SERMON

EVE OF YOM KIPPUR

1 OCTOBER 2006 - 9 TISHRI 5767

AACCOUNTABILITY@

 

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah I began this series of High Holy Day sermons by asking you to ponder a question that I thought might seem strange to you. If you remember, I asked you to consider Ato what person or thing you would consider yourself most loyal.@ I was trying to get you to look at something from an unusual and different perspective. Instead of the usual theoretical, theological, and philosophical point of view, I wanted to get you to look at this issue from a life-and-death perspective, since that is the real perspective of the High Holy Days. While it=s one thing to speculate about how things might be under certain circumstances, at the High Holy Days we are supposed to look at things as they really are. We understand the process of the High Holy Days to be one in which we really confront our mortality and, in so doing, look at the issues that have an impact on both what kind of life we are living and should be living and how long a life we might be able to negotiate.

 

Last Saturday morning, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about moving beyond ourselves and, in so doing, moving to the place where we could not only imagine, but even feel, the pain of others to the point where that pain would motivate us to act to try to relieve the suffering of others, both those close to us as well as those whom we have never met. My goal in bringing up that sensitive and uncomfortable subject at all was to try to get you to put compassion back in your lives in a world that has become one of personal isolation, withdrawal, distrust, coldness, and distance.

 

Putting compassion back in our lives is counterintuitive in our day. Yet it is the only antidote to the survivalist, take-no-prisoners approach that is so prevalent in government, business, education and entertainment.

 

Since another one of the overarching themes of this season is our committing ourselves to changing behaviors that are inappropriate, destructive, and damaging, I want to frame my remarks tonight in terms which refer to my Rosh Hashanah sermons but which also point in the direction in which I think we ought to be going.

 

One of a rabbi=s many responsibilities is officiating at weddings. At almost all weddings, in one form or another, at least one party to the marriage promises something to the other. In the most traditional forms of Judaism, both parties make promises that are written into their ketubah, their marriage contract, even though they, themselves, don=t speak them to each other during the ceremony. In fact, the concept of making and keeping promises is the key concept underlying marriage. And as you know only too well, it is not only marriage in which promises, vows, are of ultimate importance. But there is more to promises than just making them -- a lot more. Because so much hangs in the balance based on the promises we make, I want to take us an in-depth look at promises tonight.

 

Just a few minutes ago we heard the Cantor and then the choir chant the Kol Nidré, a mesmerizing melody that comprises an ancient legal formula, a legal statement that asks that we not be held accountable for vows we make which are made under pressure or duress, or that we making unwillingly. In other words, we include in our worship service and we say out loud that we realize and acknowledge that we can=t keep every promise we make, especially those we never intended to make in the first place or those we discovered after the fact that we shouldn=t have made.

 

Sometimes we promise to do things or not to do things out of frustration, just to get people off our backs; sometimes we promise things just so we can move on with our lives, and we never really expect to be held accountable for the promise. And of course there are the times when we make a promise, fully intending to keep it, only to find that circumstances will prevent us from doing so. All of these things are relatively normal, and in our busy lives we are used to apologizing for these unanticipated slip-ups, and we usually expect that we will be forgiven, not giving much thought to it. I mention all of these possibilities because I want to be clear that I am not talking about them tonight.

 

What I want to focus on is a much bigger and broader issue, one that is aggravating at the very least and potentially lethal at the very worst. Let me vent my complaint; then you will see why I raise it on Yom Kippur. The complaint is that I want to live in a world where I can believe what someone tells me, and I find that situation less and less likely these days. Not only that, but the people who turn out to be lying only seem to get upset if and when they get caught; they seem to have no regrets about their actions per se, only that they have been caught.

 

From the highest echelons of government, academia, politics, media, entertainment, and business to the lowest rungs on the ladder of everyday human interaction, I find that I have fewer and fewer reasons to trust what people tell me or even the sources on which they rely to tell me what they are telling me. I used to work on the assumption that people generally told the truth, that people were generally reliable, that things were by and large what they seemed to be, and that people=s motivations were generally honest, with the predictable few exceptions. Not so any longer. Today, for reasons which I hardly need to enumerate, the opposite seems to be the case. Starting with the President of the United States and moving throughout his administration, I find that I have to start with the assumption that the truth is the first casualty. The Congress is in the same category, and with the seemingly endless drama of scandals, resignations, indictments and other political skullduggery among both Democrats and Republicans, I am relieved and grateful whenever I hear of anything positive or helpful being accomplished in those hallowed halls these days on either side of the aisle. Worst of all is that there are so many things that ought to be done through Congressional legislation that simply are not being done because of the paralysis of the political process. Directly to my point here tonight is that every one of the people elected to these high offices made innumerable promises to their intended constituencies in the course of their campaigns, and most of those promises have gone unfulfilled, probably with few, if any, real consequences.

 

With such poor role models as our national leaders on both sides of the aisle, it is small wonder that leaders at other levels assume that if the higher-ups can get away with it, then they probably can, too. And in many instances, they are absolutely correct. This kind of thinking, of course, has given rise to a cottage industry of people whose lives are dedicated to shining lights on the scoundrels, and there seems to be more than enough work to go around these days. The malady has spread to the media, all of which seem only too willing to say whatever they need to say to secure the advertising dollars they think they need to keep their medium running and their jobs relatively secure, with scarce regard for the truthfulness of their reporting. A case in point was the recent Reuters scandal during the war between Israel and Hizballah last month. It wasn=t until someone, a blogger I believe, definitively proved that Reuters= purported photographs of damage, carnage and other manufactured proof of Israeli malfeasance in that war consisted mostly of doctored photos, that Reuters finally admitted that they had broadcast these horribly incorrect images that had put Israel in such a terrible light. Had this person not persisted in trying to shine a light on this miscarriage of ethics and justice, we might never have known that Reuters was doing a hatchet job on Israel , just as CNN and Fox have done all along. The simple question is: who holds these people accountable? I=m afraid I will return to this question shortly.

 

Moving down the ladder from high government and highly visible media to the world of business, need I say much about companies like Enron, Tyco, and the others whose corporate greed and ethical vacuity have wrought widespread disaster on thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of innocent people? Until the whistle blowers finally shed some light on their actions and activities, they apparently believed that they could get away with whatever they were doing and had no compunctions whatsoever about doing it. They were, or thought they were, in so many words, accountable to no one.

 

In the world of education, we read or hear about teachers who have illicit, improper relations with children and whose only remorse is that they got caught. Likewise in the world of religion, where the scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church are simply the ones that came to light, but where the great moral body called the Church not only turned a blind eye to what was going on rampantly all across the country and apparently around the world, but in some cases even protected and defended the offenders until it was simply impossible to do so any longer. Where did the buck stop, who was accountable, and to whom? And if you think that Judaism is immune to such things, you would be sadly mistaken. We have our share of miscreants, but in most cases, we have both the means and the will to try to prevent such things from happening in the first place, and where we cannot do that, we have B and we use B effective means to identify, prosecute and punish people who violate ethical norms, whether or not they receive any punishment from the civil authorities. Why do I mention this? Because I want to be able to say that I work within a system where there is accountability, where there are articulated ethical standards, and where there is an expectation that people who work within that system will abide by those standards or face the consequences if they don=t.

 

Now I want to bring this one step closer to home. Each of us identifies with various different kinds of groupings. For the sake of convenience I=ll call them communities. Examples would be the community in which you live, in which you worship, in which you learn or work or play, in which you serve in the military, even your family. And we often identify very strongly with one or more of those communities. One of the things that is common to all communities is that their health and strength is based on the health and strength of the relationships of the people who comprise them. If people in a community get along well with one another, if they trust each other, if they think they can believe each other and depend on one another, the extent to which the community will survive and thrive is directly related to the health and strength of those relationships. So much for the sociology.

 

For a relationship to be good, healthy and strong there have to be elements in it that are beyond question. Honesty and dependability are the first two elements that come to mind. Compassion and empathy are right up there with the first two. These four elements are key components of the issues and areas I brought up on Rosh Hashanah, and they are four of the main elements that inform the themes of the entire High Holy Days. As we read through the words in our prayer books and as we list out loud over and over again the sins that we have committed, either intentionally or accidentally, between last year and this year, you will realize that they all fit into at least one of these categories. Everything we are praying about, everything we are supposed to be thinking about, everything we are supposed to be doing something about, has to do with our relationships to one another, either in the big picture or in the small picture, from the grandest and most global scale all the way down to a person=s relationship with himself or herself and, ultimately, with God.

 

At the end of the day, or more properly at the end of these ten days, we are supposed to have engaged in cheshbon ha-nefesh, Aan accounting of the soul@ through which we count (out loud) our bad points as well as our good points. We are supposed to become accountable for our actions in ways that we let slip at the time we committed the wrongs, but which we now admit. Might I suggest that, for example, these wrongs include such simple things as sitting here in these pews and gossiping about why some people get called up for an aliyah while others don=t, such things as kibitzing with each other during these services to the point where the people around you are distracted from their own praying by your own self-indulgence at their expense, such things as your being so self-absorbed that you are not even aware of how inappropriate your behavior is and therefore cannot even begin to seek forgiveness for it. And that=s just in this room! Imagine what we cannot even begin to remember, the little things, the annoying, aggravating habits. They are all about relationships, and we mouth the words about our wrongdoings, rarely speaking them as if they really pertained to us, sometimes erroneously believing that they only pertain to someone else.

 

There are dozens of stories from the Midrash about what happens when people die and are confronted upon their death by someone on the other side who asks them to justify their request to enter Paradise . They are never asked about how important they were or how wealthy they were or how impressed other people were by their greatness. Instead they are asked if they were honest in business, if they were loving to their families and friends, if they studied Torah with regularity, if they were supportive of their community, and so on. Even after their deaths, they are held accountable for their actions when they were alive.

 

You will notice that the Acolor@ for the High Holy Days is white. The Torah mantles are white, the clergy robes are white, even the flowers are white. In Judaism, white is not only the color that symbolizes purity; it is also the color that symbolizes death. And on Yom Kippur we who are alive behave as though we were dead. We do not eat or drink, we do not wash ourselves or engage in intimate relations, we do not put on makeup, we do not engage in business. We do none of the things we do customarily in our daily lives. Instead, we humble ourselves before each other, before ourselves, and before God, and we imagine holding ourselves accountable in ways that we simply do not do during the rest of the year. We believe that God holds our lives in the balance, even more during these ten days than at any other time of the year, and that even though our past actions might have condemned us to death, the sincerity of our accounting for ourselves, coupled with the sincerity of our repentance and our commitment to change for the better, might lighten the sentence. So we surround ourselves in white to remind us not only of purity, but of mortality as well.

 

Our tradition teaches us that on Rosh Hashanah God writes our names in the Book of Life, the Book of Death, or the Book of In-Between. Already by Rosh Hashanah our fate is written. Already by Rosh Hashanah our past actions have dictated our future. And on Yom Kippur our fate is sealed. But during those ten days, we have the right, the privilege, the opportunity and the obligation of accounting for ourselves in a way that can convince even God to grant us another year of life, even if we had already been inscribed in the Book of Death at the beginning of the process. For me the image is that of looking my own death in the eye and deciding whether or not I am ready to die. It=s not just about me. No one=s death is just about him or her. Our lives and our deaths are about those people whose lives we touch. In my case, even though I have no children of my own and no official dependents, I am not ready to end my life yet; there are too many people who mean too much to me, too many people who say they need what I have to offer, too many people who depend on my professional services, my love and care, my advice and counsel, my friendship, my leadership, my hopefulness, and so on, to be willing to end it all right now.

 

So if I have the chance to turn things around, to rescue myself from death at least for a while, to have some more time to be with the ones I love and to love the ones I=m with, and to contribute my portion to the great store of critically necessary mitzvot, then I=m going to take that chance and run with it. Not to do so would be so unforgivably selfish, yet so typically 21^st century that I would deserve to die.

 

All of this means that I must be brutally honest with myself, with you and with God. I must be not only willing take an accounting of myself, but to do so in a way that proves beyond any doubt that people can continue to count on me, to believe in me, to trust me, to love me, and to want to be in relationship with me. This is the hardest work any of us will ever do, but it is the work that each of us must do. And this is the time, the place, the moment, the chance, to do it among the people who care for you the most, who want you to succeed, to live, to thrive and to be better than you have ever been before.