October 1, 2006 - SUPER HEROES FOR OUR TIMES - (5767– Yom Kippur Kol Nidre Service)

Every year I go looking for postal stamps that will convey some message related to the High Holidays. There is no stamp specifically dedicated to these special days. Galling as that may be, it’s true. I guess there simply aren’t enough Jews in this country to justify the Postal Service’s producing a High Holiday issue. Yet, for some odd reason, there is a Chanukah stamp. Well, I’ll leave that phenomenon for you to ponder.

To be sure, there is the perpetual “love” stamp in its various guises. Last year I bought it in the “I love you written across a yellow heart” motif and sent that out on all our correspondence. But, I didn’t want to repeat that theme this year. Building on what I had to say on Rosh Hashanah about the dire challenges from Islamic radicalism that we Westerners must confront, somehow, the love stamp didn’t seem all that fitting this year. What I did choose, however, almost as an epiphany, were the Super Heroes. Yes. The sheet of stamps of the different Super Heroes!

Now here, I realized, were stamps that carry an uplifting image and message for our times! Here’s Superman and Batman, Wonder Woman and Flash, Green Arrow and Plastic Man. There’s Super-girl, the Hulk, Hawk-man and Aqua-man…all with their super human powers…and oh boy!, I thought, could we use ever them now!

In part, I chose these stamps because of the subcutaneous message that here are figures, many created by Jewish cartoonists…and in lieu of the Postal Service’s ignoring these awesome days, the least I could do was to choose the next best thing…products of Jewish minds, hands and spirits that seek to inspire courage, patriotism, and from some Superman films, “Truth! Justice! and the American way!”

You and I know that we Jews didn’t always have it so good here in America. Some of these super hero figures appeared because of our diminutive numbers, our post-Depression, post- Holocaust feelings of persecution and desperation in a world which lacked surety, security and safety for our people. But, in truth, the cartoonists weren’t the first to provide models and surrogates for courage. They were building on a long standing tradition. We Jews have been creating super-heroes for ourselves for centuries…millennia, actually. We had to, to survive, spiritually.

As we shall see tomorrow in the afternoon litany of this Holy Day, throughout most of our history, our people seemed to suffer one oppressive time and regime after another. So, the ancient rabbis sought to provide them with superheroes. The battered and the exiled didn’t need the kinds of flawed, human prototypes we today have reclaimed in our studies of Tanak. They didn’t need to be focused on Abraham’s abusive traits that led him to cast out Ishma’ail and his mother Hagar, handmaiden of Sarah. They didn’t need to see Isaac’s vulnerabilities, character flaws and desperation following the Akedah, nor Jacob’s many foibles as he wrestled with his faith in God and questioned the Almighty’s purposes for him seemingly at every turn. We, today, are dismayed by Moses’ temper and his ultimately losing battle in his effort to redeem this slave-bound people from their being psychologically tethered to Egypt. We successful Jews of modernity have, until very recently, been able to afford Biblical figures of clay feet and flawed characters.

No, instead of focusing on the imperfections of the Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, what the victims of the Babylonia Exile, the despotic and vicious Roman rule, the bloody and devastating Spanish Inquisition, and the expulsions from Portugal, England, France and the German states, the persistent pogroms in the Pale in Eastern Europe and Czarist Russia, and the degrading, low key oppression for centuries under Moslem rule, and, finally, the Holocaust itself…what they needed were figures who would inspire in them the faith, the trust in God, and the hope that Second Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s words would be fulfilled in their time. They needed reassurance that God would redeem them and, because of the merit of their ancestors (known in Hebrew as Z’chut Avot), if not because of their suffering, or for their own merit, God would return them to their land, the land which God had promised to their fore-bearers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the covenanted parcel of ground in the center of the then civilized world which God had ceded them in exchange for their promise to adhere to God’s commandments. They needed and got that reassurance through the rabbinic reshaping and hero-izing, if you will the main Biblical protagonists.

The rabbis excised the flaws of these Biblical characters through creative midrasheem…stories and word play which removed the patriarchs’ and matriarchs’ foibles and turned these very human people them into gallant, venerable and larger-than-life figures.

The rabbis created heroes not celebrities. In lieu of the dearth of national philatelic recognition of the Yameem Nora’eem and because the Postmaster General hasn’t selected any Patriarchs or Matriarchs as subjects for stamps, I pasted the ones modern Jewish cartoonists created on the envelops of my New Year greetings in order to inspire, albeit with tongue-in-cheek, the same kinds of feelings and visions in the people we know and to all who might see these stamps throughout the freedom loving world.

I want to stop for a second and reiterate what I just said. The rabbis created heroes not celebrities. Celebs shine for a brief moment in time…but do you know how to tell them from the real deal? Watch what they do! While the celebrity is a big name temporarily, the hero is a big person, permanently!

We need some big people today! Yes, we need them now! I fanaticize about creating a Biblical-Cartoon hero to fashion our lives after, because we all need to emulate some great traits in our lives. I am conjuring someone, either like Abraham who fought the kidnappers of his nephew, Lot, or the Superheroes who also stand up for the downtrodden and oppressed. Maybe, for example, we could combine characters and have an Elijah-like Superman fly in and smack the delegates of the United Nations into reality, to blow a powerful shofar in their ears so that they would prioritize the genocide that is happening in the Darfur region and make stopping it, rather than perpetually criticizing and blaming Israel, job one. Perhaps a Jacob-like Batman could swing over the General Assembly and give Mahmoud Ahmadenijad a clop on the noggin, foiling his Holocaust denial and his eagerness to destroy Israel. And how about another, whom we’ll call Tzedakah Person (TP for short) who will both dig deeply in his/her own pockets and inspire us to help Israel now rebuild her northern cities which suffered 901 direct hits from Hezbollah Ketyusha rockets. It is up to the Jewish communities around the world to raise a half billion dollars in this cause. Denver’s portion of that amount is $2 million. Of that amount, $1.7 million has already been raised. Now it would be Tzedakah Person’s job to lift us up from our despair over the despicable actions of Hezbollah and the world’s responses to Israel’s attempts to repulse terror, and inspire us.

Lebanon will get her money from the United Nations. We Jews are responsible for repairing Israel. Such is the world we live in. But, Tzedakah Person would team up with Abraham-Superman to rectify that injustice sometime in this Biblical-cartoon fantastic future I’m putting forth.

Tonight is Kol Nidre. It is, alas, not a night for fantasizing. Israel’s needs and our responsibility to help our fellow Jews is real and it is urgent. It is now.

And this night in Jewish history is replete with qualities and values for us to emulate. Kol Nidre beckons us to get honest with ourselves and our God. Tomorrow I want to spend some time talking about truth and honesty. But tonight, I simply want to introduce us to the program for this day. For, absent our adult beliefs in any Biblical or super heroes coming to our aid, we need to become, for tonight and tomorrow, heroes in our own eyes. And in order to do this, in addition to supporting the people of Darfur and of Israel, we have to be able to stand up to and admit our flaws and our shortcomings. Real heroes are what they are because they are real people with real problems, real potentialities and real capabilities. They make mistakes and sometimes hurt others. They do things which fall outside the purview of what God would have them do; they sometimes behave inappropriately. But the mark of real people, as opposed to the plastic ones we meet so often in the pages of People Magazine or on ET, is that they make amends when they foul up. They acknowledge their wrongdoings and, without ulterior motives, apologize. They set the record straight. They come clean to get more than their self images back on track. They atone in order to get their very lives together.

The Super Heroes of this evening will be the persons who, with all of their flaws, are able to reach out to God and reach into themselves, moving past all that is wrong. They will re-attach their futures to their best selves, to the very best that is within them. They will list, admit and reject their shortcomings, failings and sins, choosing not to stay tethered to them, but to now move past them to recapture their inner standards and their ethical moorings. They will put their best intentions to work and will give of themselves in ways that truly seem superhuman and will do deeds that will surprise even themselves.

They shall be exemplars for their neighbors and their relatives in what they do and what they study. They shall be role models by how they love and how they care. They will be doing their parts to create a better, saner, more courageous world. They will then be able to look at themselves and realize that they have become their very own Kol Nidre heroes.

Can we not imagine that they I have been speaking about are us? I surely can, and I hope, on this holy night of Kol Nidre, that you can too.