Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
May we look back for a moment and ask ourselves what sort of year this past year has been for the Jewish people? It was a year that saw one of the major political parties nominate a man for the presidency who had a Jewish grandfather, and who won the nomination by outlasting one candidate who was an observant Jew, another who had a Jewish father, a third who had a Jewish wife and a fourth who had a Jewish girlfriend who keeps kosher and persuaded him to become a vegetarian so she could eat at his house. (That last reference, if you weren't sure, was to Dennis Kucinich, -- not to Al Sharpton.)
It was a year that saw the New England Patriots, owned by a prominent member of the Boston Jewish community with multiple ties to this congregation, win the Super Bowl, and the Red Sox, with a Jewish general manager and often with two Jewish players in the lineup, contending for a spot in the playoffs.
On the other side of the ledger, it was a year of continuing bloodshed and death in Israel with little reason to hope for a solution anytime soon. It was a year of increasing anti-Semitic incidents in Europe as a growing Muslim population in countries like England, France and Holland complicated life for Jews in places where they had been reasonably comfortable for decades.
It was, in other words, a year like any other year, a year filled with pride and with pain, with joy and with sorrow, with hopes realized and hopes frustrated, with new lives beginning even as other lives ended. And there is every reason to anticipate that this New Year will be more of the same.
May I presume that a sophisticated congregation like this one is familiar with the concept of "near-death experiences." You know, the experience of people who are seriously ill or undergoing surgery, who see themselves leaving their bodies, traveling through a long tunnel toward a source of light, being greeted there and told to return because it wasn't their time to leave this life quite yet.
I've learned one important thing from these accounts of near-death experience. God must have the most accurate, most efficient computer in the universe. I mean, if He doesn't, who does? God's computer never makes a mistake. Protestants are always greeted in the World to Come by Jesus, Catholics by the Virgin Mary, and Jews by a beloved relative. There has never been a case of a Jew being welcomed by the Virgin Mary or a Protestant by somebody's bubbeh.
But I don't want to talk about near-death experiences this morning. Just the opposite: I want to talk about the Rosh HaShanah service as a "near-life experience." Much as near-death experiences give people a sense of what it will be like to die and you don't have to be afraid of it, this morning as a near-life experience says to us "this is what it would feel like to be really, fully, actively alive, and you have it to look forward to. Taste it, savor it on this first day of a brand-new year, and let it teach you what it would mean to be alive during the days and months to come.
What does it mean to be truly alive as we experience it this morning? The first ingredient is community, being connected to other people. We tend to lead such lonely, disconnected lives so much of the time, surrounded by strangers. So many of our daily transactions are with people we will never see again, and that is if we're lucky enough to interact with another human being at all. It started with self-service gas stations, and then ATM's in place of bank tellers, and buying over the Internet, and FastLane on the Turnpike instead of an attendant to take our money, and self-service check-out counters, and it's all very convenient and we probably save some money, but there is something fundamentally unhealthy about it. Human beings were not meant to live this way. Human beings were meant to realize their humanity by sharing their lives with other human beings.
Martin Buber used to say that God is not found in buildings or in people. God is found in relationships, in moments when one person connects with another person in a meaningful way.
We live in a society that not only minimizes our contact with other people, but actively works to set people against their neighbors, separating liberals from conservatives, working class from upper class, pro-choice from pro-life, dividing people by race, by income, even by age. No wonder we feel lonely out there and we hunger for community.
Even families are no longer the framework for sharing that they have always been. Children move away from parents, brothers and sisters don't see that much of each other, husbands and wives and their teenage children are on such different schedules that it's hard for them to share a meal together, let along share an important conversation. There was a court case a few years ago in which a wife sued her husband for not shoveling the snow off the front walk, causing her to fall and hurt herself. The husband's lawyer defended his client by arguing that, as a point of law, a wife cannot sue her husband because a family is a single unit. It would be like a person suing himself. The judge rejected that argument, ruling that maybe a few generations ago, a family was a single unit but that was no longer the case. Now families are collections of units living at the same address.
When God created the world, He looked down on His handiwork at the end of each day and said "Ki tov." He pronounced it good. But at noon on the sixth day of Creation, after the creation of Adam, God looked down at what He had done and said "Lo tov," it's not good. Lo tov heyot ha-Adam l'vado. It's not good for that newly created human being to be alone. He'll never develop into a complete human being that way. So He provided Adam with a wife, and with the ability to have children, and his children built villages and fashioned communities so that they could realize their humanity.
But for us, their descendants, little by little, life has conspired to isolate us, to deprive us of normal, healthy connections with other people. And then we come here and all those separations are put behind us. No matter how much money you make or what financial problems you have, no matter whom you're planning to vote for or how you translate your Jewishness into action, you come here and we become a congregation, singing, chanting, praying together. That is why we have a fixed liturgy and a printed prayerbook, not because there is anything magically efficacious about these words as opposed to other words, but because when we are all on the same page, something very special happens. For one of the few times in our lives, we transcend our loneliness, our individuality, and we become part of something bigger and greater.
In the 1950's and'60's, when the movement from the cities to the suburbs was in full force, when Natick was transformed from a small town to a suburb west of Boston, when Temple Israel grew from a gathering of a few dozen local merchants to a congregation of several hundred commuter families, Marshall Sklare, the most discerning sociologist of the Jewish community, noticed something that was happening to the American synagogue. People were not joining synagogues because they wanted to pray. They were not joining synagogues to identify with Jewish people around the world. They were joining suburban synagogues to meet other Jews. They were saying, "We're new in town, we don't know anybody, we don't know which of our neighbors will accept us and which will reject us, so we want to meet other Jewish families in the same situation."
And to an extent, that continues to motivate us. We come to shul on Rosh HaShanah for a lot of reasons, but one of them, one of the major reasons, is that we want to be reassured that we are not alone as Jews. We need to know that there are other people, hundreds of other people, who care about the things that we care about, other people who worry about the impact of Mel Gibson's movie, who feel the pain when innocent civilians are murdered in Israel and feel it a second time when so called "liberal" voices blame Israel for the violence, who worry about what a shrinking Jewish population and an increasingly strident evangelical voice will mean to America. It would be so hard if we were the only ones who worried about those things. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be one of the only Jewish families in a small town down south or in the Midwest, and have nobody to share these concerns with?
So we come to shul and we are reassured that we are not alone. A thousand voices join in chanting B'Rosh HaShanah yikatvenun, and we know that we are not the only ones who worry about what will happen in the New Year: who will live and who will die, who will keep his job and who will lose his. These things worry our neighbors too, and there is some comfort in that. We hear the shofar sounded and we are reassured that we are not the only ones who pray that this will be a year of liberation, a year that will see the clouds of war and bigotry disperse. We see friends, we see neighbors, we wish each other a Shanah tovah, a good New Year, and something inside us that has lain dormant through all these months of dealing with strangers, with computers, with electronic machines, is awakened to life again and we feel a lot more alive.
Do you know why we created the tent service nearly twenty years ago, and why we've continued it despite the expense and inconvenience? Because twenty years ago, when we were trying to cram everyone into the main service and hope the fire chief didn't stop by, we found ourselves literally telling people not to come to shul on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. Come next month on Shabbos, we told them; lots of seats up front. Don't invite your parents to visit you for the holidays. We don't have room for them. No room for your children who are home from college. Tell them to stay on campus and go to services at Hillel. And we looked at each other and said, "You know, this is crazy. So many of our fondest memories are of going to High Holy Day services with our families. We should be in the business of encouraging families to worship together, to start the New Year religiously together. Why are we doing the opposite?"
What else happens when we come to shul on Rosh HaShanah that reminds us of what it feel like to be alive, to be authentically human, to have our eyes open and our souls open to what is going on in the world? What else makes this morning's service a "near-life experience?" We are reminded that there is more to life than getting by. Life is about more than meeting your obligations, paying your bills, returning phone calls. Life is about more than getting up every morning. It's about being grateful for a night's sleep, and anyone who has had trouble sleeping realizes what a miracle that is. Life is about more than having enough to eat, more than counting carbs to lose weight. It's about experiencing your mealtime as a three-times-a-day miracle offered to you by a life-sustaining universe. Life is about more than checking on how the Red Sox did last night. It's about being alert to the remarkable things a human body can do, from the pageantry of the Olympics to the miracle of the body healing itself after illness or injury. To be alive is to be alive to the miracles inherent in everyday experiences. Who else reminds you of that, except when you come to synagogue?
I remember a woman asking me after a lecture one evening, "How do I convince my twelve year old son to believe in God?" I answered her, "I'm sorry but that's the wrong question. You can't talk someone into believing in God. The real question is, How do you teach your son to recognize God when he has met Him? How do you teach him to find God in the beauty of nature, in the miracle of being sick and recovering, in the overwhelming feeling of being caught doing something wrong and being forgiven? Religion is not so much about what you believe; it's about your learning to see the world in the light of God's presence." And again, who reminds you of that except when you come to services?
Life is about values, life is about choices, life is about going out of your way to do something, if not every day, then every week or every month, that will make a difference, that will add to the amount of love, of kindness, of hope in the world, doing something that will cause another person to walk more confidently, smile more often, and face the next day more bravely. And again, where does anyone tell you to do that if not here?
We tend to be so busy with the trivial that we lose sight of that. So this is the morning when we ask God to grant us a year of life, and God says to us, "You asked me for that last year and I gave you one. What did you do with it? Did you use it to grow? Did you use it to learn? Did you use it to brighten someone else's year?" That is why the prayers we recite this morning are in the plural, every one of them, - because you can't have a good year if you only worry about yourself, if you only pray for your own health and prosperity and that of the people closest to you. You will only have a good year if you work to help other people have a good year.
And one more way in which this first day of the year helps to remind us of what life is all about. I don't know how many of you have read Mitch Albom's most recent book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Albom is the author of Tuesdays with Morrie, and his new book has been a best-seller for most of the past year. The book tells the story of a man in late middle age, apparently based on an uncle of the author, who works in an amusement park and is killed in an accident there. In heaven, he meets five people whose lives have intersected his while he was alive, including a young girl whose death he inadvertently caused when he was in Vietnam and another young girl whose life was saved in the accident that caused his death. He learns things he never knew about how his life has affected other people.
If you read the book, you may have noticed that it has an endorsement by me on the back cover. I didn't think it was as good a book as his first one, but I endorsed it anyway only partly because Mitch Albom endorsed my last book but mostly because it sheds a light on a very important issue for a lot of people. The book speaks to us because it tells us something that we desperately want to be told, that our lives make sense, that there is a point to our lives. Our days are not just a random stringing together of unrelated events. We would have trouble getting up in the morning to face the new day if we didn't believe there was some purpose to our being alive, to our being the people we are rather than being somebody else. We probably would not bother taking Rosh HaShanah as seriously as we do if we thought the coming year was just going to be more of the same, changing nothing, achieving nothing. We need to know that there is a coherent narrative to our lives, that an act of selfishness when we were teenagers was redeemed and compensated for by an act of generosity when we were older because in the intervening years we had learned our lesson, that we went out of our way to help a friend this past year without realizing that years ago someone went out of his or her way to help us and somehow that experience shaped and motivated us. The life of every one of us is a story, a unique story, an unfinished story. There is a point to our living the way we do, doing the things we do. There is drama in our lives, there is pathos, there is meaning. I remember my teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel once saying that God speaks to us very slowly in our lives, one syllable at a time." Not until we approach the last chapters of our lives can we read the story backwards and understand what the central narrative of our lives has been all about.
So we come to shul on Rosh HaShanah and we are told, as we will be told in just a few minutes, that God remembers even what we have forgotten, not in order to make us feel guilty and under constant surveillance, but to make us feel significant, to know that what we do matters at the highest level. That's why Albom's book works on an emotional level more than on a literary one. We come to shul on Rosh HaShanah and we are tantalized, we are sustained, we are inspired by the promise that next year can be better than last year, and that we have a role to play in making it better. We are actors in the drama of making this a better world, we are not just the audience.
One of the key lines of the Rosh HaShanah liturgy, - you all know it- reads: ZOCHREYNU L'HAYYIM MELEKH HAFETZ B'HAYYIM, Remember us for life, O Lord who stands for life, or as I would translate it, Remind us of what it feels like to be truly alive, because we feel it when we come into Your presence. Remind us, because we have forgotten, the intense fulfilling feeling of belonging to other people, connecting with other people. Redeem our days from triviality by giving us important things to do. Fill our lives with meaning so that we and all who know us will recognize that we have in fact lived.
V'KATVEYNU B'SEFER HAHAYYIM L'MAANCHA ELOHIM HAYYIM, And inscribe us in the Book of Life, in the chronicle of those who understand what it means to live L'MAANCHA, for Your sake, O God of Life. AMEN