L'Shanah Tovah! Let me invite you to just take this moment to relax. Smile, and say Good Yom Tov, to your neighbor. Stretch your arms and your legs if you need to. Some of you have been here since early this morning. You have earned the holiday meal that awaits you on the dining room table-the soft, round challahs, apples and honey, perhaps a traditional brisket or chicken. I assure, you, we are almost there. Think of this moment as the seventh inning stretch, or more accurately, the seventh inning breath: Everyone take a good deep breath, and relax. Today is a day for joy, and for hope in the future. We proclaim the words in the Mahzor, "Hayom Harat Olam: Today, the World is Born!"
People who meditate often pay attention to their breathing for a very simple reason. Our minds naturally like to wander, to flit from thought to thought, rather than stay focused in one place. We may be physically here, but our minds are likely to be thinking about what happened yesterday, or what we need to do this evening. We may miss a lot about what's really happening to us if our minds are somewhere else. But our breath is constant, always with us, always able to anchor us in the present moment. It's that simple. So if you are still thinking about lunch, put that thought aside now. Instead, try this: as a way of staying in this precious New Year moment, right here, right now, allow your attention to just rest on your breath. Notice it as it rises and falls ...Try it.
Breathing comfortably? Good. Here's a Rosh Hashanah suggestion: Picture the whole world, as it would look right now from outer space, as in a photograph taken by an astronaut. You might want to gently close your eyes, in order to get a clearer image of the earth on that big screen in your mind. Look for the lush, dense rain forests, and vast deserts; majestic, snow capped mountain ranges; you can even see huge cities from your vantage point in the sky. Now pull back for a larger view: surrounding the planet in a cushioning embrace is the clear blue band of earth's atmosphere providing life sustaining breathable air. Draw a breath from that atmosphere. Savor it as it fills your chest and your belly, bringing oxygen into your blood, reaching down to your arms and legs, your fingers and your toes. It tastes and feels so delicious; take another breath. We take in oxygen and release the carbon dioxide, which is breathed in by the green forests, which in turn release oxygen, in an endless miraculous cycle.
Now imagine what the earth must have looked like in the very beginning, before the forests and the deserts, the cities and the mountain peaks. Can you imagine what it looked like when God first began to create the heaven and the earth? The earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep. Roaring torrents of water cover the earth, and then, sweeping over it all, a Ruach Elohim- a wind of God. Feel the Ruach Elohim, as a warm breeze passing over the dark, cold water.
Eons pass. Vegetation appears on dry land. Primordial life forms make their way out of the waters, and breathe air. More eons pass. It is the Biblical sixth day, and God has formed a human being. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, nishmat chayim, and man became a living being.
So many generations have passed since then. Our tradition compresses them into a mere 5,764 years. But we still carry within our bodies a likeness, an echo, of that creation. We carry within our veins the salty waters out of which life first emerged, we breathe the same air that nourished those earliest life forms, and we are each endowed with a nishmat chayim, the divine breath of life that was first felt as a ruach- a wind of God hovering over the waters. Our veins, arteries and organs form a complex ecosystem that mirrors the complexity of the planet, of the universe. Like the ancient ebb and flow of the ocean tides, our breath unceasingly rises and falls, each intake miraculously renewing life. Today is the Birthday of the World. And that whole world is present within each of us. Today, the World is created. And today, each of us is created anew.
What a gift is each simple breath; giving us life, and connecting us to life. Neshama: the word for breath, and for soul. Jews who pray each morning pray the words: "Elohai nishama shenatata bi tehorah hi. My God, the soul/ breath that you have planted within me is pure."
If you have closed your eyes, open them now and allow yourself to look around. Look into the eyes of the friends and family with whom we share this sacred space on this sacred day, and recognize that the very air we breathe connects us to each other, and to God who planted breath within us.
I remind you today of the miracle of such a basic function as a breath because it is so easy to take it for granted. We are so busy, so frantic, so preoccupied, that sometimes, we even forget how to breathe properly, deeply. Anxiety makes us short of breath. Fear causes us to catch our breath. We are overwhelmed by our need to change the world, and we forget that the only world we need to change is the one we can: The one within us. Isn't that what Rosh Hashanah is all about?
Let me tell you today about three people who have something to teach us. One person overcame the grip of depression; the second won her struggle with grief, and the third waged a courageous battle against a debilitating illness.
Jane Stern, a food writer and radio personality, came by her phobias honestly. Fearfulness and idiosyncrasy was a family legacy. Her grandmother was so agoraphobic that she didn't leave the house for thirty years. Her father flew into uncontrollable fits of rage as a result of a childhood head injury. Insanity ran in the family. In addition to all of that, several relatives, including Jane's parents, had died early, tragic deaths. It was no wonder that she was paralyzed by fears: Fear of flying, fear of small spaces, unable to even ride busses; fear of blood, and on and on. At fifty two, she began to spiral into a depression that left her spending her days at home in a baggy blue bathrobe watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and Sally, as her marriage threatened to unravel.
What saved her were two things. First, she sought out the help of a good therapist. The second thing that saved her was a sandwich board sign with magnetic letters, that was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Town Fire Department: Volunteers Wanted: Fire Emergency Medics. Ambulance Girl is the title of Stern's memoir that chronicles her journey from a raging former urban Jewish hypochondriac who threatened to vomit from carsickness if she couldn't sit in the front seat, to her reborn self as a volunteer EMT.
At first, it seemed like a crazy idea. Even the classroom work was a parade of amputations, hideous deformities and gross disasters. But she stuck it out. She learned to carry a 250-pound man down a staircase, backwards. She became accustomed to answering emergency calls for help from the people in her town at any hour of the day or night.
She faced her worst fears. After a disastrous fire, Stern wrote, "I now think I am the type of person who would faint at the sight of a spider, but could run into a burning building to save a baby. Fear is like a hologram. It seems filled with substance, and when you go beyond it you realize it was just an illusion."
Stern discovered that it's never too late in life to learn that through helping others, you can help yourself. She writes, "The closest I ever felt to God was in the back of an ambulance. The most fully alive I have felt was when I held a dead man's head wedged between my knees and ventilated him back to life. One of the most precious moments of my life was the night I connected with a dying crack addict with AIDS who shared the same taste in gospel music I do."
Jane Stern could not rewrite her crippling family history. Yet, through reaching out and discovering our common humanity, she remade her world.
The second person I want to tell you about is a woman I have known since my previous congregation in Providence. Doris is a widow, whose husband died suddenly, leaving her with several small children. She was inconsolable. She dutifully went through all the steps of mourning, but to no avail. Her grief was of that debilitating kind that saps even your deepest reserves of energy, when even the simplest chores seem overwhelming. How could he really be gone? How could she be expected to take one more breath, to get through one more day alone, without him? She couldn't sleep. She couldn't concentrate. Her health suffered. Her parenting suffered. Friends reached out to her, but nothing helped.
When I ran into her sometime later, she looked transformed. The sparkle in her eye had returned. What had happened? "Well, Rabbi," she said, "this is what happened. I was really in the dumps. Then, one day, I decided that I would participate in a marathon walk in memory of my husband, to benefit others who suffer from cancer. It was a crazy idea. I hadn't had any energy in months. I'm the person who sighs in the supermarket when she realizes that the milk is at the other end of the store! I hadn't exercised in who knows how long. 26 miles-forget about running a marathon; how could I possibly even walk it? But I was determined to make that goal. I actually went into training: a regimen of exercise and diet.
And I did it! The day of the walk, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people. I felt intimately connected to all of them. Most of us had lost someone. We felt comforted and strengthened by each other's determination to go on.
At each mile, there was a sandwich board with a picture of a child who is fighting this illness. I stretched out my hand to touch each sign at each mile marker- 26 signs.
In the crowd ahead of me, I saw a man wearing a tee- shirt, which said, "I'm walking so that others may live." Those words spoke to me. Through those 26 miles, I just kept my eyes on that tee shirt in front of me. "I'm walking so that others may live." I never spoke to the man in the shirt. He'll never know how much his words encouraged me. "But," she smiled, "next year, I will do that marathon again."
Friends, when we are able to feel connected to the world around us, to reach out to others, and to allow others in, then we can rebuild the world that we inhabit.
The third story I want to share with you this morning is a sadder one, but an uplifting one nonetheless. Laura Rothenberg was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was three days old. In her memoir, Breathing For A Living, she describes her decision as a 19-year-old sophomore at Brown University to have a double lung transplant. You may have heard part of her story on NPR's Radio Diaries series. " Here is the deal with CF, " she said "...after years of infection, the lungs sort of get worn down and deteriorate. Most people on the street wouldn't realize how much harder I have to work to breathe. Or even people who know me don't realize it because, over the years I've gotten better at hiding the fact that I have trouble breathing."
Laura had already outlived most of her friends with cystic fibrosis, kids she grew up with in hospital wards. At 19, she was a veteran, but her health was deteriorating. She joked about having already had her midlife crisis, since the typical life expectancy for someone with CF is 28 years. Laura writes, "I'm a typical college student, if there is such a thing. Except that I won't be able to look back on my life from an old age...I think about death every day. I wrote a poem about my funeral when I was seventeen...So I look back from now, my midlife point, and evaluate."
The decision whether or not to put her name on the transplant list is huge. Even if the transplant is successful, and her body does not immediately reject the new lungs, there are other considerations. She will become permanently diabetic. There are a host of possible complications. And the drugs will change her appearance: Laura is afraid that she'll never get a boyfriend if she becomes pudgy-faced and bushy eye browed.
But time is not on her side. "It just sort of all hit me today," she writes. "I was lying on the couch in the living room, and the sun was setting, and I just knew it. It was at that moment that I really felt that I wouldn't be alive at New Years. The last few weeks, I definitely felt that I was starting the dying process, and it's just a matter of when. How fast. How much time. It didn't make sense to push the limit, trying to see how long I could last with these old lungs. So I decided, I'm going to try the lung transplant. You know, there are risks with it, ...but I don't want to just go downhill without trying to stop it first."
Laura's story is the story of small victories in a landscape of setbacks. The dreary wait, month after month, for the transplant. The initial success, and the myriad complications that follow. Through it all, we follow a young woman who clutches every normal moment as a victory: every visit with a friend, every class that she was able to attend, the brief periods of clear breathing when she could kick a ball on the quad.
You begin to see that what kept despair at bay was the incredible support of Laura's family and friends. They were her constant cheering squad, in the hospital, on the telephone, or part of a vast E-Mail network of friends who shared every daily development Laura's mother put it this way:
"While we waited for the transplant...Each person was trying his or her best to help Laura get through the wait and each person was and is an important part o her life. Each was giving, and each one, no matter how they contacted Laura or how great or small their contribution loved her and admired her courage and tried to help her, and each one had made a difference. And each time I realized this, I felt that we are all related and that it is really only in special circumstances like all the difficulties that Laura had faced ...that we human beings begin to accept our relatedness."
In the final chapter, a year after the transplant, Laura quite matter of factly, reports that chronic rejection of her new lungs has set in, and there is no longer anything curative that can be done. But she moves into a new apartment with her boyfriend, and continues to live each day as best as she can. She must have intuited the outcome the previous summer, when she gave this report for NPR's Radio Diary: "I definitely think about after I'm gone. I've always been scared that people will forget about me, but I'm also here right now. So its about trying to come to a place where I can just accept that things have gone the way they've gone, and accept that its never going to be perfect. You know, I'm well enough to go back to school. I'll be a junior. You know, I want to walk from my door to the Main Green, maybe even play soccer, which I haven't done in eight years. But I don't really count on anything anymore. I just go with the flow. I think that's ok."
When Laura Rothenberg died at the age of 22 in March, she left a legacy of wisdom and courage from which we can all learn. Although her efforts in undergoing a double lung transplant ultimately failed to prolong her years, she succeeded, heroically, in honoring the fullness of her allotted days. Like Jane Stern, like Doris, she filled her world with relationships of caring and of love. In the end, what more can one do?
When Rabbi Haim of Zanz was a young man, he burned with the desire to change the world. However, as the years passed, he saw that the world would not bend to his wishes. So he tried to change the community. But as the years passed, he saw that this task too, was beyond his reach. So he decided to change his wife and children. But as the years continued to flow by, the great man saw little gain for of his efforts. Finally, Rabbi Haim prayed, "Ribono Shel Olam, Master of the Universe, I ask of you only this: help me to master myself, and to perfect my own heart, and it will be as if I had renewed an entire world."
Today the world is created again. And that world is within you and me. A single breath is so short, lasting just a few seconds. It has to be followed immediately by another, and another again. In a sense, our lives are always hanging in precarious balance. The question is, what shall we do? How shall we live? We can lead timid lives, always worrying about what might be, what disasters lie just beyond our vision on the horizon. Or we can remember the message of Rabbi Haim, which is really no different than the well-known Serenity Prayer: "God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...Courage to change the things I can...and Wisdom to know the difference."
Jane Stern could not alter the past events in her life that led to her phobias and her depression. But she chose to face her fears and overcome them, by reaching out to others in need. A widow could not bring her beloved husband back, but she chose to walk forward, so that others may live. Laura Rothenberg couldn't rid her body of the poor health that was her inheritance since birth. Yet even when the simple act of breathing could no longer be taken for granted, she chose to live as normally, as lovingly and as fully as she could, for as long as life was within her
Last Shabbat, we read in the Torah, " Re'eh, natati l'fanecha et ha chayim v'et hatov, v'et hamavet v'et ha ra. See, I have put before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity...uvacharta bachayyim. Therefore, choose life." Friends, may we always have the courage to choose to live- one day, one step, one simple breath, at a time.
L'SHANNAH TOVAH TIKATEIVU V'TECHATEIMU