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Rosh Hashanah Morning 5767- Saturday Sept 23, 2006
This summer I had quite an experience buying my car. Within the first week a significant concern arose, I went back to the dealership to resolve it, and was surprised when I was mistreated by managers and owners alike. Ironically, I noted that day happened to be the first of Elul, the month we Jews begin our cheshbon hanefesh, our internal accounting for our deeds. Elul, the month preceding Rosh Hashanah, is a time to recenter ourselves and remember the most important lesson we are to take from the celebration of our world’s beginning, the centerpiece of our New Year: that all of us are created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God. We are not just biological organisms programmed with instincts and urges, not simply creatures of the highest intelligence who can learn to decode and manipulate DNA, the very building blocks of organic life. It goes even higher than that. We are each beings with the tzelem, the likeness of God, which is expressed through our souls. According to the Zohar, the mystical writings of our people, this God-given essence or soul is the mysterious light of each person’s individual selfhood that shines through everything he is and everything he does.
Perhaps the soul is what accounts for the fact that when researchers weigh a person just before death and then immediately after death, uniformly people weigh exactly 2 ounces less after they’ve died. Maybe some other reason explains this biological discrepancy. The truth is, we can’t say we know much scientifically about our souls. And yet we cannot deny the experience many of us have had, times when we have seen right through to another person’s being, and seen the godliness in them. And we have had the other times too, as with the not-so-nice folks at the car dealership, when it is difficult to see anything divine in people we encounter. It is as if the tzelem, the divine light, has been eclipsed, preventing the soul from shining into the world. And that is the most tragic thing I can imagine for anyone, a living death of sorts.
The Yiddish writer IL Peretz tells a short story about a young boy who came home from school one day very irritable and began picking on his brother and sisters. When the siblings told their mother about his behavior, she sent the boy to his room until supper. In a fit of rage, the boy didn’t go to his room, but ran out of their house, went down the hill and into the valley between the mountains, and sat on a rock and yelled, “I hate you.”
Suddenly, the echoes all around him resounded with a chorus of replies. The boy immediately ran home and sobbed to his mother that everybody in the world hated him. Whereupon the mother placed her hand on his head with a maternal pat and said, “Why don’t you go back down the hill to the valley, sit on that same rock and call out, ‘I love you,’ and see what happens?”
The power of Rosh Hashanah comes from reaching inside ourselves and remembering who we are, beings created b’tzelem elohim, beings with souls. The power of Rosh Hashanah comes from allowing the world to see ourselves as we truly know ourselves to be, made in God’s image. Each of us has the potential to either obscure or reflect into this world our own unique refraction of God’s divine light. There is a Chasidic story Rabbi Bunem taught his disciples about Rabbi Isaac of Cracow. After many years of great poverty that had never shaken his faith in God, Rabbi Isaac dreamed that someone told him to look for a treasure in Prague under the bridge that led to the king’s palace. The rabbi set out for Prague, and every day he would walk around the bridge, which unfortunately was guarded by the captain of the guards.
One day, the captain confronted Rabbi Isaac about what his business was at the bridge. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Rabbi Isaac told the captain the story about his dream. The captain laughed: “And to satisfy your dream you walked out your shoes to come all the way here? Why, if I believed in dreams, a long time ago I would have gone to Cracow, because I had a dream that in Cracow, under the stove of some Rabbi Isaac, is buried a treasure.” Rabbi Isaac heard the story and bowed silently; he then returned home to Cracow and dug up the treasure that was hidden under his own stove. From this tale, Rabbi Bunem would instruct his students, saying: “ Take this story to heart and make what it says your own. There is something you cannot find anywhere in the world, even with your tzaddik, your leader, and yet, there is a place where you can find it.” Rabbi Bunem’s story teaches the greatest treasure is that deep sense of knowing that we are created in God’s likeness, knowing and feeling our own intrinsic value, and that we have gifts to bring into the world. This season of awe is our time see ourselves, our souls anew. Let’s start with the easy stuff. As Rabbi Isaac learns in the story, the world is no place to look for the treasure. Your value has nothing to do with wealth or status.
Counter to all the billion dollar market brainwashing that most of us have consumed since we were very young and began listening to the radio or watching television, knowing our own infinite value will never come from driving a new car, or having the latest computer toy, or even losing that last ten pounds. As hard as we may try, we will never be able to buy, sweat or diet our way to our souls. Moreover, clocking time in at schul out of a feeling of obligation or guilt won’t do it either. All of us know, being a good Jew or even being a good person isn’t simply about showing up at services. Being a good person means leading an examined life- one not solely in pursuit of the extra dollar, but truly in pursuit of the extra mitzvah, of the activity, of the people, of the places which will grow and nourish our souls. And when we are searching, actively endeavoring to nurture our inner lives, study, prayer and worship become meaningful experiences. Being a good Jew ultimately is about seeking out life affirming activities, searching for ways to ignite and share the fire of our souls. The reckoning we make during these Days of Awe is about how much we have pursued the real treasure, not the limited riches of status or material gain.
And what of the debris under which the innate wealth of our souls has been buried? For one, technology is part of the debris. Ironically, computers, fax machines and blackberries make our lives more comfortable and efficient. They also tend to make us much more demanding of ourselves and others. But is that how we want to be? Treating relatives, friends, and people at work as though they should be as efficient and productive as our computers? Consider what it does to our souls when we take the credit for being reliable because our computers pay our monthly bills, but let ourselves off the hook from reliably keeping promises we make to our spouses, our children, our co-workers. In the same vein, we like to think the internet has brought the world closer together.
We can fax or email something overseas with the ease of pushing a few buttons, but are we as willing to push all the buttons and walk all the walks to bridge the distances between ourselves and our teenage children, or the Muslims who live around the corner, or the African Americans who share our classrooms, or homeless man we see each day on our commute to work? Today we can Google anyone and get their vital statistics, accomplishments. Data sharing gives us the false illusion that we can know everything about a person. Instant communication and twenty four hour news give us the illusion that we know everything that is going on in the world. But do we really know? Do we know anyone? Do we really know anything? The greatest assault on our divinity and our humanity is the delusion that we truly know or care without looking into the eyes, without feeling another’s pain or grief, without hearing the timbre of another’s voice. This is the technological debris from which we have to escape on this New Year.
But we also have to reckon with a society that tries to keep telling us that our personal value at home, at school, at work is measured almost solely by external performance and not by inner worth. Grades or evaluations label us either as successes or as failures. What might it be doing to our children’s souls to be considered “regular,” when others around them are “gifted and talented?” It may well be that those labels describe skills of language and math, science, art.
But our schools and society are not doing anything to support other gifts and talents- the precious potential within that yearn for nurturing- their willingness to work hard, their persistence, their skill at friendship, their value of family. And those kids who do bear the crown of being honored or gifted and talented, how do they know that their goodness, their compassion, and not their grades or their ability on the soccer field, are their truly important and treasured gifts? Kadimah, Confirmation and Post Confirmation classes here at Temple are not designed as academic programs, precisely because we want our teenagers to have a place they can achieve a sense of worth from developing their inner lives, not from getting good grades or climbing the social ladder. Unfortunately, this labeling for success and failure doesn’t only happen to our children while they are in school. Many of us fall into the trap of referring to “my grandson, the doctor” or “my daughter the lawyer.” How will our children learn that, in the end, what really counts to us, and what should truly be valuable to them, is not their external accomplishments, but the riches of their personhood, their warmth, their compassion, their love of family, their loyalty, their friendship?
We come by the mistake honestly, as grading and labeling happens to us in the workplace, where the benchmarks of accountability have trumped the values of loyalty, longevity and dedication. It would be demoralizing if I measured my value as a rabbi based on how many members we have in the congregation at any given time. Or if I accepted a bonus for increases in Temple membership numbers. Can those externals ever compare to the value of my presence in the home of a grieving family, or with the ill in a hospital room, or in the continuity of relationships derived from shared weddings, births of children, B’nai Mitzvah and beyond. Every profession has its equivalents. Teachers today are doubly challenged in that their performance is evaluated from the grades of their students instead of the quality and creativity of their teaching. Lawyers are evaluated on the number of clients they bring in, CEOs are judged by the bottom line. But what about the health of the company? Just because that is the way it is in business doesn’t mean that is the way it should be. Should a CEO only be accountable for the profits of the company? How about the working conditions, the safety, the flexibility for family time. Does the personal connections a lawyer makes with clients not count?
How about the teacher who inspires below average students to find satisfaction in learning a new skill or teaches a bully to be more compassionate, is that important even though it cannot be measured? The largest problem for us with putting such an powerful premium on performance is that we begin measuring our personal value on the judgments, measurements, and approval of others. When we do that, we give the world the power to put a price tag, on what is priceless: our selves.
These Days of Awe stand before you as an opportunity to dig through and discard all this debris, to call it what it is, the detritus of modern life and to reestablish your self image as a reflection of the divine image.
The moment you see yourself as a creature with a soul, somehow a product and a part of the divine plan, you will begin to have value and dignity, and new opportunities will emerge to see yourself, and those around your and even those far away from you, as ultimately sacred. This is our tradition’s ultimate premise: that the human soul is and somehow at this season can approach the throne of divine forgiveness. And what do we need to be forgiven for this year? I leave that for you to judge for yourself.
But don’t forget to ask forgiveness for measuring and quantifying and profit-and-loss-ing yourself and others. Don’t forget to ask forgiveness for judging on performance, for seeking of approval, for forgetting that you and every single human being was conceived in the same way, in the image of God. Forgetting this allowing this to be buried in the debris of life, is our greatest sin and leads to all the others. Remembering it is Judaism’s ultimate value, the synagogue’s ultimate measure and the New Year’s ultimate goal.
Rabbi Meiri
