THE GREATEST NO-HITTER OF ALL TIME--YOM KIPPUR SERMON, 5776 / 2015

 

                Shanah Tovah, everyone.  I want to wish you all a Tzom Kal, an easy fast, and G’mar Hatimah Tovah—we should all be inscribed and sealed for good into the Book of Life for this New Year, 5776.

 

                I don’t know if you ever heard of the story of Mr. Schwartz Lumber Jack Supreme who one day walks into the offices of the North Woods Lumber Company in Wisconsin and meets with the foreman as part of his interview to become a lumberjack.  The foreman looks at Mr. Schwartz and sees an elderly man, well into his eighties, a Yiddish newspaper stuck held in one armpit, a little ax flung over his other shoulder, who proceeds to apply for a position with the company.  The foreman tries to be sensitive to the elderly Mr. Schwartz and says to him, “You know, a lumberjack is a very strenuous job, are you sure you are up to the task?”  Mr. Schwartz says, “I’m up to the task.  I’ve been choppin’ avay all my life.”  The foreman is still skeptical so he asks, “Well, where have you worked in the past?”   Mr. Schwartz replies, “Vell, I vas choppin away in the Sahara Forest.”  The foreman replies, “Mr. Schwartz, you mean the Sahara Desert.”  And Mr. Schwartz replied, “Vell now they call it a desert!”

 

                What does it take to do something extraordinary in life, something for which you will alwys be remembered? 

 

                This Yom Kippur is an anniversary of something extraordinary that happened which has had a lasting impact on the Jewish community.  Let me remind you about what happened 50 years ago on this day.  Yom Kippur fell on October 6 which just happened to be the first day of the World Series.  That year, Yom Kippur came late.  The teams in the series were the National League’s Los Angeles Dodgers versus the American League’s Minnesota Twins and the big question was would the Dodgers’ star pitcher, the Jewish Sandy Koufax, pitch in that game.  Big decision—the Word Series is the Yom Kippur of baseball and Yom Kippur is the World Series of Judaism.  In the end, Koufax did not pitch that game and it was a proud moment for Jews around the country.

 

                I was ten years old at that time and I remember the discussions surrounding Sandy’s decision.  If he sat out the game, not only would we be qvelling with pride as Jews, but as Minnesotans, we might even have a shot at winning that game.  For Minnesota Jewry there was downside to Koufax sitting out the game.  And in fact, Minnesota did win that first game but the Dodgers went on to win the series.

 

                I have to thank Brad Kolodny for reminding me about this anniversary and directing me to an article just written about it by Rabbi Jeremy Fine, the assistant rabbi at Temple Aaron in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Rabbi Fine’s question was if Sandy wasn’t at the game on Yom Kippur—where was he?  And is it true, as Minnesota Jewish lore would have it, that Sandy actually went to services at Temple Aaron.  As one might expect, there are several versions to this story.  First version—he was not at services.  Second version—he was at services.  Third version—he was at services in the morning.  Fourth version—he was at services in the afternoon.  Fifth version, he was at services and Rabbi Raskas, alav hashalom—may he rest in peace—the senior rabbi of Temple Aaron at the time, made eye contact with him but called no attention to him wishing to protect his privacy.  Sixth version, he was at services but Rabbi Raskas nev e saw him, and we can’t find anyone who did. 

 

                The Koufax story, 50 years later, is still a great story and for the Jewish community.  But why?  Was it foolish for Koufax to sit out that game?  It was, after all, no ordinary game.  This was the World Series!  Setting one Yom Kippur aside for the World Series would be understandable—wouldn’t it?  Did he really have to be so righteous?

 

                Lawrence Kohlberg is a man with whom we should all be familiar.  He was a major American psychologist whose life work was devoted to the study of moral development in people.  Like Jean Piaget who studied cognitive development in children as well as their moral development, Kohlberg saw people as progressing through several stages of ethical awareness before reaching what he had determined would be the height of moral sensitivity and practice.  You would think that a guy like this would be fairly resolved to following the law, but actually, before his matriculation at the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in one year, he worked for the Haganah, the precursor to the Israeli army, smuggling Jewish refugees from Romania through the British blockade and into then Palestine.  He was captured by the British and imprisoned on Cyprus, where he and fellow inmates broke out and returned to the United States.  Now, you see, that’s a story that would make for an interesting essay on your college application forms.  So how does a man like this, willing to ignore social norms and laws, end up studying moral development?  In part, it has to do with the idea that in his scheme of moral development, the sixth or highest stage of moral evolution has to do with the ability to see above the social conventions that we grow up with and are acclimated to.  We hope that what is most familiar to us as good citizens is good and moral, we hope that the laws that regulate our lives are just and fair, but as we all know, a law is a law not necessarily because it is just or good, but because someone or a society has deemed it so, and that law or convention may be completely immoral or unethical.  Think of the years that children could be legally employed as cheap labor, or women denied the right to vote, or African-Americans segregated from the rest of the world in spite of slavery having been abolished.  It’s not the person who goes with the flow who is necessarily the good person, but the person who has the insight to look over the flow and sense that the direction is either salutary or detrimental to society.  There exists something greater than the law of the land.  Call it the law of God if you will, or if that makes you uncomfortable, call it the universal law to which all people ought to be subject.  Kohlblerg would probably tell us that his work with the Haganah was designed to circumvent the law of humanity in deference to a higher law, and in such a case, disobedience was an act of moral courage.

 

                I think Kohblerg is totally correct.  But I realize that there is a flaw in the argument in as much as there will always be disagreement over what constitutes a higher law.  As for example when Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses due to her opposition to gay marriage, did so on the basis of following a higher law, namely God’s law.  But here, too, Kohlberg might argue that the shortcoming in Davis’ argument would be her insistence that she knows exactly what God’s law is based on a book.  A higher moral awareness is not necessarily derived from the pages of a single book, even the Bible.   The challenge here is to determine the guiding principles in our lives.  Are we content to do what is merely expected of us, or are we bold enough to do what is right whatever the circumstances?  In Psalm 15 we read:

 

Abide by an oath even if it does us harm (Psalm 15:4)

 

Well, if I make a promise and as it turns out, I may come out on the short end, shouldn’t I try to circumvent that promise?  Generally speaking, the answer is no, because generally speaking your word is far more precious than any material losses you will incur.

 

                In January of 1982, Air Florida Flight 90, taking off from Washington National Airport for a flight to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, failed to gain altitude and crashed into the 14^th Street Bridge over the Potomac River, just two miles from the White House.  The air craft continued over the bridge, crushing several occupied cars and before sinking into an icy Potomac River.  The aircraft was carrying 74 passengers and 5 crew members and everyone was killed with the exception of six people.  About 20 minutes after the crash, a helicopter arrived on the scene dropping a life line to airlift or drag the survivors away from the crash site.  One passenger, Arland Dean Williams Jr., 46 years of age, handed the life line twice to other passengers rather than use it himself.  He was the last of the six to be recused and by the time for his own turn, the tail of the aircraft shifted and must have dragged him down into the icy waters.  The 14^th Street Bridge is today the Arland Dean Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge in memory of his heroism.  Many other honors have been conferred upon him posthumously. 

 

                How does a person like that do something so extraordinary?  How does one become so self-sacrificing—literally!  Is it nature?  Is it nurture?  Is it both? 

 

One of the great piyutim, religious poems that we recite on Yom Kippur is Ki hinei kahomer—We are like clay in the hands of the potter, or otherwise known by its refrain, labrit habet—Look to the covenant.  You are all very familiar with it.  Its first stanza reads:  “As clay in the hand of the potter, who thickens or thins it at will, so are we in Your hand, Guardian of love; Recall Your covenant; do not heed the Accuser.”  I love this poem—don’t you?  And then each stanza focuses on whom to liken Israel to given various professions—we are as stone in the hand of the mason, iron in the hand of blacksmith, the helm in the hand of the sailor, glass in the hand of the glazier, cloth in the hand of the draper, or silver in the hand of the smelter.  But what does this sacred poem ultimately mean? 

 

                I find a commentary on this piyyut by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, very compelling.  Rabbi Sacks explains as follows.  There’s a play on words in this piyyut that we have to be sensitive to and it occurs in the very first stanza where the play is on the two Hebrew words meaning potter and accuser.  The potter is Yotzer and the accuser is Yetzer.  You can hear the play very clearly even if you don’t know Hebrew—Yotzer/Yetzer, Yotzer/Yetzer.  Now even though yetzer can be translated as the accuser,  and our Mahzor does translate it as s uch, the accuser begin that no goodnick of an angel in the heavens above revealing the darkest aspects of our lives, it is more easily translated as inclination.  And you know that translation whenever we talk about the Yetzer hatov, the Good Inclination or the Yetzer HaRa, the evil inclination.  And if we translate Yetzer as inclination, then the repeating refrain of each stanza would be, God—pay no attention to our wayward inclination.  And all of this is tied up with the story of Noah and the Flood, if you can believe it.  True.  Here’s the scenario:

 

                It’s been over a year since Noah and his menagerie have been cooped up on this ark and finally, God tells them that the earth is dry and everyone is free to go as he or she pleases.  So Noah releases the family, the animals, and so forth, and as a dutifully grateful man, he builds an altar and makes offerings to God.  God, in turn, is pictured as breathing deeply these wonderful aromas of the offerings and then the Torah gives us an insight into God’s thinking:

 

Never again will I doom the earth because of man,

since his yetzer, his inclination, is evil from his youth…  (Genesis 8:21)

 

You know what God is doing in this very personal thought that is revealed to us in the Torah?  God is confessing.  God is doing Teshuvah.  Man’s yetzer, man’s nature is evil from his earliest day.  But if the problem is man’s yetzer, whom is to blame for that but the Yotzer, the Creator?  The paytan, the author of this moving piyyut is challenging God.  God you gave us this Yetzer, you gave us free will, you gave us a desire to act rebelliously, don’t go punishing us for the flaws You are responsible for!   And you know what—God buys it. It makes sense.  Who is to blame for the Yezer, the inclination to do evil but the Yotzer, the One who created us to begin with.

 

                At one and the same time, this beautiful piyyut reminds us that we are flawed—which out to induce a little bit of humility in us all, but that we are also the creation of the greatest potter, mason, blacksmith, sailor, glazier, draper, smelter of all—God.  Because we are flawed, we are not so great.  Because we are created by God, there is always some One greater than us in the world.

 

                It’s of great interest to me that as Jews, traditional Jewish law requires so little of us.  One might even say that it requires nothing of us.  To be a Jew, according to halakhah, you have to have a Jewish mother which makes all of us Jews by accident.  If our mothers were Jewish then so are we.  But then a second question should gnaw at our beings having determined our legitimacy as Jews—so what?  So what if our mothers were Jewish?  If Jewishness is a status devoid of values or practices or rituals, if it all boils down to an accident of birth, then exactly what pride should we have in our birth?  Frankly, I have no idea, which is the reason why for me the big ideas in Jewish tradition almost always point to the sense that we may live to make a living, but whether we are truly alive or merely exist depends on whether we truly live with the idea that there is something far greater than ourselves in his world and are willing to act on it.

 

                Sheryl Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.  In 2012, Time Magazine included her as one of the 10 most influential women in the world.  Due to her holdings in Facebook, her net worth is over one billion dollars.  Her husband, Dave Goldberg, was the CEO of Survey Monkey and he died suddenly in May of this year while on vacation in Mexico.  At the end of Sheloshim, the 30^th day of mourning, which for a spouse would be the end of the official period of mourning, Sheryl posted a rather long and personal essay about her experience of death and mourning, and one of the things that leapt out of the essay, at least for me, was her trip to the hospital in the ambulance with her husband.  At some later point, she would be told the truth, that her husband had died before he ever got into the ambulance, but she didn’t know it at the time.  She wrote that the ride to the hospital was unbearably slow.  And “I still hate every car that did not move to the side, every person who cared more about arriving at their destination a few minutes earlier than making room for us to pass.  I have noticed this in many countries and cities.  Let’s all move out of the way.  Someone’s parent or partner or child might depend on it.”  What Sheryl is pointing to is the fact that we live in a world where people have forgotten how to stop.  We all must continue to do what we are doing because apparently what we are doing is so important, and since no one else can probably do what we are doing as well as we are doing it, we cannot stop and that’s true even if an ambulance is on our bumper, desperately trying to get to a hospital, at least according to Sheryl Sandberg’s experience in an ambulance ride that is now seared into her memory forever.

                The idea here is that in so many different cases, where our religious ideals ought to be trumping everything else, we often allow “the-everything-else” to trump the religious ideal.  And the social pressures are on us at all times to make those religious ideals secondary, or tertiary or whatever comes after tertiary (I looked it up, but no one ever uses those words).  The practice of our religious principles way too often fall victim to other principles that are unworthy of our esteem—convenience, economics, self-interest, personal ego.  Kent M. Keith, a Harvard law graduate, EdD, and writer, wrote a piece that has become known as “The Paradoxical Commandments.”  He wrote:

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

 

                I don’t know if Mr. Keith was thinking religiously when he wrote these paradoxical commandments, but he might as well have included a few more:

If you go to morning minyan to say kaddish on a yahrzeit, you may be late for work.

Make the minyan anyway.

 

If you devote a few hours a week to reading a Jewish book or exploring a Jewish website, you might lose some television time or playing mindless games on your smart phone.

Read a Jewish book and grow intellectually anyway.

 

If you buy a bottle of wine and a couple of hallot for Friday night, you’ll be out $15.

Buy the wine and hallah anyway.

 

If you steer business activities and meetings away from Shabbat, you will annoy clients and associates.

Steer business activities and meetings away from Shabbat anyway.

 

                You may have read some works by Dr. Oliver Sacks, the noted British neurologist and author who attained fame through his narrative expositions of his patients.  He wrote “The Man Who Mistoook His Wife for a Hat.”  The movie Awakenings starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro is based on a memoir he wrote on his success with treating catatonic patients with the drug L-Dopa.  He comes from a rather illustrious family.  The Israeli diplomat Abba Eban was a cousin.  Sacks grew up in a very religious family where the observance of Shabbat was a regular routine.  His last essay in the New York Times recalled the kind of Sabbath environment in which he was raised, how his mother dropped all other duties to prepare gefilte fish for Shabbat, how his father would make Kiddush on Friday evenings, how on a Shabbat afternoon they would go to an aunt’s home for Kiddush, and so forth.  He drifted from Sabbath observance with age and his disenfranchisement with religion was solidified when his mother exploded at him for expressing homosexual feelings.  The 100^th birthday of a cousin brought him to Israel, back to relatives he had not seen in years, and back to the shalom of Shabbat that he had not observed in years.  Another of his famous cousins, the Israeli Robert Aumann, the Nobel Laureate in Economics (who by the way also has a teaching position at Stony Brook), told him that had Stockholm pressed him on the issue of traveling on Shabbat to be awarded the Nobel prize, he would have refused to accept it.   The way Aumann put it, observing Shabbat was not about improving society, but rather about improving the quality of one’s life.  It was not long after, that Sacks was diagnosed with metastatic cancer.  The last paragraph in his essay was this:

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.  (The New York Times, Sunday Review, August 14, 2015)

There was a not so subtle undertone of wistfulness, of longing for what might have been a very different life had he observed Shabbat, but now he had only to remember what Sabbath was like, as he faced the final hours of his own life.  He died just a couple weeks ago on August 30.

 

                Over the centuries, Jewishness has been most closely identified as the tradition of Kashrut and Shabbat.  It’s the tradition that said we don’t have to avail ourselves of every food and we don’t have to work every waking hour.  And in spite of those restrictions, no one will ever starve and no one will ever grow poor.  To the contrary, one’s life may be enriched in ways no metric can ever measure precisely because we connect our lives with principles of enduring and eternal worth:  we are guests in God’s world, spirits in matter, forces of kindness, beings of self-reflection and mindfulness.  We’re pretty good at doing this a few days a year, but our lives and our families would be far better off if we practiced those principles with greater regularity, let’s say, once every seven days.  Like any master will tell you, the perfection is in the practice.  No one has to become a Hasid to do Shabbat.  You just have to choose something: Kiddush, hallah, Torah study, attending a service, refraining from business, and if 25 hours of a business-free period is too much then do twelve or six or three hours.  But do something not because you’re so religious but because Shabbat is what Jews do.  And make it fun because if it isn’t fun, you’re doing it wrong.

 

                According to a few baseball statistics I checked, Sandy Koufax pitched four no-hitters in his career and one perfect game.  But the no-hitter that the Jewish community and perhaps the rest of baseball fans will always remember him for is the no-hitter in the first game of the 1965 World Series, a no-hitter because he refused to pitch.  For Sandy, baseball was big but there was something bigger. And whatever it is in our lives that’s big, there’s something bigger.  And it shouldn’t take a Yom Kippur to remind us of that big idea.  So here is the challenge.  What is your no-hitter?  What will you do or what will you refuse to do because as a Jew, you are a promoter of that big idea? 

 

Shanah Tovah…