Rabbi Hamilton’s Yom Kippur 5769 Sermon: Change is Possible

A few years ago, a prominent Jewish educator died in Israel, and among the eulogies that appeared in the press, one person remembered an incident early in her career. She was headmistress of a school in Jerusalem for orthodox girls. One day, the fourth grade teacher came to her and said “We’ve got a problem. Things are disappearing from girls’ desks and lockers. At first, it was just little things, pencils and hair ribbons. This week, money and articles of clothing were missing. We have a thief in the class.” What did the headmistress do? She called the class together and said to them, “What I’m going to say now applies to only one person in this room but I don’t know who it is, so I’m going to say it to all of you. Someone has been stealing from her classmates. We take this very seriously. If the missing articles are put on my desk by 8:00 tomorrow morning, I will consider the matter closed. If not, I am warning the person who did this that there are two possibilities as to what will happen next, and they are both bad. Either you will continue to steal and one day you will get caught, and you will be embarrassed and your family will be shamed. Or else you’ll continue to steal and you won’t get caught, and that will be even worse, because then every day of your life, you will have to think of yourself as a thief. Now I want you to consider this very carefully: is what you are taking worth thinking of yourself as a thief for the rest of your life?” The articles were on her desk the following morning and the stealing ended. A ten-year-old girl decided that what she would do tomorrow would be determined, not by what she had done in previous days, but by her vision of what kind of person she wanted to see herself as being.

Yet most of our lives aren’t spent reflecting on our destinies in such a focused setting.  Most of our daily doings feed hungers, respond to the urgent, attend to the important, and simply get through the day having done what we can.  But we do come here tonight, very much attentive to our fates, focused on how we’ve lived over the last year, and on the kind of lives we’d worthily live in the year to come. 

The truth is that change is so hard.  Changing attitudes, in our world of narrow ideologies and stubborn convictions seem unheard of.  Changing habits seems so unrelentingly difficult.  We find ourselves making the similar pledges to ourselves when we read the prayer book year after year.   It is almost enough to cause us to doubt the pragmatic possibility of change itself.

Nobody understood the ‘challenge of change’ better than God, and this is why God has designed us to recognize and deploy the most vital change-agent we have at our disposal – experience.  First-hand experience’s power to persuade is unrivaled.   Conservative Utah Senator Oren Hatch comes out in favor of stem-cell research, against the prevailing sentiments of his party.  Why? Because a close family member has survived a near-fatal illness resulting from a treatment only made possible as a direct result of stem-cell research.  The medieval rabbi Isaac Abravanel once wrote: “Experience is more forceful than logic.”  Experience can alter more than logic, it can shape and change “theological” convictions as well.  God designed us, I believe, for experience to be our most potent change-agent.

Let’s take a look at how this holiday’s central biblical book, the book of Jonah, takes up experience as change agent for the prophet himself.  You know the story.  Jonah is told to instruct the wicked Ninevites to repent.  He tries to get out of it.  God takes him back via the belly of the fish.  Jonah does his job, and the Ninevites repent.  The book might have ended here, especially if it were a book solely about repentance. But the book does not end with Ninevite repentance.  Instead it continues, giving deeply personal attention to Jonah’s temperament.

Totally distraught, Jonah wants to die.  He dislikes God’s forgiveness of wicked people – Israel’s enemies in Nineveh.  God is too merciful with evil people Jonah believes.  Now, God could club Jonah over the head with a lecture about the virtue of God’s ways.  But instead – and this is the key, the profound point I want us to see tonight – God subtly stages an experience in which Jonah can learn the merits of Divine mercy as if self-taught, on his own.  God produces a gourd that gives Jonah pleasure, the gourd then dies and Jonah again becomes despondent.  Jonah quickly realizes that a gourd that ‘appeared overnight and perished overnight’ could have benefited from Divine compassion.  He then connects the dots, realizing further that such Divine compassion is what makes the world go around – even when it is occasionally applied to bad people who opt for penitence as the Ninevites do.  With subtly, God has framed an experience that enabled his prophet to change his belief and conviction about the role of compassion and forgiveness in the world.  God’s point at the conclusion of Jonah’s book: self-realized lessons are more convincing (it is not clear whether Jonah learns this lesson – but it is very clear to me that God intends Jonah’s readers – each of us – to learn it).

I believe this is why biblical prophetic figures like Moses, Jeremiah and Isaiah always initially appear so reluctant.  God could, of course, force their hand.  But instead God stages experiences whereby they teach themselves of their worthiness for their calling.  Biblical scholar Yohanan Muffs reminds us in a article called Uses of Divine Power about the prophet Samuel who anoints Kings in ancient Israel – and this may be relevant in an election year.  Samuel’s first job, anointing King Saul, has ended in failure.  King David is to be anointed next.   But the prophet Samuel is stalling, unenthusiastic about the possibility of a second failure.  God knows his prophet is stalling.  God does not respond with anger, clubbing him over the head, demanding he pick himself up and go to work.  Instead God gently lets Samuel stall, taking his time meandering about, until Samuel is ready to go forth and anoint David as King.   Again, self-realized lessons are more convincing.

There is no more important biblical book than Jonah within which to teach this lesson for two reasons:  1) because on the surface, the book seems to say just the opposite with a fleeing Jonah coerced and forced to return to work.  There is no more poignant place to teach Divine subtly than against the backdrop of Divine coercive intervention 2) because Yom Kippur is the most important time of the year for Jonah’s readers, all of us, to recognize the ‘lesson-learning power of change’ that is built into our experiences.

And if God is this subtle and gentle in crafting experiences for God’s most intimate partners, in a biblical world of booming revelations and divine interventions, how much more could it be the way God interfaces with people throughout history and even today.

The one major difference between God’s staging of such experiences in biblical times and subsequently, is that unlike the intimate encounters between God and the prophet – where the prophet is alone – today God sends us “people” into our lives if we are open to them, company, peers and caring others to join us in such experiences.

Like the forward thinking Israel educator, in considering the changes we seek for ourselves in the coming year, I want us to face forward, deeply mindful that we are not the prisoners of our past, but rather the architects of our future.  And that the God, in building us to be self-taught through experiences, also wants us to go out and make those experiences happen.

There are two kinds of people-centered, peer-driven experiences I want to focus on tonight – both deeply holy, yet thoroughly pedestrian.  Both are designed to forge, repair, and heal relationships.  The first we’ll explore is about connecting with strangers, and the second is about the infectiousness of forgiving the estranged.

The first Rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls the side-by-side, as opposed to the face-to-face experience. When two people who may not know or even like each other share a effortful task, an invisible but strong bond is fashioned between them.  The best illustration of side by side’s power to forge bonds, is the story of Lord Mishon’s decision to host Shimon Peres and Jordan’s King Hussein for dinner in his London apartment way back in the early 1980s – well before any peace treaty was imaginable.   Face to face during dinner, Peres and Hussein were cordial and polite, but didn’t really talk about anything substantive.  As the meal winded down, the each got up to thank their host.  “Where are you going?” he said.  They said, “It’s been lovely, but the hour is getting late, thank you for your gracious hospitality.”  “You haven’t done the dishes yet?”  “Are you serious?” Their host was, and so, loosening the ties and taking off their jackets, they went into the kitchen.  Peres washed. Hussein dried.  And a half-hour later, there was a connection between the two, because of this side-by-side project that could never have been achieved through their face-to-face cordialities.  

God has built us for side-by-side connecting.  I make that claim because this is precisely how God chose to make us a people back in the Torah.  God knew that one doesn’t create connections by a bringing a people out of Egypt, nor by giving them the Torah at Sinai.  One creates a people by having them build something together, side-by-side, so we were commanded to construct and disassemble the Tabernacle 42 times during our wilderness wanderings.  This side-by-side building project is what made us a people.

Years ago two busloads of Israeli and Palestinian teens had been camping in the same general region – of course never to interact or show any interest in each other.  When each needed to return from their retreat, they discovered a large tree had fallen across the road.  With one of the teens on the Israeli bus needing medical attention, and everybody on both buses generally eager to return home, the teens from each bus set out to clear the roadway of the obstruction.  Hours later, having worked side-by-side, sharing sweat, they thanked each other with handshakes and mutual appreciation that would have been unimaginable with some face-to-face dialogue.

There is nothing more natural than side-by-side working together.  And there is no experience more connection-forming and belonging-building.  This is a good reason why this year at KI, we are evolving our Ashrei Project House Meeting face-to-face focus of last year to an Ashrei Action week of side-by-side doing which you’ll hear about later this evening. 

The other relationship forging experience in which I find God’s invisible hand at work, is the holy and hard work of apology and forgiveness.  Virtually every page of the Yom Kippur prayer book indicates that forgiveness is God’s way this Yom Kippur.   It is therefore, our way of the holy as well.  But what is fascinating and novel for me this year is the notion that it can be contagious. 

Last week I approached a member of our community to apologize for having let her down, having failed to visit her during a recent recovery as I had promised.  Something surprising – not entirely easy – but remarkably healthy happened.  The person told me she had indeed been very disappointed in my failure to follow through on my word.  Although I might have been alarmed to have so underestimated the urgent need for my apology, I quickly became appreciative of her candor.  When we visited together last week after Rosh Hashannah, we discussed the merits of such candor.  When your barber gives you a bad haircut, you have a choice.  You can leave without saying anything, come back out of habit or loyalty next time and hope they do a better job.  Or, you can say something and hope that there is room for learning to take place. This is because it is only when you do say something that learning can take place.  Just as her saying how disappointed she was in me invited such a learning experience for me.  But by the end of our visit, something even more remarkable happened.  She was feeling ready to say something to her adult child who had done something disappointing which had been simmering beneath the surface for months.  I said to her, you always run the risk that your daughter will respond with a list of grievances she’s been nursing too.  And this is a risk.  But even more likely, is the infectiousness of honest reconciliation, and forgiveness.  One person’s effort at courageous forgiveness will tend to beget a similar effort for another. 

Side-by-side building experiences are about addition, fashioning new connections and bonds in our life for the better.  Forgiveness experiences are about subtraction, letting go of festering impediments that impair cheerful, healthy relationships, ventilating them of acidic emotions.

Both locate holiness in the person seated next to us and the connection we build and repair with them.   And I want to suggest, that both might relate to the God we address in prayer tonight as well.  That’s right the side-by-side and the infectious forgiveness might be applied to an experience ‘right here and now ‘ with God that is about both addition and subtraction. 

Interpreting the experiences God has staged in our lives is a tricky discipline I do not believe that God stages calamities and tragedies and pain in order to make us self-taught.  I do believe we hold the capacity for making loss matter by our response – and by such a response therein lies any Divine lesson about our courage and resilience.  Of course interpreting the experiences we’ve had is a sketchy, hit and miss endeavor. One person sees a telling sign in bumping into a long-lost friend from an unresolved chapter of her life.  Another interprets a coincidence as a warning of something worrisome around the next corner.  It is easy to misinterpret data.

    It reminds me of the story of a man who is worried about his wife’s growing loss of hearing.  He consults a doctor, who suggests that he try a simple at-home test for her.  Stand behind her and ask her a question, first from 20 feet away, next from 10 feet away, and finally right behind her.  The man goes home and sees his wife in the kitchen, facing the stove.  He says from the door, “What’s for dinner tonight?”  No answer.  Ten feet behind her he repeats, “What’s for dinner tonight?”  Still no answer.  Finally, right behind her he says, “What’s for dinner tonight?” And his wife turns around and says, “For the third time – chicken!”

Misinterpreting data can present a serious problem – between spouses – and also in our experiences in conversation with God.  As we take up the prayer book in a moment, perhaps we might consider reinterpreting the data from past experiences.  Until recently, listening for God’s voice, we might have felt like the person who is sitting in a café waiting for a friend to arrive.  People come and go, but we remain focused on the appearance of our friend.  Even for those among us who love to “people watch” those walking in and out are less real in our minds than the absence of one for whom we are waiting.  So it often is in our conversation with God tonight.  We’re waiting for the epiphany, the ‘booming ah hah moment’ of biblical proportions, when lessons from recent experiences of healing, and experiences of growing, are really so close.  This is how God enters and intervenes.  This was true for Jonah and God’s one-to-one relationships with the Prophets.  It is no less so for us today.

Jonah’s gourd is small.   Small things teach.  Small things poise us for experiences that are headed in the right direction.  And heading in the right direction is what successful change is all about.  At the tribute to Barry Shrage last month, I heard a story from Rabbi Avi Weiss about a Rabbi who asks his students: two people are standing on a 50 rung ladder, who is higher the person on the 47th rung or the person on the 25th rung?  It depends on which direction they’re each heading.

As we look to shape the vision of our tomorrows, the kind of people we wish to become, not merely settling for who we’ve always been, not as prisoners of our past, but architects of our future.  We are aided by Divine intervention, the change-friendly power of experience.  And we can fashion experiences with others – which will find everybody involved feeling self-taught as is God’s way – to build, repair, and heal so that our capacity to change will be credible and convincing for us and for all who join alongside us, heading in the right direction.