Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
The story is told of the British nobleman, a member of the House of Lords, who was leaving church one Sunday morning when the sermon had been about the sin of adultery, and was heard to remark, "I yield to no man in my admiration for the Church of England, but when it starts interfering with my private life, it goes too far."
In a somewhat similar vein, I yield to no man in my admiration for Thomas Jefferson. I think he was a great American, a towering intellect, a brilliant statesman and an inspired writer. But he made one mistake 230 years ago for which we are still paying the price and I hold him accountable for it. He wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Bad idea. For 230 years, Americans have been pursuing happiness and becoming increasingly frustrated when they could not achieve it. We have tried to find happiness by amassing wealth and learned that that didn't work. Whatever we had never seemed enough, and we had to neglect other priorities and learn to see other people as obstacles in the process. We tried to find happiness in the pursuit of pleasure and that didn't work either. We found fun, we found diversion but never happiness. However rewarding the experience may have been, it was like a really good meal. It left you feeling satisfied for a few hours and then you were hungry again.
So let me try this morning to improve on Jefferson. Let me suggest that what God really blessed us with was life, liberty and the pursuit of meaning. Happiness should never be our goal; it will always be a byproduct, something that creeps into our lives while we are busy trying to live a life of meaning. The truth is, you can't pursue happiness. It has to pursue you. It has to sneak up on you while you are busy doing other things.
About a month ago, a New York Times columnist quoted Walter Lippman saying, "People don't become happy by satisfying their desires. They become happy by living within a belief system that restrains and gives coherence to their desires. Above all the other necessities of human nature" Lippman went on to say, "above the satisfaction of any other need, above hunger, love, pleasure, fame, even life itself, what a person needs most is the conviction that he is contained within the discipline of an ordered existence."
Walter Lippman was not a religious man, but what he was talking about in that passage, written some sixty-five years ago, is why we need religion. Religion is not a matter of obeying a lot of arbitrary laws to gain God's favor. It's just the opposite. It is a way of taking our wants, our needs, our cravings and putting them into an organized system, so that what we do makes sense at the deepest reaches of our souls.
In fact, if I dared to use a word that is too often misunderstood, I would say that the challenge God set for us was the pursuit of holiness.
Now I know that "holiness" is a word that puts a lot of people off. It is at best something we can take in small doses. It speaks to us of a life out of the mainstream, a life of renunciation, Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks living lives of poverty and celibacy, and our instinctive response is "Thanks but no thanks."
But that gets it wrong. Holiness is not a renunciation of life; just the opposite. Holiness is life moving from black and white to color. It is life in high definition; everything becomes brighter and clearer, more interesting. The pursuit of holiness means adding a dimension to your life, not subtracting one, adding a dimension of meaning to what would otherwise be something none of us want to be, and that is "ordinary."
On the very first page of the Bible, when God creates the world, He creates everything there is by command, by fiat: Let there be light, let there be grass and trees, let there be birds and fish and animals. But when it comes to creating the first human being, God doesn't just say Let there be….God fashions Adam out of earth and then breathes some of His own spirit into Adam, something God does for no other creature. Just before doing that, God says NA'ASEH ADAM B'TZALMEYNU "Let us create a human being in our image." Us? Our? Whom is God talking to? I understand God to be speaking to the animals whom He has created in the verse immediately before that. I understand God to be saying to the animals as the last step in the evolutionary process, "Now let's come up with something unique a creature that will be a combination of you and Me. It will be a physical being with physical needs, but it will have My breath, My spirit in it."
The human capacity for holiness reflects that uniqueness, the quality that makes us more interesting, more unpredictable than other animals, the ability that only we and God have to take something ordinary and make it special. And the pursuit of holiness means that, just as we go to school to develop our intellectual potential, just as we take piano lessons to develop our musical potential and go to the gym to develop our athletic potential, we turn to religion to develop our potential for holiness, the part of us that lets us rise above the animal level and be a little bit like God.
For much of recent Jewish history, we have tried to get people to be Jewishly observant for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes we urged people to follow Jewish laws and practices for God's sake, a way of doing something for God, and most of you were perceptive enough to figure out that God would probably manage to do just fine without us if He had to. Sometimes we told people, "This is the will of God and if you do these things, God will like you better." And a lot of people lived traditional Jewish lives on that basis and then got very upset when it seemed that God had defaulted on His part of the bargain. I have had countless people say to me, "If God could let this happen to my family, what good did all that coming to shul do me?" Now I happen to believe there is an answer to that question. Did you read about the experiment a few months ago with two groups of post-surgical hospital patients? One group was prayed for, the other wasn't, and it didn't seem to make any difference in the time or nature of their recovery. When I was interviewed about it on CNN, one of the things I said was "God's job is not to make sick people healthy. That's the doctor's job. God's job is to make sick people brave."
But that's not the point. The point is that when God laid down the rules of the Torah, there was no promise of health and prosperity if we followed them. What there was, was a promise of holiness, that we would be a special people, a holy people. So this morning, I would like to give you a new way of looking at the ingredients of a Jewish life, based not so much on where these laws come from as on what they lead to.
For example, it should be clear to us that keeping kosher has little or nothing to do with health. I remember when I first came to Natick forty years ago, one member of the congregation explained to me that the Jewish dietary laws were based on obsolete notions of how meat and milk interacted in the stomach, but we now know that is not true. Another shared his theory that they had to do with the lack of refrigeration in the Sinai desert. But the dietary laws never claimed to be about health. And they never claimed to be about teaching self-control, as you can verify at the next Jewish wedding you go to as you watch people fortify themselves with hors d'ouvres lest they starve to death before dinner is served.
What the Jewish dietary law code is about is an absolutely brilliant, inspired way of introducing holiness into the act of eating, elevating it from something we share with animals to something that connects us to God by introducing into the act of eating concepts of permitted and forbidden. Animals eat anything that suits them; human beings, and only human beings, have the unique capacity to say No to certain foods, not because the food is spoiled and not because it contains transfats or too many calories, but because they have voluntarily pledged themselves to a system that says certain foods are out of bounds, as a way of making the act of eating a mindful one and not just a matter of appetite.
There is a Jewish law that I suspect most of you have never heard of and few of you observe. I don't observe it, though I'd probably be better off if I did. Most orthodox Jews don't observe it. What is it? According to the Talmud, you are not supposed to eat standing up. The Talmud says, horses eat standing up. Animals eat standing up. People sit down and make the process of taking in food a mindful one.
This is the genius of the Jewish dietary code. We don't teach people that the needs of the body are repulsive, corrupt, a concession to human weakness. We bring holiness into our meals the way we bring holiness into our sexual lives, not by abstaining but by imposing rules of permitted and forbidden on what is for all other creatures a matter of instinct.
If there are people here this morning who have never considered keeping kosher because you assumed it was based on obsolete pseudo-science but you are intrigued at the prospect of using it to turn breakfast, lunch and dinner into mindful, uniquely human experiences rather than just another occasion to refuel your corporeal gas tank, I hope you will use the New Year to make a New Start. You don't have to go whole hog (or in this case, whole no-hog). There are intermediate steps you can take, and once you buy into the concept, I would urge you to contact Rabbi Liben or Cantor Richmond about where and how to begin.
In much the same way, I think we have totally mishandled the way we have urged people to keep the Sabbath. We have said to them, "On Shabbat, it is forbidden to turn on lights, it is forbidden to spend money, it is forbidden to drive to visit relatives. Don't do a lot of things you might enjoy doing. And the reason is to celebrate the fact that you have been liberated from slavery." All these rules and prohibitions to make the point that you're not a slave? Am I missing something?
Suppose instead of giving you rules, a long list of Don'ts, suppose we said to you, "All week long, you are defined by your work, by what you earn and what you spend. You deserve a day on which you define yourself by who you are and not what you earn. Suppose we said to you, All week long, you are a slave to a schedule. How often in an average day do you check your watch to make sure you're not running late? Can you even keep track of the number of times? You deserve a day in which the concept of running late does not exist, a day when you will tell time not by looking at your watch but by following the course of the sun across the sky.
Just as the system of keeping kosher makes us different form animals, puts us in touch with the breath of God inside us, by the way we relate to food, the Shabbat makes us different from animals in the way we relate to time. Animals are controlled by time. Some are active in daylight, others are nocturnal. Some are active year-round, others hibernate in winter. But they have no choice in the matter. The clock and the calendar even tell them when to mate and when to bear their young. Only human beings can shape time to our purposes. Only we can arbitrarily take a day and choose to make it special - a birthday, an anniversary, a holiday - and for no reason except our choosing, we can make that day feel special.
Do you realize that for 98% of Americans, and for 99.9% of the human race, there is nothing special about today? But for us, it is an experience of holiness, a time to stand before God and come to see ourselves as God sees us, and it is special only because we chose to make it special.
You understand that a day, a month, a year are astronomical events. They have to do with the earth's path around the sun and the moon's course around the earth. They would happen even if there were no human being on the planet. But a week is a human invention, a way of expressing our power to define time, and the Shabbat, a day of liberation from the tyranny of time, is the great symbol of that.
Again, as with the dietary laws, once you buy into the concept, you will find your own way to live it, remembering only that some of the attractions of getting and spending, of filling every hour of the day with obligations, the tar pit we live in during the week, can be every bit as seductive as a cheeseburger. I would offer two pieces of advice: first, I would start by giving the tradition the benefit of the doubt. Start with it and work your way down rather than start with nothing and work your way up. Second, it is a lot easier to make Shabbat special in a community, in the company of other people who are striving to do the same.
There is one more dimension worth mentioning. When Hitler destroyed European Jewry, he not only killed people. In six years, he destroyed a civilization that had taken a thousand years to create. He destroyed centers of learning and fountains of holiness that the Jewish world of Europe represented. In the sixty years since the end of World War Two, we have replaced the learning. American Jewry has done an astonishing job of producing Jewish scholars, writing serious Jewish books of a kind that did not exist until a few years ago, establishing departments of Jewish studies at countless universities. It has been a remarkable achievement. But we haven't replaced the holiness that died with the Jews of Europe. We have filled the intellectual vacuum the Holocaust created, but there is still a holiness deficit in the world, and the world is a less decent place than it was a century ago because of it. This then becomes our sacred task as Jews, for our sakes, for the world's sake. This is how you assure yourself that your life has meaning: add to the store of holiness in a world that is suffering from a lack of holiness because it doesn't understand as our Jewish tradition has taught us to understand what holiness is all about.
What will it do for us? It will put you in touch with a part of yourself that has been lying dormant for all these years, and it may turn out that that was what you've been missing. It is the most distinctively human part of you, the part of you that is most like God and least like all those other creatures on earth. When you relate humanly to food by making each mealtime a visit with God, when you relate humanly to time by shaping one day a week to what you need rather than what others need from you, when you relate humanly to your possessions by giving charity and discovering that it doesn't hurt, then you will be well on your way to achieving the real goal of your life, the pursuit of holiness, the pursuit of fulfilled human potential, and the happiness that has been searching for you all these years will finally find you.
Shanah Tovah.