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Rosh Hashanah Eve 5766 - Turning the Enemy Among and Within Us

As David Brooks recently wrote in the New York Times, nothing has changed during the war on terror as much as our definition of the enemy. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, we assumed the conflict was between the jihadists and the West, a conflict between medievalism and modernism. We believed that terrorists were bred and nurtured from cultures isolated from our Enlightenment ideas, cultures disoriented and humiliated by backwardness of the Arab world relative to the pluralism and opportunity of the those countries living in the modern age. Trapped under stagnant and repressive regimes with little hope of acquiring the kind of economic mobility or political capital to lead productive lives, we believed these terrorists naturally lashed out at the United States and Europe because we were the embodiment of everything they could not have. And by seeking martyrdom, they would achieve the worth in death they could not imagine or make happen in life.

Years of research and the London subway bombings this summer forced us to change that view. We now know that 75 percent of anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class or upper-middle class homes. Sixty percent of them have attended college. And three quarters of them hold professional or semi-professional jobs, particularly in the areas of engineering and the sciences. They may have moved from Western countries to Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or from the Middle East to England or France, but they are far from medieval. Instead they arise from the ranks of the educated, the mobile, and the multilingual. The jihadists are modern, both psychologically as well as demographically because they are self made men, and self-made men don't exist in traditional societies. And rather than deferring to custom, the brand of Islam they practice is anything but traditional. They take advantage of modernity, affluence and freedom to become practitioners of a do-it-yourself Islamic tribalism, and they do it with the zeal of converts. Jihad becomes the way for well-educated, worldly but disconnected people to give their life shape and meaning.

Welcome back to the Post-modern age.

We ushered in Post-modernity fifty or so years ago in the aftermath of the Shoah, the Holocaust, when we were forced to give up the fantasy of Modernism that promised enlightenment and education was the key to bringing about the fulfillment of our human and moral potential. After all, the Nazis were educated but ultimately evil. In fact they, like the jihadists today, founded their own ideology of hate by basing it on pseudo-scientific claims of the genetic inferiority of the Jews. How easy the discipline of the university can be coopted for whatever one's purposes. Revisionist historians and intelligent designers are contemporary examples of this fact. But Post-Modernity was never just about Hitler and Himmler and Eichmann. One only has to read Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners to understand that the sinister musings of a few ideologues was also able to infect and mobilize millions of ordinary citizens to respond with their desire for evil, their yetzer harah. Even more tragic, the vast majority of survivor stories include moments when Jews had to suspend their own sense of morality in order to save themselves. The hard truth is that the Shoah wasn't always as Primo Levi opined-that people who survived did so by clinging to their humanity.

And who is to say how any of us would respond in similar circumstances? This is what I mean. We humans are like our figurative parents in Torah, Adam and Eve, who know the difference between good and evil, and yet only sometimes choose the good. As Yehuda Amichai scribbled on a notepad before his death, "From Satan, haste, from God, no hurry. I am torn between them." He also wrote, "It is always dark inside the heart, because it is inside the body." It's frightening to realize that the terrorists of today look a lot more like us than we'd like to admit. It not only makes you worried how vulnerable America is from enemies in far off places, it has to make you wonder as well about the person sitting next to you on the airplane, the new family who moves onto your block, the people sharing the stadium with you at a Raven's game. Its frightening to think that evil inclination may reside in all of us. That growing up in similar circumstances with somewhat equal opportunities may turn one to a life of productivity and loving relationships and another to a life of hatred and extremism.

I don't know how Post-modern or philosophical it is, but my response to the fact that each one of us is so vulnerable to abandoning our moral impulses, or even of convincing ourselves that good is evil and evil is good, is by remembering that the human heart, while residing in a dark place, can also emerge to reveal radiant beauty and bring supreme joy. There is a poem by Emily Dickenson: "They might not need me, yet they might. I'll let my heart be just in sight. A smile as small as mine might be, precisely their necessity." In an age when it's hard to escape the reminders of how wrong our world can go, I find it necessary to remind myself that changing that world means allowing my heart be just in sight and to feed it with stories and sentiments that will grow my faith in humanity's equally enduring capacity for kindness and compassion, and love. This is neither unique or new. Recently NPR sponsored a revival of the 1950s radio program This I Believe, hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow for the same purpose. Like us today in the face of terrorism and a myriad of societal ills, the essayists on Murrow's series fifty years ago expressed tremendous hope in spite of the fear of atomic warfare, increasing consumerism and loss of spiritual values.

Each day, millions of Americans gathered by their radios to hear compelling essays from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller and Harry Truman as well as corporate leaders, cab drivers, scientists and secretaries -- anyone able to distill into a few minutes the guiding principles by which they lived.

Let me share with you parts of an essay from the new NPR This I Believe project, entitled, "Always Go to the Funeral," by Deirdre Sullivan. Ms. Sullivan describes how uncomfortable it was as an adolescent being forced to go to the funeral of her former math teacher, especially finding herself the only student there. But as her father said to her over and over, "always go to the funeral." Twenty years later, her teacher's mother greets her by name with tears in her eyes, recognizing her as the one student who came to her daughter's funeral. This experience taught her a profound philosophy of life. Ms Sullivan writes: "'Always go to the funeral' means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to.

I am talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under attended birthday party, the hospital visit during happy hour. The shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing. In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity."

Love, compassion, kindness do come simply by going to a funeral. Not necessarily in catalyzing grand sweeping acts of social change or in solving the world's energy problems, but by overcoming inertia to do something important for another human being. It seems so simple and yet how many of us neglect to put this idea into practice regularly. Our lives seem too busy to accommodate the small gesture of loving kindness our neighbors and friends might need. And forget about it if its someone farther removed from us- a temple family we barely know, a friend of a friend, the new kid on the block.

It's interesting. Most people remember a kindness much longer than they would an injury. Always go to the funeral also means always write a note when a loved one is ill, always smile at the garbage men and the grocery cashier, say thank you but no thank you to the telemarketer who interrupts your dinner.

We often think that love is described as all the extraordinary acts we do for one another- the mother who runs into the burning building to save her child. The enormous sacrifices of money and time we make to support our children's aspirations. But if you were to ask a young person what love is they give much simpler answers: Billy, age four, said, "When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth." Or seven year old Bobby, who said "Love is what's in the room with you at [holiday time] if you stop opening presents and listen."

As we waited for the space shuttle Discovery to return this summer we were painfully reminded of the Columbia disaster. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut on that mission was remembered in many obituaries for what he had brought with him into shuttle, a picture of a moonscape drawn from the imagination of a young boy who did not survive the Holocaust. I imagine he brought it up there as a tribute of sorts to how far the world has come from a place where Jews faced certain death and could only dream of the moon, to a world where an Israeli could practically touch it. But I heard an even more heroic remembrance about Ramon's character. When NASA wanted the seven astronauts to bond before going on their mission, they decided to have the crew hike up a mountain together with thirty five pound backpacks. Midway through their trek, it became clear that only Ramon and McCool were in condition to reach the summit. The group decided to stop part way up and continue climbing in the morning. At dawn, five of the astronauts awoke to see their backpacks missing. While they were sleeping, Ramon and McCool had carried all of them, 250 pounds worth, to the summit for the others. In that way they acted upon the directive of Jewish tradition that to lighten another's burden, to help him carry the weight, is to truly love him.

When twenty nine members of Temple Emanuel were in Israel this summer, none of us had to carry anything but ourselves the 2640 steps up the snake path to the ruins atop Masada. When you arrive at the top of Masada, exhausted and hot, its hard to escape thinking about the people who trekked up there to stay, barricading themselves behind fortress walls in a fight to the death against the Romans. Granted, the zealots who perished there inherited a former palace of King Herod, and all the storehouses he set up there in case he had to ever flee. Still, what Masada evokes, and the reason the paratroopers in Israel are inducted into their service there, is an insistent sense of faith and hope that resides in the human heart. These people gave everything. They made a commitment to fight the oppression of the Romans and remained loyal to that cause and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Two thousand years later, their optimism and hope remain to inspire our generations. Their story continues to be told: to paratroopers, to kids, to tourists, to Israelis who come to visit, hear the story, and see the place continue to be inspired by their hope. And today there is a new chapter in that story.

Two thousand years ago, someone ate a date that was in Herod's storehouse and chucked the pit to a spot where it was able to be preserved, undamaged. About a year ago, it was discovered and planted at a kibbutz in the Negev desert. Why plant a two thousand year old date pit? Because of the never ending reserve of optimism that resides within the human heart. Because we actually believe that a species of date palm we once thought to be extinct, could be resurrected. That its leaves might hold precious medicinal properties that would heal the ailing. Because the dates you get in Israel today are actually grown from date seeds from California. And even if it takes a generation, thirty years to bear fruit if and only if the plant turns out to be a female, we want to plant for our children the possibility that they will taste sweet dates, that are from the same tree from which our spiritual ancestors ate. And in thinking this way, we get to think that the evil empires of Rome may rise but will eventually fall. And what will endure is the precious, the sweet, the simple hope that the potential for good in human heart is indestructible.

So here we are at the beginning of a new year. And all I want you to go away with is this very simple but sublime realization. That whatever your shortcomings, whatever your mistakes, shortcomings and mistakes which you now have this ten days to explore and review and admit, that there is still is reason to expect better of yourself. You know the Torah teaches us Kedoshim Tehiyu, you shall be holy. A god awful thought- how can I be holy? I can't be holy. I can be holy? The Torah doesn't teach us to be holy because we aren't or because we can't be. The Torah teaches us to be holy, because we can. The Torah provides us with all sorts of rules on how to conduct our lives- to love our neighbors as ourselves, not to lie or cheat or steal or murder, not to take advantage of the poor or the weak, to respect the elderly. The Torah doesn't command us in this way because we are inherently evil. The Torah provides us with all of these commands because it assumes we are capable of following them. This is what holiness is. And you can be holy is the Torah's message.

This is a Torah not of human depravity or of original sin, but a Torah of hope. We plant the seeds of this hope in so many ways. Beshanah haba'ah, in the coming year 5766, let us uproot the possibility of evil by discovering and recovering the seeds we know we can sow: seeds of simple goodness and occasional righteousness, seeds of generosity, seeds of hope and seeds of peace. Let us plant them, and nurture them, that our world may bear their fruit.

Amen.