We come together each year on this holiest night, all too mindful that the answer to the question  “who shall live and who shall die; who shall heal, and who shall take ill” is often so completely out of our hands.  The Unetane Tokef prayer asserts that so much of what will happen to us this year is fated.  But its message is also an empowering one.  It is through our response to whatever happens, emboldened by repentance, prayer, and righteous generosity – consisting of a serious conversation with ourselves, with God, and with each other - we can significantly effect the impact of whatever is in store for us in the coming year.

If we ever doubted the potency of our capacity to really do this, the case of Martha Stewart from earlier this year offers a classic illustration of just how impactful our response can be.  Regardless of the severity of her actual crime, it was the cover-up that followed that made her look ten times worse.  If it is always possible to respond to a poor judgment or a moment of weakness, by misbehaving in ways that make it ten times worse, then the flipside is also true. The potency of a reparative response is, one characterized by Teshuva, Tefillah, and Tzedakah will, instead of making the cover-up worse than the crime, render a moment of weakness or misguided judgment a revealing time for contrition, humility, and glowing humanity.

So often rabbis only talk about coping with bad things that happen to us.  I did so myself last week on Rosh Hashannah.  But, in reality, the good things that will happen to us are often just as much out of our hands, as the bad things are.   One reason why rabbis focus more on calamity and less on celebration, other than the fact that coping with good news is a lot easier than coping with bad news, is because we see ourselves, often rightfully so, as deserving the good that comes our way.  We work hard; we persevere, so that when good things happen to us, we’ve earned them.  But nobody earns or deserves bad things.  Nobody sees themselves as bad, wicked people.  The Talmud teaches “eyn adam masim atzmo rasha” “it is not human nature to see ourselves or our causes as wicked.  Not even Hitler or Stalin believed they were evil.  As far as they were concerned, how ever objectively evil they were, they saw themselves as engaged in redemptive pursuits.

Yet if we can shift our perspective about how we look upon everything that happens to us in the coming year – the bad and the good - then Yom Kippur’s message is that we can have a significant impact on how the coming year will be for us by way of our response.

A couple of weeks ago at a Kehillath Israel Board of Trustees meeting, we reflected on why, given how profoundly helpful and liberating an experience doing Teshuva can be, many of us seem to have such a hard time doing it each year.  Trustees offered rich insights, personal and philosophic in nature as they always do.  One in particular made a fascinating observation in which she suggested that one reason why we find it so hard to change for the better by doing Teshuva is because we’re not exactly sure how.  If we had a clearer roadmap or user manual to help provide the resources and the way of going about it, more of us might feel less tentative about doing it.

I think it is a mistake to believe that, just like success in anything else, if we simply have to try harder, if we are more focused and determined, then we’ll succeed in doing Teshuva this year.   Some think that if they can seize enough control of their lives, they’ll guarantee that they’ll be on top of the world this year.  Type A personalities in particular, are prone to this belief.  You know the type of person who is hard driving, has to succeed, do three things at a time person.  The kind of person for whom the ‘close door’ button in elevators was invented.

The idea that you can make your own luck in this world is popular among lucky people.  But unlucky people know better.  The whole notion that you get what you deserve in life if you work for it, is fine if you work in a place where it makes a difference.  But you can be very industrious in a relocation camp in the Sudan and you’ll still die of dysentery at age seven or eight.

What is vital is not more determination this time around.  What is necessary is a more helpful climate, a more advantageous environment that puts us in a more beneficial posture to maximize our response.  Teshuva, after all is a word which can be rendered to mean, not ‘repentance’ or ‘return’ but ‘response.’  By adjusting our perspectives toward both the good and the bad that happens to us, we can position ourselves to better respond – taking back control and making the coming year the best one yet.

Yom Kippur’s classic biblical text is the book of Jonah, read in synagogue tomorrow afternoon.  Although tradition says that it is a book about Teshuva, it is possible to suggest that it really is not about repentance, because the people in the book don’t really repent.  In some sense, Jonah is actually about God’s forgiveness even without repentance.  The city of Nineveh is given a prophet, even though they haven’t deserved it.  Jonah is saved from the sea, even though he hasn’t deserved it.  The Ninevites only repent because they don’t want to be destroyed.  That’s hardly true repentance.  And they get saved.  In some way, we can read the book of Jonah as being about undeserved grace.  God saves you, even sometimes when you don’t deserve it.

 The truth is that we are the luckiest Jews who have ever lived -  financially, politically, in every way.  If you live already in the second half of the twentieth century, after the invention of antibiotics, that alone puts you in the 96th percentile.  Indoor plumbing, dentistry, air conditioning, heating, living in America and not in Somalia.  Is this because we deserve it?  Are we better than all those previous generations?  No, of course not.  Part of what the immediate reflex of almost any prayer in the modern period should be is a tremendous gratitude for all that we have.

 The problem is that people tend to focus on what they deserve, instead of on what they’ve been given.  If you don’t get your seat for Kol Nidre services, you’re angry because you deserve it, you’ve sat in it for years, and you’ve paid for it.  But in the meantime, you’ve been given this tremendous shower of blessing in this life and you don’t spend your time saying “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

 Even the things we take pride in.  Why take pride that you’re smart.  You didn’t earn your IQ points.  They were a gift, entirely a gift.  Or if you’re handsome, or pretty, or talented.  That was given to you.  You can be proud that you’ve developed it and you should be.  But the lion’s share of what we have in this world is a complete and total gift.  The parents that you have, the home that you grew up in, the fact that you were raised for most of your early years when you were totally helpless.  Reorienting ourselves to appreciate that we are just unbelievably fortunate.  The blessings we enjoy in this day and age and in this country are just endless.
This is not to say that life isn’t full of pain and disappointment, but not orienting ourselves to see these blessings can lead us to convince ourselves that it only contains pain and disappointment.   Appreciating the blessings we have that are totally beyond our control is a first vital step toward affecting the climate out of which we are able to maximize our response.

The other step, of course, applies to how we see bad things that happen to us. In spite of the fact that we don’t see ourselves as earning the bad things that invade our lives, it is nevertheless so often the case that when terrible things happen to us, we are tempted to believe that we did something to deserve them.  I’ll never forget a visit with a congregant from my prior congregation who, in the prime of his life, had suddenly been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he had less than a year to live.  “I’ve tried to live a good life, to be a good person.  I don’t understand what I did to deserve this.”  No matter how forcefully I argued that he should not see himself as being punished, no matter how determined I was as his rabbi to convince him that God was not decreeing this illness because of some past sin in Robert’s life, I could not convince him and he remained resolute that somehow God had done this to him for a reason.

This past summer I even gave a sermon from this pulpit, recalling that conversation with Robert, in which I sought to disassociate the second paragraph of the Shema theology - that sins are always punished and mitzvoth dependably rewarded - lest we believe that every painful misfortune happens to us because we did something wrong.  But in all the preaching and teaching and counseling I have been doing over the years to bring this point home, I now realize that I had been missing Robert’s point.  He wasn’t trying to insist that he had done something bad once upon a time as a way of deserving such a punishment.  He wasn’t trying to paint himself as guilty, adding ‘Divine insult to injury.’  What he was doing was trying to claim a measure of empowerment in his world that had been turned upside down.

I now realize that there seems to be a corner of our minds that insists on making sense of a world –even when the world doesn’t make sense.  We seem more comfortable in a world of cause and effect, a world in which there is a reason for everything, than we are in a world where things “just happen.”

Elaine Pagels in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpant, explains our tendency to blame ourselves for the bad things that happen to us saying, “many people would rather feel guilty than feel powerless.”  We are even eager to blame ourselves for our misfortunes as a way of reassuring ourselves that some sense of order, or contingency, or causality exists in the world.   A controlled world is less terrifying than a chaotic one.

All the time that I had continued to insist how wrong it was for Robert to see himself as deserving such a sudden, terminal diagnosis, I was unwittingly, also suggesting to him something scary and hard to swallow.   In a world where things just happen, I was undermining his faith in being rewarded for responding nobly.  He could decide instantaneously to spend every waking hour with his wife and children and totally realigning his priorities for the next six months, but be hit by a bus tomorrow, because just as his illness made no sense, so too, by implication, the sincerity of his response would make no sense.   Only now, upon reflecting further, have I come to terms with the fact that what I saw as theologically preposterous, was for him, emotionally agreeable.

When we frame our response to life’s unexpected blows, as we regroup and resolve to shape a better tomorrow in the wake of what happened to us yesterday, we feel reassured by a world that contains accountability.  Acting with determination and tenacity feels more satisfying when we believe in a payoff for courageous conduct.  A world of control where we feel a tiny bit guilty for misfortune, is an empowering world, that inspires a more resolute conviction that we are able to chart and make real our own recovery and renewal.  Some of you may remember a television series from the 1960s, Get Smart.  If you do, you might recall that the names for the two competing secret agents groups were “chaos” and “control.”  Maxwell Smart was part of ‘control’ cast as the good guys, which lends a surprisingly serious side to this otherwise hilariously silly show.

 As long as we don’t take such guilt too personally and as long as we don’t take it too far, deluding ourselves into believing that we have total responsibility for anything someone else does to us – including our enemies - then I have come to appreciate that the prayer book wouldn’t call Yom Kippur’s confessional prayer “Ashamnu”, literally meaning “we are guilty”,  if a touch of empowering guilt were not helpful for us.

Armed with a shift in perspective, concerning the good things and the bad things that happen to us that are beyond our control, emerging more appreciative of the good and more empowered in the wake of the bad, we are best positioned to maximize the effectiveness of our response.

The other vital adjustment we need to make is in our ‘response expectations.’  By shifting and recalibrating them, I am not trying to align us with lower standards for change.  A colleague tells of giving a sermon once pointing to the inconsistency of people who come to synagogue on special occasions but don’t come every week to Shabbat services. He called it the most effective sermon he ever gave.  People listened to him and stopped coming on special occasions.   I am not trying to set the bar to low, but rather to grease the wheels toward a more effective response that will enable a more satisfying and successful Teshuva experience.

By far the most helpful insight our prayer book offers is that Yom Kippur is equally relevant to everybody.  How do I know this?  Because the response to tragedy, the response to evil, even the response to poor judgment or weakness on our part, is FULLY ACCESSIBLE TO EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US.

Every single person, from the most saintly to the most wicked, needs Yom Kippur just as much.  When we look at the sin of some public figure whether it is sexual, or financial, or based on power, the reason we say, “Why would anyone do such a thing?”  is because that doesn’t happen to be our problem.  But we all have our weaknesses, our different buttons that get pushed.  When we distance ourselves from other people’s sins, it may be because we don’t realize that we have a button that gets pushed too.  The Al Chet and the Ashamnu prayers include them all.  Every single person can pause on a different line that hits home more for him or her.  But the message we need to take away is that we need Yom Kippur’s forgiveness no more and no less than every other person in this room.

For the first time this year I realized that there is no Al Chet for not having kept kosher, or kept Shabbat, or having failed to keep wool and linen separate – all mitzvoth ordained by the Torah.  Virtually all of the enumerated Al Chet’s pertain to civility, fidelity, and righteousness.  Which means that the healthiest way to respond has nothing to do with one’s level of Jewish knowledge or observance.  Every last one of us has equal access to talking seriously to ourselves – Teshuva; talking seriously to God – Tefillah; and to talking seriously to each other – Tzedakah.   A credible Jewish response, indeed a compelling and authentically Jewish response, has nothing to do with waiting an extra six hours in between eating meat and milk, or waiting an additional 72 minutes on Saturday night before we end the Sabbath.  Such practices may add depth, meaning, and rhythm to my life and to my relationship with God, but they do nothing by way of responding helpfully to unwelcome disclosures, or even to ameliorate suffering at the hands of some crippling calamity.

The other vital shift in ‘response expectation’ applies to the quantity or magnitude of the response.  We should not set unreasonably high expectations of ourselves.  If we only measure outcomes that are totally transformative, completely restorative, we’ll always undervalue, even overlook whatever small steps we take in the right direction.

One of my Seminary teachers, Professor Israel Frankus once told a story about his senior colleague, the esteemed Talmudist Professor Zucker.  Apparently, every fall with the start of a new school year, Zucker used to say about the new class of rabbinical students “This year’s students are the worst students I’ve ever had.”  Every year, without fail, Professor Frankus would be walking Professor Zucker home from Shul Friday night and he would listen to him excoriate “This year’s students are the all time worst.”  Finally, one year he decided to challenge him.  He said, “Professor Zucker, every year you tell me “This year’s students are the worst you’ve ever had.”  “Yes” he replied, “But this year, these students are so bad.  They’re even worse than next year’s!”
The point is that you don’t have to do dramatic change.  Just heading incrementally in the right direction, just doing little things to respond to debilitating news by being true to the best in ourselves is doing very much indeed.  We ought to take note of less dramatic, but no less impressive evidence that we’re headed in the right direction.

 If you want to feel good about yourself, there is a very simple recipe. Tonight we said Kol Nidre three times.  Three times a week in this coming year, go out of your way to do something nice and considerate for somebody else. Writing a check doesn’t count.  It can involve staffing a hotline, doing grocery shopping for a neighbor that is recovering from a recent medical procedure, driving carpool for a friend whose been overwhelmed by a family loss, choosing to come and help make the minyan one morning or evening.  Don’t say you don’t have time.  You make time to watch your favorite shows, you make time to go to the gym.  I guarantee that doing these things will make you feel better, faster than going to the gym.  Because when you find the time to do nice things for others, you physically feel better and lighter, like ‘yes, this is the way I’m supposed to feel.’

 It’s not about gritting our teeth and trying harder this year than we ever have before.  It’s not about ‘really meaning what we promise’ this time around.  Rather it is about shifting perspectives and adjusting expectations.   These are the ingredients that offer us a recipe for taking control in the coming year, regardless of what will happen to us as a result of chance or good or bad luck.  May this ‘recipe for response’ provide food for the soul that will nourish and replenish us through this day long fast, so that the year we have just begun will be the most fruitful and fulfilling one we’ve ever lived.