Walking into History

I walked out on Jewish history this summer.  Or that’s how I felt as I sat on a bus, heading from Jerusalem to Ben Gurion airport, on Sunday morning July 16.  The war in Lebanon was less than a week old, filling Israel with its own special atmosphere of crisis and calm.  As scary as the war was, just being there, terrified and calm all at once, I felt a part of the country in some deep way, and now I was abandoning ship, running home for the comfort of family and the good old USA, where people like us actually think that the biggest thing they need to think about is deciding between Harvard or Yale for their brilliant child.  Even though a wise Israeli consoled me when I called to say goodbye and told him of my guilt at leaving, I haven’t been able to shake that sense that I walked out on history.  My own personal struggles aside, I want to discuss with you today what it means to walk into history.  Because that is what each of us must grapple with, both for our lives but more importantly our people, something bigger than us, something that nourishes us as much as we nourish it. 

A friend told me that one Friday she made a huge amount of food for Shabbat, even though most of her family wouldn’t be home for the weekend.  She just felt like cooking a lot.  So 5 minutes before Shabbat started, in walked her younger son unexpectedly from NYC.  And at 11 pm her medical resident son walked over from the hospital, where he was on call for the weekend.  So all the chicken and turkey she’d prepared went to the right sources after all.  Supply creates demand, not the other way around.  And that’s a roundabout way of saying that we create history by walking into it, as much as history creates us.

 

We tend to think that RH focuses on the changes that happen to us, but that’s not quite right.  The things that happen to us come at the end of some process, or maybe in the middle.  First, we change history; second:  in the process of changing history, we change.  These happenings occur dialectically throughout our life, with each constantly acting upon the other. 

[Cf. Isaiah Berlin on Chaim Weizmann:  we needn’t be great men; needn’t think messianically about the import of our lives—that’s the point of peoplehood—we can be bigger than we are by acting in/through a group]

             

Walking into history and changing it, and thereby changing ourselves, rests on two key assumptions.  First, that history changes—it’s open rather than predetermined.  We don’t believe as Achilles did that he was doomed to die in battle because that was his tragic destiny.  In 1897, when the Jewish people numbered some ten million, mostly poor, physically scattered,  politically disorganized souls, Herzl wrote in his diary at the 1st Zionist Congress:  “today we created the Jewish state.  It will come into being 50 years from now.”  He was right; history remains open to us as it was for him to make in it something new.  We sound the shofar—tekiah, shevarim, teruah—symbolizing that our lives run not according to fate, but beat to the call to return, to walk back into history.  Tekiah awakens us to history and gets our attention.  Shevarim—the broken sounds embody the brokenness of history as it is as opposed to how it ought to be.  Teruah give us marching orders, the small steps that show us how to walk into history, not as fantasists and utopians, but as dreamers and planners and workers committed to changing the world.  The last tekiah sounds a note of triumph:  we can change history, if we dare to try. 

             

The first assumption—that history remains open to us and to our efforts to change it—rests on a deeper psychological and emotional truth:  tikvah.  We need hope—the conviction that we can change the world, that change remains within our grasp.  That is part of the sheer beauty of the YN:  we look into our lives for the sake of human change, with real hope for ourselves and for the world. 

             

We find models of hope, and models of history’s openness to us, all around us in Jewish life, in our prayers and in our Torah texts.  Abraham, the subject of the Torah reading on RH, highlights change as a necessity for life.  The generation of Babel thought it could unify itself, use its technology to create a perfect society symbolized by its perfect tower, and keep life static and sane.  A on the other hand embraces change:  leaving the familiar behind for God and a new people.  He understands that human life is about change, not all of it natural—much of it the most important part is about consciousness and will.  He circumcises himself, he changes his body.  His body may have been perfect as it was, but that wasn’t the point of human life—change was the point, trying to be something higher than just another animate life form. 

             

Even though we talk a lot about continuity in Jewish life, keeping faith with our forefathers and mothers, continuity often looks a lot like discontinuity.  The text I made for you, taken from the Mishnah RH, (M. Rosh Hashanah 4) discusses practical and symbolic issues that confronted the Jews of the immediate post-Temple period.  Practices previously observed only in the Temple when holy days fell on Shabbat, like blowing shofar or bentching lulav and etrog, what would become of them?  Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai legislated these practices, delicately shifting previous lines separating the temple/non-temple precincts, and in the process both preserving memory of the temple while enabling a post-temple Judaism to emerge.  At heart these leaders remained hopeful that Jews and Judaism could survive, they made history by making it so. 

             

Judaism contains the secret to us possessing the hope that we need to dare to walk into history and to change it.  The key is seeing yourself as if you were slaves in Egypt, to quote the immortal line from the Haggadah, to see you history and destiny tied to the history and destiny of the Jewish people, as the Rambam taught.  [mention text handout]  Ask not, said President Kennedy.  Taking responsibility for one’s community gives one the hope that walking into history means walking alongside of one’s fellows, together trying to change the world.  What else can it mean when the Jews of Persia recommitted themselves to Jewish life after Haman, the Jews of the Diaspora the same after the Temple, the Jews of Spain when they found themselves spread out throughout the Mediterranean, the Jews of Europe after the pogroms and the Shoah:  we kid ourselves if we think we can survive history by walking out on it.  We may lose our lives but we never lose our hope that things change—history remains open to our efforts. 

             

Now is such a moment in Jewish life—in Diaspora and in Israel too.  “May you strengthen us this day—the prayer HaYom intones—may you bless us this day.”  Rabbi Weiss gave a beautiful perush in which he said that’s what HaYom means to him:  we spend so much time obsessed with past and future that we forget that life consists of millions of present moments—thousands of HaYoms/todays, nows.  Now is the time that Israel needs us, now is the time to hope and believe that we can change Jewish life here and in Israel, through commitment to Jewish life, to Jewish education, thereby changing the course of Jewish history.  Tzedakah—social action; tefillah—Jewish spiritual renewal including study; teshuvah—recommitting one’s most precious resources to Jewish life:  we have so much about which to be hopeful.  History isn’t like the movies; an opportunity arises—if we fail to seize it it may vanish unless we react in time.  Timing is everything in life.  As the Mishnah teaches “Do not say when I have time I will do, lest that time never come.”  There is no time like the present.  HaYom. 

             

Living in the present—believing that history remains open—cherishing our hope; forces us to make distinctions, between dreams and fantasies, between the good and the perfect.  Consider Israel:  most of us want it to be perfect—a light unto Jews and gentiles, as it were.  Most of it want it to be messianic in its perfection, putting an end to anti-Semitism, to the problems of assimilation, etc etc.  Israelis refuse it seems that burden we impose upon it:  they insist that living in history, hoping to change history, means taking responsibility for one’s history, living with a mission and an inability to carry it out perfectly.  We wait for moshiach, in the meantime we live in history, changing it as best as we can.

             

The YN embody that sense of how precious life is precisely because it is so fleeting, so imperfect, so much beyond our control, at least in terms of life and death.  But life isn’t about just nature, about our biological beings defined by our terminal points of birth and death.  We don’t live just according to the cycle of nature; teshuvah = a life lived in history.  We own our lives when we take responsibility for our moral selves, when we see ourselves living in history, receiving it as handed down to us; changing it and passing it on to those who will come after us.  Only by living in time, committing ourselves to the world in time, can we achieve the holiness that comes with making something sacred out of the mundane, the sheer physical dimension of our life. 

             

All of us have dreams, things we dare to hope for, however improbable.  Abraham dared to hope that by walking with God his life would change.  Childless, he dared to dream of life with a child.  He dared to dream what it would be like to pledge his life to something larger than his material, biological needs, what it would be like to dedicate his life to serving God.  Each of us has to find our own way to walk into history, and to change it.  Maybe that’s changing the lives of those around us, of our community.  Maybe that’s through our philanthropy.  Maybe that’s through changing our physical space and moving, or through education, or through political and social action. 

             

At this time of year we study the Rambam’s laws of repentance.  He teaches in the third chapter of that treatise that “One who withdraws from the ways of the community” [comes under the rubric of apostate] even if he commits no transgressions, but disengages from the congregation of Israel: not performing commandments in their midst, not participating in their plight, not fasting on their fasts, but going his own way like one of the gentiles of that land, as if he were not of them. [Such a person] has no share in the world to come.”  Identity involves not just biology, but consent, yoking oneself to the history and destiny of one’s people. 

             

Maimonides was right, in his time and in ours.  The Jewish people—and Judaism, cannot exist without Jews, and Jews cannot exist without Judaism and  the Jewish people.  Our prayer should be for history to remain open, for us to retain the vision and the courage to change it, for us to hang on to the hope that dwelt with Jews always, the hope for lives of freedom and dignity.  This generation of Jews has far more freedom and dignity than any other in Jewish history; yet ironically we need to recapture the hope that our current troubles—whether those of Katyusha rockets or assimilation—can be licked.  There is only one way to beat those challenges:  by banding together and walking into history. 

             

None of us can do this alone.  Jewishness involves our global family, our responsibility for the covenant, which charges us with making this world fit for humans and for God.  We live by the promise that we have a role to play in serving God and bringing this world closer to its promise. 

             

When we live in history, we enlarge the scope of our lives, seeing our existence as meaningful because we act in a 3200 year old drama.  That story gives our life story a transcendent purpose, a pride in what we’ve accomplished, a people that cares for its own and for all of God’s creations.

             

Rabbi Soloveitchik taught that Ancient Israel contained two kinds of groups:  camps and congregations.  People formed camps for negative reasons:  they reflected fear and the need for self-defense.  Congregations grew from visions of a higher life, a better world that could be, a place of love and dignity and justice.  To bring such a world about, we need individuals to share a common past, believe in a common future, and endowed with the courage to work toward such a vision. 

             

Saul Bellow wrote a book some 30 years ago about going To Jerusalem and Back.  Rereading that today fills me with a sense of plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.  Hear his words from 1976, true today as they rang then:  “Life in Israel is far from enviable, yet there is a clear sense of purpose in it.  People are fighting for the society that they have created, and for life and honor.”  And still they fight, imbued still with a sense of purpose:  the freedom of Jews to live in their own country.  The more that we build lives and communities of spiritual intensity and seriously educated Jews, the more Jews will realize that our civilization opens the world for us, providing us with a language and a lense for living life, for building this world, reinforcing the purposefulness that should animate everyone’s life, that vital life force that makes history.

            

God willing I will return to Jerusalem soon, together with my family.  All of us have much work to do wherever we live, changing history, changing ourselves, hoping to face the present with courage and conviction.  I hope that we will all take our places in history.

Today, HaYom.  Shana tovah.