SERMON

ROSH HASHANAH MORNING

13 SEPTEMBER 2007 - 1 TISHRI 5768

“TOUCH”

Last night I spoke to you about anger and frustration, both mine and, I suspect, yours, as well as how important I have come to believe and understand it is to acknowledge and address these feelings, in particular on these High Holy Days. This morning I want to give you both some context in which to understand yesterday’s thoughts and some suggestions about how going through the High Holy Day process can be instructive and helpful. I am reminded of a sad story about a former Jewish hospital chaplain who had begun to lose his mental capacity, but who had not begun to realize it. While he was on his rounds in the hospital, he entered the room of a patient, and he introduced himself to the patient as the Jewish chaplain, as was his usual custom. And he asked the patient how he was doing. After the patient rattled off a rather lengthy list of illnesses, conditions, diagnoses and problems, the chaplain, who soon thereafter was relieved of his responsibilities, responded by saying, “You think you have problems! Let me tell you about mine....”

I was also reminded of my very first day on the job  in 1974 as a newly-minted, untrained rabbi and Jewish chaplain at the hospitals affiliated with the Mayo Clinic. The chaplain who was going to be our Clinical Pastoral Education supervisor, a credentialed supervisor from a rather conservative Protestant denomination, began our first day’s class with what I thought was going to be some really important practical information. “The first thing you need to know, “ he said, “is the difference between major surgery and minor surgery. Major surgery is when it happens to me; minor surgery is when it happens to you!”

Before I left the chaplaincy work at the Clinic’s hospitals three years later, I had learned another really important thing. Pain is something that modern science and medicine have not yet learned how to measure. If you think about it, you will realize that when you see a doctor about pain, they don’t measure anything. Instead, the doctor will often ask you to report, on a scale of one to ten, how much pain you are experiencing. Not only that, but they can’t even tell you where it is! In other words, they have to ask you to describe it and take your word for it because they don’t know how to measure it themselves. And as you can imagine, what one person experiences as severe pain, another might experience as moderate pain. It is, in a word, subjective. And this is as true for psychological and emotional pain as it is for physical pain.

To be completely honest, it was because I was thinking about emotional pain, and one person’s emotional pain in particular, that I decided what I would discuss with you this morning. That one person was a subject of this morning’s Torah reading and he is the subject of tomorrow’s Torah reading as well. Abraham figures very prominently in these two days’ readings, and it his personal agony that brought into focus one of the other aspects of the High Holy Days that I wanted to share with you.

In today’s reading, Sarah has finally given birth to their son, Isaac, in their old age. This happens after she has granted Abraham the right to have a child through Sarah’s maidservant, Hagar. That son, Ishmael, is born and becomes the apple of his father’s eye, not surprising since Abraham was already in his nineties when this happens. But when Sarah gives birth to Isaac, she eventually determines that she doesn’t want her Egyptian maidservant’s son sharing in her son’s inheritance, and so she demands that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away. Abraham, heartbroken at this unexpected turn of events, turns to God for comfort and instruction. What he hears amazes him, but he goes along with it out of respect for God. God tells him to let them go, because God has already promised to make a great nation out of Ishmael’s descendants, and that couldn’t happen if Ishmael died in the wilderness, as Abraham feared that he would. As a sidebar, it is worth noting that the Torah notes that Ishmael eventually is regarded as the father (i.e., progenitor) of the Arabs. We’ll come back to that at another time.

It doesn’t take much to imagine what Abraham must have gone through when Sarah made her demand. We have no indication that theirs was anything other than an excellent marriage up to that point. And while we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Abraham’s fears were unfounded. But until he knew that, he lived, however briefly, with the thought that his beloved son, for whom he had waited for so very long, would soon be dead, and not only dead, but dead because he, himself, would have sent him to his death. You want to talk about emotional pain? It is hard to imagine anything worse than this in terms of emotional pain.

But the Torah reading for tomorrow, for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, from my point of view is even worse. Tomorrow’s reading follows immediately in the Torah text on today’s reading, and it makes Abraham’s mental agony over what he thought would be Ishmael’s early death like a walk in the park compared to what awaits him in the next portion. For it is here that God instructs Abraham, in what is called a “test”, to take his son, his only son, whom he loves, Isaac, to a designated mountaintop and to sacrifice him there to God.

It wasn’t so bad that Ishmael was spared, and maybe wasn’t so bad that Abraham’s fears turned out to be baseless. And it was at least nearly tolerable that Abraham wouldn’t have had to see his beloved son die, since all of this would have happened in the wilderness, away from view. But in this second case, not only would Abraham see Isaac’s death close up; he would be the instrument of Isaac’s death by his own hand.

I remember my maternal grandmother, grieving over the death of one of her sons, saying that there was no pain on earth that was worse than losing a child. I will never forget the anguish that consumed her when my uncle died. She never got over the loss. So I could only begin to imagine what Abraham might have been experiencing, just catching his breath from the episode with Ishmael, and then being thrust into this horror with Isaac. Torn between his desire to obey God and his love for his remaining son, Abraham set off in the direction of Mount Moriah. If this weren’t bad enough, the text suggests that Abraham sets of very early in the morning so as not to arouse any suspicion with Sarah, who is not informed of the impending death of her only child. It wasn’t bad enough that he was going to have to kill Isaac; he would ultimately have to face Sarah afterwards. It had to be emotionally completely overwhelming.

You know the rest of the story. Abraham follows God’s instructions to the letter, and has even raised his hand with the knife in it to sacrifice Isaac, when God stops him at the last possible moment, substitutes a ram in Isaac’s place, and tells Abraham that this was all a test to see if Abraham was a true believer. We are, of course, all supposed to be immensely relieved that Isaac was spared, and that the line of Abraham will continue as God has promised.

One interesting side note here is that the Midrash suggests that once Sarah discovers what has happened, there is  no mention in the Torah of any conversation between them ever again. In other words, it seems that Sarah never speaks to Abraham again because he was willing even to consider following God’s command and kill their son.

I suggest that in these two episodes the Torah has painted the pictures of the two worst-case scenarios that it is possible for humans to imagine. While the commentators on the Torah have written at great length about every conceivable aspect of these stories, what I want to emphasize is a little different from what they discussed.

First, can we understand that it is not possible to compare pain? If we cannot measure it, then we cannot compare it either. And that includes emotional pain. So for someone to say that their pain, their emotional pain, is greater than someone else’s really only can mean that they claim to have great emotional pain. And if they are in that much personal emotional pain, then maybe we can forgive them for thinking that theirs is greater than someone else’s. I believe that this is true not only for individuals, but also for countries, societies, and religions as well. It does not mean that my pain doesn’t count; but it may mean that theirs is so great that they cannot relate to yours or understand yours as well as you can relate to your own.

We live in a time when more and more people seem to be under more and more stress. Sometimes that stress is economic, sometimes it’s physical, and sometimes it’s emotional or a permutation or combination of these things or even of other things. And the stress comes from an ever-growing catalogue of things that add unwanted pressure and pain to our already-overburdened lives. I know this because I can list the increasing numbers of people who seek me out for comfort and advice when their personal pain becomes too great to bear alone.

And it is possible that as I have gotten older I have opened myself up more and more to the pain of others. I realize more and more that when someone tells me of their anguish, I no longer feel badly for them; I feel badly with them, sometimes to the point of crying with them. Last Friday night, when I was offering a short d’var Torah, I found myself once again overcome with emotion because I was thinking about – no, more accurately, feeling – the pain of the people I was talking about, and I couldn’t hold back the tears because I felt their suffering so intently.

At one point I wondered if I were really just going over the edge, emotionally falling apart, because I found myself so brimming over with emotion so often. I wondered if I were going crazy, losing my mind and my control of my emotions and myself. But I also wondered if maybe I hadn’t allowed myself to experience an indescribable gift, the gift of real empathy at a time when it seems as though everyone else is withdrawing into themselves, afraid to touch or be touched emotionally, for fear of I-don’t-know-what.

As I looked around at my world, this world of advanced technology that I love so much, I saw a society full of people with ear buds or earphones dangling from their heads, isolating them from everyone else in the world, wrapping them in a cocoon of sound so that they wouldn’t have to interact with anyone or anything, physically separating themselves from the world in which they were living. In one way these people seem to relinquish any and all responsibility for themselves or their actions, especially the pedestrians who walk into crosswalks listening to their favorite tunes, oblivious to the fact that they are crossing against the light or that there is oncoming traffic hurtling toward them. Or people who spend countless hours in front of their computer screens, interacting only with those whom they choose to include in their world, ignoring or deleting those whose opinions, appearance, or other traits, issues or presenting symptoms they find uncomfortable or inconvenient.

But the end result is the same: we distance ourselves more and more from a world we don’t like, and thus we avoid the pain, discomfort, difficulty, and challenge of having to deal with a world not entirely of our own creation, a world broken nearly beyond the point of repair. Abraham’s world came crashing down around him not once, but twice. And yet he remained not only in the world, but intimately involved in it. His pain and suffering could be compared to Job’s, but what would be the point? Both men suffered, but both continued on with their lives, wounded but walking.

As I make my way through this world cluttered with people who are struggling with their own personal agonies, whether their lives touch mine directly or not, instead of finding myself isolated from them, frightened by their pain, repelled by their suffering, I find that I am irresistibly drawn to them, to offer what help I can offer, to comfort when and where I can, to support in whatever way I can find. And I find that touching them and being touched by them only enhances my humanity. Now I even understand the subtle psychological message in the old telephone company advertisement that simply said, “Reach out and touch someone.” It’s not as easy as it sounds, but I think our common humanity may depend on it.

I think of the Hasidic story of the rabbi who watches two Russian peasants drinking together at an inn. The first asks, “Boris, do you love me?” His friend replies, “Ivan, do I love you?! We’ve worked side by side on our farm for years. Of course I love you!” They return to their vodka and a minute later, Ivan asks, “Boris, do you know what causes me pain?” Boris thinks for a moment and answers, “no.” At that point Ivan roars, “If you don’t know what causes me pain, how can you say you love me!?” Afterwards, the Hasidic rebbe who heard this exchange said to his students, “This is the essence of our connection with one another. We must look deeply enough into one another’s souls not only to know what makes us happy but also to understand what causes us pain.”

Forty years ago Chaim Potok wrote his famous book, The Chosen. In it a rabbi offers some words of wisdom to his son, Reuven. He says, “Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?” He paused again, his eyes misty now, then went on. “I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning; meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. Do you understand what I am saying?”

We stand today poised on the threshold -- the dawn -- of a New Year. Like every other year, it will be a year of both joys and sorrows, ups and downs, thrills and chills. Like every other year, it will be filled with opportunities to reach out and touch someone or to allow someone to reach out and touch you. Like every other year, it will be a year in which you can isolate yourself from the world with its pain and suffering or one in which you can open yourself even more than you have ever done before to help alleviate that pain.

Rabbi Doug Kahn, Executive Director of the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council, recalls the Talmudic tale of a rabbi who asked his students how they could tell the when the night had ended and dawn had broken. The answer, he said: “When you can look into the eyes of another and recognize a sister or brother, then truly night is over and dawn has begun.”

Let this be a year in which we learn to look directly into the eyes of our fellow human beings and there to see a sister or brother in the humanity of every person we encounter. Let this be a year for us when, together, we begin to see the end of the long night of suffering and anguish that has racked our world and let us begin to see the dawn of the day of our collective redemption. Let us learn again to touch and be touched by one another.

Amen.