Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
At the heart of this evening's sermon is the assertion that, if Martha Stewart had kept kosher, she would not be facing prison time today. Of course, if Martha Stewart had kept kosher, she would probably never have become Martha Stewart, but that wasn't what I had in mind. I'll tell you what I did have in mind in just a moment, but first let me tell you a story.
It's a story attributed to the saintly hassidic master Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev. It seems that a young man from Berditchev, to the embarrassment of his family, went off in a bad direction. He became a criminal, a pickpocket, stealing from neighbors, robbing people, showing no respect for the law or for other people's property. The young man died shortly after Rosh HaShanah and as one would expect, he went to hell as a punishment for the life he had led. When he arrived in hell during these days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, the first thing he saw was Satan putting the finishing touches on the dossier he was preparing to present to God on Yom Kippur, detailing all the sins of Jews throughout the world, every lie, every act of deceit or cruelty. It was a long and embarrassing document and Satan was prepared to use it to convince God to inscribe all those less-than-perfect Jews for a year of misery and misfortune. At that point, the thief realized that this was the moment for which his entire life had been a preparation. While Satan's back was turned, he picked Satan's pocket, stole the dossier and threw it into the fires of hell, destroying the evidence. At that moment, a band of angels flew down into hell, picked up the thief and carried him up to heaven.
I found that story in a book I read an advance copy of last year called The Holy Thief. It's the autobiography of a man who must be the most unusual Conservative Rabbi in America. His name is Mark Borovitz. He lives in Los Angeles, and he spent most of his life either committing crimes or going to prison for his crimes, before a prison counselor straightened him out and put him on a path that ultimately led to rabbinical school. He now runs a combination synagogue and half-way house for habitual lawbreakers who are trying to go straight.
Mark Borovitz was a 14-year-old boy in Cleveland when his father died and his family had no way to pay its bills. When nothing else worked out, a family friend put him in touch with the Cleveland mafia and he began selling stolen electronic goods. By his junior year in high school, he was spending his evenings serving as president of his synagogue's USY chapter and his afternoons earning $500 a week selling hijacked boom boxes and television sets to his high school classmates.
After high school, he branched out into stealing and forging checks. On a couple of occasions, he went into business selling cars and did not hesitate to cheat his partners as readily as he cheated his customers. He went to prison several times, at one point between sentences he got married and had a daughter. But no matter how often he promised his family that he was going to stop, he kept going back to a life of crime until finally a prison chaplain was able to get through to him.
I had occasion to be in Los Angeles shortly after I read Mark Borovitz's life story, so I called him up and invited him to have breakfast with me. I asked him, "Why does a person like you do what you did? You know it's a virtual certainty that sooner or later you'll be caught and go back to prison. You know you're hurting your family. You keep promising them that you'll change but you don't change. There is that one heartbreaking scene in your book where your fourteen year old daughter pleads with you not to do anything that would send you back to prison again, and you swear to her that you won't. Then that same afternoon, you take money out of her college savings account to finance your gambling on football games. Doesn't it occur to a person that if he's clever enough to think up these elaborate schemes in the first place, he's probably clever enough to make a good living honestly, without the embarrassment and the prison time? Why does a person keep doing it?'
He looked at me and said, "It's really simple. When there is a fundamental emptiness inside you, there is something exhilarating about being able to say, The rules don't apply to me."
I said to him, "Of course; that makes a lot of sense. That explains the teenage girl who shoplifts even though she can afford to buy what she steals ten times over. That explains the man or woman who acquires a drug habit even though they don't really enjoy it and it takes all their money, but they love the feeling of doing something forbidden. That explains the husband who cheats on his wife. It's their way of quieting that nagging voice inside them that says to them, "You're nobody special," by letting them say, I am special; the rules that apply to other people don't apply to me."
And that brings us back to Martha Stewart. Why would a billionaire violate the law to avoid losing $30,000? She probably tips her hairdresser that much. would King David, with a house overflowing with wives and concubines, covet the wife of one of his soldiers? It's not the money and it's not the sex. It's the exhilarating feeling of being able to say, The rules don't apply to me.
So, would keeping kosher really have helped Martha Stewart? Would it help any of us? Maybe, maybe not. There are all too many instances of people who keep kosher and violate ethical standards in other areas. But think of it this way: I can imagine that every one of you will come to a moment in your life when your future happiness will depend on your saying No to temptation. It may be a lucrative but shady business deal. It may be an illicit sexual involvement. It may be an invitation to spend money you don't have on some attractive luxury. Whatever the circumstance, you'll know it's wrong, you'll know it has the potential to seriously mess up your life. But it will be very tempting. Now, if that is the first time in your life that you have to say No to temptation, what are the chances that you'll get it right the first time, with your future happiness depending on it? And what are the chances that you'll give in to the attraction of placing yourself above the rules? But if you have spent your whole life saying No to tempting things, if you have been doing things to make yourself strong in the behavioral sphere the way people who go to the gym lift weights to make themselves strong physically, a process incidentally known as "resistance training," doesn't that improve your chances of getting it right?
And what is Yom Kippur if not a celebration of our ability to say No to things that tempt us the other 364 days of the year? Remember what Rabbi Borovitz said to me: it's the person who is lacking something inside who needs to give his self-esteem a boost by deciding that the rules don't apply to him. The really superior athlete enjoys the feeling of being able to win without cheating. It's the athlete who is afraid he's not good enough who feels he has to cheat to compete. The really good student takes pleasure in doing her homework herself, without having to ask for help or peek at the answers in the back of the book. And the person who takes Yom Kippur seriously enough to do it right emerges at nightfall feeling cleansed and strengthened, with a new appreciation of his or her will power. We will walk out of here tomorrow night saying to ourselves "Hey, I just found out how strong I can be."
I want to move this discussion to another level by introducing you to a verse from the Torah, from the book of Leviticus, and I'm going to suggest that this may be the first time in history that this verse has been used as the basis for a High Holy Day sermon. It comes from chapter 19 of Leviticus, the chapter known as the Holiness Code because it begins with the command "You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy," and then it spells out several dozen ways of introducing holiness into our lives. It's a strange blend of obligations and prohibitions. It tells us to honor our parents and show respect to the elderly and the handicapped. It forbids revenge and getting even. It commands us to leave a corner of our field unharvested, for the poor to come and help themselves to it. It contains the verse "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." But it also has some far-out ritual laws, like the command that an animal sacrifice brought in celebration of something must be eaten entirely on that day, with no leftovers, or the prohibition of wearing clothing made of two kinds of material, one of animal origin, one of plant origin.
Then in the middle of the chapter, we read "When you enter the land and plant any tree for fruit, you shall regard its fruit as forbidden. Three years it shall be forbidden to you, not to be eaten." What are we to make of that law? I always understood it to be based on the assumption that for the first few years of a fruit tree's life (and there may be some of you out there who know more about this than I do), the fruits are inedible until the tree matures. The purpose of the law is not to tell people not to eat unripe fruit; they could have figured that out for themselves. The purpose, I thought, was to exempt the fruit of the first three years from being brought to the altar as part of the offering of first fruits every spring. To offer unripe, inedible fruit on the altar would be like bringing a lame or sick animal for a sacrifice. It's not worth anything to you, so it's no sacrifice. That's how I always understood it, and when I wrote the Etz Hayim commentary on the Torah that we and other Conservative synagogues use on Shabbat, that was how I explained it.
But last year I read a book by my classmate Professor Jack Neusner, who is probably our generation's greatest authority on the Talmud. Commenting on this verse as part of an examination of the theology implicit in biblical and rabbinic law, Neusner picks up on something that I had never noticed. He asks, "Does the phrase 'forbidden fruit' remind you of something? Is there somewhere else in the Bible where people are told not to eat the fruit of a certain tree?" Of course! Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Neusner's dramatically bold interpretation of this verse (and some of you may realize that I've written a book with a different interpretation of the Garden of Eden, but the stories in the Torah are so profound that we can learn different, even opposing lessons from them, and both interpretations can be true) would suggest that something very unfortunate happened in the world when Adam and Eve could not keep their hands off the fruit of the tree of knowledge. As a result of what they did, their descendants, that is to say, all of us, grew up as people who would have trouble with self-control, people who could not be counted on to play by the rules, people who will cheat if that's what they have to do to win, people who could not reliably say No to temptation, and the world has been a mess ever since because of it. When God commands the Jewish people to be holy, and part of that holiness involves what we eat and what we don't eat, what He is doing is challenging us to atone for the sin of Adam and Eve who could not say No to temptation. He is challenging us to redeem the world by practicing self-restraint by learning to say No. That is the essence of holiness. When we fast on Yom Kippur, when we come out of this day with a new resolve to live by Jewish standards, we atone for that original sin and make this truly a Day or Atonement.
Neusner's theory offers a fascinating contrast to standard Christian theology, and I want to choose my words carefully here because I don't want to be unfair to Christianity. Christianity says that because human beings are unable to resist temptation, unable to say No to what they know is wrong, we have estranged ourselves from God and the only way to bridge that gap is for God to make a supreme personal sacrifice. We flawed human beings can't bridge the gap by our own efforts.
Judaism says that because human beings are unable to resist temptation, unable to say No to what they know is wrong, we have estranged ourselves from God. So God says to us, "You broke it; you fix it. Show Me, by acts of self-restraint in your eating, in your speech, in your sexual behavior, in the way you earn and spend money, - show Me that you've grown up and have learned to say No."
Think about that for a moment. Do you realize what an audacious statement that is? It's saying that, when we take Yom Kippur seriously, when we take the rules of Judaism seriously, when we take our own lives seriously, we redeem the world from brokenness. It's not just a matter of being good Jews and pleasing God. It's not even solely a matter of personal morality. It's a challenge to the Jewish people by our behavior, to repair the breach between God and the entire human race.
I would remind you of what Rabbi Borovitz told me that morning in Los Angeles. It's the people who feel empty inside, people whose lives are devoid of meaning, who need to boost their egos by saying "I don't have to live by the rules. The rules don't apply to me." When your teenage or adult children say to you, "Why should being Jewish be important to me?" and you tell them about a hundred generations of ancestors who sacrificed so much to preserve their Jewish identity and they tell you that's ancient history, and you warn them about anti-Semitism and they respond "maybe when you were growing up but I've never had problems with my non-Jewish friends," maybe you could try telling them that in some mysterious way that we can't understand, by some process that doesn't follow the laws of physics or politics, the world needs the Jewish people in order to fix what is broken in the world. The world needs Jews who take their Jewishness seriously, to redeem it from the misbehavior of all those people who think only about themselves. That would be the one thing that persuades God to go on tolerating this messed-up world.
A young woman said to me at one of my lectures, "To me, Judaism is not dietary laws and going to synagogue. To me, Judaism is tikkun olam, social action, doing things for other people to make the world better. Everything else is just a distraction from that." I said to her, "Great, I'm all in favor of tikkun olam, but let's try to understand what that means. In Jewish theology, tikkun olam means fixing what is broken in the world. And what is broken in the world is not just economic oppression. What's broken in the world is the difficulty people have seeing themselves as human beings who are capable of holiness. Tikkun olam has to mean more than serving meals to people with AIDS and picketing Wal-Mart. Tikkun olam, literally "repairing the world," means undoing the sin of Adam and Eve by becoming models of self-restraint as well as models of caring and generosity, self-restraint in the way you eat and drink and dress and speak, not just for your sake so you don't mess up your life by giving in to temptations, not just for God's sake; God will be just fine whether you live by the Torah or not, but for the world's sake, so that our saying No to temptation will move God to say Yes to letting the world continue to exist, because if there is no holiness in the world, what does God need a world for?
Is it realistic to believe that this tiny sliver of the world's population who are Jewish can repair the damage done by the other six billion humans? I wouldn't dare to suggest it, except that it has happened before. One man, Abraham, with his wife and son, pledged themselves to a new understanding of God, and the rest of the world fell in line.
A few thousand people standing at Sinai went on to teach the world about a God who demanded righteous behavior and not only sacrifice and blind obedience. We gave the world the Ten Commandments, the psalms and the prophets, and three thousand years later, a majority of the human race looks at issues of morality through Jewish lenses.
The rich culture of Europe in the first third of the 20th Century, unparalleled creativity in music, art, theatre and literature, was overwhelmingly the work of a few dozen Jews living in Berlin, Prague, Paris and Vienna who saw the world differently than their neighbors did. Jews have been such a factor in the cultural and spiritual life of America - shaping the movie industry, television, teaching at the best universities, writing and publishing books, medicine, law, commerce - hardly anyone believes that we are less than two percent of the American population. How could that be when everyone's doctor, lawyer, accountant and favorite newspaper columnist is Jewish? The rule of thumb in the publishing industry is that 50% of all non-textbook hardcover books sold in the United States are bought by Jews, and the other 50% are bought by gentiles as presents for their Jewish neighbors. And when you realize that all of us without exception think about the world around us and the world inside us differently than people did 150 years ago because of two Jews, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, why shouldn't we believe that we have the ability to make the world a different place?
The problem is, I'm sorry to have to say, that when people think about what it means to be Jewish in America today, I'm not sure that saying No to temptation is the first thing that comes to mind. The American Jewish community has too often defined itself by excess, by extravagance. We have insisted that we don't need rules. We don't need to give anything up. We can be Jewish without being religious, that Jewishness was a matter of ancestry, of who your grandparents were rather than what your values are, memories of holiness rather than experiences of holiness. And so you get the Jackie Masons and the Woody Allens for whom Judaism is something funny, something to make jokes about, not something redemptive, and we wonder why our children don't take their Jewishness seriously.
Yes, we are still more charitable than any other segment of the population and we still value education more than any subset of our neighbors. But there was a time when we cherished those things but we also had a talent for holiness, when we knew how to sanctify time, how to turn our kitchen tables into altars, how to guard our tongues from profanity and malicious gossip, and I fear we've lost it. And because we've lost it, because we have shirked our unique responsibility, the world we live in remains a broken place, an unredeemed place, a world in which it is often hard to find God
My friends, the world we live in is a mess because people have forgotten the art of holiness, because we have forgotten that the essence of holiness, from the pages of Leviticus to the breakfast we'll choose not to have tomorrow morning, the essence of holiness, of genuine tikkun olam, is playing by the rules, saying No to things that tempt us, even as we sanctify Yom Kippur by overruling our hunger, even as we are summoned to sanctify the Sabbath by liberating ourselves from the stressful world of making and spending money, even as we are enjoined to sanctify the most powerful instinct of all, the sexual drive, not with celibacy but with huppah and kiddushin, with a marriage ceremony.
My friends, the world is starved for holiness. The world is broken for lack of holiness. It's hard to find God in a world deprived of self-restraint. And we, the people who first taught the world what it means to be a holy people, we have the power and we have the sacred obligation to make the world whole again.
May this coming year see us all blessed with life, with health, with material success, but more than anything else, for our sakes and for the world's sake, may this coming year see us blessed with lives of holiness. AMEN