On My Mind Kol Nidre 5774 Rabbi Michael Adam Latz Shir Tikvah Congregation
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On My Mind Kol Nidre 5774 Rabbi Michael Adam Latz Shir Tikvah Congregation 18 months ago, Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR in Los Angeles came to Shir Tikvah as our inaugural Lou Wiener Memorial Scholar in Jewish Innovation. Prior to her visit with us, she lectured at St. Johns and St. Thomas Universities on the role of religion in American politics. Before her first talk, there was a dinner where she met with the President and Faculty of the University – all Catholic theologians and clergy. At one point during the dinner, there was a lull in the conversation, so Rabbi Brous took the opportunity to ask: “So, how do Catholics really feel about birth control?” There was a prolonged hushed silence. “I swear,” said Rabbi Brous, “I could hear an ecumenical cricket chirping three floors down.” “We ended up having a very frank and fascinating conversation about the ways in which popular practice – both in Catholicism and in Judaism - often veers from official religious doctrine.” Afterwards, one of the professors approached Rabbi Brous, smiling. “I’m sorry about that awkward silence,” he said. “You see, we’re not only Catholic – we’re Minnesotan. So we basically never say what’s on our minds.” “Oh,” responded Rabbi Brous, “I see. Well I’m not only a Jew, I’m also a New Yorker. So I basically always say what’s on my mind.” (Rabbi Sharon Brous, Ikar, Yom Kippur Sermon 5773). Tonight, I’d like to share with you what’s on my mind. On my mind, and in my heart. 2 This past year, we’ve witnessed a litany of violence—mass shootings in Newtown, that we thought would be the turning point on gun violence, only to have it become a colossal failure of political and spiritual will; the bombing at the Boston Marathon and subsequent manhunt for the two perpetrators that shut down a major United States city for 24 hours; rape as a war crime in Congo and the brutal gang rapes of young women in India; suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq; and last month, chemical warfare was used in Syria. Our hearts are darkened with grief. We wonder: Is violence an inherent part of the human condition? We are hungry, tonight; but the fast that Isaiah speaks of is urgent and it isn’t to achieve some nascent spiritual piety. Don’t fast to make God happy, the prophet preaches, because God is too damn busy worrying about ignored and starving children, and those to whom we give access to semi-automatic weapons, and for the earth that we neglect and abuse. This fast we are doing—it better lead to concrete acts of moral concern and widen the circle of compassion for all humanity and the earth; otherwise, proclaims Isaiah, don’t bother. We aren’t looking for easy answers; we know that life is messy and complex, that in our increasingly global village we are ever more responsible for one another; that soccer balls lost in a Japanese tsunami wash up on the Alaskan shoreline. We are hungry for moral guidance, but a diet of obsequious answers and political punditry starves our souls and causes our spirits to wither. We are intellectually adept and we can hold competing values, but if we are served empty rhetoric and vacuous platitudes we will look elsewhere for spiritual nourishment and the institutions we’ve built over the past centuries will starve themselves out of existence. From our inception, Judaism has celebrated our exquisite human creation and sought to understand and control our capacity for 3 violence. The classic story of Cain and Abel, in which Cain murders his brother—and, if we live into the epic myth, one quarter of the world’s population—is brutal. And, despite or perhaps because of Cain’s cheekiness to God, the story poses the essential spiritual question for human kind: HaShomer achi anochi? Am I my brother’s keeper? Yes. Judaism is un-ambivalent. For all the anxiety we have about just about everything, we know that caring for each other, our responsibilities to one another, building a beloved community is the essential core of living as a Jew. HaShomer achoti anochi? Am I my sister’s keeper? Absolutely. Yom Kippur: This t’shuvah business means that for 3,000+ years, Jews have understood that while we strive for purity and holiness, we humans have a pretty good track record of falling away from God’s vision of our lives for justice and righteousness, and we need to work hard to get ourselves refocused. At the same time, we believe (and we’ll study this together tomorrow morning), that human beings are born with pure souls. So much depends on us: the decisions we make, the love we share, the forgiveness we seek, the path we follow, the integrity we hunger for. We are commanded to “seek peace and pursue justice, (Psalm 34:15)” and “to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, so that nation will not lift up sword against nation; neither will they train for war again. (Isaiah 2:4).” Tomorrow afternoon, we will read the Book of Jonah. Jonah—a regular guy—is given a mission from God. Go, says the Eternal, to the city of Nineveh, and “persuade its pernicious people to repent for their sins or else.” Nu? Isn’t this what the prophets do? They speak on God’s behalf. 4 Jonah, despite his best attempts to flee, cannot, in the words of Ambassador Michael Oren, “dodge his divinely ordained dilemma. If he succeeds in convincing the Ninevehians to atone and no harm befalls them, many will soon question whether that penitence was ever really necessary. Jonah will be labeled an alarmist. But, what if the people of Nineveh ignore the warning and the city meets the same fiery fate as Sodom and Gomorrah? Then Jonah the prophet has failed. “Such is the paradox of prophecy for Jonah, a lose-lose situation. No wonder he runs away. He flees to the sea, only to be swallowed by a gigantic fish, and then to the desert, cowering under a gourd. But, in the end, the fish coughs him up and the gourd withers. The moral: there is no avoiding Jonah’s paradox. Once elected by God, whatever the risks, he must act. (By: Ambassador Michael Oren www.standwithus.com /news/article.asp?id=1593#.Ui0Lmbwqgy4).” Jonah is the ultimate cautionary tale: Do something and the consequences could be awful; stand idly by while our neighbor’s bleed and the outcome is far worse. As the United States Congress and our president debate limited military airstrikes against the Assad government in Syria, in the shadow of 9/11, on the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, I find my heart wandering to High Holy Days a year from now. For 65 years, “Never Again,” has been the mantra of the Jewish people. Never Again to such vile extremism! Never Again to the gas chambers! Never Again to genocide! 5 Never Again, in the words of Rabbi Joachim Prinz (z”l), to silence, the most insidious and evil crime of humanity! As the Assad government used chemical warfare on its own people, every person of conscience who has seen the videos of the chemical attack is devastated—children gasping for air, men flailing on the floor, women screaming and bleeding from their eyes, their mouths frothing with foam; one young boy’s arm jerking back and forth as if he’s conducting a symphony as he dies… How can our souls not be assaulted, our naiveté punctured, our conscience mortally challenged, our youthful vigor begging for succor? I am deeply worried about getting involved in yet another military conflict in yet another of the world’s roughest neighborhoods. At the same time, I am gravely concerned that when we gather on Kol Nidre a year from now, we will be stained with a scarlet “J”, descendants of Jonah who sought to flee and abdicate our moral responsibility: Will we be begging forgiveness from the Syrian people who are watching their children die from chemical warfare while we who could have done something stood on the sidelines and did not get involved? Ah, the paradox of Jonah: Alarmist? Impotent? Incompetent? Prescient? Visionary? Once again, I paraphrase my friend and colleague Rabbi Jason Rosenberg: How many times does it say in Torah, Talmud, Medieval rabbinic literature, or contemporary Jewish thought, how many times does the phrase, “they’re not my problem” appear? Exactly never. Exactly never. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel implored, “Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation? Our concern must be expressed not [only] symbolically, but literally; not only publicly, 6 but privately; not only occasionally, but regularly. What we need is the involvement of every one of us as individuals. What we need is restlessness, a constant awareness of the monstrosity of injustice.” Is there any doubt as to the monstrosity of injustice in Syria? As the President and congress simultaneously debate limited airstrikes and diplomacy, I believe our attention must focus not only on the international political crisis, but the spiritual one. Two million Syrians are refugees in Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Turkey, and yes—Israel. Official estimates are that more than 120,000 have been killed in the war. When is it enough? What needs to happen before we see this not only as their problem, but ours? Is it the number slaughtered? Do more people need to die by conventional or chemical weapons? [And yes, the irony here is bitter on our tongues: we distinguish between the vile instruments used to destroy human life.