it interesting that the bible does not continuously point to a futuristic redemptive return to the Garden of Eden. The prophets construct an entirely new vision for a messianic dream. Perfect paradise was the place from which freedom sprung, but we rarely hear of it again. This offers yet another illustration that Judaism is less concerned with distant destinies than with life’s current opportunities.
There is one additional dimension of Greek tragedy that Judaism assiduously avoids. Tragedy is manifested not only by an absence of control over our destiny, but also when a hero’s flaw leads to his undoing. If freedom’s responsibilities to contour our future and our past are our strength, we need to take precautions that this not become our undoing. How can it? When we assume too much responsibility – when we exhibit hubrus.
The Achilles heel is the illusion that we have more power than we do, the illusion that we hold all the cards. There is such a thing as a neurosis of blaming ourselves for the sins committed by others. Sometimes it is really just about them. The Zionist thinker Ahad Haam once wrote, “The most dangerous thing for an individual or a nation is to plead guilty to imaginary sins.” Too many want us to plead guilty to imaginary sins. To be sure, Israel’s soldiers are not all saints, her leaders do make decisions that are unwise, and it is our duty to own up to these responsibilities. But that sense of ‘responsibility ownership’ should be shared by our accusers.
When I say the Aleynu prayer expressing the hope that all people will come to acknowledge our God and God’s ways, I am not saying I want everybody to become Jewish. What I am saying is that I dream of a day when all people will assume responsibility for their actions, when all people can know the dignity that comes from knowing – on the one hand, the sting of having a hand in giving rise to their predicament, and on the other hand, thereby having it within themselves to put things right. I dream of a day when the world will be filled with penitential cultures and rid of blame cultures. This is what it means to be ‘a light unto the nations’ – if we can become more responsible, we can grant others the space to do so too. We hardly hold a monopoly on change.
And if we ever doubted the impact we can have on others – not killers but those who are genuinely interested in the exchange of ideas – I recall a talk Harold Kushner once gave to a gathering of teachers. “You will read a magazine article about someone who came from the most unpromising of circumstances who goes on to become a success and a role model, an outstanding athlete, a doctor or a nurse, an effective politician. The interviewer will ask, How did you do it? And the answer will always begin with the same four words: There was this teacher…” Somewhere along the line, a teacher saw a spark of promise in a student, lent the student books, bought the student meals, gave him or her the message, You can make something of yourself. As I read those articles, I often wish the interviewer would ask a follow-up question: Did you ever go back and tell that teacher what her intervention meant to you? For every student who actually bothers to go back and tell a teacher “You changed my life” there may be hundreds who could do so. We never know when we will plant a seed that may open up for somebody a whole energy source they never before were able to tap.
The New York Times carried a fascinating article earlier this year about a two thousand year old archeological find – a jug atop Massada containing date-palm seeds. The find itself was not altogether unusual. But what verges on miraculous is the fact that these carbon dated 2000 year old seeds, have actually sprouted forth a nearly two foot high date palm plant that scientists are calling ‘little methusela.’ Lotus seeds of about 1,200 years of age have sprouted in China, but never before have botanists ever been able to harvest seeds that are 2000 years old. This is such a powerful symbol for Israel’s rebirth after 2000 years of exile. Back then, somebody preserved those seeds to be unearthed and replanted in a distant time. What kind of seeds will you plant this year? Even in a world with an unfriendly future, we never know how what we do will matter. The only thing we do know is that our fate is not sealed. Our task is to step up to the moment and execute at our best. One of my favorite anonymous sayings is “I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catchers mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back.”
Investigative author Edwin Black tells a story about a terrifying darkness in a boxcar of a train swaying rhythmically, speeding toward Treblinka in August of 1943. Edjya, a thin 13-year-old girl, sat on the boxcar floor, listening to the thudding rail ties, trying to understand the scream of terrible events befalling her family. Her mother nudged her and whispered, “You’re a skinny one, Edjya, always a skinny one” as they eyed the tiny vent at the top of the boxcar. “Quickly, up there,” she said. “Edjya, go through.” Her mother repeated, “Quickly, I said. We’ll let you down slowly. Hold on to the towel.”
Edjya inched out of the vent and down the horizontal wooden slats of the boxcar’s exterior until her elbows and then finally her wrists cleared. With one foot resting on an exterior bolt, and hanging on to the towel against the wind, Edjya cried out, “Take me back up, I can’t do it.” “Get ready,” her mother instructed. “When you hit the ground, run Edjya, run. And tell someone. Tell someone what is happening.” Edjya jumped. On the ground, she was shot by malitiamen and buried in a snowy mass grave. But when Hershel, a teenage Polish forest fighter, came upon her leg protruding from the snow, he pulled her out to life and survival. Edjya and Hershel are Edwin Black’s parents.
Our future is uncertain. Thanks to the historic events of 1948 we are not hanging on to a speeding train by our fingernails, torn between an awful destination ahead and an uncertain fate below. But just because we don’t have to jump into hostile woods, this does not mean that Roee Klien didn’t have to jump upon an exploding grenade. We cannot know what tomorrow will bring. But thanks to Abraham’s penchant for the proactive and the nature of the covenant our God established with him, we can know what we’ll bring to tomorrow.