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Yom Kippur Morning - Nitzavim
In dramatic terms, the Torah tells us how we should feel today. Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem. lifnei adonai eloheichem. You are all standing here today, everybody, the men, the women, the children, the wise, the ordinary, — everybody is standing before Adonai our God. We should feel as though we are literally standing in God’s presence. By now, we’ve gone through a heart wrenching process of comparing the ideal of what we’d like to be to the reality of what we are. We’ve confronted our failings- we’ve seen our inattentiveness to family, the times we’ve been morally slack, our apathy and greed- our failures of truth, of justice and of love. We are standing here searching our tradition for ideals with which we resonate and then committing ourselves to the personal transformation which will take us into a better New Year. Here and now, we feel we are standing at the throne of God’s judgment. We’ve seen our personal failings and we are ready for personal Teshuvah.
As we stand before God there is more than just our personal failures for which we are responsible. It is also important to explore our social condition. To see how our community and nation might have stumbled from lofty ideals. To recognize how other people’s designs might have made each of us co-conspirators in evil. Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” To feel that we are standing before God accountable for our personal failures is essential to Yom Kippur. But we are also called upon to confront where we might be responsible on a social, political level, for inflicting pain and suffering on others.
Its really tragic that this year at the Olympic Games, America’s position was severely compromised. There we were at Mount Olympus to participate in games which by charter are supposed "to place ... sport at the service of the harmonious development of [humankind], with a view to encouraging the establishment of a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity...which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play."
There we were at Mount Olympus witnesses to the torch relay and cauldron of fire with its ever-present, rising flames representing the spirit of all those torchbearers and athletes who inspire others to the heights of greatness. There we were at Mount Olympus standing beneath the Olympic flag which embodies the social and political ideal of unity and friendship: five interlacing rings representing the union of the five continents- and the colors blue, yellow, black, green, and red, at least one of which is found in the flag of every nation. There we were at Mount Olympus swept up in the high ideals of the Olympic charter, the unity and friendship of the world through fair sport and competition, but America’s presence was severely compromised. Surely, the Olympics don’t always measure up to the high ideals of the Olympic charter or of its ritual symbolism. In the past there have been terrible failures: the Munich Olympics that went on after Israeli athletes we murdered by terrorists; the corruption and bribery among International Olympic Committee members involved in choosing host cities. And in Athens this year, there were absurd misjudgements in the men’s gymnastics competition that cast aspersions on Paul Hamm’s gold medal.
And we all know that among the athletes themselves, there are always those to seek to cheat their teammates and competitors through illegal performance enhancing drugs and even blood transfusions. All this invites a kind of cynicism about the spirit of the Olympic core values of fairness and friendship and breaches the trust that the Olympics is where the nations of the world can show their best, not just win at any price.
In Athens this summer, America won the most medals of any team: 35 gold medals, 39 silver medals, and 29 bronze medals. We competed well. Here in Baltimore we were especially proud of swimmer Michael Phelps for his performance as well as his sportsmanship. But as we stand here in the presence of God, we are compelled to ask, did America further the ideals of friendship and unity in the world? Let’s face it. In the political arena, America has not done well in the past year making or keeping many friends in the world. And because of that, we could not stand at Mount Olympus to accept our medals and be ourselves with the same pride and fanfare as in years past. Did you know that American athletes were forced to keep a low profile, toning down their enthusiasm and patriotism because the Olympic Committee had security fears over the anti-American climate in the world.
And did you notice that during the Olympics even our national anthem was transformed from blaring horns to peaceful, soothing strings? In a world where we are perceived as the good guys, our anthem can be played with great pride. In a world where we are waging an incredibly unpopular war, an admittedly preemptive war, a war without a carefully planned goal or end, a war that many would consider unjust and immoral, our athletes were at risk and our anthem an anathema. Let us remember that we are a nation waging war. By definition, war pits one group of people against another, in a competition to the death. It was seductive during the two weeks of the Olympiad for us to imagine that sport is the level playing field where every nation can come together. We could dream that because America’s wars are usually fought so far away. But far away for us is always very close to someone else. Its easy for us to feel a measure of peacefulness in our world because we can turn off the news reports from Iraq and we rarely are inconvenienced by having to witness the horrors of the battlefield seeing American soldiers missing limbs, or suffering from Post traumatic stress disorder. And by Presidential order, we are spared seeing the flag draped coffins of those who have paid the ultimate price for our war.
Instead of making ourselves in the image of Coubertin’s modern Olympic ideals, America has engaged politically in the world in ways that have made us a modern caricature of the ancient Greeks. Their Olympic games were all about agones. You see, the Greeks saw their games as agonies in which antagonist was pitted against antagonist until one came out on top. More descriptive words than games, might be “contests” or “struggles.” For the ancient Greeks, who were constantly at war, the agonies of the Olympics were a sort of ritualized, theatrical version of death on the battlefield: an imitation of the real sport, which was war. Even in peacetime, the ancient Greeks didn’t take to poetry readings, musical concerts or theater. Their entertainment was poetry contests, music competitions, and drama events where there was always a declared winner upon whom the laurels could be heaped and at least one miserable loser. And so the ancient Olympic games taught and reinforced the themes of honor and glory, triumph in combat, of striving to be a winner over some loser.
From where I stand, America has been a player on the world stage more in the ancient Greek style of looking for a win, than in the modern Olympic style of cooperation and fairness. And we’ve paid a price.
A recent poll finds that while 45% of Americans believe that the United States plays a more important and powerful role as world leader than it did ten years ago, 67% say we are less respected. And if you look at what happened at the Olympics you know how very disrespected we really are. For, to many nations of the world, we are living in what Roger Ebert calls, “an age of Rambo patriotism.” Now that the moral ambiguities of Vietnam have faded from memory, we have found more comfort in the cliches of action movies, in which the tough talking hero is always virtuous and those who see complexity and urge the hero to think through his actions, are always wrong, if not villainous. After September 11th, we had a choice as to how to respond as a political nation, by humility or by hubris. And we’ve chosen hubris, excessive, self interested, callous pride. The United States holds in its hands more military and economic power than probably all the nations of the world combined. And yet today, we are politically impotent. Because we stand alone, we are ever more vulnerable to fanatical terrorists whom we do not understand and who hate everything we stand for and each one of us personally. It is appalling that we, the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world, are squandering all our energies on one bad guy, making millions of others hate us, and losing the respect of the majority of nations.
And all of this because we choose to abdicate the frustrating task of cooperating with other nations to track down elusive terrorist cells, and we refuse to take up the unglamorous work of protecting ports and chemical and nuclear plants in this country and elsewhere from possible attack. The problem is that Rambo looks for the quick kill and might be able to successfully subdue a bloodthirsty regime, but doesn’t have a clue as to how to win over people’s hearts. The United States of America will have spent 100's of billions of dollars subduing and rebuilding an Iraq we supported for 20 years under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and then ravaged for 13 years when he stepped out of line with our interests. In the process, we have alienated hundreds of millions of Moslems and most of the nations of the world. Our athletes could not hold their heads high. And perhaps we cannot either, especially when we reflect on all the good we could have done with the same resources. Think of how we could have eliminated malaria, provided safe drinking water, drugs for HIV-AIDS victims. Imagine how, instead of Iceland, America could be the nation spearheading hydrogen fuel cell technology to reduce our world economy’s dependence on oil. Imagine all the homes we could have rebuilt in Grenada and Haita after the recent hurricanes. Contemplate the schools we could have built in Rwanda and the wells we might have dug in Sudan.
Think of all the good works and the good will we could have accumulated instead of the seething hostility that faces us today.
Some of us may enjoy getting away from reality by watching Rambo movies. But we have to ask ourselves, has the Rambo mentality come a little too close to reality? And is it shielding us from all the other realities- a declining environment, economic injustices, a faltering public educational system. Have we allowed ourselves as a nation to be seduced into making enemies and not friends in the world, making war instead of peace?
The ideals of fairness and friendship, cooperation among nations, peace and harmony do not belong exclusively to the International Olympic Committee.
We find them in all our siddurim and machzorim, in both Union Prayerbooks, the Gates of Prayer and the Gates of Repentance. How many of us remember praying from childhood even until now with these words: “Bless our country that it may ever be a stronghold of peace and its advocate in the council of nations...” And in our new prayerbook “Strengthen the bonds of friendship among the inhabitants of all lands...” These are our ideals, our goals, our vision. And in our failure as a nation to embody them, we are all, in Heschel’s terms, if not guilty, then certainly responsible.
Our Torah reminds us, Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem. lifnei adonai eloheichem. We are all standing here today, each one of us before Adonai our God. To examine and repent for our personal sins, to change our ways. Equally, we stand before God on this most holy of all days, to reflect on the quality of our national life. I pray that each one of us will rethink and define our personal view of America’s public role in the world and our personal responsibility for it, that we may more adequately reach toward the high ideals we have always found inspiring, the ideals of human justice and of peace.
