Rosh haShanah Shachrit, September 25, 2014/1 Tishri 5775
There’s a theory which posits that if we ever discover the precise origins and meaning of this universe, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There’s another theory that states this has already happened.
For me, the process of writing – not just sermon writing – resembles an exercise in just such a multiple universe theory: there is some probability that in at least one universe, the writer will be content, and in another, the audience. There is also a certainty that in some universe, neither will emerge satisfied with the communication. No matter how carefully arranged, all communicating with words can lead to something akin to a zen koan, a kind of parable pointing to the absurdity of trying to sort reality into fixed categories.
According to one famous koan, a Zen master lay dying, with his monks gathered around him. The senior monk leans over and asks the master for final words of wisdom. The old master weakly says, “Tell them Truth is like a river.” The senior monk relays this message on to the others. The youngest monk is confused: “What does he mean, ‘Truth is like a river?’” The senior monk relays this question to the master, and the dying master replies, “O.K., Truth is not like a river.”
This could as well be a rebbe story: the hearts of great spiritual teachers range far beyond binaries. Complex reality simply can’t be sorted into neat little boxes. Truth is and is not like a river; it transcends classification, or, at best, remains classifiable for only an instant. Yet, we plague ourselves with efforts to arrive at capital “T” Truth, that simultaneous river and non-river, especially about sensitive, or frightening, or challenging, or threatening matters. For example, the matter of Israel/Palestine, about which I rarely meet an agnostic. Mostly, I encounter people filled with painful certainties, discomfited by alternative certainties, certainties that pile up into a high and wide wall named “dilemma” – a devastating problem defying resolution.
Last spring, I read My Promised Land: the Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by Ari Shavit, a well-regarded Israeli journalist. Shavit doesn’t offer his memoir as capital “T” truth. He does, however, make a masterful effort to understand the Jewish state’s evolution from an aspiration of late 19th-century political theorists to its current incarnation as an economically powerful, high-tech, militarily secure (though constantly threatened) political entity. His analysis carries great weight, alternating between narratives of Zionists and of the Arabs who also live on the land, struggling to discern the roots of shared suffering and of lost opportunities for peace. It seemed the perfect choice for a High Holy Day book report: compassionate; fair-minded; keenly aware of errors, misperceptions, and willful deception on all sides; regretful and hopeful. And then, Gaza exploded – from inside and out.
And the dilemma became unbearable, the issues so fraught with competing elements of physical and spiritual risk, the first risk being that incurred by speaking our individual truths, frustrations, anxieties, and hopes. As it’s impossible for everyone to begin with the same understanding about the great koan of the meaning and purpose of Israel in the world, the potential for open-hearted dialogue within the Jewish community and beyond lies crushed under the weight of our incompatible categories.
And, beloveds, this summer’s vitriol makes me cry. Social media, especially, infiltrate our every moment with conflicting narratives and demands for our assent or objection. We have learned to harden our hearts and minds to reject rather than process challenging information. Our modes of argumentation assume that disagreement exposes the moral failure of one side or the other, as if two were the maximum number of viewpoints. Families, friendships, community groups, congregations shatter against the hard stone of the dilemma before us.
How do we disengage from soul-crushing exercises in competitive suffering? How do we grieve for ourselves and for “the Other,” without giving up some perceived moral superiority? How do we escape from our triumphalisms, our powerful conviction that “our worst is better than the Other’s best”? How do we listen and truly hear one another with compassion – Sh’ma Yisrael – even when we don’t agree and can’t yet imagine ever agreeing?
How can we come to recognize where we are being triggered by fear? How can the memory of the Shoah not trump every argument in favor of negotiation over warfare? How do we deal with the secondary trauma of the Shoah in this moment, the vile resurgence of European anti-Semitism and its step-child, militant Islamic Jew hatred? How can we balance the condemnation of Israeli policies that oppress Palestinians with support of an oppressed people whose own social structures include violent oppression of women, of political dissenters, of minority religious views?
How do we resist the fearful paralysis that inhibits serious internal reflection and external dialogue? How do we live the Judaism we espouse, an evolving tradition that insistently moves away from tribalism toward a universalist understanding of human relationships and of human responsibility one for the other? How do we do the sort of cheshbon ha-nefesh, the accounting of the soul, necessary to clarify our deepest values and strengthen us to accept the challenge of unyielding complexity? Most important, how may we shape ourselves and our tradition to have the greatest impact for good?
In an era when polarization has come to dominate our culture, we might be forgiven for accepting it as a fixed attribute. We may overlook the ways in which we suffer from self-inflicted wounds. As Reb Zalman (z”tl) has noted, we sometimes seek easy answers to relieve the anxiety of being with a problem and fail to look for the upayas – the skillful spiritual means – and the texts that can serve us at a difficult time.
One of Judaism’s skillful practices is listening to the stories of tzaddikim, of people striving for righteousness. Sometimes, their stories help us take yet another step on the path of personal and communal redemption. Back in the spring of 2010, Marc J. Rosenstein posted a commentary on Leviticus 19: 17 -18, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall reason with [warn, chastise, “call out”] your neighbor, and not incur guilt on his account. You shall not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Eternal.” Rosenstein writes:
The Chilazoner Rebbe was sitting with his Hasidim around the holiday table [in the Galilee], and he told the following parable. “Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off. ‘Damn Arab kids,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws. They whine about having no rights, but they refuse to accept responsibility!’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me. The driver was Ultra-Orthodox.
“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off. ‘Damn Ultra-Orthodox,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws. They think they are holier than the rest of us, that they can run the country as they want, forcing everyone else onto the shoulder.’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me. The driver was a settler.
“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off. ‘Damn settlers,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws. They think they can hold the rest of us hostage to their messianic meshuggas – driving us all to disaster.’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me. I recognized the driver from his picture in the business section of the paper, a prominent lawyer from Herzliya.
“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off. ‘Damn North Tel Aviv snobs,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws. They throw around their money and power and treat the whole country as if it were their own private estate.’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me. The driver was my neighbor.
“Once I was driving along the highway, in a hurry to pick up my kid from the Acco train station. I passed a whole lineup of cars moving irritatingly slowly, and then had to squeeze back into the right lane before the West Acco intersection. A traffic cop pulled me over after the light. ‘What, did I do something wrong?’ I asked him incredulously. ‘Are you kidding?’ You just cut off that whole line of cars – an Arab, an Ultra-Orthodox, a settler, a lawyer, and a local. You almost caused a serious accident!’ ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I didn't see them. I really didn't see them.’
'There was silence at the table as the Hasidim contemplated their master’s deep wisdom. Then one spoke up, hesitantly,[a bit like the youngest monk at the deathbed of his teacher]: ‘Perhaps the Master would agree to interpret the parable?’ But the Rebbe would only repeat the last sentence: ‘I didn't see them. I really didn't see them.’
And those who have understanding will understand.
In spite of the heaviness in our hearts as we face one another feeling stymied by a dilemma, we are people of understanding. We do hear the entire teaching of the Deuteronomy passage cited above: we are committed to eradicating hatred from our hearts; we recognize our obligation to warn one another against harmful acts – with loving kindness, not so as to incur guilt for failing to warn or guilt for disrespecting another image of God; we accept the challenge to let go of grudges in pursuit of peace; wherever we are, we seek to attune to the best in ourselves and our neighbors. And we do this because we have been blessed with the sacred opportunity to discern our own holiness in the image of our Source. We do this because polarization leads to despair, disdain, and destruction – toxins that pollute every aspect of our lives.
Please do not misconstrue what I’m saying as an endorsement of untroubled neutrality; of a naïve acceptance of all views as equally valid; of a mushy-headed “love will find a way” sensibility. Please hear my call for discernment, which requires patience, and for giving a full hearing to each person we encounter, and for noticing when we reject something without consideration – those rejections are both great indicators of our vulnerabilities and of potential shifts in understanding. If striving to fulfill the commandment to love one another were easy, it would probably carry much less weight. It’s not easy. It challenges us to say honestly to ourselves: “I’ve met my neighbors; don’t care for them at all; yet I will find a way for us to thrive together until we figure out how to love one another.”
At a meeting between the Dalai Lama and Israeli and Palestinian peace activists in 2005, His Holiness – whose Tibetan community-in-exile knows something about facing a Great Wall of oppression – reminded his guests that “regardless of your past history, the current reality is that you have to live side-by-side.” This is an old small “t” truth begging to emerge. As far back as our early rabbis, we’ve been warned against claiming primacy over others, because all humanity descends from a single ancestor (Sanhedrin 4:5).
Humanity has been offered Torah and her mitzvot so that we might live by them, that is, in seeking to fulfill them, we find life (Leviticus 18:5). Over and over, Torah breaks down the very idea of “stranger,” until the word Israel itself barely holds meaning beyond “God fearer.” Having inherited this radical understanding of the human family, we are covenanted to struggle with the paradox that seemingly opposite things can be simultaneously true, small “t” true. Perhaps the best we can do is train ourselves to become disruptors of categories. Anger and resistance bind us tightly and feed our fear that the conditions that create dilemmas can never shift; emotional and spiritual spaciousness opens windows of creativity and potential. As long as we accept polarization as a normal intellectual, emotional, or spiritual state, we will continue to miss the mark in our efforts to love one another as we are loved by our Source.
I pray that in the new year we will accustom ourselves to sitting peacefully with internal contradictions, on our way to learning how to accept external contradictions with less fear, less resistance. I pray we come to understand violent conflict as an attack on our planetary Mother, so that we can embrace a pro-humanity, pro-peace, pro-non-violence worldview. Within the inexhaustible Source that creates and sustains our being from moment to moment, at this turning of the year, may we find comfort in shared silence, inspiration in the white spaces, redemption in compassion. Within that inexhaustible Source, may we rest transparently, allowing our pain and fear to be soothed by the Merciful One, in whom we find our eternal home. Kayn y’hi ratzon, so may this be God’s will and ours.
There’s a theory which posits that if we ever discover the precise origins and meaning of this universe, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There’s another theory that states this has already happened.
For me, the process of writing – not just sermon writing – resembles an exercise in just such a multiple universe theory: there is some probability that in at least one universe, the writer will be content, and in another, the audience. There is also a certainty that in some universe, neither will emerge satisfied with the communication. No matter how carefully arranged, all communicating with words can lead to something akin to a zen koan, a kind of parable pointing to the absurdity of trying to sort reality into fixed categories.
According to one famous koan, a Zen master lay dying, with his monks gathered around him. The senior monk leans over and asks the master for final words of wisdom. The old master weakly says, “Tell them Truth is like a river.” The senior monk relays this message on to the others. The youngest monk is confused: “What does he mean, ‘Truth is like a river?’” The senior monk relays this question to the master, and the dying master replies, “O.K., Truth is not like a river.”
This could as well be a rebbe story: the hearts of great spiritual teachers range far beyond binaries. Complex reality simply can’t be sorted into neat little boxes. Truth is and is not like a river; it transcends classification, or, at best, remains classifiable for only an instant. Yet, we plague ourselves with efforts to arrive at capital “T” Truth, that simultaneous river and non-river, especially about sensitive, or frightening, or challenging, or threatening matters. For example, the matter of Israel/Palestine, about which I rarely meet an agnostic. Mostly, I encounter people filled with painful certainties, discomfited by alternative certainties, certainties that pile up into a high and wide wall named “dilemma” – a devastating problem defying resolution.
Last spring, I read My Promised Land: the Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by Ari Shavit, a well-regarded Israeli journalist. Shavit doesn’t offer his memoir as capital “T” truth. He does, however, make a masterful effort to understand the Jewish state’s evolution from an aspiration of late 19th-century political theorists to its current incarnation as an economically powerful, high-tech, militarily secure (though constantly threatened) political entity. His analysis carries great weight, alternating between narratives of Zionists and of the Arabs who also live on the land, struggling to discern the roots of shared suffering and of lost opportunities for peace. It seemed the perfect choice for a High Holy Day book report: compassionate; fair-minded; keenly aware of errors, misperceptions, and willful deception on all sides; regretful and hopeful. And then, Gaza exploded – from inside and out.
And the dilemma became unbearable, the issues so fraught with competing elements of physical and spiritual risk, the first risk being that incurred by speaking our individual truths, frustrations, anxieties, and hopes. As it’s impossible for everyone to begin with the same understanding about the great koan of the meaning and purpose of Israel in the world, the potential for open-hearted dialogue within the Jewish community and beyond lies crushed under the weight of our incompatible categories.
And, beloveds, this summer’s vitriol makes me cry. Social media, especially, infiltrate our every moment with conflicting narratives and demands for our assent or objection. We have learned to harden our hearts and minds to reject rather than process challenging information. Our modes of argumentation assume that disagreement exposes the moral failure of one side or the other, as if two were the maximum number of viewpoints. Families, friendships, community groups, congregations shatter against the hard stone of the dilemma before us.
How do we disengage from soul-crushing exercises in competitive suffering? How do we grieve for ourselves and for “the Other,” without giving up some perceived moral superiority? How do we escape from our triumphalisms, our powerful conviction that “our worst is better than the Other’s best”? How do we listen and truly hear one another with compassion – Sh’ma Yisrael – even when we don’t agree and can’t yet imagine ever agreeing?
How can we come to recognize where we are being triggered by fear? How can the memory of the Shoah not trump every argument in favor of negotiation over warfare? How do we deal with the secondary trauma of the Shoah in this moment, the vile resurgence of European anti-Semitism and its step-child, militant Islamic Jew hatred? How can we balance the condemnation of Israeli policies that oppress Palestinians with support of an oppressed people whose own social structures include violent oppression of women, of political dissenters, of minority religious views?
How do we resist the fearful paralysis that inhibits serious internal reflection and external dialogue? How do we live the Judaism we espouse, an evolving tradition that insistently moves away from tribalism toward a universalist understanding of human relationships and of human responsibility one for the other? How do we do the sort of cheshbon ha-nefesh, the accounting of the soul, necessary to clarify our deepest values and strengthen us to accept the challenge of unyielding complexity? Most important, how may we shape ourselves and our tradition to have the greatest impact for good?
In an era when polarization has come to dominate our culture, we might be forgiven for accepting it as a fixed attribute. We may overlook the ways in which we suffer from self-inflicted wounds. As Reb Zalman (z”tl) has noted, we sometimes seek easy answers to relieve the anxiety of being with a problem and fail to look for the upayas – the skillful spiritual means – and the texts that can serve us at a difficult time.
One of Judaism’s skillful practices is listening to the stories of tzaddikim, of people striving for righteousness. Sometimes, their stories help us take yet another step on the path of personal and communal redemption. Back in the spring of 2010, Marc J. Rosenstein posted a commentary on Leviticus 19: 17 -18, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall reason with [warn, chastise, “call out”] your neighbor, and not incur guilt on his account. You shall not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Eternal.” Rosenstein writes:
The Chilazoner Rebbe was sitting with his Hasidim around the holiday table [in the Galilee], and he told the following parable. “Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off. ‘Damn Arab kids,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws. They whine about having no rights, but they refuse to accept responsibility!’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me. The driver was Ultra-Orthodox.
“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off. ‘Damn Ultra-Orthodox,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws. They think they are holier than the rest of us, that they can run the country as they want, forcing everyone else onto the shoulder.’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me. The driver was a settler.
“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off. ‘Damn settlers,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws. They think they can hold the rest of us hostage to their messianic meshuggas – driving us all to disaster.’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me. I recognized the driver from his picture in the business section of the paper, a prominent lawyer from Herzliya.
“Once I was driving along the highway and a car passed me and pushed quickly in front of me, cutting me off. ‘Damn North Tel Aviv snobs,’ I said. ‘They have no respect for the laws of the land, not even for the traffic laws. They throw around their money and power and treat the whole country as if it were their own private estate.’ A few minutes later I found myself stopped at a red light next to the car that had passed me. The driver was my neighbor.
“Once I was driving along the highway, in a hurry to pick up my kid from the Acco train station. I passed a whole lineup of cars moving irritatingly slowly, and then had to squeeze back into the right lane before the West Acco intersection. A traffic cop pulled me over after the light. ‘What, did I do something wrong?’ I asked him incredulously. ‘Are you kidding?’ You just cut off that whole line of cars – an Arab, an Ultra-Orthodox, a settler, a lawyer, and a local. You almost caused a serious accident!’ ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I didn't see them. I really didn't see them.’
'There was silence at the table as the Hasidim contemplated their master’s deep wisdom. Then one spoke up, hesitantly,[a bit like the youngest monk at the deathbed of his teacher]: ‘Perhaps the Master would agree to interpret the parable?’ But the Rebbe would only repeat the last sentence: ‘I didn't see them. I really didn't see them.’
And those who have understanding will understand.
In spite of the heaviness in our hearts as we face one another feeling stymied by a dilemma, we are people of understanding. We do hear the entire teaching of the Deuteronomy passage cited above: we are committed to eradicating hatred from our hearts; we recognize our obligation to warn one another against harmful acts – with loving kindness, not so as to incur guilt for failing to warn or guilt for disrespecting another image of God; we accept the challenge to let go of grudges in pursuit of peace; wherever we are, we seek to attune to the best in ourselves and our neighbors. And we do this because we have been blessed with the sacred opportunity to discern our own holiness in the image of our Source. We do this because polarization leads to despair, disdain, and destruction – toxins that pollute every aspect of our lives.
Please do not misconstrue what I’m saying as an endorsement of untroubled neutrality; of a naïve acceptance of all views as equally valid; of a mushy-headed “love will find a way” sensibility. Please hear my call for discernment, which requires patience, and for giving a full hearing to each person we encounter, and for noticing when we reject something without consideration – those rejections are both great indicators of our vulnerabilities and of potential shifts in understanding. If striving to fulfill the commandment to love one another were easy, it would probably carry much less weight. It’s not easy. It challenges us to say honestly to ourselves: “I’ve met my neighbors; don’t care for them at all; yet I will find a way for us to thrive together until we figure out how to love one another.”
At a meeting between the Dalai Lama and Israeli and Palestinian peace activists in 2005, His Holiness – whose Tibetan community-in-exile knows something about facing a Great Wall of oppression – reminded his guests that “regardless of your past history, the current reality is that you have to live side-by-side.” This is an old small “t” truth begging to emerge. As far back as our early rabbis, we’ve been warned against claiming primacy over others, because all humanity descends from a single ancestor (Sanhedrin 4:5).
Humanity has been offered Torah and her mitzvot so that we might live by them, that is, in seeking to fulfill them, we find life (Leviticus 18:5). Over and over, Torah breaks down the very idea of “stranger,” until the word Israel itself barely holds meaning beyond “God fearer.” Having inherited this radical understanding of the human family, we are covenanted to struggle with the paradox that seemingly opposite things can be simultaneously true, small “t” true. Perhaps the best we can do is train ourselves to become disruptors of categories. Anger and resistance bind us tightly and feed our fear that the conditions that create dilemmas can never shift; emotional and spiritual spaciousness opens windows of creativity and potential. As long as we accept polarization as a normal intellectual, emotional, or spiritual state, we will continue to miss the mark in our efforts to love one another as we are loved by our Source.
I pray that in the new year we will accustom ourselves to sitting peacefully with internal contradictions, on our way to learning how to accept external contradictions with less fear, less resistance. I pray we come to understand violent conflict as an attack on our planetary Mother, so that we can embrace a pro-humanity, pro-peace, pro-non-violence worldview. Within the inexhaustible Source that creates and sustains our being from moment to moment, at this turning of the year, may we find comfort in shared silence, inspiration in the white spaces, redemption in compassion. Within that inexhaustible Source, may we rest transparently, allowing our pain and fear to be soothed by the Merciful One, in whom we find our eternal home. Kayn y’hi ratzon, so may this be God’s will and ours.