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Yom Kippur AM 5766
"I have set before you today life and death, blessing and curse. U'vacharta bachayim, choose life so that you and your children will live." It sounds like a simple formula: do good things and the blessings of life and health will follow. Do the wrong thing and, well, you'll get the punishment you deserve. How easy it would be if only things were like this morning's promise in Torah. Real life is much different. Acting justly, being kind, spending your life in service to others is certainly valuable, and is even laudable. However, acting on the impulses of our ethics, living a moral life is not enough to stay the hand of circumstance, and protect us and our families from harm. All of us can tell the stories of people we know who didn't get what they deserved in life. I always think of my oldest and dearest friend's mother, a devoted Jewish educator, a great friend and person who was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 50 and died less than a year later. I think about a mother I know caring for her three grown children who are all gravely ill. I think of the children who die after battling cancer, and the babies who drown in the family pool.
And I think of the parents of those children and how they have to carry the burden of their loss. I think of hard working folks in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana who just didn't have enough money to put gas in a car and leave before the hurricane and the hundreds of thousands subjected to the recent natural disasters in Pakistan and Guatemala.
It was Mordecai Kaplan who said, "Expecting God to protect you if you behave justly and honestly is like expecting a bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian." And to quote Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, life is not like a vending machine where if you put in virtue, you will get out happiness. The formula of Torah simply does not hold. And the Rabbis agree. The Talmud tells us that Rabbi Jannai, a respected and learned sage would always check a bridge before crossing it, for he said 'A man should never stand in a place of danger and say that a miracle will be wrought for him, lest it is not." We cannot expect our learning or our goodness to stay the hand of circumstance. The Haftarah we will read this afternoon Jonah, disagrees with the Torah also. Jonah teaches that repentance, like virtue, is no guarantee of good fortune or happiness.
Sometimes life treats us to arbitrary blessings, such as the gourd plant that blossoms and shades Jonah in the desert. And at other times, deserving or not, those blessings can shrivel up and die in the blink of an eye.
And we are left wondering what to do.
Over the years, I have come to understand that those who canonized the Bible didn't find any more solace in these simplistic formulas than we might.
And so they chose to include sacred writings in our Biblical canon which are a direct responses to this morning's portion and to the experience we've all had that bad things do happen to good people. Like the book of Job. Job was a righteous man, blessed with seven sons and three daughters and wealth beyond his needs. Until Satan posed the question to God, would Job be so blameless if his life was a little tougher? So God tests him. When Job learns that his children are dead, he still doesn't curse God. Then Satan afflicts Job himself. Again, Job remains devoted to God. The bulk of the chapters in Job's story are conversations between Job and Job's friends who visit to comfort and console him by urging him to examine and reexamine his deeds for the reason this tragedy has befallen him. When Job can no longer stand the futility of that exercise, he cries out to God. God appears to Job out of the whirlwind, to admonish him for questioning God's actions and for the temerity of thinking he might understand God's ways.
Job recants, God restores his fortune and Job lives on to create another family, seven new sons and three new daughters. Regardless of whether we find meaning in the answer that Job gets from God or from the so-called restitution that Job earns after enduring his trial, the book of Job certainly opens up the possibility in the Biblical canon that innocent suffering does exist. Even as devout a soul as Job, who appeared to follow all God's rules, and about whom even God says, "There is no one like [Job] on earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil." Job, who would even command his children to offer sacrifices after a week of feasting just in case they accidently offended God, even this Job can suffer innocently. Today, we cannot contemplate innocent suffering without thinking of the Shoah, especially in remembering the children. Listen to the testimony of a prisoner who was in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, at the peak of the extermination of Jews:
"...When the Hungarian Jews arrived, we used a music camouflage. At the time the children were burned on big piles of wood. ...[They] were crying helplessly and that is why the camp administration ordered that an orchestra be made by 100 inmates and should play. They played very loud all the time.... so that even the people in the city of Auschwitz could not hear the screams. Without the orchestra they would have heard the screams of horror..."
When such things can and do happen, even now in Darfur, Sudan, there is no denying the existence of innocent suffering. And when hundreds of of thousands of Nigerians face hunger and certain death, and hundreds thousands of people die in natural disasters like the recent tsunami, hundreds die as a result of hurricane Katrina and hundreds of thousands become displaced persons do we not ask ourselves where is the whirlwind with God's response? That is where another book included in the canon brings another look at the same question. I lovingly refer to it as the renegade book of the Bible: Kohelet, Ecclesiastes. Kohelet is the narrator of the book, an older and worldly man looking back on his own life and attempting to put the pieces together into a series of life lessons.
Essentially, what Kohelet concludes is that seeking the answers and meaning to life's most difficult questions is an utterly vain pursuit. And any simple formulas of what you can expect from life are absurd, since anything can happen or already has happened, even bad things to good people. Moreover, the God of Kohelet, while He may have established the rhythms of the world and the cycles of life and death, is remote and uninvolved in our lives. In fact, the prayer we will recite next week on Shemini Atzeret Simchat Torah, when we begin to pray for the rains to return to Israel, is in the spirit of Kohelet's submission to living in a world which water can be unpredictably life giving or death dealing. We can only pray and hope that the rain will be "for blessing not for curse, for sustenance, not for starvation , for life and not for death." And unlike Job's finale where God speaks out of the whirlwind, the book of Ecclesiastes runs as a monologue, a prayer without answer. Kohelet's God is silent.
From these two books, I personally have learned that I have Job moments, moments when I am awed by the senseless suffering that I see but still refuse to let go of the idea that God is yet present in our lives, and I have Kohelet moments, when the meaninglessness of suffering makes God feel so remote as to be absent, silent.
It is in my Kohelet moments when it is helpful to turn to another book in Ketuvim, the writings of the Bible, that is, the book of Psalms. Last May, Harold Kushner spoke in Baltimore on his book tour for, The Lord is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom from the Twenty Third Psalm. At that lecture he recounted a familiar experience we all have had. You are at a funeral. Perhaps the deceased is a loved one. You feel your own pain, you contemplate your own mortality. And then something magically comforting happens as the officiant of the funeral leads the assembled in Psalm 23.
"The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures, leads me beside still waters and restores my soul. He guides me in straight paths for His namesake. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me..." It was the mysterious yet universal sense of comfort in those words, which led Rabbi Kushner to devote a book to this Psalm, a book in which he points out that the psalmist understands that there is a difference between how we perceive our relationship with God when things are going well for us, and when we are walking in the shadow of death. Notice how the Psalmist uses the third person speaking of God in the beginning of the psalm when things are going well: "He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He restores my soul. He guides me in straight paths for his namesake." But when the Psalmist turns to the frightening experience of death, and its shadowy unknown, he talks to God, in the second person. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me, Thy rod, Thy staff, they comfort me..."
As Martin Buber taught, the difference between theology and religion is that theology attempts to talk about God, while religion is the experience of God. The comforting power of the 23rd Psalm is the recognition that we, too, can not only talk about God, but can be brought into an experience of God, even and especially as we walk through the darkest times of life.
The comfort of these words comes from the simple fact that the psalmist neither doubts the existence of evil nor that God will be by his side when he is stricken by it. He trusts. Its not a naive sort of trust - the kind that guarantees that our suffering is part of God's plan for us. I mean trust in the sense that there is something imperishable at the core of the universe and the core of each one of us, and God is a source of inexhaustible strength on which we can draw when suffering befalls us.
When Rabbi Kushner opened the floor to questions from the audience, one questioner referred to Kushner's most well known book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He mistakenly called it, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. I am certain it was not the first time that error was made in his presence. So Kushner patiently responded, "The name of the book is deliberately When Bad Things Happen to Good People, because I wasn't attempting to answer the question, Why?" I personally find this is one of the most challenging parts of my rabbinate: my inability to answer the question "why?" and make people's suffering meaningful.
I would love to be able to give people a way to look at the deep pains and challenges of life and provide the answers as to why they happen. After all, a rabbi is supposed help people make the moments of their lives meaningful. Can a life only be meaningful in times of joy and in ordinary times be made sacred?
In moments of disaster, how can I be comforting and also tell someone looking for a reason for their disaster that there may not be one? Over the years, I have discovered that the Torah's simple answer that everyone gets what he or she deserves isn't enough. But that there is still a simple formula for life. Even in the absence of the answer to the "why bad things happen to good people" that being with people, making sure they are not alone as they walk through the valley, is where the meaning happens. There was a study done at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin on pain tolerance. They took some students and tested how long they could soak their feet in ice water. What they discovered was universal: a person could keep his foot in the freezing water twice as long, if someone was in the room with him.
Think about that the next time you are worried about whether someone will really want to see you while they are in the hospital or recuperating at home, or whether they'll take your call while reeling after the loss of a job or after hearing a dire diagnosis. Religion, our religion, is the continuing project of making sure no one has to be alone. Even the word, religion is related to the word ligament, that which binds the muscles of our bodies together.
When we are there for one another, to remind each other that we really are good people, that we don't deserve the pains we are enduring, we feel less deserving of our suffering, our pain becomes less painful, our misfortune becomes less oppressive. Finding the answer to the why of suffering may have no relevance. But finding meaning in the midst of the suffering we encounter is important. The meaning is that you don't to be a Jewish doctor to heal others, to lessen their pain and stress. And you don't have to wait for doctors to lessen your own suffering. The meaning comes in our human contacts. In feeling loved, beloved, and cared about, and in feeling loving and caring. And in knowing that at the heart of the mystery of creation is the creator, who accompanies us on the journey.
The same day I heard Rabbi Kushner speak, I happened to have a conversation with someone celebrating her remission from cancer. She told me that even after months of undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, that she wouldn't trade the experience of being so ill for anything. That the way she lives, treasuring the simple moments of life and the people around her would not have been possible without having traveled through the darkness of her cancer. She was not alone. As the Torah reminds us, God recognized this fact in the very first moments of creation: "Lo tov heyot ha-adam levado, it is not good for a humanity to be alone." And so God created others to be ezerei k'negdo, helpers beside us. As we close the book on the past year, and seek to write ourselves in to the book of life for another year, let us remember the words we recite upon completing a book of study and beginning another: Chazak Chazak v'nitchazek. Chazak: Be strong this coming year and reach inside to find your inner strength, Chazak: look for the presence of God in the core of all life which can strengthen you when things get tough, V'nitchazek: but at those times when we know we cannot do it alone, let us be there to strengthen one another.
Amen.
