So good to see the congregation
gathered on this Rosh Hashanah. L’shanah
Tovah Tikateivu— May we all be inscribed into the Book of Good Health and
Peace, Prosperity and Goodness in the New Year, for all of us and for our
families.
The story is told of the famous Sherlock Holmes and his trusted
aide Watson who had to leave London en route to solve a particularly difficult
case in the North. They were travelling
by horse-drawn wagon when night fell and it was time to set up camp on the
road. They erected a tent, ate dinner,
and the two turned in for the night. In
the middle of the night, Sherlock Holmes awoke with a start and looked
about. He nudged Watson out of a deep
sleep and said, “My dear Watson—Look about you and tell me what you see.” Watson, rubbing his eyes and allowing them to
adjust to the darkness gazed up into the heavens and replied, “Well, Sir, I see
planets and stars, I see distant galaxies, I see the transcendence of the
universe and the majesty of eternity.”
Sherlock Holmes replied, “Watson, precisely. Someone has stolen our tent.”
If God ever came to me and
asked, “So, what do you think of my Bible?
Give Me an honest appraisal. As a
work of literature, how would you rate it?”
How’s that for a question that should inspire a little fear and
trembling. Tell the author, and in this
case it would be an author with a capital “A,” exactly what you think of His
creation. And when it comes to conversing
with the Lord, deception is not a prudent strategy. “Well, Lord, now that you’ve asked, I can
tell you that I think that there are many passages where the Hebrew soars
poetically, and the drama is first-rate, and the laws are demanding and thought-provoking,
and it is a miracle just how much is conveyed using words as sparingly as You
do. “Rank,” the good Lord would say, “I
hear a ‘but’ coming so on with it. What
would you change?” “Well, Lord, I don’t
think it’s really a ‘but’ per se, but if You ever consider a rewrite, You might
want to throw in a joke here and there. You
know, lighten it up. Put people at
ease. I think humor is really
important.” And that’s what I would say
to the good Lord, Author of the most read, studied and pondered piece of
literature for the past two millennia.
Assuming I actually could
survive a conversation of that nature, God might just point to the funniest guy
in the Torah as proof that the Bible is not divorced of humor. And who would that be? It would be Isaac, Yitzhak, whose name
literally suggests “laughter.” There is
a passage in the Torah that speaks of a famine, forcing Yitzhak and Rivkah to
move to Gerar, a city in Philistine territory.
And fearing for his life and the life of his beloved Rivkah, he tells the
residents of Gerar that Rivkah isn’t really his wife, only his sister. But then one day, the king of the
Philistines, Avimelekh, spies Yitzhak and Rivkah through their window and what
does he see…
[he] saw Isaac [doing something with] his wife Rivkah (Genesis 26:8)
Now, the Torah
doesn’t actually say “doing something with,” it uses a verb “m’tzahek”
which is difficult to translate. It has
been variously and sensuously translated as—Isaac was caressing his wife, sporting
with his wife, playing with his wife, fondling his wife, and so forth. There are many different ways the translators
have chosen to translate the term m’tzahek,” but the translation I like
best is one I heard from my revered teacher, Rabbi Harold Kushner, who
suggested that we translate the verse simply as:
Isaac was making his wife, Rivkah,
laugh…
It really is a
translation that works beautifully and it takes our most maligned patriarch
Isaac, who too often is written off as silent, passive, victimized, and gives
him a new and more appealing character.
Isaac is the patriarch with a sense of humor. He makes Rivkah laugh. What a wonderful human activity: making each
other laugh. When we forget how to laugh,
we lose a part of what makes us human.
This past year, 5774, was about
as unfunny a year as they get. And
that’s not to say that there weren’t some positives. There were.
The stock market has been pretty good.
But on the other hand—we had a tough winter; Malaysia Airline Flight 370
just disappeared from the face of the earth; another one of its planes was shot
down over Crimea; gun violence continued to disrupt the nation, the outbreak of
Ebola in Africa; and then, of course, there was the kidnapping and murder of
the three yeshivah students in Israel: Eyal (Yifrah), 19 years old; Gilad (Shaer),
16; and Naftali (Fraenkel), 16 years of age.
I don’t think there’s a congregation around the world that won’t hear
the names of these three boys mentioned during Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.
It has been a long time since
the American Jewish community has been as galvanized as it was this summer
having received news of their murder. It
was just so senseless, so pointless, so perfectly wasteful of human life. It was an action that served no one’s interests—not
the Israelis, certainly not the Palestinians.
I wanted the Plainview, Syosset, Jericho, Woodbury, Bethpage, Westbury
communities to convene. We needed a
vehicle by which to express our outrage and our sorrow, our solidarity with
Israel, and with the help of the Mid-Island Y JCC, we got together, and we drew
on at least a 350, perhaps 400 person crowd.
We filled the gym at the Mid-Island Y.
It was a very Jewish
meeting. We lit candles, we said
kaddish, we listened to some speeches and afterwards we talked. The only thing missing was food. But here we were, on a week day, drawn together
by a common concern, the fate of the Jewish State. It was an evening of sorrow but also an
evening of triumph because that evening everyone knew that we had a purpose in
this world, and the purpose was to stand up against injustice and insanity. We were there because we were Jews, and I
know that for those who could not be there, they were proud of all of us who
could be there. It’s amazing how
powerful just showing up can be.
There’s a professor at the
Harvard Business School by the name of Clayton M. Christensen. And he tells a very interesting story about
an exchange with a Marxist economist who was finishing up a Fullbright
fellowship in Boston. This economist was
from China. And he asked the economist
if he had learned anything startling during his stay in America and the
economist said he had. What he found so
surprising was the role that religion played in the functioning of democracy
and capitalism. He was astounded by the
fact that people would listen to a minister or a priest instruct them about
rules to abide by that were not necessarily in their own self-interest, and
then willingly abide by them. And this
economist saw a connection between the ethical and moral commitments of
religious faith and the success of our democracy and our American form of
capitalism. Christensen, who is himself
a Mormon though I have no idea how devout, reflected on the waning influence of
religion on the general population and suggested that as religious commitment
declines, the very foundation of democracy is at stake. There will never be enough police to keep
people in check who believe that they owe no allegiance to any power greater
than their own selves. Neither of them
really addressed the issue of ritual or prayer, sacred rites of passage, though
they must have been thinking of them as well.
But their focus was more on the internalization of sacred principles,
ways of looking at the world that define what it means to be a person of
conscience and integrity, what we would otherwise refer to as a mensch
I love this story and I love
what the professor had to say about religion.
This idea—religion is that which moves you to be a better
businessperson, a better human being, a better proponent of democracy—is one I
want to believe in, even if we can find instances where religion seems more a
toxin than an antidote. But let’s be
real. Religion sometimes is unfairly
given a bad rap. There’s no noble
discipline in life, whether medicine, the law, politics, or religion that can’t
be abused or used for disreputable purpose.
I want to be more specific about religion. I want to say that it is our Judaism, when
understood and practiced with clarity and creativity that actually makes us
better human beings.
And yet, I always cringe when I
hear myself differentiate between being better Jews and better human beings. Not that I don’t wish that—I obviously do!—but
it’s as if our Jewishness and our humanity occupy separate realms of
reality. Witness Person X—he’s a
wonderful Jew, but a terrible human being.
Witness Person Y—she’s a wonderful human being, but a terrible Jew. This divorce of our Jewishness from our
humanity makes no sense. How can
Jewishness be divorced from humanity? If
I had a dog and only fed her kosher food, I could say, she’s not a very good
human being, but a terrific Jew. There’s
a reason why we think that our Judaism and our humanity occupy different realms
of reality, but getting into that will take us too far afield. Suffice to say that we do think like this and
because we do, our Jewishness having been separated from the issues that
concern us most.
Is it any wonder that synagogues today find themselves under tremendous
pressure? Membership dwindles and
programs no longer capture the attention of the community as they once did. And it’s
not, as some might argue, that Jews don’t want to be Jews—they do. But they are, and I would dare say, we all
are seeking a Jewishness that is integral, not peripheral, to our lives. The less our Judaism speaks to us about life—our
lives lived everyday and in real time--the lower a value we will place on that
kind of Judaism. And the lower the value
we place on our Judaism, the less likely we are to associate with an organized
Jewish community.
A brief quiz: Who was it who used to get up on a stage,
turn to the audience and ask, “Can we talk?”
That’s right. It was Joan Rivers,
alehah hashalom—she should rest in peace.
It was her signature question.
Public speakers sometimes have these telltale phrases that identify
them, like Rodney Dangerfield when he would say, “I get no respect.” But I was thinking about Joan Rivers and
asking myself why did we think that question was funny. Maybe we thought it was funny because it was
a signal that we were going here something outrageous come out of her
mouth. Maybe it was funny because it was
a way that this petite woman, only five foot two, could immediately draw
thousands within an audience into her confidence. Maybe it was funny because it had an
innocently stereotypical Jewish ring to it.
Suddenly, you were sitting in her kitchen or living room and you’re
going to hear a juicy story.
Whatever—she pulled it out of her tool box of jokes and captured our
attention for however long she was going to keep us laughing.
You know, we all like to laugh
and we all like to talk. And when
something funny is going on, we all like to listen, which is the reason why I
would have had God tuck a few more jokes into the Torah. On the other hand, the Torah is Five Books
worth of conversation. God doesn’t quite
say, “Can we talk?” but we get hundreds upon hundreds of verses that begin
either with Vaidaber God spoke or Vayomer
God said. I always chuckle when
I walk into a synagogue with a sign that reads:
It is forbidden to speak during prayer
Really? I hope not, because the predominant form of
Jewish prayer is speech. Were we to stop
people from speaking during prayer, the entire prayer service would come to a
screeching halt. We don’t have the Ten
Commandments, at least not in the Hebrew, we have the Aseret haDibrot the Ten Speakings. We even
have a way of identifying types of conversation dividing them into Divrei
Kodesh Words of Holiness or Sihat
Hullin Ordinary Discussion. Jews
are talkers. We all have differing
levels of skill, when it comes to communication, but it is, for all of us, the
principal way that we interact with each other, touch one another, console one
another, encourage one another, educate one another, enlighten one another, and
it’s also the way we make each other laugh.
I was once interacting with a
group and I said that I was going to make a bold assertion that there wasn’t a
topic in the world that didn’t have some Jewish spin to it. So I challenged the group to stump me by
shouting out a random topic. So someone
shouted: Craps. OK. So what do we learn from this? We learn the rabbi should never say, Stump
me. But ok—is Craps the topic? Fine. Actually,
let’s broaden the topic. Let’s talk
about gambling. And we did. Why do people gamble? Well, it’s fun. It’s okay to indulge yourself in a dream of
being a multi-millionaire. Hey—you never
know! Then again, do you know any
gamblers who have an addiction to gambling?
I’ve known a couple in my time and in both cases, they lost thousands of
dollars, they lost their jobs, and their marriages ended in divorce. The addiction led them to lie about money,
lie about where they were, and eventually create enough debt in the family as
to generate the kind of distrust and anger that places substantial strains on
the marriage, and in the cases I’m thinking of, the marriage did not
survive. The Jewish spin? It should be clear to all that any addiction
is dangerous, not only what it can do to you but what it can do to the loved
ones around you. Once gambling is above
the truth or above one’s marriage, then it’s legitimate to question whether
one’s priorities are in order. The
sacrifice of love and security in favor of wealth and riches is something our
tradition will question. And you notice
I’m not saying that gambling as entertainment is in some way wrong. I think we would be hard pressed to make that
argument. But if asked, both Moses and
God would have something to say about Craps.
It’s a Jewish topic.
This group I spoke with had not
gathered to study Torah. It was more of
a spontaneous gathering. They weren’t
necessarily regular shul-goers—some were.
They weren’t necessarily observant—though some were. But they were all Jews who were fascinated by
the idea that an ancient tradition, one they had presumably inherited, one they
could call their own because it was their own, could in some way guide their
lives today in spite of it being over 2,000 years old. And we weren’t talking about anything
peripheral to their lives. We were
talking about people whose decisions lead them to financial and marital ruin.
If I told you that I walked away thinking that this was one of the
more successful, effective, powerful sessions in Torah study, would you agree
with me that we were studying Torah? We
really were. And it all happened
surrounded by some really good nosh, casual conversation, and a lot of
laughter. I think the humor allows us to
touch on subjects that make us uncomfortable or sad or anxious in a safe
way.
Sometimes, it’s the funniest people in the world who are perhaps
struggling the most with inner demons.
How sad were we when we learned about Robin Williams and how he ended
his life. We were shocked—right? How could someone so talented and so funny be
so desperate as to end his life so abruptly?
I’m not going to suggest that he needed a friend or a community to talk
to, (he may have had both of those, I don’t know, and perhaps his situation was
such that no one could have helped him), but I do know that the people who have
friends, confidants, a community that they can turn to when life becomes
tumultuous fare better than those who do not.
People need people with whom they can talk and talk with honestly.
Who was the funniest character in the Torah? Isaac—he made his wife laugh. At another time and another place, maybe
Isaac would have been a stand-up comedian getting up on the stage and saying
“Can we talk?” Wait, that’s Joan’s line;
Isaac would need something else. And
eventually his fame would grow and he’d be interviewed and the reporter would
say, “Isaac, what in your background gives you the emotional energy to get up
on the stage and be so funny?” And Isaac
would say, “Well, it really comes down to anger. You see, when I was a kid, my father tried to
kill me.” “Wow,” the reporter might
say, “that must have been traumatic.”
“Yea—that was traumatic!” The
interviewer might press him a little bit more on this matter and ask, “How do
you cope with the awareness that your father tired to do this to you?” and here
let us suspend our imagination in favor of the actual words of Torah when we
read of Isaac:
And Isaac went out into the fields, as
evening fell, to talk… (Genesis 24:64)
That’s what Isaac
did. Isaac might say, “I talk a lot with
people who love me and care for me.”
Actually, the rabbis read this line to mean that Isaac went out into the
fields to pray, specifically Minhah, the afternoon service, which is ideally
recited as evening falls. And maybe
Isaac did both. Maybe his talking to
friends in the field was a sort of spiritual encounter in which the burden of
his heart was made lighter. Maybe he
could at some point come to the realization that his father did try to kill
him, but that was long in the past, and though it still hurt, he is now the
father of two children and married to a wonderful woman with whom he speaks all
the time. He makes her laugh and she
makes him laugh and over time he’d been able to work through the deepest
anxieties and troubles of his heart. Of
the three patriarchs, Isaac lived the longest, passing from this world at the
age of 180.
It’s the friend, the confidant, who challenges your
thinking—gently I would hope—questions your conclusions, offers alternative
perspectives, deliberates on whether there is another logical approach to the
issues you face, who is among our most precious assets in our lives. We may come upon the truth ourselves but we
are more likely, after multiple conversations with others who help us refine
our thinking and dispute our conclusions, to finally arrive at the truth. And the truth about who we are and the path
we need to take in life is always the most compelling form of Torah.
I have a few questions. With whom do you talk? With whom would you like to talk? What would you like to talk about? Is there something that’s either troubling
you or something that’s puzzling you that you would want to share with a few
other people troubled or puzzled by the same issue? It could be anything really. It could be issues as varied as how to say No
to my teenager without the roof caving in; how to cope with a parent suffering
from dementia; how to navigate through a relationship that has become unstable
and tumultuous; how to deal today with a past that has included some form of
physical or emotional abuse; how to deal with an addiction, your own or that of
a loved one; how to survive the Bar and Bat Mitzvah year; how to love kids who
have drifted from you; techniques for being a good grandparent; following a
diet that is reasonable and balanced; Jewish meditation; Jewish yoga; I could
go on but the point here is not to enumerate an exhaustive list of what to talk
about. It is rather to get you thinking
about what you would want to talk about with other like-minded individuals,
with the understanding that the synagogue is a place where our Judaism and our
humanity coincide, and an ancient wisdom exists which can offer us insight in
how to live our lives today. But in
order to do that, we have to start a conversation, with a little bit of nosh,
some coffee or tea, among trusted friends or people we can learn to trust, in
some safe space. The issues to talk
about would be the issues closest to your hearts and you are the only ones who
can tell me what those issues are.
Over the past year, I’ve been speaking to a very talented and
bright group of people who comprise what has become known as the Whole Health
and Wellness Committee. We’ve been
talking about what a congregation would look like were it to focus on the
issues that mattered most to the members who belong. We have a vision of people getting together,
maybe once-a-month, maybe once every six weeks, to talk about these critical
issues. They could meet at the
synagogue, or perhaps in each other’s homes, or maybe at Bagel Boss or
Starbucks. The location of the meeting
could be anywhere, but it’s the topic that would matter most, because it would
be the topic that mattered to you most.
I call this group the Whole Health and Wellness Committee, because the
ultimate goal of the committee is to use the congregation, our Jewish tradition
and background, as a tool for promoting greater health and wellness. It is a concrete plan to follow one of the
Torah’s most fundamental mitzvot: Choose Life.
So here comes a little assignment I’d like to give you: I’m asking you to write to me and tell me
what’s on your mind. You’ve got my
e-mail address. I’ve been sending you e-mails
every day. Let me know the issue that is
your deepest concern. And let me know if
you want a group organized or if you already have a group of friends with whom
you would want to meet. Let’s get
together and talk, and nosh, and think, and laugh. The laughter is really important. There is always a certain joy in coming
closer to the truth.
Joan Rivers once said, “I hate
housework. You make the beds, you do the
dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again.” If our Judaism is something that appeals to
us only a handful of days during the year, we’re going to end up hating
it. For years now, the Jewish leadership
around the world has been staring at the planets and the stars and galaxies without
the guts to say that the tent is missing.
So here I am to say: the tent is
missing. There is something missing from
our Judaism and it should have been obvious but we get too distracted by
non-essentials. We always hear that
Conservative Judaism is doing poorly. You
know what: Judaism the world over is doing poorly. A tradition this old and
this rich should hold greater sway over the people it supposedly serves. Our Judaism and our humanism need to reconnect,
and they can, but only if we start talking about the stuff that really touches
us. We will soon discover how the wisdom
of the ages as found in our sacred texts can put us back onto the path of righteousness. I look forward to hearing from you this week.
Shanah Tovah, everyone.
