Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
A man came up to me one evening after one of my lectures and said to me, "Rabbi, you seem to know the Bible pretty well. Can you tell me, of all the things that God says to people in the Bible, what sentence does God repeat more often than any other?" I thought for a moment and said, "Probably the one about being kind to the widow, the stranger and the poor person. I think God says that five or six times in the Torah." He shook his head and said, "Not even close. The sentence God repeats more than any other is: Don't be afraid."
I checked it out when I got home and it turns out he was right. More than eighty times, God says Al Tira, "fear not," don't be afraid. He says it to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob. He says it to every one of the prophets and tells them to say it to the people. I believe God is trying to get that message to us today: Don't be afraid when you read the news coming out of the Middle East. Don't be afraid when you hear about the problems facing American society. It's not that there is nothing to be afraid of. There are lots of things to be afraid of, but God wants to reassure us that we can handle them if we are not paralyzed by fear.
For forty days before Yom Kippur and for ten days afterward we add a psalm to our daily prayers every morning and evening, a psalm we don't recite at any other time of the year. It begins: ADONAI ORI V'YISHI, MI-MI IRA? ADONAI MAOZ HAYYAI, MI EFCHAD? God is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? God is the source of my strength; of what shall I be afraid?
Now, when the psalmist tells us three times in the first three lines that he's not afraid, the message we hear is that he is afraid but he is working at coping with his fears, and that he turns to God to help him do that, just as the author of the 23rd Psalm writes, "I shall fear no evil for Thou art with me."
Eighty times God tells our ancestors not to be afraid. I want to focus on one of those times this evening. When I verified the claim about that being the sentence occurring most frequently in the Bible, I shared that insight with my friend Rabbi Jack Riemer, and he responded by sharing with me an insight into one occurrence of that phrase that meant a lot to him.
It happened to Jacob late in his life. You may remember the story from the Bible. Jacob had twelve sons. He favored one of them, Joseph, over the others, and in their jealousy, the other brothers sold him as a slave to a passing caravan and told their father that he had been killed by a wild animal. Joseph ended up in Egypt where he interpreted Pharaoh's dreams, advised him how to avoid a famine and make Egypt the only country in the area with enough food for its people and a surplus to sell to foreigners. Joseph's brothers came to buy food, and Joseph revealed his identity to them twenty years after they had sold him into slavery. He invited them and their by-now-elderly father to move to Egypt where he would provide for them.
The brothers then return home and tell Jacob that Joseph is alive, that he is an important government official in Egypt and that he wants them to move there to live with him. Jacob immediately begins to make plans to relocate his family to Egypt.
It is at this point that God appears to Jacob. God hasn't spoken to him once in the past twenty years, which the midrash explains by saying that the spirit of God does not abide with a person when he is angry or grieving. But God speaks to him now, and God says to Jacob, AL TIRA, Don't be afraid. God makes three promises to Jacob: I will go down to Egypt with you, I will bring you and your family back, and your son Joseph will close your eyes.
I want to focus on those three promises, because God understands even before Jacob does what Jacob is afraid of.
First, "Don't be afraid to go down to Egypt because I will be with you." Jacob is about the enter a new stage in his life. He doesn't know what is in store for him, but he does know two things: change is inevitable and change is scary. Change means leaving the familiar for the unknown. Once before, you may remember, God spoke to Jacob when he was leaving the familiar for the unknown. It happened when he was an adolescent leaving home because he had cheated his brother and deceived his father to gain the blessing that was meant for his brother. That time, God reassured him that, although he was leaving his parents' home and leaving the land of Canaan, he was not leaving God behind. God would be accessible to him at the house of Laban as God had been at his parents' home. Now once again, many years and many experiences later, Jacob is about to leave the land of Canaan and make his way to a new land. This time he is not exchanging adolescence for adult responsibility, as he did the first time he left home, facing the uncertainty of marriage, of parenthood, of earning a living and establishing his identity. That was the first time God spoke to him. This time, he is exchanging the role of head of the household, being a mature adult responsible for his own wellbeing and that of those around him, for the role of an old man in an unfamiliar setting, sustained and supported by others. That scares him, and that is why God comes to him now and reassures him, "Don't be afraid."
Now do you see why I chose this passage to focus on? It's Yom Kippur, when we recite the prayer about "what is the New Year going to be like? A year of health and prosperity, or a year of illness and financial concern? A year of new people coming into our lives, or a year of people leaving us?" There are people here this evening who are facing the same kind of uncertainty that Jacob faced in the Bible. Maybe they are contemplating changing jobs, even changing careers. Maybe their children are grown and they are thinking of selling their home and moving into smaller quarters, and at some level it gives them the feeling that their world is shrinking. There are people here this evening who look at the horizon and see the end of their working life approaching, or perhaps they are wondering how much longer their current job will be viable. And they are asking themselves, as Jacob must have been asking himself, Who will I be when I am no longer bringing home a paycheck? Who will I be when I'm no longer in charge of a household and a family? There are people here this evening for whom the coming year will represent a new family arrangement, some of you adding, some of you subtracting, and you are understandably apprehensive about how that will work out.
God doesn't answer Jacob's concerns directly, but He does answer them when He says "I will go down to Egypt with you." God is saying, "Yes, the future is unknown. The future is by definition always unknown. But you have to believe that, whatever the future holds, you will be up to the challenge. Look at what you've already done. You've worked your way through problems before. I was with you in hard times in Aram and in Canaan, and I'm not about to abandon you now."
God says to Jacob, "Don't think only about what you are leaving behind. Think of the new experiences awaiting you, and the opportunities for growth and for remaining vital that these new experiences will represent, because facing and mastering new situations will keep you young and vital."
God's second promise, "I will bring you and your offspring back," speaks to Jacob's second fear. If Jacob was afraid, on the one hand, that Egypt would not work out as a home for him and his family, that they would not fit in, at the same time, he is afraid that it will work out all too well, that his children and grandchildren will feel too much at home in Egypt and forget that they are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And again you see why this is a passage that speaks to us today. We have been accepted in America, integrated into American life, more than our parents and grandparents could ever have imagined. My father spent the first twenty years of his life in Lithuania, but he never thought of himself as Lithuanian. He didn't speak Lithuanian, he spoke Hebrew and Yiddish. Even more so, the Jews of Germany, who spoke German, wrote important books in German, contributed to the cultural life of Germany, in fact virtually were the cultural life of Germany, were never permitted to forget that they were part of a separate community. But in this country in the past fifty years, we have been accepted. The bigots, the antisemites have been marginalized. If two generations ago, Jack Benny and Danny Kaye had to change their names to make it in show business, nobody asked that of Jerry Seinfeld or Barbara Streisand. We have been accepted and we are grateful for it. But at the same time, we share Jacob's fear. We worry that our children and grandchildren will become so assimilated - in the clothes they wear, in the music they listen to, in the pop stars they idolize-that they will forget that they are Jewish. God's promise is that they may wander, they may find an Egypt to travel to psychologically, but they will find their way back. If God's Covenant with Abraham is true, if the Revelation at Sinai is true, the truth will ultimately win out. People will come to recognize it. If the bond between parents and children is strong, if we don't overreact to an adolescent slamming the door to her room by slamming doors of our own, then that bond will exert a gravitational pull strong enough to keep them from wandering too far.
And it seems to me to be happening. Thirty years ago, bright young Jews were traveling to India and Nepal to study Buddhism. Today, non-Jewish Hollywood celebrities are studying Kabbalah (although as some of you have heard me say, the Kabbalah that Madonna is studying in Los Angeles is authentic Kabbalah to the same degree that she is an authentic Madonna). There are serious books being written, college courses being offered, adult classes proliferating, creative options for worship and study, to a degree that we have never seen before. Who could have foreseen a generation ago that Chabad houses would be as ubiquitous as Starbucks? In the spiritual world as in the culinary world, people are coming to realize that junk food may be tempting but is ultimately harmful, and are finding their way back to the real thing.
There is a Jewish legend about how Shma Yisrael became the quintessential declaration of Jewish faith. It bases itself on an incident at the very end of the book of Genesis, the very end of Jacob's life in Egypt. Jacob is dying. He calls Joseph to his bedside and asks Joseph to bring his children, Jacob's grandchildren, so that he can bless them. Jacob then goes on at great length praising his grandchildren, telling Joseph how much he loves them, as if they were his own children. Then, the Bible says, he looks at Joseph's children, Menasseh and Ephraim, and asks MI ELEH? Who are those kids? And Joseph has to explain to him, "Those are the children with whom God has blessed me."
According to the Midrash, why doesn't Jacob recognize his own grandchildren, the ones he has just been talking about, saying how much he loves them? Not because his eyesight is failing, as happened to his father Isaac. He doesn't recognize them because they look like Egyptian children. Born and raised in Egypt, their dress, their appearance is no different from the young people around them. And that bothers Jacob deeply. When he asks, "Who are those young people?", he is really asking "I know what their names are, but who are they? Are they Jewish children? Are they part of our family, part of our people, with the same commitments and loyalties? Or have they become Egyptian children with Jewish parents?
And Menasseh and Ephraim, sensing their grandfather's concern, answer him, SHMA YISRAEL, Listen, Israel (remember, Jacob's other name is Israel), ADONAI ELOHEINU, the Lord is our God. We may look different, we may act different, but we still believe in the same God, the same Covenant, the same values, the same bloodstained and tear-stained history that you do. And ever since then, Jewish parents have blessed their sons on the eve of the Sabbath, saying "May you be like Ephraim and Menasseh, fully integrated into the society you live in and at the same time, loyal and learned members of the Jewish people." As God is immortal, as the Torah is immortal, God's promise that the Jewish people will continue to be His representative on earth, that He will guide them to find their way back from whatever Egypt they have wandered to, is equally eternal.
God's third promise to Jacob is perhaps the most interesting and the most relevant of the three. "Joseph will close your eyes." Do you understand the reference? When a person dies, if he should die with his eyes open, the final act of kindness one can perform for him is to close his eyes, to bring down the final curtain on his life.
What is Jacob worried about as he prepares to relocate to Egypt? He hasn't spoken to Joseph for twenty years, since the day he disappeared and was presumed dead. I imagine Jacob thinking to himself, How does he feel about me after all these years? Is he angry at me for neglecting him? Does he blame me for favoring him and making his brothers jealous? Has he made a new life for himself that has no room for me in it?
I can imagine Jacob saying to himself, There were so many times when I wasn't a very good father, when I made mistakes, when I had my priorities wrong. Will Joseph take this opportunity to get even with me? And the greatest fear, the one he can't even put into words, is: I don't want to die alone, with nobody caring for me.
Over the years, you have told me your stories: stories of estrangements, of family members not speaking to each other, of feuds going back so many years that nobody remembers how they started. There were the funerals where families would sit shiva in two or three different homes because the brothers and sisters didn't get along and they weren't going to let their Momma's death change that. There was the woman who told me that she wasn't going to say kaddish for the father who had abused her physically and psychologically, and I tried to persuade her to say Kaddish, not to mourn the man who died but to grieve for the father she always wanted to have and never did, and now it was too late. There was even one funeral I officiated at where the surviving children couldn't agree on how the family name was pronounced. Sometimes the encounter with mortality forces people to open their eyes and realize what they are missing; sometimes it finds the fault line in a family and drives people further apart.
You came to me with your stories: the elderly parent who accepted the invitation to move in with her children, only to find herself left alone all day with the dog and the television set in a town with no public transportation; the elderly parent who lived with her children and grandchildren but couldn't get her daughter to accommodate her food limitations; and at the other end, the couples who invited a widowed parent to live with them with the best will in the world, only to find themselves with no privacy and an endlessly needy parent. And behind all the stories lies the desperate, unspoken fear: I don't want to die alone. Elderly parents are understandably frightened as they grow old and dependent: will this be payback time for every argument, every restriction, every resentment held on to for decades or long buried but revived at this moment?
So Jacob is frightened as he prepares to move to Egypt to live with Joseph, and God has to reassure him. God has to say to him, Your father Isaac wasn't a very good father. He favored your brother Esau over you. He never appreciated the things that made you special, that made you the rightful heir to the tradition of Abraham. He didn't know how to help you get what you wanted and needed in life. And you weren't a very good son. You lied to him, you deceived him. You sided with your mother against him. But in the end, you came back and were able to love him. You and Esau outgrew your conflicts and when he died, the two of you came together to bury him and mourn for him. Reconciliation is possible. Forgiveness is possible. It may not be easy but it can happen, and it is so much better than the alternative.
And then finally that moment comes. Jacob makes the long journey to Egypt. Joseph is there to welcome him. What were they thinking at that moment? Was Joseph thinking, I can't remember what it was like to have a father, a loving father who cared for who I was and not just what I could do for him? Was Jacob thinking, How will Joseph handle this role reversal, my being dependent on him?
Jacob arrives in Egypt and Joseph is there to greet him. They embrace, they kiss, they cry. And Jacob responds to Joseph's embrace by saying AMUTA HAPA'AM, Now I can die, which I take to mean: Now I'm not afraid of facing the end of my life, because I know I won't be facing it alone. The love that had lain dormant below the surface for all those years is recovered in one moment of mutual need and mutual forgiveness. Jacob settles into life in Egypt. Joseph presents him in court. He is proud of his father. And when Jacob dies, Joseph is there to close his eyes and tend to his burial.
My friends, it's Yom Kippur. It is the day when we spend the whole day in shul trying to plaster over the cracks in our lives, trying to put together the pieces of our lives so that we will start the New Year whole and not broken. And of all the things that frighten us, of all the dire things the New Year may have in store for us, from terrorism in this country to war in the Middle East, from loss of health to loss of jobs, I suspect that there is no prospect more frightening than the fear that we won't be able to tear down the walls that have somehow sprung up between us and other people in our lives and that, when problems come along, we'll have to face them alone.
But if the challenge is tearing down the walls that separate us, if the challenge is building bridges to re-connect us to people we really care about, that is one challenge we will not have to face alone. God promises us, as He promised Jacob, that He wants us to do it, that He understands how intimidating a prospect it is, to make ourselves vulnerable to rejection as the inevitable risk of letting yourself care for someone, but He will be with us to give us the courage.
The last words ever spoken by a prophet in Israel, the last line of the last of the biblical prophets Malachi, reads: HINEH ANOCHI SHOLEACH LACHEM ET ELIYAH HANAVI LIFNEY BO HAYOM HAGADOL, I am going to send you the prophet Elijah just before the dawning of the messianic era, V'HESHIV LEV AVOT EL BANIM V'LEV BANIM EL AVOTAM, and he will help bring about the one thing in the world that is lacking to make this world the messianic kingdom. He will connect the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents. He will teach us to love each other again, and then the world will be ready to be redeemed.
God's promise at the outset of a New Year is the same promise He extended to Jacob many years ago, not that it will be a year free of problems, free of conflict. It will be a year with its share of problems, -- change and conflict and uncertainty - but we will be up to the challenge because whenever we set out to do the right thing, God will be at our side until all that is broken will be made whole again.