Kol Nidrei Sermon 5777 (2016)
A man got into trouble when his wife informed him that the day had gone by &he had forgotten her birthday. He told her how sorry he was, & said he would do anything to make up for it. She immediately said, ‘Alright, tomorrow there better be something in the driveway for me that goes from zero to 200in 2 seconds flat, or you're in for it.’ The next morning the wife awoke early, & looking out her bedroom window saw a small package in the driveway. She was a bit perturbed, as this was not what she was expecting. She went out & retrieved the package and upon opening it, found a handsome brand new bathroom scale! The funeral for her husband took place earlier this week.
This story might seem a bit off color, but it does illustrate a central theme of this Holy Day: that our deeds can determine whether we'll be inscribed in the Book of Life –or not.
It also illustrates another point I’d like to make this evening –as certain as this husband screwed up, we will inevitably face disappointment & worse – adversity.
Facing adversity, disappointment & loss, is a hard but inevitable part of the human condition.My eldest son Ranon, who is 9, is beginning to understand the hard reality that there is often a difference between his expectations & his actual experience– otherwise known as a bummer, a letdown or disappointment. Part of me wants to spare him from this & other misfortunes or difficulties, but I know that trying to do so is impossible.
More importantly,it wouldn’t allow him to develop coping mechanisms, problem-solving skills or perseverance. As someone who has struggled with depression, I’m sure some of you have too, you know what really matters is not how well we avoid it, but what we do with it once we experience it.
In my opinion, one of the important aspects of teshuvah, often over- looked, is developing what Stanford psychologist & Sefardic Jew, Carol Dweck, calls a ‘Growth Mindset.’ A mindset open to finding constructive ways to deal with & overcome what life throws us.With grit, with a commitment to learning from our experiences, & with a desire to grow personally, she shows we can more often than not; turn these inevit- able experiences with disappointment & adversity into opportunities for growth & renewal. Perhaps rediscovering or better appreciating what our liturgy asserts about the start of the Jewish New Year – that it is a Ha’ Yom Ha’rat Olam – a world pregnant with possibilities, opportunities – with love, meaning & purpose.
This subject of nurturing resilience, fostering grit, & responding con- structively to adversity from a Jewish perspective, is dealt with in Rabbi Harold Kushner’s exceptional book, Overcoming Life’s Disappoint- ments, a book that has helped meand I’d like to share a few of his lessons this evening, each drawn from the example of Moses.
What Moses could accomplish in a single day wouldput many of us to shame – confronting Pharaoh or splitting the Reed Sea to lead the Israelites across. Equally impressive is what he could accomplish if given severeral weeks – calling down 10 plagues on theEgyptians,spend- ing 40 days on a mountaintop receiving God’s word. But more than anything, what impresses methemost is what Moses could do day afterday, week after week, for 40-yrs – serving as theleader of a people who, more often than not, did not want to be led & complained about the life into which he had led them. They hated the conditions of their wandering. They weretroubled by theuncertainty of what lay ahead for them & their children. They never quitebelieved they were capable of conquering settling the Promised Land. They resented whatthey could do & what they could not do.Moses had 40-yearsofconstant upset! Sohow did he do it? How did Moses learn to overcome the day-in, day-out disappointmentssetbacks,the frustration of his dreams? How did Moses develop coping mechanisms? And how can we?
First & foremost, Rabbi Kushner tells us, is byremembering why it is that we do what we do.
The story is told of a rabbiwho had had such a busy week that he never got around to visiting the sick members of hiscongregation in the hospital. As a result, he had to cancel a plannedSunday afternoon family outing in order to make his hospital visits. After an hour, he left thehospital feeling that he had wasted his time.
Two of the people he had come to see had beendischarged previous afternoon (& were probably angry at himfor not having come to seethem earlier). Two more were sleeping & he hesitated to wake them. Another had a roomful of visitors & saw the rabbi’s presence as an intrusion. And the last patient he visited spent 20 minutescomplaining about her aches & pains & previous afflictions cited themas the reasons she could no longer believe in God or the value of prayer. The rabbi could nothelp thinking of all the ways he would rather have spent that hour.
Walking back to theparking lot unhappy with the demands of his job & feeling resentful, he passed an officebuilding witha security guard in front. The guard wished him a good afternoon, which prompted the rabbi to stop & say to him, “It’s Sunday. The building is closed & empty. Whyare you standing here?” The guard answered. “I’ve been hired to make sure nobody breaks into steal or vandalize anything. But what are you doing here in a suit & tie on a Sundayafternoon? Whom do you work for?”
The rabbi was about to tell the guard the name of his congregation when he paused, reachedinto his pocket for a business card, & said, ‘Here’s my name & phone number. I’ll pay you $10 a week to call me every Monday morning & ask me that question: Remind me toask myself, Whom do I work for?’
Something dangerously corrosive happens to the soul when we lose our sense of purpose, ortoo narrowly define it.
A Jewish legend tells that after Moses received the original set of theTen Commandments from God atop Mount Sinai, he began to climb down the mountain todeliver God’s word to the people.
Moses was an old man & it was hard for him to negotiatethe climb, but he did it because he was inspired by what he was doing. Halfway down themountain, though, when he saw the Israelites dancing around the Golden Calf, the writing disappeared from the tablets & suddenly they were just 2large, heavy stones, too heavy forMoses to handle. At that moment, they fell from his grasp and broke.
When he thought he wasdoing something that made a difference to people, Moses could bear any burden. When he lostthat sense of pur- pose, he became too discouraged to keep on doing the hard things that wereasked of him. God had to summon Moses back to the mountaintop, not only to recreate a 2ndset of tablets, but to restore his sense of purpose before he could continue his task.
When we lose sight of the bigger picture of why it is that we do what we do, we lose our drive & sense of self, & risk succumbing to disappoint- ment & thesense of failure. But when we remind ourselves of our purpose & remain true to ourselves our ability to persevere thru adversity isseemingly limitless.
A story was once reported about a man who would visit his wife in anursing home every day. She suffered from Alzheimer’scould not recognize him. People asked him, ‘Why do you keep on going when she doesn’t even know who you are?’ And he would answer simply & resolutely, “Because I know who I am.”This man teaches us that a key to surviving ¬ being consumed by adversity is to remember who we are and why it is that we do what we do.
The 2nd lesson R. Kushner learns from Moses is the importance of letting go of the ‘tyranny of the dream’, or as the great American Mythologist Joseph Campbell put it: “We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
We all have dreams – this is how my life should be, this is what my future should look like. Sometimes the dream centers on a profession or an expectation of a certain standard of living. We paint a picture of what our family life will be like – a loving, devoted partner; a beautiful, spacious home; a certainnumber of healthy children brought into the world without complication.
But when life doesn’t match those dreams, what do we do?
For the latepsychologist,Daniel Levinson, one of the founders of the field of Positive Adult Development,the only escape from a senseof failure is to free ourselves from the tyranny of those dreams. We need to free ourselves of the conviction that we will have failed at life if our earlier dreams don’t come true. It’s about facing our past with gratitude & our future with confidence, even as we carry with us the memories of dreams that never came true – for there are other, more attainable dreams waiting for us.
Henrietta Szold, founder of what would become the towering giant of American Zionism in the 20th-c – Hadassah, dreamed of having a family & children. The personal tragedy & great disappointment of her life was that she never married, never had a family.
A heartbreaking moment of Szold’s personal story reads like an Edith Wharton novel of unrequited love. It begins in 1903. For 6 long yearsHenrietta Szold & Louis Ginzburg worked closely together. She, the daughter of one of Baltimore’s great rabbis, he, the up-&-coming crown prince of Solomon Schechter’s recast faculty at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her exceptional talents enabled her to become the 1st only woman en- rolled in an otherwise all-male rabbinical school. As astudent, translator & editor from 1903 – 1909, Henrietta Szold would collaborate with Louis Ginzburg in what was one of the most fruitful relationships of Jewish scholarship in the 20th-c. Though she was around 40 & he more than a decade her junior, in Henrietta’s heart there was much, much more to the relationship.
The hours they spent together, the lunches, the dinners, the long walks along the Hudson; for Henrietta the possibility of a proposal from Louis remained a steady hope. And so when Louis Ginzburg returned from a European trip in the summer of 1908 with news of an engagement to another woman, the shock, betrayal & horror Henrietta Szold experienced was be- yond description. ‘A Dark Chronicle of a Broken Heart,’ is how the scholar Dr. Baila Shargel characterizes Szold’s writing from this period. One of Szold’s diary entries says it all: ‘Today it is 4 weeks since my only real happiness was killed.’ Yet Szold would not allow that profound disappointment to thwart her life & deprive her of other great accomplishments.
Though Henrietta Szold continued to cherish the dream of marrying & having children, she did not allow herself to be held hostage by that dream. Instead, she devoted herself tosaving the lives of other children & so many others around the world. The ‘Youth Aliyah’program she created thru Hadassah is estimated to have saved some 22,000 Jewish children from Hitler’sconcentration camps. The highly advanced medical treatment of Hadassah Hospital extended to Arabs, as well as Jews, in Palestine played a major role in lowering Arab infant mortality.
Szold’s story is courageous for so many reasons. But most of all, it is the story of one woman, one individual, – to paraphraseFrench author Albert Camus – finding, in the midst of her winter, an invincible summer.
The KotskerRebbe once described 3 rungs of sorrow. He who stands on a normal rung weeps; he who stands on a higher rung is silent; but the one who stands on the topmost rung converts their sorrow into song. No matter the hand Szold was dealt, she transformed her sorrow into song, & so much more. Tothis day Henrietta Szold is regarded as 1 of the gen- uineheroic figures of American-Jewish history – a scholarly woman, a passionately committed Jew & a person who saved manythousands of lives.
Up on a mountain, God painted a picture for Moses, a dream of what the Israelite people in covenant with God could achieve,what they could become. When Moses came down from the mountain to find the Israel- ites prostrate in worship of the golden calf, he not only shattered the two tablets he bore upon the ground – his dream shattered, as well. But the shards of neither were discarded. The Midrash depicts Moses as lovingly picking up the pieces of stone &, when the new tablets would later be carried throughout the Israelites’ journey, the old pieces would be carried in the ark along with the new. R. Kushner imagines Moses saying to him- self as he contemplated those fragments touched by the hand of God, “Those broken pieces of stone remind me that I had a dream once, a dream of how I would reshape the world,a dream of how God, working thru me, would make everything perfect. It didn’t turn out that way. But those stones speak to me not of failure & frustration but of reality, of the limits of what is possible when you are working with human beings.”
Kushner continues:“I ended up using them as stepping-stones, building blocks that helped me learn about human nature, about myself other people, about realistic & unrealistic hopes. Ratherthan giving up on life, rather than giving up on people because of my disappointment, I built on the experience of my disappointment. The broken tablets pointed me toward wholeness, & the dream that didn’t come true helped me discoverwhere truth lies.” In order to overcome, R.Kushner teaches, we do not need to abandon our dreams– but neithercan we allow them to define success & failure in our lives.
Lou Holtz, the legendary football coach, once said that, “Life is 10% what happens to you & 90% how you respond to it.” While I may quibble with Holtz’s percentages, what the hard-scrabble Holtz knew, whatSzold knew, is that none of us choose the set of cards we are dealt. There is so much that is beyond our control. This is why humility is SO important.
Now, when life doesn’t seem to be cutting us any breaks, the last thing many of us are feeling is anexaggerated sense of self-importance.
But the humility ofwhich R. Kushner is speaking is not a function of ego, or self-effacement, or false modesty. Humility, he teaches, is the realiza- tion that not everything that happens in life is all about you. Things may work out well, but you may not have been the primary reason for their success. Things may fail, but the failure may not have been your fault. Humility means recognizing that you are not God & it is not your job or responsibility to run the world. That was how Moses was able to remain humble–by recognizingthat he was only God’s instrument. His humility helped him cope with the frustrations of trying to lead an uncooperative nation.
Tomorrow we will hear once again the haunting liturgicalwords: “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, & on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live & who shall die, who shall flourish & who shall perish. These words of U-NetanehTokef are some of the most troubling words to say & under- stand, I struggle with them every year.
But Dr. Sarah Alexander shares an interpretation that resonates with me.
She says thatthe opening paragraph of the prayer, the part in which we are told that the book is opened & the entries are in our own hand- writing, is a poetic way of saying that some of the things that will happen to us in the year ahead will be the result of things we do & choices we make. We deserve the credit & the blame for perhaps half of the things that happen to us.
Then the 2nd half of the prayer, the part about our fate being decided or sealed on Yom Kippur by forces beyond our control, is a poetic way of saying that many of the things that will shape our lives in the new year will be out of our hands. This is the result of biology, other people’s choices, sheer luck. And in this way, I find the words of U-NetanehTokefnot only meaningful, but even comforting. Afterall, would we really want to be in total control of life, anyway? As 1 writer puts it: ‘If life obeyed our plans & expectations, thenlife would only be as wide as our finitemind could contemplate& our limited imaginationenvision.’
While no1 wishes it, as we live our lives, as we raise our children, we will be faced with adversity, big & small. I think that one of the greatest gifts we give to ourselves, our children, our grand-children, is to recognize the value of endurance & the ability to bounce-back & even grow from disappointment, from loss, from failure. To have the ability toremember why it is that we do what we do, to relinquish the tyranny of brok- en dreams, &retain a sense of humility, remembering what is in our control & what is out of our control,can be tools to help us constructively respond to the inevitable adversities of life.It is this attitude that can help us maintain worthiness and authenticity, & develop more courage, compassion &connectionas a result of our experiences.
May we discover untapped strength & resiliency from the difficult exper- iencesof life,may they teach us, embolden us. May they make us better friends & loved ones, equipping us with empathy & a deeper appreciation for the good that supportive, caring people can have during our toughest times. In other words, experiencing adversity, confronting it, & over- coming it all,can make us better people. It can makes us wiser, more sensitive, & better prepared to face the next train coming, be it for good or for bad.