Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Yom Kippur 5779

Here Come Moses’ Children

YOM KIPPUR 5779

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

On a hot day in June of 1964 Rabbi Richard Levy relates that, 

I was at a convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis when Martin Luther King sent a telegram asking for rabbis to join him in a demonstration in St. Augustine, FL…. So I went with fifteen other rabbis. We were ushered into a [room] where King was speaking and as we came in he said, ‘Here come Moses’ children’.

Here come Moses’s children. How about that? How striking… Which led me to ponder: What does it mean to be Moses’s children today? Thus this sermon… which is Part Two of my exploration of the legacy of the Sixties that I began last night.

Some of you know that one of those Augustine sixteen was my own rabbi, from Temple Israel in Croton-on-Hudson, NY, Rabbi Michael Robinson, of blessed memory. Another was my late professor at Hebrew Union College, Rabbi Eugene Borowitz. These brave souls spent all night in a sweltering jail. At 3:00 AM, by the light of a single naked light bulb in the corridor outside their overcrowded cell they wrote a letter, Why We Went.

The Augustine Sixteen declared, 

We came because we could not stand quietly by our brother’s blood. Here in St. Augustine we have seen… the deep implacable hatred. What disturbs us more deeply is the large number of decent citizens who have stood aside, unable to bring themselves to act, yet knowing in their hearts that this cause is right and that it must inevitably triumph.

The Augustine Sixteen were telling us that when we stand idly by we are not innocent; we are part of the problem.

King himself said in his famous Letter from Birmingham City Jail that, 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

King said,

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.

King said,

We have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate… who is more devoted to “order” than to justice… and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient season. Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

The man who spoke at the famous March on Washington just before King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” was a rabbi. His name was Joachim Prinz. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he led a congregation in Newark, and he helped lead the Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. Rabbi Prinz said that day,

The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.

Yet another great rabbi from the civil rights movement, Abraham Joshua Heschel, perhaps said it best,

In a free society; some are guilty, all are responsible.

Fast forward fifty years: She was not a rabbi or a minister, but I am still haunted by the words of Heather Heyer. Do you recognize that name? She was the young woman killed in Charlottesville, when she was rammed by a car driven into the crowd by an avowed racist.

Heather Heyer wrote that day in what would be her final Facebook post:

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

Are we outraged? Are we paying attention? Are we standing up or are we standing by?

In the spirit of King and the Rabbis and Heather Heyer: What does it mean to be Moses’ children today?

What does it mean to be Moses’ children in the wake of the racist violence of Charlottesville and Charleston?

The police violence of East St. Louis, Staten Island, Baltimore, Baton Rouge?

The mass shooting violence of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Sutherland Springs, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland?

What does it mean to be Moses’ children in a time of #black lives matter and #me too and #march for our lives?

What does it mean to be Moses’s children in a time of zero tolerance of migrants and the separation of children from parents?

In the spirit of our revolutionary ancestor, allow me to respond that to be Moses’s children means, if nothing else: Opening our Eyes and Voting with Our Feet.

Opening our Eyes:

When he was a young man the Torah says that Moses “went out to his people and witnessed their toil.” (Ex.2) Then he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen, and he acted.

Later on Moses opens his eyes again. “He gazed and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, ‘I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight.’” (Ex.3) God too opens His eyes, as it were, as the Torah says, “God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”  
 
Deep into the civil rights struggle, during his Poor People’s Campaign near the end of his life, King said,

We must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. Negroes generally live in worse slums today than 20 or 25 years ago. In the North schools are more segregated than they were in 1954…. The unemployment rate among Negroes is [worse]; twice that of whites. And the average income of the Negro is today 50% less than whites.

If we open our eyes today, what do we see 50 years after the Civil Rights movement?

Black kids are three times as likely to be poor as white kids. 

Black unemployment is twice that of white unemployment. 

Homeownership is 40% for African Americans; 70% for whites.

Four in ten black and Latino students attends schools that are 90% minority. In NYC it’s five in ten.

Latinos actually are now the largest minority in the country. Poverty rates have declined for all Americans except Latinos. One out of four Hispanic adults lives below the poverty line; one out of three children. Millions more, who cut our lawns; clean our pools, wash our dishes, and pick our fruit live just above it.

And did you see this last week: In 2016 net worth among white middle-income families in America was 19% below 2007 levels (adjusted for inflation). But among blacks, it was 40% below, and for Hispanics 46% below.

Do you call that an economic recovery?

Praying with our Feet:

God said to Moses to get up and start marching back to Egypt to speak truth to power. Later God told Moses to get up and start marching out of Egypt and toward the Promised Land.

Professor Michael Walzer of Princeton writes in a powerful verse that we often read from our prayerbook,

Standing on the parted shores of history we still believe what we were taught before we ever stood at Sinai’s foot; 

that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt; 

that there is a better place, a promised land; 

that the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness; 

that there is no way to get from here to there except by joining hands, marching together.

When Rabbi Heschel marched with King at Selma he remarked afterwards, “I felt as if my legs were praying.”

Praying with our feet means marching and lobbying. I was so proud when young people across America led the way last spring in the March for our Lives and the national school walk-outs. 

I was so proud when I found out that our own Leonia high schoolers Maddie Raciatti and Isabel Raskin were among the student leaders here in Leonia. 

I was so proud last year when I went to a Leonia Town Council meeting to advocate for the Leonia sanctuary city resolution that our own Sandy Pecht had made a special trip back from college to do the same. 

The year before last I had the privilege of meeting civil rights icon John Lewis, still feisty after all these years. I shook his hand and told him that I was the head of The Jewish Publication Society that had published the work of Rabbi Heschel. He recalled marching with Heschel and how much that meant. He said to us rabbis: 

Keep marching. Raise your voices. Make some noise!

I know that if Dr. King was here, if Rabbi Heschel was here, if Rabbi Prinz was here, if Rabbi Borowitz was here, if Rabbi Robinson was here… they would all say the same thing as Jon Lewis.

They would remind us that the Torah commands (Lev. 18):“You shall not stand idly by.”

They would remind us that the Torah commands (Ex. 23): “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

They would remind us that the Torah commands (Deut. 16): “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”

They would remind us, “Open your eyes and vote with your feet.”

They would remind us that so much is at stake in American today.

We are fighting for freedom of the press right now.

We are fighting for oppressed refugees right now.

We are fighting for traumatized children right now.

We are fighting for victimized women right now.

We are fighting for the future of our very democracy right now.

We are fighting for the future of our gasping planet right now.

They would say at this New Year: Remember who you are!

They would say, as we enter the room:

Here come Moses’ children. 

Here come Moses’ children. 

Make way for the children of Moses.

 From the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

A Message From Our President

Dr. Lance Strate

Author, Author!

I have often been struck by the fact that the most sacred object in our sanctuary, the Torah scroll, is a book. Sure, we dress it up nicely with our finest fabrics, decorated with lovely embroidery, and further adorned with silver breast plate and crown, as well as the silver yad or pointer, the silk sash or girdle that binds the scroll and keeps it closed, and the wooden shafts that the scroll is wound around. But it's still a book, a fancy book sure, a sacred book most definitely, but a book nonetheless.

Our worship is centered around the book, as we repeatedly face the Ark that holds the Torah scrolls during our worship services, show our respect by standing whenever the Ark is opened, and show our love by kissing the scrolls when they are carried down to the pews, albeit indirectly by kissing our prayer books. Reading from the Torah is one of our most sacred rituals, and our rite of passage from childhood to adulthood.

Our veneration of books extends to our printed prayer books and bibles, and in our tradition whenever one such text is dropped or falls to the floor, the person picking it up also kisses the book. And these books that contain the name of God are never destroyed when their usefulness is at an end, but rather buried as we would a loved one that has passed on.

Judaism is not the only religion that is centered around a sacred text, and in fact it was the Moslems who referred to Jews and Christians alike as people of the book. But there is something unique and special about our relationship to books, so much so that here in the United States, Jews purchase 23% of all hardcover books published, while we constitute only about 2% of the population.

As a people, we are bibliophiles, booklovers. And we are bookmakers, writers, authors. The Torah features Moses, who took dictation from God, and the Tanach ends with Ezra the Scribe. We gave the world the Bible, including the Christian version, which may be considered the all-time bestseller. More recently, of the 110 Nobel Prizes in Literature given out since 1901, 15 have been awarded to Jews including Henri Bergson, Boris Pasternak, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elias Canetti, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Harold Pinter, Patrick Modiano, and Bob Dylan. (It's often cited that we Jews constitute less than 0.2% of the world's population, while accounting for over 22% of Nobel Prizes awarded in all categories, 11,250% above average.)

It should come as no surprise, then, that we have more than a few published authors among the membership of our Congregation Adas Emuno, not the least of them our own Rabbi Schwartz. As you may know, his new children's book, Adam's Animals, was published this past summer, and his newest book, Paths of the Prophets: The Ethics-Driven Life, is due out this March.

✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✡

Have you published a book or article, essay, story, or poem? Let us know, and let us celebrate together!

We express our love of books during services, Saturday morning Torah study, adult education programs, and especially through our religious school. We are the people of the book, and our houses of worship have always been houses of learning as well. The secret of our survival and our success is intimately linked to our religious tradition being wrapped around the Torah scroll, revolving around spirituality and schooling, and a love of books. On Rosh Hashanah we ask God to write our names into the Book of Life, and as readers and writers ourselves, we become authors of our own destiny. For this reason alone, we should never forget to write our shul into own book, the book that we all write, the book of our own lives, and those of our family, friends, and community. May it be so.

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Evening 5777

AVINU MALKEINU

ROSH HASHANAH 5777

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

Rosh Hashanah is a time when we celebrate the past even as we embrace the future. We mark the arrival of the High Holy Days by honoring the old while welcoming the new. We chant ancient words, but often add new melody and translation.

This Rosh Hashanah I would like to partake of the old/new by starting a new tradition. Now, on the eve of the Holiday, rather than giving a sermon on contemporary matters, I would like to offer a Davar Torah, a commentary, on one of the key prayers in our holiday liturgy.

After all, we recite these prayers year and year, sometimes by rote. They form the backbone of our service. They move us in an emotive, nostalgic way… but what do they mean? What are we saying? Why are they important?

I am going to start with perhaps the best known prayer of the High Holy Days⎯the Avinu Malkeinu. (That is why I am delivering these words now⎯before we recite the prayer, rather than the usual spot afterwards). And as you will see in a few moments, I will have some help.

That is because my commentary will include some creative interpretations of the Avinu Malkeinu from the new Reform machzor, called Mishkan Hanefesh, which was published just last year. It is a beautifully produced two volume set, and expensive, and it is unlikely we will purchase it anytime soon. But I want to introduce some of its best new material into our service, and this is one way to do it.

We know that the oldest surviving prayer book, Seder Rav Amram, which dates to the 9th century in Babylonia contains the Avinu Malkeinu. So Jews have been reciting this prayer for at least a thousand years. But the original phrase, Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father, Our King, is known from a Talmudic tale of Rabbi Akiba, who died around 132 during the Second Revolt against Rome. So Jews have addressed God in this way for almost 2000 years.

This prayer obviously has staying power, and star power. It remains the centerpiece of the High Holy Day liturgy before the open ark. It has been set to so many stirring melodies. But as Professor Lawrence Hoffman, a leading authority of Jewish liturgy, and one of my rabbinical school professors, notes, “The music... so overwhelms the lyrics that most people remain relatively unconcerned with what it means.” While that is not a tragedy, it behooves us to consider the content of what we are saying, or rather, praying. And as we will see, how to properly translate and understand Aveinu Malkeinu is a challenge.

 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Another scholar, Richard Saranson, writes that, 

It is an irony of history that the very language now so controversial in Avinu Malkeinu (namely the masculine-gendered, hierarchical images of God as "Father" and "King") is what make this prayerful appeal so distinctive and effective for its original users.

Avinu Malkeinu, Rabbi Saranson, goes on to say, 

is a penitential litany.  That means that it uses the...  refrain, "Our Father, Our King," repeatedly to invoke the gracious favor of a God who is conceived of as both distant and approachable, both stern and merciful; whose powerful nature can be portrayed as both Ruler and Parent toward the people Israel, who view themselves during the High Holy Day season as both dependent and unworthy of favor–"Deal with us graciously for Your own sake, since we can plead little merit before You." Encapsulated here are the ambivalent feelings of we mortals toward the power in the world outside us over which we have uncertain or little control.

The story in the Talmud tells of Rabbi Akiva stepping before the ark during a great drought and exclaiming, Our Father, our King! We have no king but You! Our Father, our King! For Your sake, have compassion for us! And then the rain fell. (Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 25b)

Over time the number of petitions for God’s compassionate care grew and grew. For example:

Our Father, our King! Deal with us [graciously] for Your name’s sake!

Our Father, our King! Send a complete healing to the sick among Your people!

Our Father, our King! Remove from us plague, sword, famine, and destruction!

Our Father, our King! Remember that we are but dust and ashes!

Our Father, our King! Speedily bring us salvation!

In the traditional Ashkenazic rite there are forty-four such petitions!  Most Reform prayer books have reduced that number significantly. For those of us who remember the old Union Prayer Book there were only seven. Reform reduced the number of petitions for reasons of length and because the strong penitential rhetoric of some of these petitions did not sit well with a modern sense of human empowerment.  Gates of Repentance, which we use, brings back more of the Avinu Malkeinu petitions, and concludes with the one that pleads our lack of merit. Why? That last line is commonly sung to a well-known eastern European melody, which we use too, and thereby has come to typify the entire litany for many American Jews.

While earlier generations of Reform Jews had difficulty with praying that we have no merit, our generation has also had trouble with the Avinu Malkeinu’s masculine and hierarchical images of God. You might say that it is no longer politically correct to use such language. Already in 1996 the new gender-sensitive edition of Gates of Repentance included at the back of the book a feminized version of the prayer. But for many, substituting parent for father, and ruler or monarch, for king, takes away from the power of the prayer. It has led to quite a debate, and in the end the new Reform machzor leaves the key phrase untranslated. How’s that for ducking the issue?

A final point before the interpretative readings. As Rabbi Barry Block write in sermon about this prayer a few years ago: "Calling God Avinu and Malkeinu, in the same breath, is an oxymoron." A parent is not a monarch, and "does not rule with strict justice." A ruler, on the other hand,

cannot remit penalties out of loving favor....

The one, true God is two opposite things⎯Avinu, a loving parent, and Malkeinu, a strict ruler⎯at one and the same time. God is a living, divine oxymoron. God seeks to love. God needs to judge.

The ancient rabbis teach that both strict justice and divine love are required to establish and sustain creation….

So what do we need God to be, at this High Holy Day season, Avinu or Malkeinu?

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Yom Kippur 5775

OUR MOST COMMON MISTAKE

YOM KIPPUR 5775

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

Maybe you've heard the story about the Yeshivah University rowing team? One year they were asked to compete in the Ivy League Division. Unfortunately, they lost race after race. They practiced every day, for hours, but finished last at every meet. Finally, the team decided to send their captain, Morris, to spy on Harvard, the perennial champ. Morris went up to Cambridge and hid out along the banks of the Charles River. He carefully observed the Harvard team. A week later he returned to New York. "Well, I figured out their secret," he announced. "What? What is it? Tell us!" his teammates shouted.

"Well," he said, "We should have only one guy yelling. The other eight should row!"

Isn't it true that we yell too much?

Isn't it true that we criticize too much?

Isn't it true that we gossip too much?

I teach a unit in Confirmation class about Lashon Harah—Inappropriate Speech. It's about time to talk about it from the pulpit—when a lot of people are listening.

Judaism has a great deal to teach on this subject.

And, when you stop and think about it... foot-in-mouth disease is probably our most common malady.

I'm going to ask you a question that I ask my Confirmation students when I introduce this unit.

How many of us can go a week without saying something we later regret?

How many of us can go a day?

Whether in content or tone, lashon harah, the Hebrew expression for hurtful speech, deceptive speech, unnecessary speech, inappropriate speech, is our number one mistake.

On this Day of Atonement, it's therefore worth a look at the subject.

One needs to look no further than our own High Holiday prayer book to appreciate the dimension of the problem. Minutes ago we recited the al cheyt enumeration of our sins. No less than half of the dozen of the listed mistakes are connected to our misuse of language:

For the sin we have sinned against you by idle talk.

For the sin we have sinned against you by offensive speech.

...by speaking ill of other people.

...by scoffing and mocking.

...by gossiping.

...by swearing falsely.

I went back to the traditional High Holiday machzor, with the really big list of sins. [Our prayer book carries an abbreviated list]. I counted a dozen sins connected to speech. Here they are, Hebrew and English:

1. tipshut peh—thoughtless speech
2. latzon—scoffing
3. motzi shem rah—slander
4. bitui s'fatayim—offensive speech
5. dibur peh—insincere confession
6. sh'vuat shav—swearing falsely
7. bitui peh—foolish expressibns
8. hilul hashem—blashphemy
9. tumat s'fatayim—impure speech
10. n'tiyat garon—arrogant speech
11. r'ichilut—gossip
12. k'lala—cursing.

The ancient Psalmist wrote, "Mavet v 'haim b 'yad lashon—Life and death are in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21).

The truth is that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will also hurt us. They may not break the body, but they break the soul. They injure by slighting, by embarrassing, by branding, by marginalizing, by prejudicing. And as we all know, a slip of the tongue in the heat of the moment can occur as quickly as a slip of the foot on a sliver of ice.

The Psalmist declares, "Mi ha ish—Who is the man that loves life, and desires good fortune? The one who guards [his] tongue from evil, and his lips from deceitful speech" (Psalm 34:13).

Just how quickly and deeply words can wound is evidenced by a dramatic story told by the late, great Isaac Asimov. Asimov recounts that when he was a 15 year old high school student, his writing class teacher, Max N. asked for volunteers to read their essays. Asimov's hand shot up.

"I had read only about a quarter of it," he recalls in his memoir, "when N. stopped me and used an opprobrious barnyard term to describe my writing. I had never heard a teacher use a "dirty word" before and I was shocked. The class wasn't however. They laughed at me uproariously and I took my seat in bitter shame."

Asimov goes on to say that, despite his acute embarrassment, he took the criticism to heart, and greatly improved his next piece. When N. printed it in the school literary journal, Asimov went to thank him, only to be wounded again when his teacher told him that the only reason he had printed it was because he needed a lightweight submission to round out the serious articles.

Isaac Asimov went on to author and edit over 400 books and articles, and is considered one of America's greatest writers and intellects. Yet anyone who reads his memoir feels how fresh the pain of his embarrassment is, even though the account was penned 55 years after the event. Asimov writes at the end, "I wish I has a time machine and could go back to 1934 with some of my books and some of the articles that have been written about me and say to him, "How do you like that, you rotten louse? If you had treated me right, I could have recorded you as my discoverer, instead of branding you a rotten louse."

Asimov's experience illustrates the potent teaching of our tradition that one who shames another in public, it is as if they have shed blood. While we say that words are only words, the humiliation and hurt they may bring when misused have powerful lasting effects, whether we like it or not.

Later this afternoon, I will tell a classic Eastern European Hasidic story at our Yom Kippur Children's Service. My props are a small pillow case, and a bag of colored feathers. A boy, sometimes I call him Mert the Blurt, is sent to the rabbi for calling out bad things about other people. Unable to impress on the youth the error of his ways, the rabbi tells the stubborn kid to take a feather pillow from his home, go to the center of town, cut it open, and watch the feathers scatter to the wind. 

The boy does as he is told, returns, and asks the rabbi, "Am I forgiven now?" 

"Not quite," replies the rabbi. 'Now I want you to gather up all the feathers." 

"But that's impossible," protests the boy. "The wind has scattered them everywhere. "

"Precisely," the rabbi answers. "Your words are like feathers. Once they leave your mouth, they are everywhere. How can you repair the damage you have done?"

To make matters worse, the sad and harsh truth is that we tend to most often hurt the people closest to us.

Maybe it's because they are around the most. We interact with them more than anyone else. Improper language, exploitative language, abusive language... we use it all... and it hurts the people we love the most. Which is why all of us come to Yom Kippur with something to confess....

And so, in the final analysis, what can we do about our motor-mouths and loose tongues? How do we repent of the sins of our speech? After all, don't we want to address our most common mistakes in order to repair our most precious relationships?

They say "prevention is the best medicine" and here therefore are the three most important lessons I've learned wrestling with the subject over the years:

First: Think twice before speaking. I know it seems obvious. But if we only paused for a nanosecond before blurting out much of what we say; if we just paused and asked ourselves, "Do I really need to say that?" or "Do I really need to say it in that tone of voice?" think of how many screw-ups, never mind unintentional sins we could avoid.

Second: Be careful with the truth. Judaism teaches that a statement that is true, but derogatory, is still lashon harah, inappropriate speech. Conveying a negative or embarrassing image of someone, even if that description is factually correct (and maybe even deserved) is still wrong. It harms another person. The harm may end up being physical, financial, or emotional. Short of slander it may be legal, but that does not make lashon harah right.

Be careful about the truth for another reason. The truth can be slippery. A seemingly innocuous statement can be easily exaggerated or taken out of context. When in doubt, do without. If you have any apprehension that something you say may be misconstrued, misinterpreted, quoted out of context, or blown out of context... don't say it!

And third: Avoid gossip. I know you're saying, "how original!" But it's so true... and so hard. The Jewish teaching here is that we should not only avoid gossiping ourselves, but we should also avoid repeating it, or supporting it. We relate less than flattering images of other people to our spouses, family and friends. We repeat questionable things we've heard with the excuse that its common knowledge. We talk behind one another's back. We embarrass in jest. Gossip has its ways.

• Think twice before speaking. 
• Be careful with the truth. 
• Avoid gossip. 

And now let me conclude on a completely different note. Well, actually, on the flip side of what I have been talking about. Lashon harah is all about inappropriate speech. But consider, and maybe this is my fourth lesson, not just decreasing lashon harah, but increasing lashon hatov—kind and generous speech.

• We need less criticism, and more compliments.
• We need less reproach and more praise.
• We need less gossip and more tribute.

A classic story from the late, great Art Buchwald:

I was in New York the other day and rode with a friend in a taxi. When we got out, my friend said to the driver, "Thank you for the ride. You did a superb job of driving."

The taxi driver was stunned for a second. Then he said, "Are you a wise guy or something?"

"No, my dear man, and I'm not putting you on. I admire the way you keep cool in heavy traffic."

"Yeah," the driver said and drove off.

"What was that all about?" I asked.

I am trying to bring love back to New York," he said. "I believe it's the only thing that can save the city."

"How can one man save New York?"

"It's not one man. I believe I have made that taxi driver's day. Suppose he has 20 fares. He's going to be nice to those 20 fares because someone was nice to him. Those fares in turn will be kinder to their employees or shopkeepers or waiters or even their own families. Eventually the goodwill could spread to at least 1,000 people. Now that isn't bad, is it?"

"But you're depending on that taxi driver to pass your goodwill to others."

"I'm not depending on it," my friend said. "I'm aware that the system isn't foolproof so I might deal with ten different people today. If out of ten I can make three happy, then eventually I can indirectly influence the attitudes of 3,000 more."

"It sounds good on paper," I admitted, "but I'm not sure it words in practice."

"Nothing is lost if it doesn't. It didn't take any of my time to tell that man he was doing a good job. He neither received a larger tip nor a smaller tip. If it fell on deaf ears, so what? Tomorrow there will be another taxi driver I can try to make happy."

"You're some kind of a nut," I said.

"That shows how cynical you have become. I have made a study of this. The thing that seems to be lacking, besides money of course, for our postal employees, is that no one tells people who work for the post office what a good job they're doing."

"But they're not doing a good job."

"They're not doing a good job because they feel no one cares if they do or not. Why shouldn't someone say a kind word to them?"

We were walking past a structure in the process of being built and passed five workmen eating their lunch. My friend stopped. "That's a magnificent job you men have done. It must be difficult and dangerous work."

The workmen eyed my friend suspiciously.

"When will it be finished?"

"June, a man grunted.

"Ah. That really is impressive. You must all be very proud."

We walked away. I said to him, "I haven't seen anyone like you since The Man From LaMancha."

"When those men digest my words, they will feel better for it. Somehow the city will benefit from their happiness."

"But you can't do this all alone!" I protested. "You're just one man."

"The most important thing is not to get discouraged. Making people in the city become kind again is not an easy job, but if I can enlist other people in my campaign..."

You just winked at a very plain-looking woman," I said.

"Yes, I know," he replied. "And if she's a schoolteacher, her class will be in for a fantastic day."

Well...

You're a wonderful congregation.

You've done a superb job listening to me.

Have a fantastic new year!

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Kol Nidre 5775

THE DAY OF E-TONEMENT

EREV YOM KIPPUR 5775

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

Last year a piece ran on the eve of Yom Kippur, in the Wall Street Journal, that I knew I would talk about this year. The article was entitled: “Atoning for Yom Kippur—There’s an App for That.”

Here’s the story: Sarah Lefton is a digital animator in San Francisco. She was sitting in services two years ago. Maybe she was a bit bored…. Early in the service she flipped ahead to the Torah reading, and was instantly absorbed. The story, from Leviticus, explains the original Yom Kippur, when the High Priest carried out a ritual to absolve the people of sin. The ritual involved two goats. One goat was sacrificed on the altar of the Tabernacle. The other was banished to the wilderness, bearing the weight of the community’s confession. This chosen animal is the origin of the term scapegoat. “To me the story was so wild and interesting,” says Ms. Lefton. “I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if there was this Internet scapegoat you could just send around and upload your sins.”

So a year ago August she launched eScapegoat, just in time for the season of repentance. Users anonymously upload their 120-character confessions onto a cartoon goat via text or email. When confessors press submit, they are greeted with the image of a googly-eyed goat being pushed off a cliff by a priest, which is how the Talmud said it was done.

I googled the site this summer to make sure the goat was still there. He/she/it still is. A tag line says, Like in Bible Times, only nerdier. You have two options: start and see others’ sins. I did neither. I guess I’m old school. I exited.

I just have a hard time confessing my sin’s on-line… and I’m not sure I want others to read about it. Maybe I’m just showing my age or prudishness here. The site reportedly had 15,000 users during its first month.

And that’s nothing compared to the other virtual confession sites I learned about. Dailyconfession.com, founded in 1999, has 32,000 users-a day. Think about that.

And there’s evidently a massively popular app called Whisper, which invites you to share secrets and express yourself. I’m not going to ask how many of you have heard about Whisper, or use Whisper. A year after its launch in 2012, Whisper, according to Wikipedia, had more than 3 billion page views a month.

What is going on here?

Well, I suppose that the popularity of these sites testifies to the same phenomena that fills sanctuaries at the High Holidays. People feel a need to confess because we have reason to confess! We make mistakes. We make them unintentionally… most of the time. We make them intentionally …some of the time. We feel regret. We have a guilty conscience. We may fear judgment, from others or from God.

Several years ago when I was in England I visited Salisbury Cathedral, maybe the most magnificent of all the awe-inspiring cathedrals of Great Britain. On the bus back to London our spirited tour guide asked us how the Church raised the money for these incredible houses of worship. She pointed out that the Church was the most successful fundraising organization in history.

Her answer: indulgences. The promissory notes, if you will, that the Church gave out, in return for good deeds (notably including donations to the Church) that helped ease judgment for one’s sins. As I understand it, these indulgences did not absolve one of sin and they did not alleviate the need for confession. But they did mitigate damnation, which Christians to this day take very seriously.

We may not confess in the same way as Biblical forbears, or in the same way as neighboring Catholics, but we share in the primal need. So what better time, than now, to talk about… sin?

It’s interesting and not a little bit ironic that today we Jews are uncomfortable with sin… the word. The Reform movement is working on a new machzor, High Holy Day prayer book, to replace the one we are currently using. The committee likes to use surveys and focus groups on potentially contentious matters. So they queried people about how to translate the word cheyt, the main Hebrew term for sin, which as you know, appears frequently and centrally in our Yom Kippur liturgy (as in al cheyt shechatanyu… for the sin we have sinned…).

There was quite a bit of feedback. It seems that half favor keeping sin and half don’t. The half in favor say we should continue to call sin a sin. To use mistake or wrong or missing the mark is to weaken our language and reflects a moral relativism that is, well, a sin.

The other half says that the English word sin has too many Christian overtones. In truth, there are differences in what the two religions teach. For example, Christianity speaks of original sin that we are born into, while Judaism holds that sin is an act, not a state of being. Christianity often emphasizes that sin is overcome with right belief. Judaism maintains that sin is overcome with right action.

I vote for sin… keeping the word. Why let others co-opt it? More importantly, why let ourselves off the hook?

Not long ago Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the former head of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrote an interesting piece called “The Battle of Sin vs. Self” that was picked up by the Huffington Post. He describes taking a break from High Holy Day preparation by turning on the TV and coming across an interview with a well-known televangelist and author. The preacher’s message was unrelievedly upbeat. He said that people no longer wanted to go to their congregations to find out what they were doing wrong and to leave feeling guilty. Instead, they want to leave feeling uplifted, positive, and inspired.

Yoffie notes the trend across denominational lines. He writes,

 As different as we are from each other, in some ways we are remarkably alike: We are pragmatic, and above all, positive. We speak the language of positive reinforcement. We avoid talking about sin.... [We] focus on making people happy in their religious faith, and on creating worship services that are fashionable and convivial…. [and] yes, we need religion that is joyful and pleasant, comforting and community-building, and that makes us feel good about ourselves.

Yoffie points out that this is very American and very Jewish, yet he continues,

But Judaism is also about balance, and we need a better balance. Yom Kippur is... a reminder that we need less talk of what we want and more talk of what God wants of us… less emphasis on self and self-confidence, and far more on our obligation to be humble before God.

When you stop and think about it, what we are doing right now is so archaic, so odd, and so counter- intuitive… to much of our lives. We’re praying. We’re praying half in Hebrew. We’re listing our sins. We’re getting specific: offensive speech, lustful behavior, disrespect, lying, fraud… you name it. We’re confessing collectively, first person plural… but within the confines of sacred community it’s one-on-one with God.

It’s so different even from our Shabbat worship. So formal, so uncompromising… even I would say, so harsh.

Yet, I hope you would agree, so unexpectedly compelling.

The rest of the time it’s all about eating; today it’s all about fasting.

The rest of the time it’s all about forgetting our troubles; today it’s all about facing our troubles.

The rest of the time it’s all about having a good time; today it’s all about being a good person.

The rest of the time, it’s all about me. Today it’s all about God.

A final thought about sin. Judaism doesn’t just have one word for it… it has three. The main term I already mentioned: cheyt. But there are two others that are not uncommon in the Torah and in our liturgy. The Talmud (Yoma 36b) says that each of these expressions must refer to a distinct kind of sin.

As the sages understand it, cheyt refers to unintentional sin. Avon refers to deliberate sin. And pesha refers to rebellious sin.

The new machzor plans to occasionally translate cheyt as wrongs, avon as acts of injustice, and pesha as moral failures.

What‘s the point here? We make mistakes all the time. We know that. Many are unintentional. But we still did wrong. Usually they were not terrible sins. We can make them right. The possibility of change exists. The opportunity to rectify the wrong is readily before us. We missed the mark but we can do better next time. We can live up to our full potential. We can move closer to the ideal.

Our deliberate mistakes are more serious. Whether by omission or commission our willful neglect caused real harm. We let ourselves get carried away. We turned a blind eye. We know better, but we still messed up. The result is an injustice toward another. Repentance is still possible, but it will be harder.

Our rebellious sins are the most serious. We knowingly have embraced the wrong, and the harm extends beyond the individual to the community. These are true moral failures. We are subverting the values of our faith. While not all the harm can be mitigated, and full repentance and atonement may not be possible, that does not free us from trying to make amends in the best way we can.

The tough, tough message of Yom Kippur is that we have committed all three: cheyt, avon, v’pesha. That’s right: category one—unintentional, category two—intentional, category three—downright rebellious.

Hopefully not too many in two and three… but that unblinking memo to self is that we have been less than we should be. We have not measured up. Sorry. We’re not necessarily bad people. We have plenty of marks on the good side. But we fell short.

Yom Kippur is saying that if you were to sit down with God right now and honestly lay it all out… there is… room for improvement.

God expects more. We expect more. Others need more.

Our highest selves are still out there, waiting to be realized.

And that, my friends, is the bright spot in the reality check (or shall we say, gut check) of the Day of Atonement.

We can change. We can improve. We have not tapped our full potential.

We can take stock. We can make amends. We can sincerely apologize. We can wipe the slate clean.

We can atone. We can forgive and be forgiven. We can love and be loved again.

There’s no app for that. There’s no goat banished to the wilderness, real or virtual.

There’s just you and your soul.

There’s just me and my conscience… tapping into the power within us, and the power beyond us.


Bestowing the strength to search ourselves; better ourselves; transcend ourselves.

On this holy day, so may it be.

from the pages of Kadima, the newsletter of Congregation Adas Emuno:

From the desk of …                    

 Rabbi Barry Schwartz

    

Is It True?

Not long ago an anxious parent came to me with the concern that her son did not want to come to religious school. That, in and of itself, is unfortunately nothing new. But the reason was not what you would expect—the desire to sleep late, or do something else. This young boy did not want to attend because he felt that what he was learning was not true.

Upon further inquiry I learned that this boy could see no real purpose to our Sunday morning religious school service or the telling of Bible stories. Why pray if you don’t believe in God? Why listen to the Torah if it didn’t really happen that way?

I’d like to try and respond to this middle school student (little did he know that would happen in a rabbi’s column!) because it raises the important question of cognitive dissonance. Of course there are many reasons legions of us avoid prayer and Torah study, two of the most important activities of “religious” Jews. But surely for some of us it is because reason gets in the way of faith. We are skeptical of our tradition’s claim of a Creator who rules the world. We question the biblical version of history, with its miracles and revelations and acts of divine intervention.

While standing on one foot (as the traditional Jewish expression goes) I tried to explain to the parent that there are several kinds of truth. If we accept only scientific truth, I don’t think we can prove the existence of God, miracles, or revelation. But there are other kinds of truth. When we seek the moral of a story we are after “the truth of the heart”, or what can be termed moral truth. The Torah may not always record actual history, but it teaches us values by which to live. Prayer may not change anything on the outside, but it can change us on the inside. Maybe nobody is listening… except ourselves. In the words of one reading in our Siddur:

Prayer may not bring water to parched fields, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city. But prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.

When I happened to mention this incident to a colleague, he nodded sympathetically. To some extent all of us experience this disconnect between “Athens” and “Jerusalem”; between secular and religious ways of viewing the world. Then my colleague said, “What’s important about the Torah is not that it happened, but that it’s happening.” In other words, the Bible is less a record of what was, as it is a guide to what should be.

Sometimes we have to dig below the surface to find the deepest truths. As The Little Prince said memorably, “Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

History and Freedom

You may recall from two previous posts, Hannah Arendt, Jewish Philosopher, and Hannah Arendt and Charlie Chaplin, that I occasionally serve as a guest blogger for the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.  And this past August, when we went over potential dates for my next installment, one of the possibilities was September 17, and that leapt out at me because it was Rosh Hashanah.  And as it turns out, I found a perfect quote for the occasion, so I wrote it up ahead of time, and it was posted on their blog on Rosh Hashanah morning. You can see it in its original context, with the same title as here:  History and Freedom, but I'm also happy to share it with you here on our congregational blog.  And I want to say thank you to Bridget Hollenback, the Hannah Arendt Center's Director of Outreach and Social Media, who provided the images for my post on their blog, which I've taken the liberty of including here as well.  So, without further ado, here is my Hannah Arendt Quote for Rosh Hashanah: 

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random.  Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future.  Only then—but from that moment on—will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

 -Hannah Arendt, "Moses or Washington" (March 27, 1942) 

This eloquent quote from Hannah Arendt moves through a series of metaphors for historical consciousness. The first two, history is a hotel, and history is a vehicle, are rejected as misleading.  Hotels and vehicles are both transitional spaces, areas inhabited on a temporary basis, not permanent dwellings.  History is not a place we visit for a short period of time, or a place we merely use to get from point A to point B. Arendt further implies that history is not a commodity to be bought and sold, used and disposed of according to our mood.  But this is less a statement of fact than an admonition, in response to the fact that it is indeed possible for individuals to reject and deny their past, to ignore and abandon their history.  It is a commonplace to say that we cannot choose our parents, and the history of humanity that Arendt is concerned with is, after all, an extension of our personal and family histories.

   

 As an admonition, Arendt's remarks may seem to be a simple restatement of George Santayana's famous 1905 quote, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  And clearly, she shares in this sentiment about the importance of collective memory and the need to learn from the errors of previous eras. But she goes beyond this simple formulation by invoking the metaphor of history as a burden. History has gravity, history has weight, and the longer the historical memory, the heavier the baggage that accompanies it. Historical mass accumulates over time, and also through innovations in communications.  In oral cultures, where writing is absent, history as we understand it does not exist; instead there is myth and legend, preserved through oral tradition by way of continued repetition via oral performance.  Given the limitations of human memory, details about the past are forgotten within a generation or two, and the main function of myth and legend is to reflect and explain present circumstances.  This collective amnesia allows for a great deal of cultural flexibility and social homeostasis, a freedom from the burden of history that literate cultures take up.  The written word first makes possible chronological recordkeeping, and later historical narrative framed as an ongoing progression of events; this linear conception of time replaces the cyclical past of oral tradition, and what Mircea Eliade referred to as the myth of eternal return.  And so we hear the complaint of school children in generation after generation, that history is so much harder now than it was for their parents, because now there is so much more of it than ever before. 

 History is a burden, one that becomes too much to bear if all we are doing is living in the past, in rigid adherence to a fixed and unchanging tradition.  But Arendt adds the complementary metaphor of history as a blessing.  The burden can become a blessing if we use the past to understand the present, to serve the present, not to overwhelm or command the present.  The past can inform the present, history helps us to see why things are the way they are, why we do the things we do; being mindful of the past is a means to help fulfill Arendt’s goal ofthinking what we are doing.  But it is not enough simply to live in the present, and for the present.  We also have to look towards the future, to work for progress in the moral, ethical, and social sense, to enlarge the scope of human freedom.  And in light of this goal, Arendt invokes her fifth and final metaphor for history:  history is a weapon.  It is a weapon not to destroy or dominate others, or at least that is not what Arendt intends it to be, but rather a sword of liberty, an instrument to be used in the fight against oppression.

   

This quote reflects Arendt's overriding concern with human freedom.  The battle for freedom that she refers to is a collective struggle, not an individual quest.  It can only be achieved by political cooperation and unity, not by solitary escape from tyranny.  The commonly used phrase in western cultures, individual freedom, while not without value, all too easily eclipses the necessity of freedom as a shared responsibility, and in excess becomes oxymoronic.  As the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently put it, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" and "no one is free while others are oppressed."  Freedom for all, shared freedom, requires a sense of affiliation, kinship, connection, which in turn requires a sense of continuity over time. Just as individual memory is intimately related to individual identity, our collective memory is the key to group identity.  History is the foundation of community. 

Historical consciousness, which is derived from literacy, did not become widespread until after the diffusion of typography.  In addition to making written history widely available, print media such as calendars and periodicals made individuals aware of their place in history as never before, down to the basic knowledge of the year, month, and date that we all take for granted, not to mention awareness of our date of birth and age.  And as the great historian of printing, Elizabeth Eisenstein explains, more than any other factor, it was the printing revolution that gave rise to modernity.  The irony is that as printing made the past more accessible, it also made it seem less valuable, resulting in modernity's ahistorical tendencies.  Focus shifted from venerating tradition to revering progress, from looking back to origins to looking forward for originality.  This is exemplified by the fact that printing gave us two new literary forms, the news, and the novel. 

And so we get Henry Ford saying, "history is bunk," and dystopian novels like Brave New World and 1984 portraying future societies where history is either deleted or subject to constant revision.  Without a sense of the past, sensitivity to the future is undermined, and with the advent of instantaneous electronic communications beginning with telegraphy in the 19th century, more and more emphasis has been placed on the now, the present tense, leading us to lose touch with both the past and the future.  Conceptions of the past have also been affected by the rise of image culture, beginning with photography in the 19th century, so that a coherent sense of linear history came to be replaced by a discontinuous, and therefore incoherent collection of snapshots evoking nostalgia, as Susan Sontag observed in On Photography.  What Arendt makes clear is that contemporary present-minded ahistoricism risks more than Santayana's Sisyphean purgatory, but a true hell of oppression and slavery. 

So far, I have stressed a universal interpretation of this quote, and ignored its particular context.  Arendt's admonition originates in a column she wrote for a Jewish newspaper, Aufbau, published in New York for German-speaking Jews, as part of a critique of the Reform movement in Judaism.  The movement originated in 19th century Germany, as a response to the Enlightenment, and the Emancipation initiated by Napoleon, wherein Jews were released from ghetto confinement and given a measure of equal rights and citizenship.

To accommodate their newly established status, the Reform movement sought to recast Judaism in the image of Protestantism, as just another religious sect.  Apart from a liberalizing and modernizing of worship and religious requirements, this meant abandoning Jewish identity as a people, as a nation in exile, so as to give full political allegiance to the new nation-states of the west, and embrace a new national identity as citizens of Germany, or France, or England, or the United States.  Consequently, the Reform movement rejected Zionism and made loyalty to the nation of one's birth a religious duty.  Jewish identity and tradition were thereby reduced, compartmentalized as only a form of religious belief and practice, their political significance abandoned. 

 Arendt's criticism is consonant with Jewish tradition, as the Torah repeatedly asks the Jewish people to remember, to remember the Exodus, to remember the revelation at Mount Sinai, toremember God's laws and commandments, to remember God's commitment to social justice.  Rather than make an argument for a return to Orthodoxy, however, Arendt's concern is characteristically philosophical.  Immediately before concluding her column with the passage quoted above, Arendt makes a more specific appeal regarding models of political leadership and moral guidance: 

As long as the Passover story does not teach the difference between freedom and slavery, as long as the Moses legend does not call to mind the eternal rebellion of the heart and mind against slavery, the "oldest document of human history" will remain dead and mute to no one more than the very people who once wrote it.  And while all of Christian humanity has appropriated our history for itself, reclaiming our heroes as humanity's heroes, there is paradoxically a growing number of those who believe they must replace Moses and David with Washington or Napoleon.  Ultimately, this attempt to forget our own past and to find youth again at the expense of strangers will fail—simply because Washington's and Napoleon's heroes were named Moses and David. 

Written in the dark times that followed Hitler's rise to power, the outbreak of the Second World War, and the establishment of Eichmann's concentration camps, Arendt's words are all the more poignant and powerful in their call for taking pride in the Jewish tradition of fighting for freedom and justice, and for an awareness that the cause of liberty and human rights have their roots in that most ancient of documents. 

Arendt's criticisms of the excesses of Reform Judaism were widely shared, and the movement itself changed dramatically in response to the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.  Reform Judaism reversed its stance on Zionism, and remains a staunch supporter of the Jewish state, albeit with a willingness to engage in criticism of Israeli government policies and decisions.  At the same time, Reform religious observance, while still distinct from that of the Orthodox and Conservative branches, has gradually restored many elements of traditional worship over the years.  And the celebration of Jewish culture and identity has become normalized during the past half century. 

For example, witness Aly Raisman's gold medal-winning gymnastic routine at the recently completed London Olympics, performed to the tune of Hava Nagila; Keith Stern, the rabbi at the Reform synagogue that Aly attends, explained that " it indicates Aly’s Jewish life is so integrated into her entire soul, that I don’t think she was looking to make a statement as a Jew, I think it was so natural to her that it's more like, why wouldn’t she use the Hora? It shows again her confidence and tradition in a really fundamental way."

   

Raisman's musical selection made an important statement as well, in light of the International Olympics Committee's decision not to have a moment of silence during the opening ceremonies to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the death of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in a terrorist attack.  I think that Arendt would be nodding in approval at the way in which the teenage captain of the United States women's gymnastics team, in her own way, followed the example of Moses and David. 

Arendt's passage about history and freedom is a fitting one, I believe, for a Quote of the Weekpost scheduled to appear on the same day as Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is also said to be the birthday of the world.  The calendar year now turns to 5773, and 5,773 years is roughly the age of history itself, of recorded history, of written records, which originate in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization.  And while Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are referred to as the High Holy Days, and are popularly thought to be the most important in Jewish tradition, in truth it is the Passover that is the oldest, and most significant, of our holidays, lending further support to Arendt's argument.  But even more important than Passover is the weekly observance of the Sabbath day, which is mandated by the Fourth Commandment.  And in the new Sabbath liturgy recently adopted by the American Reform movement, there is a prayer adapted from a passage in the book Exodus and Revolution by political philosopher Michael Walzer, that is worth sharing in this context:

Standing on the parted shores of history

We still believe what we were taught

Before ever we stood at Sinai’s foot;

That wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt

That there is a better place, a promised land;

That the winding way to that promise

Passes through the wilderness.

That there is no way to get from here to there

Except by joining hands, marching together.

The message of this prayer is that only by working together can we transform the burden of history into a blessing, only by working together can we wield the shared history of humanity in the service of human freedom and social justice.  This is what Arendt wanted us to understand, to commit to memory, and to learn by heart.