SERMON

MORNING OF ROSH HASHANAH, FIRST DAY

23 SEPTEMBER 2006 - 1 TISHRI 5767

APAIN@

 

One of the results of our having been a Conservative synagogue that Aconverted@ to Reform more than twenty years ago is that we still observe two days of Rosh Hashanah, which is the Conservative way of doing things, as opposed to just one day, which is the Reform model. By having two days of services, we also do two different sets of Torah readings. The Reform movement chose the traditional Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah as its preferred reading for its only day of observance. What I propose to do this morning is not to delve deeply into the specific details of either portion, but to use a broad overview of what I think are the overarching themes of the two portions to draw some conclusions about why either one was chosen and what we should make of them in the context of our progress through the Ten Days of Repentance.

 

The section we read this morning is as troubling and painful a passage as we are likely to find in the Torah. It offers a vignette in which Sarah, Abraham=s wife, forces Abraham to send away Ishmael, his first-born son by his handmaiden Hagar, to what they believe will be certain death. This happens relatively shortly after Sarah gives birth to Isaac, the son she and Abraham had long since believed they would never have. We are not told of her reasons for wanting Ishmael to be banished. But she is adamant about it, and he and his mother are sent away.

 

I have tried over time to put myself in the place of each of these characters in the story. Since I don=t know how aware Ishmael was of the presumed danger he would face in the wilderness to which he was being sent, I cannot say for sure how he felt about what was going on. At least he was accompanied by his mother, and that must have given him some comfort. But Hagar must have known and realized what was going on, and she had to have known that this banishment was tantamount to a death sentence.

 

At the same time, Sarah had to know what she was doing. In putting myself into her place and mind, I could only begin to imagine what could drive her to do such a seemingly heartless thing. As for Isaac, he was just a little kid, and he was losing a playmate. But kids get over such things. So I think that for him this was no big deal.

 

But then there was Abraham whose wife was demanding that he send away his first-born son. What kind of anguish did he go through? What thoughts went through his mind? What kind of emotional pain was he suffering during this unbelievable episode? These are questions about whose answers we can only speculate. But I am not particularly interested in the answers; I am interested in the stories.

 

Let=s fast forward to tomorrow morning and its Torah readings. I had never thought about it until I started writing this sermon, but I think the first line of that Torah reading, in the context in which it appears, may be a sick joke. Immediately after going through the story of the banishment of Ishmael, with all the emotional Sturm und Drang that it entails, the next passage begins with the words, AVa-y=hi achar ha-d=varim ha-eileh v=ha-E=lohim nis-sah et Avraham,@ AAfter these things God put Abraham to the test...@ If the banishment of his beloved son, Ishmael, wasn=t a test, what in the world was it? What an awful choice to have to make, either to send your first-born son away to die or to refuse the wish of your wife of so many years! And apparently Abraham, who had been so brilliant in his encounters with his own father over the childhood incident with the idols, with neighboring kings in negotiations over securing a burial place for his beloved Sarah, and even with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah , couldn=t think of a way out of this dilemma. I could only begin to imagine the emotional pain he must already have suffered. And now it says that God is going to put him to the test. What test could be left that he hadn=t already endured? After discussing the idea of loyalty last night, I wondered how that concept fit into this discussion.

 

As you know only so well, God=s test of Abraham is to see whether he will sacrifice Isaac in the traditional manner, that is, of tying Isaac to a funeral pyre and killing him with his own hands so that he could offer him to God. It is almost impossible to imagine such a scenario. It is almost impossible to imagine anyone in today=s world taking the lives of their own children or anyone else=s as a way of gaining God=s favor or grace B unless, that is, you think about the senseless and useless deaths of innocents around the world who are the victims of those who claim that their God accepts the collateral death of innocents as the price one pays for struggling for the greater glory of God.

 

When I spoke last night about our own willingness to lay down our lives for some one or something, I intentionally did not speak about taking someone else=s life in the advancement of a cause or a belief. But make no mistake about it: there are definitely those today who believe unhesitatingly that such deaths are merely an unfortunate but justifiable means to a justifiable end. I do not agree with them in any way, shape or form. But I cannot deny that they exist, that they are out there, and that they are currently very much part of the world in which we live. I only mention this because I have tried to imagine the emotional pain of those whose children have either been suicide bombers or innocent victims of the endless hostilities, and I am crushed by the weight of that pain.

 

But let=s return for a moment to Abraham. Having just banished Ishmael he almost immediately finds himself atop Mt. Moriah with direct instructions from God to kill his only remaining child. Do notice that in neither case do we hear anything about any thoughts on Abraham=s part about his taking his own life, rather than sending one son off to die or killing the other one by his own hand. That far back in the story line, suicide doesn=t seem to be a viable option. But for me it does raise the issue of what the society must have been like back then to allow for such things in the first place. No matter what the time frame and no matter what the circumstances, I can only imagine what these people must have been going through.

 

These two stories, both dealing with what we would find unimaginable in our lifetimes, have brought me to a place in which I find myself more and more these days. And I hope that by moving together during these ten days through the process of teshuvah, t=filah, and tzedakah, repentance, prayer and righteous action, we can confront the pain of our existence and in some small way help to mitigate that pain, both for ourselves and for others.

 

At the beginning of this month I attended the regular meeting of the Alameda Ministerial Association. During our Acheck-in@ period I said something to the rest of the assembled clergy about feeling as though I were going through some sort of spiritual crisis because I had found my emotions brimming over much more than I had ever experienced before. I said that I had found myself either on the verge of tears or actually in tears so regularly that I thought I might be losing my psychological balance. But then I realized that those times when I found myself so emotionally touched were exactly the times when, in retrospect, I should have been that moved. These were times when, instead of listening at a distance to someone=s personal story, I found myself feeling their feelings with them. Instead of just reading a newspaper or magazine article about something that affected people deeply, I was feeling those feelings myself. Instead of listening to a news story on the radio or watching one on television or on the computer, I was empathizing with the people whose stories I was hearing. I also realized that the tears that were flowing were just as often tears of joy as they were tears of sadness. I began to realize that instead of being worried about this recent upsurge in emotional level of my life, I should probably rejoice in it. Instead of listening from a distance, I was experiencing life more fully than ever before.

 

And just last Sunday morning, on our first morning of Religious School for this new year, Rebecca had asked me to talk to our children about my recent, very moving experience in Israel . When I finished telling my story, one of the children only seemed to have noticed that I had tears in my eyes as I told it. I don=t think he paid much attention to what I said, only that I got choked up as I told the story.

 

I was initially irritated that this child had missed the story itself. But upon more reflection I decided that if he noticed that a man had tears in his eyes and was impressed enough by it to comment on it, then maybe something good had come out of it. Maybe this young child had realized that men can have feelings, too, and express them, and that that is o.k. Whatever the result, I have no regrets about having had such feelings and expressing them in front of children. But the experience did make me wonder about what we are teaching our children, both by word and deed, and I shuddered when I thought about it.

 

In the context of what we are all about on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, from the perspective of the emotional impact of the Torah readings for today and tomorrow, and with an eye toward our goal for this short period of time, I wonder if you have realized what I have recently come to realize: we are no longer teaching social skills to our children. Instead, they spend their time in front of computer screens, television screens, or movie screens either watching violence or being interactively involved with it. From this they learn that there are only good guys and bad guys, only black and white, only heroes and villains. In these worlds there are no middle grounds, no grays; only the extremes. From this they learn not to consider themselves part of society, not part of the community, not part of civilization, and certainly not concerned about anyone who doesn=t appear on one of the aforementioned screens. From this they learn to live in their own little worlds, cut off from each other and only able to communicate by Instant Message, SMS, or cell phone.

 

We teach them to compete much more than we teach them to cooperate. We teach them to fear what is different rather than to learn about difference and appreciate and respect it. And we fear directing or correcting them because we don=t want to alienate them. As a result, we end up not knowing our own kids, or they us. As far as I am concerned, this is at least as difficult a test as any that Abraham had to face, and I think we are collectively failing.

 

I couldn=t help remembering one of the meditations about this from our Shabbat prayer book. It reads as follows: AEach of us is a battleground for the struggle of sacred with profane. As times the profane seems to win the day. Love and truth are debased. Reason, our chief glory, is turned to evil ends. And in us the divine gift of compassion lies dormant: we fail to feel the anguish of others.@

 

As our world declines in quality of life, despite the remarkable and amazing advances of modern technology, we often feel overwhelmed by what used to nurture us. We cannot help but be moved by the stories of people who have worked all their lives, only to have their jobs terminated just prior to their retirement. We cannot help but be moved by the stories of people whose lives have been ruined by corporate greed. I was excited to hear about a new technological advance that my back was instituting that would make my banking experience easier, until I realized that hundreds of people would lose their jobs because this new advance made their jobs obsolete.

 

We cannot help but be moved by the stories of people who are blindsided by unexpected health issues that seem to come from nowhere, and which threaten their very lives, people who are the sole support of their families or people with no families and who now face becoming disabled or worse. We cannot help but be moved by reports of whole civilizations that are being displaced, hunted down, and eliminated, while the world concerns itself with interruptions in oil production. We cannot help but be moved by reports that more than 30 million people will die from AIDS in the next twenty years in the horn of Africa, leaving millions more orphans and elderly to take care of each other. We cannot help but be moved by stories of people caught up in war, famine, poverty, disease and natural catastrophe. And yet, amazingly, somehow, we are not nearly as moved as we ought to be. And this doesn=t even take into consideration trying to prevent things from getting worse!