SERMON

EVE OF ROSH HASHANAH 5766

22 SEPTEMBER 2006

ALOYALTY@

 

A few months ago our Temple Israel Treasurer, Randy Friedman, and I were having lunch together, talking about Temple Israel and our respective roles in it.

 

It seems that something I said to Randy over lunch apparently had stuck with him, and he had thought about it enough that he incorporated a little of that discussion into his remarks at our annual congregational meeting earlier this year. Although I don=t remember exactly what my original question to him was, I know that the gist of it was ATo what or to whom do you believe you owe the most loyalty in your life? Your family? Your business? Your friends? Your synagogue? Your community? Your country? Your religion? Your God? Your self?@ Apparently he had given the question some serious thought and, now that I=ve given it some more thought myself, I have come to realize how important that question really is. So I want to pose and reflect on that same question to you tonight on the eve of the Jewish New Year. I=ll explain why in a moment.

 

Here=s the same question phrased another way: Is there any one or any thing in the world for which you would lay down your life? Before you answer that question, I would ask that you ponder these thoughts which seem to go along with that question: 1) If the answer to the first question were going to be Ayes,@ would there be more than one person or one thing for which you might be willing to sacrifice your own life? 2) If the answer to that second question were also Ayes,@ what would be the order of priority in which you would consider doing this?

 

While I understand that you are not in the habit of considering such things in your usual, everyday lives, the beginning of the Jewish New Year is not a usual time. It is a time, in fact, when we really do (or we are really supposed to) take these sorts of things into consideration.

 

A little context may be in order here. As long ago as the year 700 B.C.E., Homer wrote these words in the Iliad: which translates roughly into AIt is sweet and fitting to die for one=s country.@ Here, clearly, Homer states his belief that it was not only all right to sacrifice your life for your country, but it was both sweet and fitting as well. Loyalty to one=s country is a component of patriotism; the willingness to die for it is what our men and women in uniform declare by their service on a daily basis. How many of us who are not now or have never been in the armed forces, would willingly make that sacrifice? At the same time, we might also ask what would move someone to the point of being willing to die for one=s country. What greater good would be served by that death? Most of us live in a world and a community in which these kinds of questions might seem absurd.

 

But a few weeks ago, at the Jewish Federation offices in Seattle, a very angry man made his way into the building and began shooting. One of his victims was a pregnant woman who worked in the building, who tried to shield her unborn child from the onslaught and in the process took a bullet in her arm, shattering the bone, but in so doing saved her fetus from harm. Her response was instinctive as well as instructive. She instinctively made the decision to do whatever she could to save her child, even at great, or even possibly ultimate, personal risk. She put her child before herself. In a manner of speaking, she was more loyal to her unborn child even than to herself.

 

Have you ever thought about risking your own life to save another person=s life? Why would you do it, and under what circumstances? Who or what could be so important to you that you would be willing to give up your life as you know it so that someone else could live, or so that something else could survive? How far short of giving up your life would you be willing to go if the circumstances called for it? I know that the answer would probably depend on the specific circumstances, and I know that most of us will never have to face this horrible question or situation. But what if . . . ?

 

I know that the man whom I have invited to speak to us next Friday night, on Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, has had to make that choice. He now desperately wants to move out of Baghdad , the city where he was born and has lived all his life, and out of Iraq , because he believes that he and his wife will not be able to survive the Aliberation@ of Iraq , even though they were able to survive the reign of Saddam Hussein. But my friend is adamant that if anyone is to be able to get out of Iraq , it will be his adult son, and his son=s family first, and only after they are out and safe, will Sabah and his wife try to leave. Clearly Sabah =s loyalty is to his son first and himself second, and it is horribly clear that Sabah =s life will be in increasing danger if he stays in Iraq . Yet he will not have it any other way: his son and his son=s family come first, then Sabah and his wife Shayma.

 

Please understand that I am asking these theoretical questions not because I think they are an interesting exercise, but because I think they are exactly what this High Holy Day season is about. I am asking these questions because I honestly don=t believe that we generally ask ourselves the kinds of hard questions anymore that require true soul searching, or that require the possibility of sacrifice, the potential for loss, even the loss of life.

 

Let me spell this out a little more directly. The themes of this ten-day period between tonight and the conclusion of Yom Kippur are not about forgiveness alone, although that is a subject that could take up every minute of our thinking and praying between now and then. One of the other themes of the period is that of intense self-evaluation, intense self-scrutiny, what in Hebrew is called cheshbon ha-nefesh, an accounting of the soul, by which we hold up a real mirror to ourselves, look directly into the mirror, and force ourselves to see what is really there, on the assumption that what we see will not necessarily be what we like seeing.

 

And at this point I can come back to my original theme with a little variation. Instead of asking about how far we might be willing to go to save someone else=s life, now I would like to ask how far you would be willing to go to save your own. But this time, the question is not about your physical life; it is about your soul. If you pay any attention at all to the words in the machzor, the High Holy Day prayer book, you will notice that it is filled with admissions of failure, wrongdoing, guilt, weakness, and so on. And you will also notice that every time we repeat that litany of errors, we ask God to forgive us because we are only human. If you think about this in the terms I have been using tonight, our High Holy Day prayers are an attempt to save our own lives, to save our own skins. We are, in effect, making a sort of roundabout statement about wanting to stay alive, which is actually a really straightforward way of being about as loyal to ourselves as we can be.

 

But why bother? I would say that we bother going through this exercise because, whether we admit it or not, somewhere deep down we=re not sure whether the whole process in which we engage during this period might not actually be correct, that there might in fact be some truth to what we=re saying, and that by admitting our mistakes and promising to try to fly right, we might actually influence the powers-that-be, the powers that might actually have the real power to extend and/or improve our very lives. But that admission would mean that we would be saying that maybe we don=t really have ultimate power over our own lives and our own destinies, that our ultimate destinies might rest somewhere where we don=t have much power or influence. And that, my friends, can be a quite scary thought.

 

But that, my fellow Jews, is exactly what this ten-day process is all about. It is really about forcing ourselves to ask ultimate questions about how far we would really be willing to go to do what is necessary to do to try to save someone=s life, whether your own or someone else=s. You know as well as I do that in our tradition, we believe that each person has a soul as well as a body. We can identify B and even quantify B that body. But we can=t identify, quantify, or even describe the soul, even though we are taught that we have one and that we couldn’t=t live without one. We have written and taught and preached about the soul from time immemorial, and yet not one of us, no matter how hard we tried, could really say anything about the soul that was anything more than theoretical.

 

We can say that someone has a beautiful soul, that someone has or is an old soul, but the definition would, by necessity, remain elusive, vague, and subjective. At the same time, we posit that the soul is the spark of the divine within us, that which provides the life force in each of us. And we are taught that it is a gift from God, given to us for safekeeping during our lifetimes. So that soul is very important, especially for something we have never seen with our own eyes.

 

But let=s come back from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of the empirical, the measurable, the identifiable. Let=s assume that even if your life were absolutely great and that you couldn=t think of any way to improve it, you either know or know about people whose lives are not even close to as good as yours. Let=s assume that their lives are in need of improvement from the point of view of health, wealth, relationships, or any of a number of other factors. Depending on how close to you those people were or are, what or how much would you be willing to sacrifice to help make their lives better? Or, to phrase it differently, how loyal to them B in a certain sense of the term B would you be? Ask that question of yourself in terms of the people closest to you, for example, your spouse or partner, your parents, your children. And then expand the circle to include other family members, whether by blood or marriage or adoption. And then expand it to include friends and other circles in which you travel.

 

One of the hardest questions I think I can ask, and one of the hardest to answer for many in this sanctuary, is where your congregation falls in this scenario. And what if I expanded it to include Jews everywhere? How connected should we be, and how connected are we, to Jews in other places? If we have to set priorities with how we allocate our personal resources in terms of whom we can help, whom we can save, whom we can serve, where do this community and our congregation fit into this? Do I dare ask the embarrassing question about how we relate to people within our own community, people who have knowingly and willingly cast their lot with us by choosing to be members of this Temple, but whom we don=t know very well or even particularly like? What if we learn that they need our help and that we would really have to stretch to provide the help they would need? Dare I ask how we would want that question to be answered if the tables were turned and we were on the needy end rather than they?

 

It=s not so different from trying to decide which request for funds that comes in the mail we will honor and which we will not. Will I support National Public Radio, Amnesty International, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, People for the American Way , AIDS research, breast cancer research, MoveOn.org, Rabbis for Human Rights, MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, Ukrainian Jews, Darfur relief, Israel relief, and so many more? To which group, to which cause, to what constituency, to which persons, will I demonstrate my loyalty? How will I determine the best way to set my priorities, to decide what, of my meager resources, might be used to help save a life or a soul?

 

Although I know that this is going to sound utterly predictable, my best answer to all of these questions is to say that you will not find the answer by sitting on your couch watching television. You will not find it in the halls of our local, state or federal legislatures either. You will not find it in the sensual excesses in which we so often indulge, and which so often dull our senses to the point where we cannot even be aware of the sufferings of others. But you will find it in the place so many choose not to look, that is, right here in the synagogue, and not only in the synagogue in general, but in this synagogue in particular, whom so many have simply taken for granted.

 

This place remains the place from where your values came. This place remains the place that teaches these values to your children, even if you cannot articulate those values as Jewish values yourselves. This place remains the place to which you turn when you seek ultimate meaning in your lives, but to which an awful lot of you don=t turn very often anymore. This place remains.

 

It is easy for me to tell you that you ought to support your local synagogue. But you already know that, and you really don=t need me to tell you. Most of you do that already, in one way or another, and for that I, and the community that comprise this congregation, am very grateful. But on this Jewish New Year, when we pray to a God from whom we often feel distant and in whom we=re not at all sure we believe, when we pray for forgiveness for sins we hesitate or hate to admit we=ve committed, we tend to do that in a group setting, an intentionally created group setting. That setting is this community to which, by your very presence here, you have established and affirmed a two-way connection, a link, a bond, that ties you to us. What it also does is knock on your door to remind you not to forget us among those priorities that make demands on your time or resources, just like you knock on God=s door to remind God not to forget you during this most fragile and vulnerable time.

 

Let me close with one more anecdote. I was in Israel last month for a conference. As it turned out, I was there during the latter part of the war between Israel and Hizballah. I had not anticipated being there during a war, and although I didn=t hesitate to go, I was more anxious than I would have been if there had been no conflict going on. Yet despite that anxiety, within twenty-four hours of my arrival in Jerusalem, I found myself on an empty tour bus heading north to the town of Nahariyah, directly into the war zone, to pick up a busload of people from that town who had not been able to escape the fighting and who had been holed up in bomb shelters for more than a month, and to bring them to Jerusalem for four days of respite and tranquility. I had become part of a small effort to provide some relief for old, sick, poor people, some new immigrants, who just couldn=t get out of town to escape the daily missile and bombing attacks from little more than five kilometers away.

 

As the bus drove in the morning darkness toward the Lebanese border, I couldn=t help asking myself why I was knowingly putting myself in harm=s way for people I didn=t even know. My friend Ya=akov, the owner of the company that was organizing this program of helping people escape from the northern towns for a few days of tranquility and respite, said that this would be the Abus ride from hell, and that I was crazy to want to do this.@ But still he welcomed me with open arms and told me that he loved me for my willingness to cast my lot with the Jewish people in this way.

 

Where was my loyalty? To people I didn=t even know, people with whom I couldn=t even carry on a simple conversation, people who, if we lived through this episode, I would never see again? As we drove through that darkness, I said to myself that I really didn=t want to die at that point in time, and so I wondered again and again why I was doing this and whether I had made a mistake. The answer was simple: no, this was no mistake. I had my priorities and loyalties together. If my theology was correct, then I was probably all right, because I was on my way to do a mitzvah, and according to our teachings, no harm is supposed to come to you while you are in the process of doing a mitzvah.

 

In the meantime, just like tonight, just like our machzor tells us, we are supposed to look death in the eye, we are supposed to re-order our loyalties and our priorities so that we can live our lives more meaningfully, more appropriately, and yes, more hopefully. I have never prayed as hard as I am praying tonight that we can approach this task of self-searching honestly, that we can re-order our priorities correctly, that we can reassess our loyalties in ways that lead us, each and all, toward lives that are both worth saving and worth living.