Our Heneini Responses - Rosh Hashanah 5766

Some of you may recall that in early August after an Air France plane crashed, every one of the passengers successfully evacuated.  The swift efficiency with which more than a hundred passengers were able to flee to safety offers an important window into human nature at times of heightened stress and emergency.  Even though we are schooled to believe that panic and chaos reign in emergencies when crowds are subjected to confined quarters, limited visibility, and restricted egress, surprising research seems to suggest just the opposite - that people almost always keep their wits and even elevate their humanity.

Carnegie Mellon professor of social and decision sciences Baruch Fischhoff pointed out in an editorial in the week following the Air France evacuation that it required an extraordinary degree of social coordination - which emerged among a group of strangers with virtually no time to prepare. Once out of the wreckage, they were aided by other strangers who, on the spur of the moment and with no expertise in emergency situations, had pulled off a nearby highway and calmly charged into the scene, despite the risks posed by an exploding plane.

Indeed, the critical first responders in almost any crisis are ordinary citizens whom fate has brought together. In this way, the Air France crash was fundamentally no different from the heroic evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11 or the Madrid Transit system on 3/11. Ordinary people helped out one another.  What professionals and policymakers often call 'panic' is a normal response to stress, which although unpleasant, is typically productive. It focuses people on solving the problem at hand or identifying those among them who can do so. In London in response to July's 7/7 underground terrorist attack, such problem-solving was evident among those who surmised that the darkness in the subway tunnel meant that the third rail posed no risk of electrocution.

When I shared this observation with a group of seniors at 100 Center Street last month, they suggested that the only folks who end up in a state of confused panic are the government officials, and that in predicting a likelihood that we'll panic, they're simply projecting.  

The past year has presented our world with more than its share of large-scale traumatic experiences - tsunamis, terrorist attacks, hurricanes - to test our mettle.     One of the real threats to our wellness and safety is internalizing a belief that we lack the resources to cope, that we are too vulnerable, frail, and fragile to survive what real and present threats have in store.  Policy-makers, political leaders, and media analysts regularly suggest that widespread panic will be the expected response.  They may even feel it is in their interest to opportunistically keep us at a fever pitch - in a state of fear - pliable and responsive to theirs policies, securing their indispensability.

Yet human beings do respond most impressively in crisis.  And it is in 'response' where we find the essential theme, the essential challenge and the essential way of these 10 days that encompass the High Holidays.  Rosh Hashannah launches a 10 day period known in Hebrew as the aseret y'mei teshuva, commonly translated as "the ten days of repentance."  But the word teshuva doesn't only mean to repent, to regret, or to redress wrongs.  The word teshuva can also mean 'response.'  Often we see teshuva as a profoundly internal turning.  But it can also be understood as framing our response to external stimuli and events. 

The first question ever asked in the Bible, when God, in the Garden of Eden asks "Wherefore art thou?" invites a response.  In turn, twenty chapters later, we hear that response with the word Heneini - literally rendered "I am here," but really meaning "I am fully present in mind, heart, and soul." Abraham is the first among many biblical figures to say Heneini, but I never noticed until this year that Abraham actually responds Heneini in the story of the Binding of Isaac three different times.  The three times Heneini is uttered by Abraham offer three paradigms for how we might better appreciate and appraise our capacity to respond to emergencies, to personal stresses and challenges, as well as to opportunities to be true to our best in responding to everyday encounters. 

The best known utterance of Heneini by Abraham is the one he utters in the moment of gravest danger - when he is a hair's-breath away from sacrificing Isaac on the altar.  This Heneini  symbolizes our impressive response to crises - our keeping composure in emergencies, when immediate life-saving action is required. And as studies suggest, not only don't we lose our heads, but the stress level actually makes us more productive - so it's no surprise that Abraham not only spares Isaac, but introduces the ram's horn to Rosh Hashanah - which throughout history and today awakens us to teshuva - to this season's productive responses to how we've been living our lives.  The first Heneini reminds us that in being hard-wired to keep our heads in emergencies, not only should enable us to worry less about the likelihood of panic, but also that intense focus might just yield something new and important than steady calm thinking never would have.

Thankfully, most of our lives aren't spent ricocheting from one emergency to another.  But even when not being forced to respond instantaneously, there are still mounting difficulties, escalating anxieties that challenge us - times when we feel overwhelmed by accumulating tensions in our relationships with friends, colleagues, even family.

A couple of months back I officiated at a funeral, meeting a cousin of the deceased at the graveside service who proceeded to share with me - matter of factly - that she had not spoken to three of her four children in more than twenty years and that she didn't even know the names of her grandchildren - some of whom she worried would arrive shortly at the funeral that afternoon.  I could hardly believe my ears.  After gently probing it became clear to me that she had no interest in repairing these outrageously broken, totally destroyed parent-child relationships.  The very same day, I found myself sipping a cup of coffee on Harvard Street, overhearing the young woman seated at an adjacent table leave the following message from her cellphone on the voicemail of her husband.  "Joe, it's me.  I want a divorce.  Bye."  Again in disbelief, I turned around to express my combination of alarm and sympathy, but this twenty-something woman was already onto another call for some casual chit-chat with a friend.  What struck about both of these travesties was the casual, almost pedestrian manner in which these two very different women had become so completely indifferent to these anguish-producing traumas.

For most of us coping with the stress and loss that the coming year has in store for us makes us want another kind of response.  And this is where the second Heneini holds important guidance.  For us, the second example when Abraham responds Heneini comes when first called by God to bring Isaac on the three-day journey to the mountaintop.  The opening verse from Chapter 22 reads "vayhi achar hadvarim ha-eileh, v'ha-elohim nisa et Avraham"  "And it came to pass after these things, that God tried Abraham, "vayomer alov Avraham, vayomer heneini" God called to him 'Abraham' and Abraham answered 'Here I am.'"  In this context, Abraham's Heneini is associated with a fitful effort to relate to God in the wake of God's vexing request to bring Isaac up as an offering.  The key word that influences this heneini is the word 'nisa' which is generally rendered God 'tried or tested' Abraham.  But 'nisa' can also mean 'to exert effort, to try very hard.'  This second kind of response is characterized less by our acumen with emergencies, than by our effort, determination, and sheer exertion in struggling to bring troubling matters to God.  In this effortful struggle to bring our troubles to God, we may find that the effort is as important as the results.   

One of the most important books I read over the summer was called Difficult Conversations: How to discuss what matters most by three members of the Harvard Negotiating Project.  One of the surprising points the authors make is that when faced with an argument that seems hopelessly deadlocked, trying to listen, truly striving to empathize with the person with whom we are fighting, actually makes a greater impression on them than actually being able to empathize.  They are more moved by our genuine, sincere, heartfelt struggle to understand things from their point of view than they would be if we actually did.  If trying matters more than actual results in this way, then Abraham's second Heneini - when the context is 'nisa' one of effortful exertion to connect with God.  If the first Heneini was about keeping our heads under pressure, the second Heneini is about putting our hearts into trying especially hard to bring our troubles to God.  And the effort, may matter even more than the apparent results. 

Religion has offered human beings a response to external stimuli from the beginning of time.  Originally, that response was as basic as making sense of sunsets and changes in the seasons.  Much later, when God and God's call became far more personal, religion's response mattered so much more.

Once upon a time, according to the historian's who wrote The Human Web, a volume that seeks to explain how the human species was able to survive and emerge on the planet to a position of influence, religion was for mystery, a category for the incomprehensible.  According to these secular scholars, religion followed the three earliest skills - the ability to use fire, to use sticks and stones as tools, and pre-language communication - among the first four things preventing our primordial distant ancestors from dying out.  For early cavemen and women, religion was simply a place to park mystery, a sterile response to the incomprehensible.

And, the book suggests, with the passage of time, several millennia later, as empires formed from clans, religion underwent a thorough overhaul as a concept in the world.  It began to be taken much more personally.  It was no longer a matter of pouring over some periodic table of the world's unknowable facts, religion started to matter to people's personal destiny and begins to matter with a whole new intensity.  Now more than a theoretical construct, my fate and destiny, any hopes for salvation were wrapped up in it.  Escalating stakes in this kind of response, could not be higher.

A closer to home analogy between primitive religion and later personal religion, I could imagine watching a sporting event being played in some remote part of the planet. Everything about the sport and the teams would be entirely foreign.  Yet I'd be reassured to know that play had proceeded by the rules, competition had been strong, and that a victor had rightly emerged.  Compare that highly theoretical distance, with how you and I felt watching the Red Sox and Patriots win their world championships this year.  The emotional attachment and levels of engagement are entirely incomparable.  So too, primitive religion was kept at abstract distance, while personal religion emerged as the ruling passion of people's lives. 

Although the book doesn't make this point, I would suggest that this revolution into the person significance of religion corresponds to an emergence of a personal God.  This two-way dialectic was mutually reinforcing.  Judaism, in later introducing ethical monotheism, accelerates dramatically that personalized passion of God for relationships with each of us, awaiting our echo of Heneini. 

Even as I have always found the story of the Binding of Isaac to be a difficult and morally obtuse narrative, it is possible to suggest that God is trying to convey the extent of God's desire for a most intense bond - one that would mirror the bond between a parent and a child.  Perhaps this is all God seeks to demonstrate.  He never intends to permit Abraham to take his son's life.  This is not a story about the fate of Isaac.  It is a story about the level of intensity God brings to His personal and passionate commitment to a relationship with Abraham, and, by extension to relationships with each of us.   God is 'nisa' exerting effort, trying with determined and genuine effort to bring to us His relationship and resources. 

Where, you might ask, is the evidence of God's deep personal interest in my life? That the Bible and the prayerbook claim it does not mean that I experience it, that it's personally credible - enabling me to exert the effort to be able to sincerely respond Heneini. 

Permit me to invite an exercise that I find so compelling, that I ask you to engage in it every year at this time.  If somebody would have told you a year ago, the following things are going to happen to you in the year to come.  A loved one will pass away.  A life-long friend will be forced to face a relapse of a crippling illness.  You'll suffer a reversal in your professional stature, maybe even losing your job.  An important friendship will turn sour.  You're marriage will find itself on shakier ground.  If someone were to have said these things will happen, you would have said, "Please don't let those things happen. I can't handle all that. I won't survive it."  And yet those things did happen and you're still here.  The question worth pondering - and each of us ponders to our own conclusions - is "whence came the resources to cope, to survive, to emerge in tact from those painful reversals?" Where did I get the resources that I didn't think I had, resources that I may in fact NOT have had, until circumstances forced me to have to produce them?  My answer is those resources come from God - a God who is zochraynu l'chayim, who remembers us unto life - no matter what the past year had in store.

And here's a key point - believing that God was helped to provide us with what we needed in the immediate past, admits of a certain likelihood that God will likewise deliver for us in the near future too.

Just as looking back, "achar hadvarim ha-eileh, v'ha-elohim nisa" - to the events of our recent past and appreciating how hard God has tried to offer resources for us - so too our Heneini response finds the effort and exertion of 'nisa' striving in a determined way to bring our challenges to God, may matter as much, if not more, than believing that God has heard and delivered on them.  The second Heneini is about heart, and concerted, ongoing sweat in trying to make our relationship with God matter.  And the effort, even for a God with whom we're arguing, angry, or fighting, impresses more than we may think. 

The third and final time when Abraham responds Heneini, follows Isaac's asking a question - apparently having become aware that he may be the offering on the altar.  This Heneini is all about being truly present for Isaac.  Abraham's response predicts the actual future - he foretells the name he will give to the place atop the mountain when he states "Elohim yireh" God will provide the offering, with Abraham's later naming the mountaintop "adonai yeraeh" the place where God provides.

In this response, this Heneini, Abraham listens exceedingly well to Isaac's anxiety.  He is present for his son - he hears between the lines how his son is horrified by the fact that his father not only is going forward to offering him on the altar, but that his father has risen early and saddled his own donkey, signifying an extra-eagerness for such a mission.  Which came first, Abraham's Heneini response alluding to the future name of the mountaintop, or Abraham's later post-traumatic naming of the mountaintop itself?  Abraham's Heneini response came first of course.  Abraham was simply keeping his word - the word he had framed as part of a meticulously crafted response to his terrified son.  If the first Heneini was about responding by keeping our heads, the second about committing our hearts, then this third and final Heneini is about being fully present with our souls.  We do this by listening from the inside out, with uncommon care and uncompromised attention. 

One of the most important lessons that I learned from reading Difficult Conversations, is a lesson that has proved staggeringly reliable - the best way to get somebody who refuses to listen to me to begin to do so, is not for me to speak slower, talk louder, or keep repeating myself.  It is for me to listen better to them!  It is an amazing phenomenon and it works every time.  If and only if, they begin to genuinely feel I am listening to them, they axiomatically begin listening to me.  Listening well is contagious.  It instinctively begets better listening in the other direction. 

Last year at a conference for rabbis and educators, I found myself in dialogue with a more liberal colleague who had, to use her term, completely disengaged from Israel, finding her and her congregants increasingly uninterested in talking about Israel, traveling to Israel, exerting efforts to advance peace between Israel and the Palestinians - all of this since the failure of Oslo.  Of course for me, and many of us at KI, the intensity of our engagement during those months was just the opposite - our level of engagement had rarely been stronger in recent memory.  Instead of my attacking or challenging my colleague and entering the usual fruitless back and forth, I decided to try and listen to her better.  I asked her how it must feel, given how central Israel to her life as a Jewish leader, to grow increasingly disengaged?  How did she feel about folks like me whose intense engagement must drive her crazy?  What I heard was remarkably powerful, fresh, and sincere.  By the time we parted, a Heneini soulful exchange had produced a lot to weigh and consider that neither of us had imagined we'd hear.

Such soulful exchanges aren't nearly as common as we might expect.  Emerson once touched on this when he wrote about one of the reasons he opted out of a life in the Ministry.  "It is the best part of the man, I sometimes think, that revolts most against his being a Minister.  His good revolts from 'official goodness.'"

Our community is blessed with many who are accomplished at what you do - physicians, attorneys, academicians, businesswomen and men, Jewish communal professionals.  We all know the difference between doing our job and stepping beyond it, between acts of "official goodness" and times when you've put something much more - an emotional depth and soulful sincerity to a client, or patient, or customer, or student.

It is at such times when you bring your best to another, that you get to see then when they're at their best. Whether at times of distress or delight, whether at key milestones or philosophical exchanges, you become privileged to share uncommonly special, soul-dilating moments with people.   On such occasions, fresh insights and perspectives become available. Because you're present - open-eared and open-souled - such receptivity favors serendipity.

But another reason why we don't engage people at this level has less to do with our capacity to focus than our desire to focus.  Perhaps the person doesn't deserve our best.  Perhaps they deserve much less.  Perhaps we are convinced that its not in our interest to be present for someone who has become our adversary, someone who represents a threat to our self-esteem.  Why in the world would I consider trying to help somebody who so delighted in hurting me?

As I've sought to argue in past years, living well is not necessarily achieved by enforcing laws of fairness, rules of right and wrong.  We sometimes need to let go as a favor to ourselves, not as an exculpation of another.  After all, at the core of the response Heneini is a suffix that is in the first person singular.  If our goal is to be more stress-free, perhaps we should be less attentive to an approach that will be strictly just, and more attentive to one that will make our path smoother and kinder.  In voting for kindness, we also recall that each Heneini is a response to God who is prompting us to be more God-like. 

All three Heneinis offer responses that should inspire confidence in our capacity to live well no matter what the New Year has in store.  The first Heneini reminds us that we're capable and productive under sudden pressure.  The second Heneini teaches us that effortful exertion in bringing ourselves to God, like we are doing here today, payoff in the 'way of the journey' mattering more than the destination.  And the third Heneini models the transformative power of listening, of truly being present and being at our best.

As one of the quotations in this years booklet of reflections and prayers at your seats reads: "Every tomorrow has two handles.  We can take hold of it by the handle of anxiety or by the handle of faith."  Faith in ourselves, faith in our God, and faith in one another.

Abraham's three Heneinis collectively help make Rosh Hashanah about our rebalancing response to a year now behind us, poised and unafraid of a year that awaits.  May we enjoy the presence of mind, heart, and soul to mine for and multiply blessings in this year as well.