It is an irony that the most prominent prayers of the Yom Kippur liturgy; indeed most of the prayers of the Mahzor, are phrased in the collective. Yet, the essential task of this day is to take the measure of our lives- our commitments, our promises, and our deeds- as individuals. Who am I? What do I stand for? These questions are behind everything we say and do today, although it isn't until the waning light of the Minha service that their centrality is articulated in the Book of Jonah.
You remember the story. God tells Jonah to prophesize repentence to the people of Nineveh. But Jonah, who would prefer that the evil city be punished for its crimes, rather than repent, runs away. He flees to the port of Tarshish, and boards a boat headed in the opposite direction, as if the call of God's voice could be so easily out run. God sends a mighty wind that threatens to destroy the ship. The frightened sailors cry out to their gods as they cast cargo overboard in an attempt to save their lives. They cast lots to see who is responsible for this Divine wrath, and the lot falls to Jonah. So they said to him:
"Tell us now, you on whose account this evil has happened- What is your work? Where are you from? What is your land? And of what people are you?"
Notice, in their sudden interest in Jonah, they ask him not one question, but four, to which he answers: "Ivri Anochi." I am a Hebrew, and I revere the Eternal, God of Heaven, who made the sea and the dry land."
"Ivri Anochi." I am a Hebrew, a Jew, and I worship God of Heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.
At that moment of truth when life was in the balance, on an imperiled boat on a storm-tossed sea, Jonah remembered who he was. He was a Jew, a prophet, and a bearer of a message from God. And he knew he could no longer run away from the essential meaning and message of his life.
It changed him. After spending three days in the belly of a whale, Jonah headed back towards Nineveh, to fulfill his mission and to deliver God's message of repentence.
Yom Kippur, my friends, is our night on that storm tossed sea, with our own fearful sense of life hanging in the balance. Can it change us? For one full day, we confront the abyss. We starve our bodies. We recite Yizkor for our departed, the Eileh Ezkerah in memory of our martyrs, and the Vidui, the confession of sins, just as we are commanded to do when we prepare to die.
It is traditional to wear a white kittel today, to remind us of the shroud in which we will be buried. The morning Torah reading begins with the death of Aaron's sons. And near the beginning of the Musaph Amidah, we recite once again the words of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, as we did on Rosh Hashannah: Who shall live, and who shall die. But today, the words seem even more frightening then they did last week, because today is Yom Kippur
If, like Jonah, we were asked today, Who are you? What is your work? Where are you from…How would you answer?
Would your gut cause you to answer, like Jonah, "Ivri Anochi?" "I am Jewish?" And if you said those words, what would they mean to you?
Judea and Ruth Pearl, parents of the journalist Daniel Pearl, asked that question- what do the words I Am Jewish mean to you- of nearly 150 celebrities, scholars and every-day people. They compiled the responses in a book entitled, I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl. Let me remind you of Daniel Pearl's story:
In January, 2002, Daniel Pearl, a 29 year-old journalist, was abducted in Karachi, Pakistan, while investigating the trail of international terrorism for the Wall Street Journal. After holding him hostage for a month, his terrorist abductors tortured and beheaded him, recording much of their barbarism on videotape. In the two and a half years since, we have seen all too many innocent hostages die similar deaths at the hands of Iraqi Muslim religious fanatics. But Daniel Pearl was the first victim of this particular kind of barbarism. The fact that he was an American Jew, son of Israeli American parents, was certainly no accident. Like so many times in history a Jew was once again the proverbial canary in the coalmine, a victim and a harbinger of a dreadful challenge to all of western society. Daniel left behind his parents, two sisters, and his wife Mariane, who was pregnant with their son, Adam.
In one of the last phrases that he uttered to his captors, an echo of the prophet Jonah can be heard. He said, in stark simplicity, "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish." Daniel Pearl had been raised in a loving family. He was proud of his background, and Jewish values informed the arc of his career as a journalist. He was not a religiously observant Jew, and was not married to a Jew. But somehow, in those last moments of life, staring a monstrous enemy in the eye, it was this definition of self that came forth from his lips. "My father is Jewish, My mother is Jewish, I am Jewish."
The words struck a deep chord in us, and in everyone throughout the world who watched this horrible drama of abduction and murder unfold. That this was happening only months after September 11 only added to the sense that here was a monumental confrontation between good and evil, between reason and madness. It was a powerful religious witnessing of identity, and of a certain kind of faith. It was as if Daniel Pearl's Judaism brought him to this moment, to the role he was now playing in this awful drama at life's end.
In the months following his death, the Pearl family became determined to wrest some good from their tragic loss. They established the Daniel Pearl Foundation, whose broad aim is "to address the root causes of his murder by promoting, through his example, cross cultural understanding through journalism, music and innovative communication." The board of trustees of the foundation brings together an eclectic range of perspectives including, Bill Clinton, Eli Wiesel, Palestinians and Pakistanis.
Condolences poured in to the Pearl family from all over the world. A Temple in New Jersey wanted to name their Hebrew School for him. When the Pearl family explained that their son was not traditionally religious, the Rabbi insisted: "We want our children to have a model of what it means to be Jewish, and every mother I speak to says that she wants her son to be a Jew like Daniel Pearl."
A twelve year-old girl from Long Island, Elana Frey, came up with an idea for a mitzvah project in preparation for her Bat Mitzvah: she asked friends and relatives what the words, "I am Jewish," meant to them, and prepared a booklet of their answers. Her intention was for Daniel Pearl's young son Adam to have it, so that someday "he would have an understanding of his heritage, and his father's words would always comfort him."
Out of that lovely gesture by a twelve-year old Bat Mitzvah student, the idea for the I Am Jewish book was born.
The essays vary in length from just a few sentences, to several pages. They range from the highly academic, to the extremely personal, and poetic. Some of them even make you laugh. For example, Sarah Silverman, a writer and actress, conveys Jewish iconoclasm, neuroses, and family pride all in these three simple lines:
"Remember the guy who smashed all the idols in the idol store? His mother had a heart attack when she saw the mess, but I'm sure she bragged about it later. That's us. That's me. I am Jewish."
I am sure it won't come as a surprise to anyone in this room to know that one of the best essays, in my opinion, was the one submitted by Rabbi Harold Kushner.
I want to focus on the several prominent themes that recur throughout the book: First, many wrote about being a link in a great chain of ancestors, holding hands from Sinai down to us. To some, this bespoke a warm sense of belonging. Spencer Newman, age 10, contributed the shortest entry: "When I say I am Jewish it means to me that I have people taking care of me. It means family."
For others, our history endows us with a sense of purpose and mission. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain , writes, " I am a Jew because, being a child of my people, I have heard the call to add my chapter to its unfinished story. I am a stage on its Journey, a connecting link between the generations. The dreams and hopes of my ancestors live on in me, and I am the guardian of their trust, now and for the future."
A second common theme is the conviction that the gift of being a Jew needs to be more than an accident of birth; it has to be claimed through our convictions and our acts. " I am proud," says Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, " to be the heir of my ancestors, but I am too proud to be just an heir. I wish to be one of my ancestors, an artificer of this tradition, and thereby an artificer of myself. So I am a Jew who is becoming a Jew, if I am a serious Jew at all."
The third theme is the vibrant tension in our tradition between universalism and particularism. Asking why Daniel Pearl risked his life, and finally, gave his life, in the cause of exposing terrorism, Elie Wiesel writes:
Too many of us over the years have failed to understand this- that Judaism does not force us to choose between our Jewishness and our humanity, between the needs of our own Jewish family and the needs of the larger human family; it bids us to embrace both. The parochial Jew who only cares about God's covenant with Abraham, writes Rabbi Norman Lamm, is a poor Jew. He betrays God's earlier covenants with Noah and with Adam, which are still in force and binding upon all of us. On the other hand the Jew who marches for every cause but his own, is equally misguided. As Cynthia Ozick so beautifully phrased it in her piece:
"If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all." The world needs us to be Jewish, to be who we are, to bare the message of human dignity and holiness which is our birthright, and which God, from the very beginning, intended for us to trumpet to all of His creatures.
Jonah, who only wanted the Ninevites to suffer, did not get it. It took him a near death experience, three days in the belly of a whale, and more, before he began to understand. But I would like to think that by the time he delivered his message of hope in the streets of a foreign city, he finally understood.
Because that is the message of the book of Jonah: To say, Ivri Anochi, I am Jewish, is to know that if you try to cut yourself off from the world, you end up cutting yourself off from God; like Jonah, alone, hermetically sealed off in the belly of a whale. And to say, I am Jewish is to know that God wants us to go into the streets of Nineveh and bear a message of hope: God waits for us to change, He welcomes our teshuva, He enables us to do teshuva.
Of all the public figures, writers, and scholars who contributed to the project, however, the essays that affected me most were those written by Daniel's family. After all, this was their tragedy. They, like their precious Daniel, were also forced to look evil in the face on that day in February, two and a half years ago. How does one affirm life after such a cruel loss? Let me share with you the words of Daniel's sister Tamara. She writes:
Now, to me, being Jewish means being heir to a spiritual, cultural and long-standing mystical tradition that gives me the tools to survive and flourish in such a world…Being Jewish means being an apprentice to a school of alchemy that knows how to transmute pain and horror into life-affirming substance….Being Jewish, to me, means respecting life. It means loving heartily, laughing loudly, debating voraciously, standing up for justice, and choosing to experience life with all its ramifications. And it means acquiring dignity, even while facing adversity."
I Am Jewish. The missing contributor to the book is of course, Daniel Pearl himself. We can never know, we can only begin to guess, what those words meant to him on that fateful day. However, the videotapes revealed that Daniel Pearl spoke one further sentence to his captors, his last words that sounded unforced and uncoerced. It was a family story, a bit of personal family history. He told his captors, "Back in the town of Bnei Brak, there is a street named after my great grandfather, Chayim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town." What a strange thing to say at such dire a moment. Why? Why recall this particular anecdote?
Judea Pearl theorizes as to what his son meant to convey in these words. First, it was a message meant for his family: "… I am volunteering information that no one else knows…Because I want to assure you that I am well, I am speaking freely, and I am not defeated."
Second, to his captors he conveyed," Look guys! I come from a place where a person is judged by the towns that he builds, by the trees that he plants, and by the wells that he digs. Not by the death and destruction that he brings to the world. So come to your senses."
And finally, "To the people of the free world, Danny said:' you know what, Despite all the protests and criticisms that we hear around us, we are still the town builders in this world, not our critics. With all the images of 'the ugly West' and 'ugly America' and 'ugly Israel' that my captors and their intellectual supporters have labored to paint in the past few decades, we can be mighty proud of who we are: We are the town builders of the world.'"
When those frightened sailors demanded of Jonah, "What is your trade? Where are you from? What is your land? And of what people are you?", he chose not to answer those specific questions of occupation, geographic location and citizenship directly. Instead, his words pointed towards a far deeper level of connection, of location in the universe, than any mere list of vital statistics. "Ivri Anochi- I am a Hebrew and I worship the Eternal, God of Heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." And so it is with you and me. The words, "I am Jewish" are the irreducible bedrock upon which all the other names we carry rest. Before this day is through, let us all find a few quiet moments and ask ourselves what these simple words mean to us. How do they shape our identity as a parent, a spouse, a lover, a child? How do they direct our passion in work and in play, as an American, or as a citizen of this world? Ask what it means to say, "I am Jewish.' The answers may be as varied as the number of souls sitting in this room. But how we live our days in the coming year will surely be enriched, and may even come to depend on, our asking the question.