WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LIVING?

Rabbi Harold Kushner
Rosh HaShanah 5760

I was going to write another sermon, something about the millennium and what this century has taught us about human nature. But before I could do that, I began to hear voices pulling me in another direction, speaking with an urgency that I could not ignore, saying that there were problems I had to talk about. So I put that other sermon aside for some future millennium, and listened to those voices.

I was studying the Torah reading for Rosh HaShanah, and I heard the voice of Hagar, Abraham's concubine and the mother of his first child Ishmael. Hagar is rejected by her husband, thrown out of her home. Her child is desperately ill. She feels alone, abandoned, friendless, and she's ready to give up on life, because after all, hasn't life given up on her?

Then I read the Haftarah for Rosh Hashanah morning, the story of Hannah, driven to tears and despair because she longs to have children and she can't. Her husband tries to comfort her, but that only deepens her despair when she realizes that even people who genuinely love her can't understand what she is feeling and what she is going through.

And even when I put the prayerbook aside and read the morning paper, I continued to hear voices of despair --desperately ill people turning to the likes of Dr. Kevorkian because death seemed more alluring than life; desperately angry people suddenly exploding in murderous rage -- Columbine High School in Colorado was perhaps the most horrifying example but it seemed every week brought a new instance, from one city or small town after another.

I would finish the paper and go out into the community, and the voices would be less urgent but their stories would be distressingly similar: the sick, the afflicted, people growing older and not looking forward to it; people disappointed in the way their lives had turned out, the way their careers had turned out, the way their children had turned out.

And I realized that, although these people were all different from one another and the sources of their pain were so different, they were all saying essentially the same thing. They were saying "How can you gather in your synagogues and pray for life? Life is no bargain. Life is pain, life is rejection. The longer you live, the more life becomes a story of things being taken away from you. Who wants another year if it's going to be more of the same?"

In the Bible, on the news, in the community, people cry out that they are on the verge of giving up on life. The difference is that on the news and on the streets of Natick and Framingham, you only hear the despair, the fear, the anguish. In the Bible, God answers the cry of the desperate. And it's because there are so many people in our midst who are hurting, who are crying inwardly if not aloud, that I knew I had to put aside that other sermon and share the Bible's answers with you this morning.

Do you know the story of the student who goes up to his rabbi one morning and says "Rabbi, you've got to help me. I couldn't sleep all last night worrying about this. Tell me, what makes life worth living?" And the rabbi looks at him and says "That's such a wonderful question. Why would you want to exchange it for an answer?"

But on a day like this, on Rosh HaShanah, at the beginning of the High Holy Days and the commencement of a New Year, we want to bring our questions to the Temple and exchange them for answers. There are people here today asking that question "what's the point of going on living?", not as an abstract philosophical question but in the desperate hope that somebody can give them an answer and save their lives. And our tradition, as if it anticipated that one day people would bring their doubts and their fears to the synagogue on Rosh HaShanah, chose Biblical readings for these first days of the year that give us answers.

Let's begin with the story of Hagar. When Abraham and Sarah confront the fact that, after many years of marriage, they haven't had children, Sarah suggests that Abraham take the servant girl Hagar as a second wife and have a child with her. It works, they have a son, but then Sarah resents Hagar for being able to do what she couldn't do, and prevails on Abraham to get rid of the maid and her child, Abraham's first-born son. They are sent out into the desert. After a few days, they are out of food and water. The child is at the point of death, and Hagar is so depressed by her situation that she doesn't even have the energy to comfort him. She just puts him down and goes off by herself and cries because her life has become a story of loss and pain and unrelieved misery.

And then we read that God sends an angel who says to Hagar, s'i et ha-na'ar v'hachaziki et yadech bo, Go to the child and take him by the hand. That's the answer. That's the magic bullet. The cure for that sense of futility, that sense that life has lost its savor and there is no point in getting up in the morning, is not pills or years of therapy. The cure for the feeling that life isn't worth living can be summed up in four words: find somebody to help.

There will be some people whose depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, and for them fortunately there are medications to help them. But for those people whose depression results from what has been happening to them, the cure is Hagar's cure: find somebody to help.

When Hagar stops feeling sorry for herself and reaches out to someone who is worse off than she is, the Torah tells us that "her eyes were opened" and now the world looks different to her. It's the same world it was an hour ago, but it looks different to her. Now she can see all sorts of life-enhancing resources that she wasn't seeing before.

Find somebody to help - not because it will make you feel better to know that somewhere there is someone worse off than you, what I once referred to as the Suffering Olympics. Find somebody to help, so that you can begin to think of yourself as a giving person, a person who makes a difference, not just a receiving person, somebody to whom things happen. Reach out to someone else because your own experience has taught you how important that is, because your experience has given you the hard-earned wisdom to know what to do and what to say. The angel's words to Hagar "take him by the hand", in Hebrew hachaziki et yadech bo, literally mean "make your hand strong in his hand." When you reach out to help someone, it makes you feel strong.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson has charted the stages that a person goes through in the course of growing up and growing old. He says that late in life, there comes a moment when we have to choose between Stagnation and Generativity. Stagnation, says Erikson, is thinking only about yourself, and at any age but especially for the elderly, that can be a depressing process. Generativity is thinking about the next generation and what sort of world you will be leaving to them.

It reminded me on something that happened in our family some nine years ago. When Ariel and Isaac told us that they wanted to get married, we started calling all our relatives and sharing the good news with them. I called one elderly relative of mine in New York and said "Have you heard the good news? Ariel is getting married." Instead of saying 'Oy, Mazal tov! I'm so happy for you," instead of saying" I should only be well enough to come to the wedding," she said "How could I hear? Nobody ever calls me." (And I think I know why.)

The cure for loneliness, for rejection and abandonment, the cure for that dreaded feeling that your life is pointless, is Hagar's cure: find someone to help. Don't stay home and wait for others to rescue you from your loneliness. You be the one who rides to other people's rescue.

It's not only a prescription for the elderly, the widowed, the divorced, the unemployed. It works for everyone. It works for the middle-aged businessman who realizes he's gone about as far as he is going to go in his company, and instead of resenting people who are promoted over him, instead of taking his work less seriously to spite the company, with all the corrosion of the soul that that leads to, he becomes a mentor to the new young staff.

It works especially well for young people. One day this summer, someone wrote to Ann Landers about the twin epidemics of teen violence and teen suicide. He wrote that "young people who are involved in service programs are less likely to be engaged in destructive social behavior. Teens who help other people are 50 percent less likely to use drugs, join gangs or get pregnant. Their dropout rate is lower and their grades are higher." And you know, that makes a lot of sense. Rationally, it makes no sense for a teenager who drives his own car to high school to listen to rap music because he identifies with the kids growing up in the inner city ghettos. But emotionally it makes sense. He shares that same feeling of powerlessness, of other people being in control of his life. We all recognize the stereotype of the teen-age boy or girl moping around the house because of problems with self-image, with grades, with their social life. Is there a way to lift them out of that mood? Their cure is Hagar's cure: Find someone who needs your help, and help them. See how much better you feel about yourself and your life.

Let's turn now to the second Rosh HaShanah story, the Haftarah for the first day of the year, the story of Hannah who becomes the mother of the prophet Samuel. If you're not familiar with the story from the Rosh HaShanah service, if you're not here early enough to hear it read, you may have come across it in an article in the Sunday Globe about a month ago, about religion and infertility.

Hannah is despondent because she longs to be a mother and she hasn't been able to have children. She becomes so depressed that she can't eat, and the combination of stress, depression and not eating probably makes her fertility problems worse. It comes to a head at the New Year's festival when she and her husband go to the Temple at Shiloh. She sees all the families there, women carrying babies, parents leading their young children by the hand, and it's too much for her. She can't go to the service. Instead she goes to the shrine alone, after services are over. She breaks down and cries and prays. The High Priest Eli sees her and asks what she is doing there. She tells him her story, and we read that when she leaves the Temple, she's not the same person she was when she walked in. Like Hagar in the first story, her problems haven't changed, but she has changed. She feels, differently about them, about her ability to cope with them. They don't overwhelm her the way they did an hour earlier.

Why? What happened to her to remove that black cloud from over her head and let her feel differently about life? Let me suggest that what happened was: somebody took her seriously.

I can imagine that Hannah had a lot of friends who tried to help her, who said things like "other people have it worse," "there are lots of other things you can do with your life," "I know plenty of people whose children make them miserable," which is like saying to the man who loses his job and doesn't know how he'll support his family "boy, I wish I could sleep late in the morning the way you'll be able to." Even Hannah's husband, who genuinely loves her, says to her "What do you need children for? You've got me." And Hannah has the sense that nobody understands how terrible she feels.

Eli does. Eli listens to her. He doesn't try to minimize her anguish. He doesn't interrupt her and tell her what to do. He doesn't tell her it's God's will. He listens to her, and when she's done, he blesses her. And it turns out that is exactly what she needs. When she leaves, she is a different person because somebody took her seriously.

My friends, what the ancient Temple at Shiloh offered Hannah, this contemporary Temple in Natick offers you. We can't make your problems go away. If you need a job, we can't find you a job. If you're looking to get married, we have a sanctuary and the clergy for a ceremony, and a few open Sundays, but we can't find you a mate. What we promise is to take you seriously. This isn't a place where cripples leave their crutches and colostomy patients leave their drainage systems and walk out miraculously cured. This is a place where people leave their pain, their loneliness, their fear that God has abandoned them,and walk out knowing that someone truly cares about them.

There are so many institutions in our lives that don't take us seriously, that exploit our innocence, that answer our phone calls with a recording and our correspondence with a form letter. We desperately need this one place that exists for the purpose of caring about us.

I'm often invited to speak at educators' conferences about the spiritual dimensions of education. I tell them that I come out of a tradition that sees a classroom as a sacred space, because in Judaism, learning is a sacred enterprise. And one of the things that makes a classroom a sacred space is the sense that every child is taken seriously, that no child ever comes home with the feeling "the teacher doesn't care about me."

We know how to appreciate the bright child, the attractive child, the athletically gifted child. Do we know how to appreciate the kind child, the sensitive child, the unconventional child? Do we know how to respect the vulnerability of the shy child, the child whose experiences at home have left him or her terrified of being criticized for being wrong?

When two teenagers in Colorado exploded in an orgy of murder, it was horrible and it inflicted pain on families who didn't deserve it, but it was understandable. At an age when young people are so achingly vulnerable to issues of acceptance and rejection, they had been rejected so consistently that they lashed out, as I suspect the skinheads and members of hate groups and residents of dangerous neighborhoods you wouldn't want to walk in at night are young people who have tasted little but rejection in their lives. Even as a hungry man will be driven to steal food, a soul starved for recognition will do desperate things to be taken seriously.

For some time, I have been fascinated by the development of the Victim Impact Statement system in criminal trials. After a defendant has been found guilty but before sentencing, the victims are invited to address the judge and jury about what the crime has done to them and their families. The original intention was to put the severity of the crime in context so that the sentence would be appropriately severe. But it has turned out to have another unanticipated effect. Once the victims were given a chance to make their statements, it didn't matter to them nearly as much what the punishment was. They had experienced Hannah's cure. They were listened to, their anguish was taken seriously, and it turns out that that, not revenge, was what they really needed.

My friends, what can we pray for today? We come to shul on Rosh HaShanah and we pray for a year of health. And the prayerbook answers us: I can't guarantee you good health. But I can offer you the courage and the support system to sustain you even in times of illness. We pray for a good year, a year without any major misfortune. And again the prayerbook warns us: No guarantees, but I can offer you the resiliency to survive and transcend whatever bad news the year may have in store.

We are the students who come to the rabbi in the morning and ask him "Please tell me, what makes life worth living?" And the answer he gives us is Hagar's answer: Find someone to help. Know that somebody needs you, someone is grateful for your being there, and life will mean something."