[Previous sermon: "Rosh Hashanah Morning 5767- Saturday Sept 23, 2006"] [Next sermon: "An Inconvenient Truth - Yom Kippur Morning 5767, Oct. 2, 2006"]
Kol Nidre 5767-Oct 2, 2006
As the preacher was delivering a lengthy sermon, he noticed he had a slumbering congregant. Enraged, he interrupted himself and called out to the congregation: “All who are for salvation, stand up!” Everyone rose except for that one sleeping soul. Furious, the preacher motioned for the congregation to be seated and then screamed at the top of his lungs: “All of you who are for sin, stand up!” At this, the sleeping man woke with a start, jumped to his feet, and stood shocked, rubbing his eyes. He looked around at the seated congregation, thought for a moment, and then said to his pastor, “Reverend, I confess that I don’t know what we’re voting on, but it looks like you and I are the only ones for it!”
Well, I am in favor of sin, the word “sin,” that is. Sin is at the center of the meaning of Yom Kippur. Many Jews like to think that we are too sophisticated to “sin.” Rather, we have “shortcomings.” After all, its vogue today to translate the Hebrew word cheyt as “missing the mark,” implying that we’ve simply aimed our good intentions in bad places. We don’t actually sin.
Or worse, we mouth the words “al cheyt she-chatanu, for the sins we’ve committed...” but we don’t actually believe it is we who have sinned, I who have sinned. We stand and say “al cheyt,” so that the person standing next to us, or the person sitting in the row behind us can say, “I have sinned,” without being embarrassed to stand alone admitting his failure. Or, if we have been less than successful at commitment and have cheated on a spouse, it must be because of our parents’ failed attempts at long term love. If we are not exactly above board in our business practices, that’s just because its what you have to do in this day and age to survive and to get ahead. If we turn away while our children pad their resumes, its no real shanda, or sin, everyone looks better on paper than they really are. And, of course, once they get into a good college, its up to them to succeed. The rationalization of blame, the depreciation of blame, the displacement of blame, the collective irresponsibility that makes us averse to the word “sin” is what frustrated psychiatrist Karl Menninger over 30 years ago when he wrote his groundbreaking book, “Whatever Became of Sin?” as the legal and medical communities absolved criminals of guilt, preferring instead to call them emotionally disturbed or victims of societal ills.
Remember those great lines in Sondheim and Bernstein’s West Side Story:
Officer Krupke, you're really a square;
This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care!
It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He's psychologic'ly disturbed!
In response, Menninger wrote, “the popular leaning is away from notions about guilt and morality...no longer is there an emphasis on self-control, on individual moral responsibility, on a code of behavior stronger than technical legality or illegality.” The problem is that when we displace blame for our actions onto our dysfunctional families, the business culture, or society in general, it is the first step in transforming ourselves from moral human beings with a conscience into amoral creatures who feel no remorse for our misdeeds. It is the removal of the “I” from “sin” and if there is no sin, then we all live under a “no-fault morality” where no one is responsible for anything. Since I believe there is a problem with that, I suppose I believe in sin. And this time of Yom Kippur is about believing we can sin. Its about accounting for our sins, and taking responsibility for them through repentance and repair.
After the Shoah, the greatest collective sin of the twentieth century, we wondered how the people of a cultured, enlightened society as Germany was in the early twentieth century could mobilize and institutionalize the crimes they perpetrated against the Jewish people, homosexuals, gypsies and the mentally and physically challenged. The disturbing conclusions from Dr. Stanley Milgram’s psycho-social experiments showed the world the power authority can have over our personal responsibility for making moral choices.
Milgram proved that study participants, normal, educated caring human beings, consistently and sometimes callously would deliver what they believed to be electric shocks to a person in another room, even after hearing that person shouting in terror that they had a heart condition. They were willing to do this merely because a person in a white lab coat told them it was alright. We learned then how easily our moral framework can become corrupted by others, how simple it is for us to delegate our moral responsibility to someone else, especially someone else in authority. And we learned from the record of history that when that happens, how smooth we make the road to sin.
This potential fragility of our moral selves should serve as an internal warning for us. But an equally important positive lesson comes from the work of Eva Fogelman, who studied the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. These were the people who sheltered, fed or transported Jews to safety at peril of their own lives during years of the Nazi regime. Instead of uncovering what can go terribly wrong in our moral framework, Fogelman’s work focused on what elements contributed to making someone choose to do the right thing, even against the authorities and the standards of the society in which they lived. From years of collecting first hand accounts of rescuers, patterns in their choices and behavior emerged. One overwhelming trend was that these were ordinary people, housewives, local shopkeepers, businessmen, just like everyone else in their communities. They had jobs, families, and everything to risk, above and beyond their own lives. What made them act extraordinarily is that they also had a strong inner moral core that wouldn’t permit them to ignore the clues: the neighbors who suddenly went missing, the children who were no longer in school, the screams they heard on the other side of the ghetto walls.
They saw what was going on for what it was, wrong, and had no filter through which to interpret these events except through a lens that revealed human beings who were suffering and needed their help. And when they were presented with an opportunity to save a Jew or turn them away, and rarely did rescuers actually seek out their charges, most reported that they simply couldn’t live with themselves unless they protected the people in front of them pleading for help. Some of these rescuers articulated that solid moral stance as stemming from their faith tradition. Not that they were supported by their churches, in many cases they were not. Instead, they had internalized the message of their religion and acted upon it in their lives. Personality theorist Gordon Allport in his studies on tolerance found two types of religious motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsically motivated persons value religion as a social institution. They enjoy the community feeling and social aspects of congregational attendance. Intrinsically motivated religious people, on the other hand, derive satisfaction from internalizing the precepts of religion. They connect emotionally to what is said and taught at each service or lesson.
These two types of religious people are not necessarily separate, but in those cases where they are, Allport found that intrinsically oriented religious people are less prejudiced about those outside their faith than the extrinsically motivated. Holocaust rescuers, in general, described being intrinsically motivated by their faiths. Therefore, even the Jew, the quintessential “other,” was seen in his or her full humanity. They could not be ignored. They could only be rescued.
Whenever I think of what I need to carry with me as a lesson from the Shoah, and the purpose for which I wish my children and my students to be grounded in their faith tradition, it is to develop and hone an intrinsically motivated faith and moral character. To cultivate in myself, to teach my children and guide all of you to be people, who in challenging times, would choose to act bravely and defiantly to do the right thing, to act upon the principles of our faith which values all life as precious, as God’s creation.
But I also realize one cannot build a life based on the most extreme of circumstances. Its not likely that you’ll be called upon soon to save a person standing outside your door from Nazis or terrorists. It’s the easy stuff, the daily stuff, for which we need to be most ready. Because in our everyday lives, there is enough going on to corrode our moral values and diminish our souls. Nachmanides, perhaps the most psychologically attuned of all the classical commentators of Torah, suggests the purpose of the mitzvot, the sacred obligations that define a Jewish life, is to elevate our souls, our moral core. The purpose of doing Jewish things is not to help God, not to serve God, or even to be partners with God, but to get us ready to resist being corrupted even by a psych student wearing an authoritative looking white lab coat. Inspired by the Biblical psalmist, Nachmanides considered the soul as spiritual silver that is easily tarnished and the mitzvot, the crucibles through which we refine it. To be holy, we must do mitzvot to keep our souls shining brightly so we can go out and be positively engaged in the welfare of all beings in our world. To be holy is about protecting the vulnerable, respecting the aged, caring even for animals.
Lo tuchal l’hitalem, we are not permitted to hide from any of these obligations any more than we can hide from bigger sins. To be holy, we have to be willing not to do what we think all the other kids in school are doing when we know its wrong. To be holy means not to cause someone else’s failure to promote our own success. You may have seen the New Yorker cartoon in which two prosperous businessmen pass by a homeless man looking for a handout. One man says to the other, “That’s why I prefer RANDOM acts of kindness.” Random acts of kindness, as opposed to frequent or consistent acts of kindness? It is so easy for us in our materialistic society to justify our callousness and to shelter ourselves from guilt. But being holy means taking this afternoon’s Torah lesson to heart- and taking ourselves to task to honor our parents, to tell the truth, to be indifferent to economic class, to not bear grudges, or wrong the immigrant by unfairly profiting from his labors.
You and I, we’re not living through World War II, thank God. But we are living during a time of war. The wars in the distant lands of Iraq and Afghanistan and perhaps, in the near future, Iran. We’re living during the war against terror. And in these wars, we have discovered the moral blurriness of how an ethical society is to treat captives and suspects of terrorist acts, how we incarcerate, interrogate and prosecute those we believe have harmful, terrorist designs on us. In engaging these threats, we have all become victims and perpetrators. We have become the victims of the slashing of our civil liberties and perpetrators of crimes of torture and abuses of justice our government has already committed and are now attempting to institutionalize on our behalf.
If we stand by silently, if we do not raise our voices in protest, if we do not engage in political action to stop such abuses, call it what you want- a social disease a societal neurosis-I call it sin and guilt.
We are each personally battling a war against a market driven society whose mission it is to make us blind consumers, cogs in an amoral economic machine. Cogs are not supposed to complain. Cogs vote the party line. Cogs support wars because it’s the patriotic thing to do. Cogs don’t get involved in providing universal health care as an inalienable right of everyone in a prosperous society. Cogs keep their mouths shut.
And cogs have no guilt, because there is no guilt in a well oiled machine.
Dr. Howard Zinn, an historian and activist from Boston University has reminded us for decades that no democratic government created the greatest movements for social change. People did. Small groups who clustered together with others. Ordinary people who had moral vision to see clearly that separate would never be equal, that women could do a man’s job and men could do women’s jobs, that perhaps the Vietnam war was a mistake. In his words, “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents. And to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
God called us a stiff necked people. But I think sometimes stiff necked is a compliment if it means we’re not going to sleep through the important stuff of life. This is the time for all of us to stand up and say, “I am not so stiff-necked as to say I have not sinned, but I am stiff-necked enough to say I am going to try my damned-est not to commit the same sins again.
I am stiff-necked enough to say there are social ills all around me that I will not accept in myself or my family or in my friends. I am stiff-necked enough to say that I believe there can be a future with less violence, with more liberty, with no war. I am stiff - necked enough to say that I have had enough of political deceit. I am stiff-necked enough to say that for me being a Jew is and has always been about bucking the amoral norms, being different, being holy.
Rabbi Batsheva Meiri
