This is the time of year in our tradition when we go through a process of taking stock of our lives, of thinking about the quality of the year we’ve just had, reviewing it, rehashing it, and weighing our actions.  I am always surprised at how seriously people take this process, and every year I receive phone calls from people who are struggling with it, wondering where they’ve gone wrong, how they can make up for it, how they can forgive the people they feel they should forgive, and apologize to the people they feel they need to apologize to.  And the fundamental premise of this entire process, this idea that we should evaluate our lives, and that God is judging us, is very simply this:  there is a right and a wrong way to act.  That there is a moral and ethical code that tells us what we should do, what values we should hold, what is good and what is bad.  And that fundamental premise is supported by a caveat - when we uphold that moral code, we’ve done the right thing, and when we fail to follow it, we’ve done something wrong.
     A summary of this idea can be found in the Torah portion that we read this morning, called Ki Tavo.  Scholars typically understand that the portion describes the enactment of a covenant, namely the binding agreement that will exist between God and Israel.  The covenant is contractual in nature, so there are clearly described responsibilities and expectations for both sides.  The responsibility of the Israelites -  you might say our responsibility - is described in the following verse from the parshah:  “You have affirmed this day that the Lord is your God, that you will walk in His ways, that you will observe His laws and commandments and rules, and that you will obey him.”
     Most of the verse is clear, and it seems to me it is what you would expect to find at the heart of a covenant between God and God’s people - first of all, “you have affirmed this day that the Lord is your God” - in other words, this covenant is predicated on the idea that it is between you and God only, there are no other parties involved, it is mutually exclusive.  Secondly - “you will observe God’s laws, commandments, and rules” - to be part of this covenant you are going to be expected to act in a particular kind of way.  But the phrase that is unclear to me is the middle phrase of the verse - in Hebrew v’lalechet bidrachav - you will walk in God’s ways - what exactly does that mean?
     On the surface, we might say “well, it means you follow God” but that also doesn’t make a lot of sense, because the question is how does one do that?  And Nahmanides, the great Sefardic thinker and commentator from the 12th century, in his comment on the verse explains it like this: 
שתעשו הטוב והישר ותגמלו חסד איש את רעהו
That to walk in God’s ways a person must do what is good and what is right, all the while being kind to your fellow.
     In other words, there is a good, there is a proper, there is a right way to live life, and the one who is able to live in that spirit is one who is also able to walk in God’s ways.  We have a one word description for that person in Judaism - what do we call them?  A mensch.  A mensch is a person who inevitably does the right thing, in every area of life.
     Now there is a traditional distinction between Judaism and Christianity, certainly traditional Christianity, that I think is worthwhile pointing out, a distinction that has to do with the state that those faith traditions believe a human being is born into.  According to traditional Christian thought, a baby is born into a state of sin, and this has to do with the sin that Adam and Eve committed in the Garden of Eden, the eating of the forbidden fruit.  And in many Christian traditions, that sinful status is removed through what ritual?  Baptism.  Now what about Judaism?  In Judaism, what state is a baby born into?  The answer is not goodness - instead, Judaism teaches that a baby is born with both a yetzer hatov, what we might call a potential for good, and a yetzer harah, a potential for sin - but what category the baby will ultimately fall into is not known - so in effect, a baby in Judaism is born in a neutral state - neither good, nor bad, but with the potential for either.  And that begs a question - how do we get a child to grow up, and to walk in God’s ways, to be,as we said above, a mensch?
     This past week, David Brooks, the NY Times columnist, published an article where he talked about what he called a growing sense of moral relativism in our young people today.  The title of the article was “If it feels right,” and it cited recent research that indicates that our 18-25 year olds do not feel comfortable applying moral values or judgements to their lives.  Brooks called the phenomenon ‘moral individualism’ because when subjects were asked about whether something was right or wrong, their fall back response was to say something along the lines of “I might think this issue is right or wrong, but I don’t feel that I can make that judgement for someone else.  It is a personal thing.”
     You may notice that this is exactly the opposite of the fundamental Jewish assumption I talked about a few moments ago - that certain things are BY DEFINITION right or wrong.  In the research that Brooks was citing the fundamental assumption is that almost nothing is by definition right or wrong.  This is not something, by the way, to blame on the young people who were subjects in the study, or their generation.  Instead, it seems to me that the blame has to fall on us, their parents and grandparents, their teachers, their clergy.  Because somehow we have communicated this message to them, or at least we have failed to communicate a different message. 
     How can this be corrected?  Or, to get back to my original question, which is really the same  - how can we contribute to raising children who walk in God’s ways, who are mensches, who have a true sense of right and wrong?
     It goes without saying that a major piece of the answer to that question has to do with what happens in the home.  With the values, the sense of right and wrong, that we give to our children and grandchildren.  But I think another important piece of that equation is religious education, what a child can learn from their faith tradition while going to their synagogue or their church or their mosque.  I remember vividly from my childhood the way the rabbi of my synagogue connected the doing of good deeds to the idea that that is precisely what God expects of us.  Now whether we actually believe that or not is another conversation, but the simple truth is it is a powerful idea, an idea that can leave a strong impression on a young mind, and that can remind a young person that moral decision making is not something that happens in a vacuum - instead, it is, or at least it should be, connected to a larger moral framework - to a community, to a three thousand year old tradition, to sacred texts, and to something that is greater than any individual.  
     This is not something that will reverse itself over night.  The current situation, reflected in the studies, didn’t come about overnight - it developed over a number of years, probably decades, and will take some serious work, some serious commitment, and certainly time - to bring back to a place where we feel more comfortable.  So we may as well start now, and we may as well start with us - reexamining our own lives and values, reaffirming our own connections to both community and covenant, and living the choices and behaviors that we one day hope to see in our children.  
may that be our goal in the new year, and our reward for many years to come -