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by Rabbi Dana Saroken
It’s Been A Bad Year….
There have been many periods and moments throughout history when the Jews have suffered simply because we were Jews. Periods in time where we were brutalized by others, used as scapegoats, blamed for the problems of the world, when fingers were pointed at us for all sorts of undeserved reasons -- and yet… this year… for the first time in my memory… I feel that some of the accusations – both from outside the community and from inside our community are valid. There have been moments throughout the year when I’ve read the papers or watched the news and have wondered: what’s happened to us?! How can he have done that?! Have we gone astray? Have we stopped behaving well? Can we be trusted? Is our character intact? But one thing I know, for certain, is that this year we have reason to feel ashamed, hurt, disappointed and embarrassed by our collective acts and deeds as this has not been a good year for the Jews.
We began with a worldwide economic recession punctuated by Bernie Madoff with its deep impact on Jewish charities and families. We watched the Rubashkin family of the AgriProccessors meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa, conspire to harbor illegal immigrants and falsifying documents and watched as more than 1/3 of the company’s workforce was arrested. Rabbis were indicted in sexual and child abuse cases. We saw a handful of rabbis in New Jersey charged with money laundering and involved in selling human organs. We saw Israel’s former President – President Katzav – on trial for rape and we read the stories of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert indicted on a range of financial and ethical charges. It’s truly been a disgraceful year and those are just some of our headlines. I can just imagine what our ancestors would have said at their kitchen tables or from the stoops in their shtetls: “It’s a shanda!” And It truly is a shanda!
Unfortunately for all of us that may have lead pretty decent lives this year – imperfect, of course, but most of us probably weren’t involved in ponzi schemes, most of us weren’t perpetrators of abuse, and hopefully, none of us were involved in selling human organs or other egregious sins but tonight our tradition teaches us that we are to take responsibility for each other. Our Talmud says it oh so clearly: kol yisrael aravim ze’la’ze…meaning all Jews are responsible – this one for that one. All for one another. And we have a litany of ashamnu’s and al chets – a whole list of confessions that we say in the form of the collective to remind us of our collective responsibility. “We have sinned; We have stolen, We have killed. We have cheated. We have raped. We have abused our power. We have lied. And we have. Jews have done these things. And so…we are all guilty. We are all responsible.
But how can we hold ourselves responsible for their sins?
The Talmud tells us a story that hints to the answer of how we might be responsible: Go with me through time back to the days when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. Way back then… any role that gave a person access to the Temple and especially into the inner-most sanctum of the Temple was a role that was coveted. So much so, that the Priests instituted a race – a competition – and the winner of this “race” would win the honor of cleaning the ashes and the smut away from the alter when they finished offering sacrifices. The Priests took this honor and the competition very seriously… Only the Priests were allowed to compete and the winner was whomever made it up the ramp first. Now, the Priests were quite competitive about the competition and one day, two priests were close to tied as they ran toward the ramp…so the Priest who was slightly behind, knowing that he couldn’t win as things were… pushed the other Priest, the other Priest fell, and the Priest that pushed him ended up losing by about four feet. Of course, no one expected such bad sportsmanship from the Priest and they were surprised but what happened next was even more shocking: The Priest who ended up losing (albeit unfairly) seized a knife and plunged it into his opponent’s heart. (pause) Never having faced such a situation before… one of the most famous rabbis of that time jumped up onto the steps and screamed: “Who shall be held responsible for this: the sanctuary or the courtyard?” Meaning, who is responsible for this outrageous murder… Is it the Priests who set up this competitive system? Or is it the people – this community in the courtyard? As if this story wasn’t already sick enough though, a tragic twist occurs at the end: The father of the boy who was stabbed shows up. But instead of running over to hold his son as he lay convulsing on the ground, instead he turns to the other Priests and said, “Quick! My son is still convulsing, the knife is not yet defiled…quick remove it before the knife becomes treif – before it becomes unkosher.”
These words give us a glimpse into how far the Priestly community had fallen. They were more concerned with winning the contest than they were with goodness, honesty and integrity and kindness. They were more concerned about the status of the knife than they were about the person in their very own community, in their very own family who was lying convulsing, about to die, on the ground before them. Who’s accountable? Everyone!
And so tonight… we, too, are accountable. Because somehow, we’ve created our own competitions in which we’ve lost sight of what really matters. We’ve somehow confused our values and instead of being guided by doing the right thing and by our conscience, too often, people were guided by their desire to win and to succeed – to be the richest and the most powerful…and forgot to consider the cost. And so, we too, have been witnesses to such tragedies. Now, it’s our task to figure out why and how such things occurred.
Rabbi Harold Kushner once said that: “We live in a world of work and commerce: A world of getting and spending. A world that honors people for being attractive and productive. A world that honors winners and dismisses losers. Carl Jung spoke about this world when he said that “Act one of a young man’s life is the story of his setting out to conquer the world”. In this world, we set out to make it to the top, to be the best, to conquer the world. And if we can manage to accomplish this…we’ll have succeeded… according to the rules of engagement in this world. The problem is that since there can only be some winners – most citizens of this world spend their lives trying to measure up and often times worrying that they don’t.”
Kushner created a paradigm to which I fully subscribe: He posited that we all have two human strivings: The first is our need to feel important and to feel successful and the second is our desire to feel like we’re “good” and that we’re recognized as “good” by other good people.
The need to feel important and successful is what drives us to care about the size of our offices and how many windows they have, about our job titles, and the section of the airplane we sit in. It’s what causes some people to feel devastated when other people don’t remember their names or worse yet, don’t remember meeting them (because someone remembering your name can validate or invalidate your sense of worth and importance). And I think, in some way, facebook and twitters success are also connected to the human need to feel important and successful… when people have hundreds or sometimes thousands of friends who are following their every action or move it gives people a sense of importance. I must matter – at the very least to my 940 “closest friends”.
But the second need that Kushner refers to is our need to be “good”, to be perceived as good by other good people” and I will add to that my belief that a driving force for many is the desire to be “liked”. These desires are what partly motivate us to give to give to charitable causes to volunteer our time… because we care about being good. Oscar Wilde spoke to this idea when he wrote that, “the nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously – and have someone find out.” Dr. Jerome Kagan, a psychology professor at Harvard wrote that “the desire to believe that the self is ethically worthy is universal”.
The hard part is though, if you look across the board, at all of our sins, most of them occur when we don’t privilege both needs simultaneously but privilege instead the drive to be important and successful. It’s not a bad thing to have money, it’s not a bad thing to make it to the top of your field, your industry, your profession. In fact, most of the time, from these places, you have the power and potential to do so much good when you have acquired fortunes and such status and standing. But it is a problem when we only value success as financial and material. When we honor people for their financial, material and professional success and forget to honor them for acting like a mensch – when they do what’s right, when they make good choices when they have integrity and engage in acts of kindness. For the Jewish People, our success does not reside in grades, or degrees, or finances and while we encourage success in all of these realms. In the Talmud when asked how to identify one as being Jewish, the Talmud responds: “They are modest, compassionate and perform acts of loving kindness.” That’s what a Jew is supposed to be! That’s what a Jew is supposed to do! At some point, we have to find a way to teach our children and remind ourselves, that to Jews, as Jews, our “good-ness” and our kindness matter, too! And that at the end of our days, our goodness, our kindness, our integrity and our decency most often define us.
I once read a beautiful letter written from a father to a son that tried to address this issue:
Dear Caleb,
My beautiful little son, I have such hopes for you. I hope you’ll make good grades in school and make good money when you work. I hope you develop talents that others will admire. I hoe you acquire authority others will respect and have a winning personality that others will love.
But what I care about most is not your success or your wealth or your popularity, what I really care about is your goodness. Whatever else people may think of you, I want them to know you first and foremost as a decent and ethical person. For what this world so badly needs is more decent and ethical people.
You have made your appearance at the tail end of a century that has broken every record for evil and cruelty. Last week, as you were circumcised at your bris, my Father cradled you in his arms. On one of those arms is tattooed a blue number. That number comes from a place called Auschwitz. In time you will learn for yourself what happened there, but this much I can tell you now – Auschwitz is what happens when parents don’t train their children in goodness. Make no mistake about it, goodness takes training. Nobody is born naturally good – not even you, innocent as you are.
You are so tiny, little one. You have so much growing to do. As I cradle you in my arms or watch you sleep in your crib, I see a spark of light that emanates from you. It fills me with hope for your future and for ours. Because, like every parent, I want you to do well. But more than anything else, I want you to do good.
All my love,
Dad
Its when and only when we figure out a way to foster “goodness” and to manage our need to feel successful and important that that we will truly bring light back into our community and into the world. God created us to be a “holy People” and we have the capacity to fulfill these hopes and dreams; to be the community that God created us to be, that we should be and that we want to be. Tonight is our night to affirm that as a community we are capable of more. Tonight is our night to recalibrate our moral compass and tonight is our night to figure out how we can do better. How we can be better. And so tonight, we beat our hearts and cherish our precious opportunity to begin anew. So we can hold our heads high again and begin to forge ahead to create a better tomorrow together! Gamar Tov!
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