Kol Nidrei Drash 5770
October 1, 2009
We’re on a deadline: Obama has given Iran a matter of weeks to come clean on its newly revealed nuclear site. We’re on a deadline: We’ve got to do something about the healthcare enigma, because 52 million non-elderly Americans will go uninsured in 2010. We’re on a deadline: It’s been said that by the year 2020 in Israel the Arab population will outnumber the Jewish population west of the Jordan River, unless we don’t give back occupied territory on the West Bank. We’re on a deadline, because a World Bank study recently indicated that by the end of this century, 60 million people in developing nations will be forced to abandon their homes along coastlines – coastlines that will be inundated as a result of a 3 foot rise in sea levels, thanks to global warming and the rapid melting of ice sheets. We’re on a deadline: A while back, on the first of the month of Elul, we were given forty days to do teshuvah – sufficient time earlier on for Moses to get enlightenment on top of Sinai. On Rosh Hashana, we received a “posting” that we had ten days. Now we’re down to twenty-four hours or so to mull things over.
Now, we do this every year, so we know the drill. We also know how to cut corners.
The Mishna in Tractate Rosh Hashana reads: “If a person passes by a synagogue and hears the Shofar being blown – if she’s listening with intention, then she has performed the mitzvah… If she, let’s say, never intended to hear it – she was on her way to a gallery opening or a Ducks game, and there was this familiar, long shrieking tone that she heard emanating from a synagogue on the way – then she has not accomplished the ritual at all.” I draw the conclusion from the fact that the ruling was issued back in the second century that we’ve been going through the motions for a long time.
So what is it that prevents us human stewards of one another from staying on task? Why can’t we make up our minds to stay awake, to pay attention to what we set out to get done in our lives? What about the assignment itself gets in the way of us wanting to hang in there?
I want to speak for a minute about the morass of misinformation swirling around the national healthcare conversation, and the demise of a leader who wanted us to pay attention and do something about this issue. The sudden death a few weeks ago of Ted Kennedy served as an omen. He’s a guy I grew up with (in case you hadn’t noticed my accent), watching him on TV from the day he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, through the turmoil of the assassinations, the personal upheavals. He embodied the flawed egotism of the second half of the twentieth century, really. So I was fascinated by the sense of urgency he brought to getting this last bit of legislative work done. In the end, he seemed to recognize that there was, in addition to the political accomplishment, a moral aspect at stake. Of course, a public hero gets distorted in life and in the hour of his death. The columnist David Brooks, I think, exploited Ted Kennedy’s legacy, the senator’s bedrock liberal empathy for people without access to the kind of care and support he could get, as a rich man. Brooks was ostensibly writing Kennedy’s eulogy; but he fit the man into his own preferred, Hobbesian profile of a moderate conservative, and used his death as a way to say something about America that worries me about priorities all of us may have wrong. Here’s what Brooks wrote about the relationship between what he thinks should exist between the individual citizen and the larger polity:
This culture, this spirit, this system is not perfect, but it is our own. American voters welcome politicians who propose reforms that smooth the rough edges of the system. They do not welcome politicians and proposals that seek to contradict it. They do not welcome proposals that centralize power and substantially reduce individual choice. They resist proposals that put our security above mobility and individual responsibility.
Again: “They” (read: you and I) “resist proposals that put our security” – (read: social safety net) – “above mobility and individual responsibility.”
I know what individual responsibility means, and I take it seriously, but when Brooks has invoked mobility together with individual responsibility in the same breath, I realize that he’s giving voice to quite a different idea – that as human beings we are ultimately in this thing called “life” for ourselves – for better or for worse – and if we play our cards right, we have every reason to believe that the sky is the limit…… Seems like the reference was to upward mobility?…… And when Brooks balks at putting our collective “security above mobility and individual responsibility”, what he’s really saying – about Ted Kennedy, falsely, and about us too – is that having to provide for the needs of others less fortunate should be lower on our totem pole, and maybe even not as preeminent as we had imagined.
Jewish tradition doesn’t buy this, and it insists on each and everyone of us being fully present and accountable. Ben Azzai used to say:
Don’t scorn or treat as expendable anyone or anything, for there is no one who does not have his hour; and there is nothing on earth that doesn’t have its place.
Seemingly, Ben Azzai imagines the virtuous society in terms of a connective tissue, in which all people are worthy and have an important role to play.
We’re familiar with the story about Zusya dying and standing before the Judge in Heaven. Sometimes people miss the point of this story. Poor Zusya grows increasingly nervous, because he’s sure that God will ask him why he failed to rise to the level of a Moses or a King David during his lifetime….. and instead God looks squarely at him and says: “Why weren’t you Zusya?”. . . Often we chide ourselves for not being someone else, when the real shame is that we have failed to get the work done that only you and I can uniquely do with the people who know us and count on us! On Erev Kol Nidrei, we may want to be released from our false vows, but even more importantly, we want to see our words, our actions, our commitments to those who depend on us come into sharper definition. We want them to mean something, but we may need to rid ourselves of some of our illusions too. Some fantasies and self-inflated notions of who we think we are need to be cast off, in order for us to grasp the work we really need to get done.
Two novels I’ve read recently grapple with this issue of accountability in different ways. They both get at the central Yom Kippur theme of loss, and how we get are priorities straight, remarkably, if often belatedly, when we grasp who we are and who we are not. They are Rafael Yglesias’ A Happy Marriage and Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At the Stairs. In both of these books, there’s a year-in-the-life being traversed by the main character, and there’s the confrontation with death that forces us to see things differently than before. Also, in each one, there’s at some point a paucity of love and affection, and the dying off of old naive assumptions about the felicitous events we think will unfold for us during a lifetime.
In Rafael Yglesias’ book, a piece of autobiographical fiction, his surrogate is a middle-aged novelist who has written prolifically during the early part of his life. He lives with the frustration that while his books are critically acclaimed, still it peeves him that no one reads them. He whines, he gets jealous of other artists, picks petty arguments – just like you and I might do when we feel underappreciated – when we fail to get the attention we think we deserve. Now, in his early 50s, he’s forced to come up to the “edge” of things. His wife is dying of cancer, and she has asked him – after months of seeing specialists and embracing every possible heroic strategy – if he will just help her die. It’s an unimaginable request, but in the face of the person he love’s dire circumstances, he too is forced to confront his own limited resources. Amidst his profound confusion and pain, he discovers a new kind of goodness that resides in all things finite. Yglesias the writer, (whose wife did, in fact, die of Cancer), seems to be expressing his own shock and surprise, when he says (quote):
At long last, after decades of fussing, having watched… the mother of his children waste away, he was convinced that death was more than the neatest way to resolve a character’s story, that death was, in fact, real. He understood, right into the nucleus of every one of his brain cells, that he and everyone on the earth would soon be gone. With that knowledge beside him all day and every night, it rang false to stay angry about anything, including death, since death was, after all, the most evenhanded consequence of being alive.
Lorrie Moore’s fictional tract is less successful, I think, because it succumbs to the weakness that we all struggle with today, namely, the cynicism that displays itself when we run circles around assigned tasks. Her prose suffers a bit from being elliptical and smirky, but then again, the main character is a person emerging from adolescence. She’s a young woman in a college town environment, encountering a world filled with adult hypocrisies. It’s a world of hyper-inflated slogans and displacement. Like Yglesias’ novel, Moore’s book pivots on the protagonist’s dawning awareness that fraudulent behavior is poisonous. Her story is one about people who depend on one another, and yet they’re all cutting corners or absconding. At one point, the main character’s boyfriend, ready to run out on her, tells her, “You can’t get blood from a stone.” While up until this point she has seldom been adamant about anything, she responds, “Yes you can.”
However, like the title of the book, A Gate at the Stairs, the author Lorrie Moore suggests that while each one of us may encounter a little bit of heaven during our lifetimes, there may be a latch on the swinging portal that we need to work with, before we can enter and ascend the steps that get us where we need to go. There is an existential obstacle between who we think we are and the learning we need to do that will require our attention; it may trip us up. I often think that it’s in the moments in which we are most terrified that we stand the chance to find out something more joyous about our lives. Maybe that’s why we wear white – not black – as Jews meeting the Yom Kippur deadline.
Many years ago, when I was in high school, I remember reading Martin Buber for the first time – and I was charmed by something he wrote. He said: “All real living is meeting”. When I was young, this idea of “coming towards a meeting.” It touched me to my core, but little did I realize then how much it would mean to me today, as I get older. We may imagine that we are, at the outset, infinitely capable of achieving goals and conquering whatever terrain we set out for. We can delude ourselves, in terms of how powerful we think we are! And yet, if we follow Martin Buber’s advice, the wise person is better served cultivating humility and honesty – in the face of mortality. That’s where power is – in the here and now.
So – here tonight, as we come to the wire – we should be asking the question of the hour: How can we best take care of the obligations we have entered into in the limited time available to us? What must we be doing with our time? Where is it that we must be doing our work, with whom, right now? Right now in the sense that Yom Kippur only lasts for one day, and right now – in the sense of this lifetime! How can we be turning our attention to the critical people in our lives? And how should we be listening more intently to them?
We’re on a deadline, everyone of us. There are bills we need to pay, and we need to pay them right away. Our life partners, our aging parents, our children (age seven or twenty-seven) all need us. Our neighbors in the community await our help and support. The person at our right shoulder and at our left risks anonymity, if we don’t extend a hand. And we only have this one short life to get it together to be there for one another. But it can mean everything in the world, it can mean eternity, to be there dependably – for someone else.
Avinu Malkeynu, k’ra ro’a g’zar dinenu. The prayer says at this time of year, “tear up the grim decree” that comes down from on high that reminds us we are all mortal. Well, how are we to taste immortality? Avinu Malkeynu chaneynu va-a’neynu kee ayn banu ma’aseem. Aseh eemanu tzedakah va-chesed v’hoshee-eynu. The answer amounts to this: “Answer us Holy One, because we have no big deeds.” None of us do. When it all comes down to deadlines, our big ideas, our monumental accomplishments, amount to nothing. It’s between me and you, God – says the liturgist. Aseh eemanu tzedakah va-chesed v’hoshee-eynu. You, God, make kindness happen right here between us, close up – and with the ones closest to us – this invention of yours, this thing called “kindness” will be our salvation.
So when the Shofar is blown one final time tomorrow night, it won’t be for the faint-hearted or for those who prefer perfunctory and symbolic gestures, because each of us needs to get the work done in the time granted to us. It’s a call to be fully present. Yes, there’ll be plenty of fine print for us to review. There will be legislation to get right and differences to smooth out. There will be laughter and tears, and we’ll be asked to open our wallets and spend more for people here in this city and in the developing world who are at an incredible disadvantage – people who we’ll likely never lay our eyes on. But on Erev Kol Nidrei, what counts most are our hearts and our minds. May this be the year that we remind ourselves that what we have right here, next to us, in the company of friends and loved ones and community, is finite and precious – and, most of all, redeeming. Just to hold this Book of Life open, for however long or for however short, is a privilege we need to get right. Let’s be awake to it!
Rabbi Joey Wolf
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