June 20, 2008 - HOW DO WE REPORT THE WORLD? - (17th of Sivan,, 5768, 5768)

When I was a kid, Walt Disney brought Davy Crockett, in the guise of Fess Parker, to the silver screen and encouraged me and all my friends to indulge in an over-abundance of hero worship. Yeah, we all went out and bought coon-skin caps, toy rifles and rubber hunting and throwing knives. We young pioneers were going to settle new frontiers…or, like Crockett, Travis and Bowie did at the Alamo, die trying. One particular scene relatively early on in the film particularly stuck with me. It was filmed either in the Smoky or the Blue Ridge Mountains (and I’ll bet that they were the Blue Ridge because my family and I spent a lot of summers in that region of the country and I think I recognized them.) In any case and for whatever reason, Crockett and his side-kick, Russel, played by Buddie Ebsen, were in those mountains---for a specific reason (which I can’t remember), and all of a sudden, a war party of Black Feet Indians came by. They were moving at a pretty good clip as they followed a game trail up the ridge, looking either for other Indians, but more probably for Crockett and his side-kick.

I still remember the view up and out over the mountains as the Black Feet came charged by. Those high points on the tops of those tree-filled mountains back east are probably the reason I have always loved mountains. It probably accounts for my battling the Fourteen-ers I have here in Colorado, not giving up until I am sitting on the summits looking out at all that God has created, marveling that, having so recently felt as badly as I did those last hundred or so steps, I could be so wonderfully relieved and rewarded, able as I am to reconnoiter the entire region from those heights, and simply giddy with the vast, astounding beauty.

I am fairly sure that this is the same experience that the spies that Moses sent out had as they snuck into and around the Promised Land. I am certain that they used the high places in the land to collect their intelligence, and took in from those summits its valleys and streams, its fields and fruit tree-filled vistas. Before they return from their less-than-a-year long outing, they, in one instance, cut down a branch with a cluster of grapes. It was so big that it took two of them to transport it back to the Israelites encamped in the Wilderness of Zin. (This is the image, by the way, that you will see on all the cars of the Ministry of Tourism in Israel today).

Although the ten spies found the land to be, indeed, flowing with milk and honey, the reports they brought back terrified the Israelites, causing a general panic and that plaintive, rebellious howl of their needing to return to Egypt rather to die trying to take what God, covenantally, had promised the people but which they felt incapable of carrying out.

Having at other times commented on various aspects of this story, I want just to spend a moment or two thinking a bit about how devastating this negative report that the ten tribal leader-scouts was to the Israelites—how, almost in an instant, it destroyed the morale of this quavering mass and how it reflects something sad and peculiar in the human condition. For, isn’t it true that we lock on like a tractor beam when someone is giving us bad news? I don’t know what it is in us that seeks out and feeds upon the terrible, the shocking and the miserable. Turn on the evening news: you know, if it bleeds, it leads: the fires, car crashes and shootings; the child abuses and abusers, murders, assaults…it’s all there…(growling) and we love it! We drown our psyches in this stuff. We lap it up. But if a feature comes on about someone doing good, we go to another channel or take a snack break. Somehow, news about good Samaritans turns us off.

I can’t quite account for this phenomenon, but I know it to be true. We’d rather listen to a juicy piece of gossip than to someone who is building someone else up. We’d rather wallow in the negatives, in life’s sloppy slime than engage ourselves with what inspires, what challenges, and what wins.

To a degree the spy-incident teaches us something else that is critically important. It is that leaders and organizers can work for hours, days, weeks, months and years…and all that they try to put together can be brought down and collapse around and even on them if there is a consistent negative drum beat that someone or some-ones are banging out, causing the main group to doubt, to see the spots, to question. I give you an example that occurs in just about every congregation, including ours, that ever tried to put together A Religious School Committee. Because such a committee can work and be very supportive for the children, the curriculum, the school, the teachers, the principal and the rabbi, but let a small number of them begin to snipe out loud about their misgivings and let a few parents over hear them, and almost like a wind blown range-wild fire, all hell breaks loose. No one gets why it is that this family might be resigning, this teacher quitting or that child leaving the school. No one can pin point when or where things went south, and what was a wonderful enterprise wound up with everyone at each others’ throats, but there you have it. /It’s almost to a “t”/ what the spies did to the Israelite community there in the desert. They pricked the peoples’ balloon of faith in themselves and their futures. They shot ever such a small dart into the bubble. They sat at the very back of the row boat and drilled such a small hole…and you know what? It didn’t take but about an hour for the boat to sink. How do you figure? What do you do, especially if you are the leader? Yes, I know, I know, you confiscate all the pins and darts, and you commandeer all the drills.

People, we come out here each year. And each year, if we aren’t blow away by hurricane force winds and driving rains, we sit and gaze at the beauty around us, and are lifted by our own prayers and senses of gratitude…gratitude that God has created a world so beautiful, with such abundance, with lakes, and fields, and trees, and skies of such blues, and the beautiful hues of our Colorado sunsets. And if someone happens to whisper that those colors are caused by all the pollutants in the air, it might burst our bubble. If someone tells us that the lake water is filled with sewage and that the mosquitoes that hang around here may carry West Nile virus, it may flatten our tires. But, it is here more than at most other venues that we recapture our senses of wonder and thanks. It is here that we re-center ourselves, and having put on some bug repellent, and having contributed to the park system and having bought “cleaner cars,” we can and must reject those negative whispers and steel ourselves from the bad, confidence shaking reports. If we don’t put our faith in some of our institutions, if we don’t realize that all people including our leaders have some clay in or on their feet, we are going to go through life, stressed out, fed up, and ultimately washed up, sitting like Job on our own heaps of smelly things. And it will be our own faults for not stopping /to see/ that there are flowers here let alone smell them!

It all comes down to the choices we make about the perspectives we take. I’m fond of the Chassidic aphorism that God creates a beautiful world, but people put their hands in front of their eyes and can’t see past them to appreciate it all. Tonight, let’s take a moment to appreciate this beautiful world in which we live. And let’s vow not to give into all the negatives that people so often try to present us. Let’s stay on the positive side of life, and leave the griping, whining and grimacing to the others.