Rabbi Harold Kushner
Rosh HaShanah 5761
One of the most destructive myths, one of the most dangerous beliefs that a lot of people insist on holding on to is the notion that the movie of our lives has already been shot and all we can do is keep watching to see how it turns out and pray that it has a happy ending. People assume that the future has already been determined, that it’s hidden somewhere over the time horizon and if we only had a big enough telescope, we could take a peek at it. After all, if time is a fourth dimension of space, why can’t we go forward and backward in time the way we can go up and down, right and left?
This idea that the future has already been determined is why people take horoscopes seriously. It’s captured in the Yiddish word besherrt and in the Buddhist notion of karma, the idea that something is fated to happen and there is nothing you or I can do about it. We don’t cause it; we can’t prevent it.
We may think this idea is found in the High Holy Day prayerbook, when we read that "it is decided on Rosh HaShanah and confirmed on Yom Kippur, who shall live and who shall die, who shall prosper and who shall fail." And this past year, it received what looked like scientific endorsement when geneticists finished mapping the human genome, the DNA code that makes us who we are. It is clearly one of the great scientific achievements of all time. It has been compared to the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel. As Dr. Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute put it, "we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." It would seem that with just a little more work, we will be able to peek ahead in God’s Book of Life and know things that until now only God could know: who shall live long and who shall die young, who by stroke and who by cancer. It’s all written in our DNA, our Book of Life. And that is what scares me.
Three things scare me. Some people are concerned about the decoding of the genome because they are afraid it will lead to insurance companies denying coverage to people whose genetic heritage makes them more likely to get sick, or employers not hiring people who might miss work for reasons of illness. My concerns are different. I’m afraid that learning to read our DNA will strengthen the tendency of some people to say "Why should I change my behavior? My future is determined by my genes, and there is nothing I can do about it."
If it has been written in a book somewhere, whether it’s in God’s Book of Life or encoded in our DNA, that we are destined to live a certain number of years and then come down with certain health problems, then why bother to live healthier lives now? Whether we’re talking about life-threatening behavior, smoking, driving after having something to drink, not wearing seat belts, or whether it is deciding that "there‘s no point to trying to lose weight; it’s in my genes. I can’t control my weight anymore than I can control my height", I’m worried about our coming to believe that matters of health and wellbeing are out of our hands.
It’s like the Persian fable of the man who sends his servant to the market. A half hour later, the servant comes back, pale and agitated. He tells the master "I saw the angel of death in the market. He looked at me, looked at his list, and looked at me again. He’s come for me. I’m going to run away. I’ll run to the big city of Samarra. He’ll never find me there." The man now has to do his own marketing. He goes to town and sure enough, sees the angel of death. He asks him "Why did you frighten my servant?" The angel of death answers "I didn’t mean to frighten him. I was just surprised to see him here. I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."
The moral of the story would be that you can’t escape your fate. It’s like the novel I read in which a man travels back in time to try to prevent the Titanic from sinking (in order to spare millions of people from having to see the movie.) He warns the captain that there are icebergs ahead. But the captain dismisses him, saying "Don’t worry about it. We’re professionals and we know what we’re doing." In desperation, he gets his girl friend to distract the captain for a few minutes, and changes the steering wheel of the ship a few degrees to the right. What he doesn’t know is that the captain told him not to worry because he had already been warned about the iceberg and had adjusted the ship accordingly, and our hero had just moved the ship back into line with it.
I can understand that this is in many ways an attractive notion, that everything has already been determined. For one thing, it relieves us of responsibility and guilt. Nothing that happens is ever our fault. It had to happen that way; that’s what the script called for. For another thing, it lets us believe that Somebody smarter than us is writing the script and there is a good reason for whatever happens.
But Judaism rejects that way of looking at things. It refuses to absolve us of responsibility. On the contrary, the glory of a human being is his or her sense of responsibility. The next chapter has not been written; it’s waiting for us to write it, based on our choices, our priorities, our decisions. Despite what you may think the Rosh HaShanah prayer says, the insistent message of Judaism is: Choose Life! You choose life. Nobody else is doing the choosing for you. You choose between good and bad, between healthy and unhealthy, between sensible and risky.
What are these High Holy Days about if not the possibility of change, so that next year doesn’t have to be a repeat of the past year? We can change our behavior, we can change the way we relate to the people around us, and our lives will change.
So what do we do with that prayer: God decides who shall live and who shall die? Realize first that prayer is poetry and the one thing you can’t do with poetry is take it literally. Next, realize that the verses we sing so intently are only the second half of a two-part prayer, Netaneh Tokef. The first half says that when the Book of Life is opened, the entries are in our own handwriting. I put the two halves together and I get the message that some of the things that will happen to us in the coming year will be the result of things we have no control over. We are born with certain strengths and certain vulnerabilities. No matter how hard we wish, no matter how hard we work, most of us will never grow up to be opera singers or professional athletes, and we can blame our genes for that.
But the first half of the prayer insists that a lot of what is going to happen to us will be the result of choices we make. The entries are in our handwriting. We may not be able to choose the cards we’re dealt, but we decide how we play them. We can choose wise over self-indulgent, we can choose sensible over risky. We can choose generous over selfish. We get to write at least part of our own Book of Life.
Not only that. Not only does the Mahzor tell us that we are not prisoners of our genes. The scientists who have decoded the genome tell us the same thing. Deciphering the human genome means that we can not only read the Book of Life, we can edit it. We can not only identify what health risks we are born with. We will one day be able to do something about them. One prominent theologian put it this way: Some people are saying, Don’t play God. The bodies we are born with are the ones God intended for us to have, and if we try to change them, we are violating God’s Creation. But I don’t believe that God wants some kid to be stuck with the gene for cystic fibrosis and it is somehow immoral for us to go in and try to select it out.
I agree with him. I don’t believe God put a "Do Not Touch" sign on human biology. I believe God wants us to be partners with Him in finishing the work of Creation, overcoming the tyranny of our genetic endowment, finding cures and vaccines for diseases, helping infertile couples have children and giving those children every prospect of a full and satisfying life, and to feel that we are not replacing God when we do that. We are doing God’s work. God wants us to be co-authors in writing the Book of Life.
There is another area where we run the risk of seeing ourselves as prisoners of our genetic code. Some scientists are claiming that not only our physical health but our personalities are inherited at birth. Any of us who have raised more than one child know that children are born with their own personalities. They are not blank slates for us to write on. There is a theory that there is a gene for shyness, a gene for the propensity for violence, a gene for the tendency to manipulate people. Some claim that men are genetically driven to chase as many women as they can, to insure the survival and immortality of their DNA, and women are genetically programmed to do whatever is necessary to give their children advantages over other people’s children, and that can mean anything from pulling strings to get their child into the best teacher’s class to hiring someone to injure their daughter’s rival on the cheerleading team. To pass laws prohibiting that, they tell us, is as futile as passing a law against cold winters. It goes against Nature.
To that, Judaism proclaims "You’re right and you’re wrong." You are right that Nature is not moral. Nature is selfish. Nature rewards the strong and punishes weakness. But there is more to a human being than what is natural. We are the only creatures who have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the only creatures who can understand that some things are morally wrong. And that lets us rise above the confines and impulses of Nature to the level of human nature.
Nature says, Take whatever you need to prosper because the good things of life belong to the strong. Watch the animal programs on public television. Lions hunt zebras, cheetahs hunt antelopes. Scavengers try to grab part of the kill but the stronger animals drive them away until they have finished. That’s Nature.
Human nature tells a different story.Human nature says, share your bread with the needy. Leave the corner of your field for the hungry. The Talmud tells us that there is more to keeping a kosher home than two sets of dishes and only the right foods. A kosher kitchen means sharing your food with those who don’t have enough to eat. That’s not natural, but it’s human nature at its best.
If your neighbor is having problems, help him because you really don’t want to live in a society where some are rich and others are poor. You’ll have to spend too much of your income on security guards and burglar alarms if you do.
Human nature asks, What kind of person keeps everything he has for himself? A mensch gives ten percent of his income to tzedakah. And only a human being can understand that question. The person who says "Why should I give it away? I worked hard for it" doesn’t understand what it means to be human.
So much of the Torah is intended to subordinate Nature to human nature. We don’t have to do everything our genes tell us to do. The Jewish dietary laws are not about protecting you from trichinosis, and they’re not about the danger of meat spoiling in the heat of the Sinai desert. They are about taking something we share with animals, the need to eat regularly, and elevating it to a human level by saying "There are some foods I choose not to eat, and there are some days I choose not to eat at all, to proclaim that I control my instincts. They don’t control me."
In much the same way, there are people who insist that, because the attraction of a man and a woman for each other is natural, it must be wholesome; otherwise, why did God build it into His world? And anyone who tries to impede it is life-denying. That seems to be the message of just about every movie that Hollywood makes, - love wins out over all other considerations, whether it’s the age, the religion, or the marital status of the other person. And at the other extreme, in reaction to that, there are religions that are frightened by the power of sexual attraction, to the point of seeing it at best as a concession to human weakness and at worst as something to feel guilty about.
What does Judaism say? It says that yes, sexual attraction is natural. It will drive dogs to jump fences and break down screen doors to mate with a female dog in heat. But we expect human beings to rise above Nature, above the siren call of the lustful gene, and reach the level of human nature. Honor the legitimacy of sexual attraction, indeed the holiness of sexual attraction, but humanize it, as we humanize greed and hunger. Make it kosher. Sanctify it with commitment, with fidelity, with mutuality.
There is one other thing that scares me about this wonderful scientific achievement of decoding the human genome, and those of you who know me will understand why this is an issue for me. Yes, God wants us to be His co-workers in writing the Book of Life, and yes, God wants us to do His holy work in fixing what’s broken in a person’s flawed DNA. But there is a real danger hidden in our ability to do that.
I quoted Dr. Francis Collins earlier about catching the first glimpse of our instruction book – we can think of it as the Book of Life that the Mahzor speaks of – a book previously accessible only to God. But listen to what he said right after that: "and we can use it to design and redesign human beings any way we want to."
That frightens me, that we will use our breakthrough knowledge of the genome not only to cure cystic fibrosis and other inherited conditions, but we will use it to manipulate genetics to produce perfect children, to make sure that every child is born gifted, - bright, athletic and good-looking.
Do you know the story of the actress who wrote to George Bernard Shaw suggesting that they get married. "After all," she wrote, "think of the advantages our children will have with my looks and your intelligence." Shaw wrote back saying "But what if they had my looks and your intelligence?"
In today’s haftarah, Hannah prays for a child. She asks God for zera anashim, a human child, interpreted by the commentators to mean a child subject to all the frailties and problems of a normal human being, so that out of his own problems, he will learn compassion and empathy for other people’s problems, and by learning to cope with his own issues, he might become a leader.
It scares me that we might render children who are flawed, children who are different as extinct as passenger pigeons, and at what loss to art, to science, to creativity? We would create Garrison Keilor’s Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average, and eliminate the possibility of a Michaelangelo who was gay, of a Beethoven who was hearing-impaired, of the child who could come along and change the world because he or she saw things a little differently than the rest of us did. What if, for example, scientists learned how to eliminate the gene that makes some children restless in school and causes others to daydream in class? It would make it easier to be a teacher, but what books would never be written, what inventions would never be thought of, in that brave new world?
One of my favorite passages in the Talmud reads: The emperor stamps out coins bearing his image and everyone of them is identical, but God creates human beings in the divine image and no two are alike. Every one is an individual. What will we lose when we learn to play God and minimize those individual differences, the surprise involved in seeing a child grow into someone who has never existed before.
It scares me that, in a brave new world like that, we would lose our ability to love people who were not perfect, -- already some scientists are talking about handicapped children no longer having a right to be born, because of the burdens they impose on their families and on medical resources—and what is love if not the readiness to accept and cherish other people with all of their imperfections and be grateful that they put up with you and all of yours.
A year or two ago, there was a thoroughly forgettable movie called "Gattaca" with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. It was about a society of the future that was run by an elite who had been genetically engineered to be physically and intellectually perfect, while the menial work was done by less-than-perfect people conceived in the old-fashioned way and known as "love children." I imagine that they were called "love children," and in the movie it is meant as a put-down, because of the manner of their conception. But it occurred to me that they deserve to be called love children because, by their imperfection, they inspire love.
There are people here this morning who have known the experience of learning to love a physically or emotionally handicapped child. It’s a very different experience than loving a straight-A student who is headed for the Ivy League. There are husbands and wives here who have had the experience of seeing a mate come down with a chronic, debilitating illness and who chose not to walk away from that daily experience of pain and helplessness but to stay and lessen the pain by sharing it. It’s a very different kind of love than what you felt for each other under the wedding canopy. It’s nothing you would have chosen, and it’s certainly nothing you would have asked for in your prayers, but look at how it has deepened you as a human being. Look at what it has taught you about love, something you would never have learned at the movies.
My friends, I don’t know how many of the biologists working on the human genome project are in shul today. I suspect that more than a few are. If they are, I hope they are hearing the message of these High Holy Days, the message that "I’m not OK but that’s OK." We don’t come to shul on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur and say to God "Love me because I’m wonderful, love me because I’m perfect." We say "Love me because I need to be loved. Accept and forgive me because I need to be accepted and forgiven for everything I’ve done wrong this past year. Love me because I’m human, and I’m trying so hard to become more human."
I don’t know very much about the decoding of the human genome, and most of what I do know about it, I don’t understand. But I’ll venture a prediction. When scientists get to the point of decoding an individual’s Book of Life, when they are able to look at his genetic inheritance and read from it what kind of person he or she will be, I predict that they will find something surprising. I suspect that they will find that our inherited DNA fills only the first page or two, and the rest of the pages in a person’s Book of Life are blank, waiting for us to write on them, waiting for us to determine the rest of the story.
Our genes can only take us so far. They can endow us with certain possibilities and they can impose certain limits. What we do with those possibilities, how we operate within those limits, -- we get to decide that.
We don’t come to shul and say to God "While You’ve got the Book of Life open, could I peak at the last chapter to see how it comes out? And if not the last chapter, can I at least peak at next Thursday’s stock tables?" But if we did, I suspect that God would tell us that there is really nothing to look at. The next chapter of our lives hasn’t been written yet any more than next Thursday’s stock tables and sports results have already been set in type. The only pages in our Book of Life that have been filled are the ones we already know about, the ones we’ve already written.
We don’t come to shul to grovel and beg God for a good year. We don’t come for a hint as to what is going to happen to us next. We come to hear the message that the Book of Life is waiting for us to fill in. We come to hear the message "Choose Life!" Choose what kind of life you are going to have. And we come to gain the strength and the courage to make the right choices.
Our fate is not in the stars, and our fate is not in our DNA. Our fate is in our own hands, to choose and to cherish. May God grant that we choose well.
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