I was meeting a friend for coffee yesterday when I came across a t-shirt as I was walking by the Juniors Department at the Nordstrom Café. The t-shirt had one of “those sayings” you’ve probably seen them before, you can find them on shirts and hats and bumper stickers nowadays , they’re tag lines that boast of value concepts like “be as you are”, or “seize the day”, or “no regrets”. I even saw a t-shirt once that said,”it’s all about me”. And I couldn’t help but thinking how much our society has changed. So standing there in the middle of Nordstroms, I tried to imagine what the t-shirts, hats and bumper stickers of my grandmother’s day would have said: I imagine they would have said things like “work hard” “sacrifice” “contribute” “Be honest” “live with integrity” “live by your word” and “take care of eachother”. Yet today, people wear this clothing and don these stickers unabashedly. So maybe the writing’s not on the wall exactly….but it’s right there for us all to see. And it’s hard not to wonder when you see these seemingly innocuous but incredibly telling expressions…how we’ll make it as a civilized society. It’s only a t-shirt, a cap, a bumper sticker you might say, but we all know it’s so much more….it’s about a new approach to living. And when we see the emphasis on character waning, we realize that the ramifications and implications are far reaching.
A couple of weeks ago, a study was released that confirmed the fact that we SHOULD be concerned about the character of our youth. When 230 young adults were asked in a recent study their ideas about morality. Their answers were frightening. Not many of this age group had given much thought to issues of morality. But when asked about specific wrongs or evils, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong, but even when considering things like drunk driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner, nothing, to twenty-somethings was black or white. What most of them kept coming back to was that for them, moral choices are a matter of individual taste. Or better yet…if they had to make moral choices, and I quote: “I would do what I thought would make me happy based on how I felt… I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.” They shared. The New York Times Article, written by David Brooks that shared these findings should have scared us all but it seems that morality and ethics and good character have become a thing of the past. Yet thankfully, not everyone has given up the quest to raise new generations of people with strong moral characters.
Thankfully, two extraordinary administrators, Dominic Randolph the headmaster of the prestigious Riverdale Country Day School in New York and David Levin the cofounder of the KIPP network of charter schools and the superintendent of the KIPP schools in NYC both realized that if we want to create successful and civil young adults, something would have to change. They knew that the current emphasis on test scores “totally disregards what it means to be a successful human being….and they believed that the critical missing piece, for raising children who would grow up to lead happy, meaningful, fulfilling lives was “character”. And so, they set out to figure out how schools could impart good “character” to their students. They filled the walls of the school with phrases like “work hard”….“be nice” , “no shortcuts” , “actively participate!” and “character counts. Next they identified the character traits that had been proven to be even more important in determining future success than intellect. character traits including zest, grit, self control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, honesty, politeness, and curiosity.
And then, the KIPP school took an even bolder step: they developed a character report card. Each semester, the children would receive two report cards: one with a grade point average (A GPA that measured their academic standing and the other, A CPA a character point average – that measured their character.
I put down my Sunday Times and pondered this idea. If, as a parent, I held two report cards in my hand which would I open first? Which would mean more to me? Which would I be more scared to read? To know? And would my children’s CPA (their character point average) be a reflection on me as well as on them?
A simple story told by one of the teachers at KIPP’s infinity school tells the power of the shift:
I had caught one of my students chewing gum during class earlier today but she denied it, she insisting that she was chewing her tongue. I asked her to throw the gum away but she denied it again. Later on during that same class, she was still chewing gum…. and again she denied it. So this time, I calmly walked over to her; and said: “not only were you chewing gum, which is a minor infraction, but you lied to me twice and that is a real disappointment… What does that say about your character?” Well, now the young girl was devastated. This time, the girl spit out her gum right away and with tears in her eyes she approached her teacher after class explaining,” “I’m trying so hard to just grow up. But nothing ever changes!”’
2. Now move with me from the classroom of Manhattan to the Garden of Eden and you will find God asking the very same question only a little differently. So now it’s Adam who is caught – not with gum but with an apple in his mouth. The apple from the very tree that God told Adam and Eve they were forbidden to eat. And what does God say to Adam when he calls out to him? He doesn’t say, Adam J ….are you eating that apple that I told you not to eat from the tree that I forbid you?” Not at all. God said one word to Adam that meant so much, “AYEKA?” Where are you? God was asking the very same thing that teacher was asking…. God knew exactly where Adam was, but God was asking about his character. About who he was…. Suddenly, like the girl in the classroom….Adam too was hiding. So God’s question AYEKA was intended to cause Adam to come out of hiding. Ayeka? Who are you deep down inside, Adam? What are the things you do when no one is looking? You can almost hear God whispering….”The fact that you’re eating the apple is a problem ….but not taking responsibility… hiding…..what does this say about your character? “
Martin Buber, says that Adam’s story is all of our stories… that Adam hides in order to escape responsibility for his life. And so it is with all of us. We turn our existence into a system of hideouts. We hide again and again….enmeshing ourselves more and more deeply”. And so on RH we are ALL asked…. “AYEKA”. Who are you deep down? What are you hiding? What are you hiding from? What don’t you want others to see? What do you try not to see in yourself? How are you hiding?
Today, in our fast paced world…hiding has become so easy. Inherent in our busy-ness is a smokescreen that stops us from looking within... if the phones are always ringing, our emails and texts are always beeping, our facebook accounts are always active, our cars are always driving and our schedules are always full.... we won’t have to think about our lives …. About the promises that we made that we never fulfilled, the love that we promised to share that we haven't been giving our all to, the children we haven't raised to be the people we hoped they would be, the parents we should give more respect or attention to, the true friendships we haven't fostered and the passion -- the spark in our hearts and in our lives that we've allowed to flicker.
Of all the challenges of the HH.... between tickets, seats and meals, from disrupted schedules to unfamiliar prayers and melodies,.... I imagine that the biggest challenge of these days is STOPPING. Which is why many people (with the best of intentions, overflowing lives, and jobs in which the feel needed) will return to the world "out there" before the work is done. But our tradition....BEGS you to be here. Really here. Not only in body but also in spirit. To let your to-do lists fall to the wayside and not to worry about the smaller things that consume us the rest of the year. This is our time to begin the work of reflecting and thinking, envisioning and re-envisioning our LIVES.
But looking inward can be scary especially if we’re concerned about what we’ll see. We all yearn to think of ourselves as “good”. And yet we know as well as anyone that from time to time we find ourselves doing things that make us doubt our goodness. Cheating, stealing, losing patience, taking credit for things we shouldn’t and the list goes on and on…. the infractions may be small (and sometimes not) but what do they say about our character? There is also another part of us though… a part that seeks fame, fortune and power…. and because of these drives too, we end up doing “questionable” things along the way. Despite the justifications we use to explain away our aberrations, we’re left with a blurry image of two selves as opposed to a whole self. Who are we really? And for most people….it’s not so clear.
Rabbi Alan Lew (of blessed memory) once told a very honest story about his daughter Hannah’s bat mitzvah. He shared that he hated to watch the video of this very special day in Hannah’s life and in his family’s life because the video forced him to look at himself. “I like to think of myself as a mellow, laidback kind of father. But what I see when I look at myself in this video is a nervous, passive-aggressive fellow with a big phony smile on his face. I don’t like to look at a moment-by-moment unfolding of the way I really am”
The truth is, he shared…that we talk about the Book of Life but perhaps “there are several volumes of the Book of Life on our shelves…” there’s the one we leave out on our cocktail tables and post on our facebook pages – the stories of our successes which we have carefully constructed so that people will think highly of us and maybe even envy us. But this isn’t the book we need to read or the video we need to see. We need to watch the full movie - the one that has recorded everything; our failures, our dysfunctions, and our heartbreaks, too. We have to watch for long enough to see the recurring patterns. What circumstances keep repeating themselves in our lives? Why do we keep losing jobs? Why do we keep losing husbands? Why do we find ourselves lonely so often? Why do we keep getting into the same kinds of conflicts with people wherever we go? “( p 144) Perhaps, he suggests, “a good question to ask ourselves as we plunge into the process of teshvuah on RH is this: what would we read about ourselves if our own family members wrote a book about who we were? What would that book reveal?
Each of us at one point or another has beautiful hopes and dreams of the person we will grow to be someday and it doesn’t matter if we’re 10 or 100 there’s always time to become that person. Think about your own lives for a minute… and think about the person or the people in your life who you have admired most, the person who you would say, “that person is someone I’d like to be like.” Who do you measure yourself up against every once in a while hoping that one day, you’ll come close to being the person that he or she was? (pause) Chances are you’re thinking of someone who lived with integrity and treated other people with kindness and respect.
One of those people I learned of a little while ago….. who was that kind of person is a man named Aaron Feuerstein. (You may have heard of him)….Aaron Feuerstein took over his father’s company Malden Mills Industries which was started by his grandfather back in 1806. On a cold December night in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a fire broke out in the factory complex of his textile manufacturing plant. And sadly, by the time firefighters from Lawrence and the surrounding areas were able to get the fire under control, most of the buildings were destroyed. Thank God, no lives were lost, but the psychological and economic impact n the city of Lawrence were devastating and 3,000 employees feared the prospect of losing their jobs 2 weeks before the holidays. (Something that many people here can relate to). Almost everyone in Lawrence assumed that the Feuerstein would take advantage of the opportunity to relocate his plant to a lower wage area in the south or overseas. That they would lose their jobs and their benefits and that the city would lose its biggest economic asset. But none of those things happened. A day after the fire, Aaron Feurstein announced that all the people on his payroll would receive their salaries for the next three months and would maintain full health care benefits for 6 months though there would be no work for them to do, and….he announced; he would rebuild the plant on its original site. He was quoted as saying, “I have a responsibility to the workers and an equal responsibility to the community. It would be unconscionable to put 3,000 people on the streets and deliver a death blow to the city of Lawrence. Maybe on paper my company is worth less to Wall Street, he said…But I can tell you [despite what they think]…it is worth more.” (pause). Feurstein of course, in those moments of deliberation had to weigh out his own financial self interest with the interests of the greater community but what made him a man of exceptional character was his decency in privileging the well-being of others. He lived with integrity and he had an answer to Ayeka. In that moment, and I imagine throughout his life….he was very clear on who he was. And others will remember who he really is, deep down inside for a long, long time.
But there are others, too…. my grandmother ( I imagine like many of your grandparents) was a woman who was so magnificent inside that if I were ever to be a fraction of the woman she was, I would feel so proud. Like many people of her generation she worked hard, every day of the week, as she ran the furniture business that she started up. She had a keen mind for business, and blended a beautiful combination of honesty, candor, confidence and strength which earned her the respect of men and women alike in a business world where few woman were at the helm. Gram had a knack for just about everything and there was never a time that she seemed flustered. She somehow managed to run a business, employ her family and make sure they were all provided for, raise her children, run the sisterhood, engage in important issues in the community and as if that weren’t enough to fill her days…she always made time for anyone who needed anything. It didn’t matter if you needed a tear in a garment mended, a place to live for a year or a bed from her store although you couldn’t afford to pay for it….she was always there for friends and for strangers. She was composed and dignified, she was sharp and competent and she was good and still today, when I walk through the town where my grandparents, my parents and I once lived, people who knew my grandmother will sigh with a knowing pause before they recall what a fine lady she was and how everyone admired her. … Ayeka? She knew. We all knew.
And there are others….people even closer to the here and now that inspire us…. For me, J I am inspired by so many of you each and every day. There’s the person who had a splendid career and is now home taking care of his wife who has altzheimers….every single day. It’s hard. And it’s painful in so many ways. But it’s what he does because he loves her. Because deep within him, he knows that they made a commitment to each other sixty years ago and he will be there with her, just as he promised underneath the chuppah -- through the good times and the tough ones. He’s there to remind her what to do with her spoon when she’s hungry at dinnertime, he’s there to hold her hand when she’s scared and he’s there to
enable her to live with as much dignity as possible. He wouldn’t have it any other way. Talk about character. Ayeka? He knows and we do too…. deep down, he is a man of integrity and devotion (who puts his wife up on a pedestal and cares for her even when it’s hard because of the love that they shared and always will)
There are others too…. a woman in our community who inspires me through her character traits of optimism, gratitude and zest. To see this woman you would think her life has been one big blessing. But to know her story, you knew it was anything but. And yet….she endures. And endures and endures. She lost two husbands and she buried two sons and somehow, she stayed committed to experiencing life as a blessing and never giving up on God, on faith, on love or on happiness. And this past year, when she stood underneath the chuppah with her newfound beloved, the happiness and hope in our community was palpable. Yes, finding a partner and creating a beautiful love again in your eighties is inspiring in and of itself but the truth was that it was her optimism, her hopefulness and her ability to find the goodness in people and to experience her life as a blessing…that is the true inspiration. And when God asks Ayeka? She knows and we all know….exactly who she is way down deep inside.
These are a few of my heroes. They may have accomplished important things but mostly, like your heroes, I imagine…. their character is what is most inspiring. They have integrity, they care and they stand for something that matters, they treat others with respect, and they persevere. Who are the people that you admire most, And who were they or who are they down deep inside that made you love and revere them even more?
Today, on RH, the first day of creation, we are all in the Garden of Eden, and God is calling out to us. Ayeka? God whispers…. Who are you? I know what you are proud of, what you like about yourself, even love, and for all of those things I am pleased…. but today, consider the other parts. Underneath your accomplishments and acquisitions… who are you? What are the things you care most about? The things that keep you up at night? What are your priorities and how do you actualize them? Are you a good child, parent, partner, neighbor and friend?
And when we’re done considering our responses….perhaps, as we sit down with our apples and honey at lunchtme, we can think about the character traits and virtues that you could write down on your walls this year or have printed on your t-shirts, hats or bumper stickers – words that that could remind you of who you want to be in this world? Ten days from now, we’ll be back together for our final tekiah gedolah…. if we’ve done the hard work….the searching…. the scribbling….the re-envisioning and the recreating….each and every one of us will know exactly where and who we are when God asks, “Ayeka!” Shana Tovah
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