Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5770 - CRACKS THAT LET THE LIGHT IN

In the year 70 C.E., murderous Roman soldiers were besieging Jerusalem. They had succeeded in totally blockading the city. One of our Jewish sages, Yochanan ben Zakkai, determined that resistance to the Roman legion was futile. In his determination and with demonstrated enumah, tikvah and, as modern day Israelis would say, optimiyut: faith, hope, and optimism for the future, he managed to have himself delivered in a coffin and transported out of the city. Although, the Roman soldiers, making insure what the coffin contained was indeed dead, repeatedly thrust their swords through the box, Yochanan ben Zakkai arrived at Yavneh unharmed. He then went to meet with the leader of the Roman armies, Vespasian. For some odd reason, Ben Zakai called the Roman, to his face, “emperor.” At the very moment, a runner from Rome came, declaring that the Emperor had died and that, indeed, Vespasian was the new emperor of Rome. For his auspicious prediction, the new sovereign permitted Yochanan ben Zakkai a wish. Ben Zakkai’s wish was to establish a school in Yavneh. This school enabled Jewish life, based on Torah, to survive the Roman occupation and outlast that empire until this very day. For us Jews today, to live with hope (tikvah), faith (enumnah), and optimism (optimiyut) is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. To live without these essentials is to risk everything we have and everything that we are. Please allow me to explain.

This past year has brought trials and difficulties to many members of our congregation and beyond. With costs rising, health care being either less and less affordable or wholly out of reach for some, the labor market throwing off millions of jobs, in more than a few instances, it has been increasingly difficult to hold one’s head up and look to the future with optimism. Now, it’s all well and good that the economy is showing signs of improvement, but if you’ve lost your job and your unemployment compensation is running out, making a mortgage payment may well be what’s keeping you from the street. Thousands have already lost that battle and have either moved in with family or friends. Or, they have swelled the ranks of the on-the-street homeless. And economic well-being isn’t the only thing that can keep folks up at night. If there is a child who is struggling in school, if there is illness in the extended family, if relations with a teen aren’t going all that well and there is a constant battle in the home, sleeplessness isn’t hard to understand. To live with such dire anxiety without a safety net of hope, faith, and optimism about the future makes every thinking second slow torture and breakdown all too possible.

Perhaps, then, the greatest hurdle for those who are finding themselves down, strange as this may sound, is to regain the understanding that the earth doesn’t revolve around them and that what they are facing is in no real way is their fault. That they have lost their job, for example, is no more a gage of their abilities than it is for millions of others who are in the same boat. That, in the search for employment, there isn’t time for support groups to explain that this isn’t their fault and is no reflection on their talents adds to the misery because, were they able to compare notes, they would realize how many, many others are in the same boat as they. It isn’t a misery-loves-company argument I am making here. It is that there is an epidemic of joblessness in the world. One need not and must take it personally even though we know that it affects them so. But one needs to remember the gratitude for having a social safety net there for them in the guise of unemployment insurance, especially when national health care is being debated! .

Lacking hope, faith, and optimism, Abraham might have starved in the over-populated region of Ur of the Chaldees. There are those Biblical scholars and anthropologists who conjecture that there were simply too many people for the region around the Tigris and Euphrates River economies to support. When such things happened, often groups would strike out for other, often unknown, under-settled places; and attempt to establish new lives for themselves and their loved ones.

In today’s economy, President Obama has encouraged people to begin new journeys themselves; ventures, as it were, to follow up on dreams and ideas long set aside because of more pressing priorities. There are those unemployed folks who, lifting themselves by their bootstraps, have headed back to school to broaden their chances for employment when companies begin to hire again. Others have taken an entrepreneurial turn and struck out on their own. This takes guts. It takes thinking, foresight, and a cash investment. Most of all, it takes faith that our nation will regain its economic footing and that Congress, for example, will come through with unemployment coverage that will tide the jobless over until then.

We all know what our national dependence on Middle East oil has done to our pocket books as well as to our national security. That America has managed to invent and innovate her way out of similar circumstances in the past is all the more reason for this or any administration to encourage such inventiveness and native resilience. Were he so inclined, Barack Obama could point to Israel and to the fact that this virtually resource-less land and its over-achieving populace are responsible for so much of what has fueled the use of cell phones and computers. It is the technological cooperation of Israel and the United States that is helping to keep so many employed, and both nations free and out in front of our enemies, as we must continue to be.

You know me to be no Pollyanna. I am not saying that it is hope, faith, and optimism alone that will bring us through these tough times. One can sit and pray endlessly that God will send us answers and bundles of money as some of us witnessed happening to that Orthodox couple in the film we showed here at B’nai Chaim’s movie night, Ushpizin. But, generally speaking, life in America doesn’t work that way. At the very least, those who are in need are expected to participate in priming the pump, actively seeking what there is to help tide them over and to prepare themselves for better times. It really does no good to sit and despair over how the wheels came off the bus, to cast blame on others or to heap abuse on oneself. The better strategy is to believe that things will not stay this way forever, and to invest with faith that the turnaround will include you, too.

B’nai Chaim, itself, didn’t need the torrential downpour that not so many weeks ago flooded our Social Hall and Kitchen. I personally haven’t felt as down as I did the night that I learned that our basement window wells had filled once again but this time actually shattered, spilling water everywhere downstairs. Of all the times for this to happen, the worst for the expenses involved had to be during this economic downturn when resources are most tough to find. However, I also realized something else for which I was thankful. Even though there was loss, there was no damage to anyone’s life or limb. Even though this flood will deplete some of our reserves, we are amply capable of coming back—just as we did for Paint up, Fix up, Clean up Sunday. That was a day we added to our sense of congregational commitment and purpose. It was a day we came together, rolled up our sleeves, and put some elbow grease into our spiritual home. And we learned the lesson that Leonard Cohen sings: that it’s the cracks in everyone and everything that let the light in. Pitching in together in those recent, tough, water-logged days; allowed each one of us to shine the light of our congregational caring on this Temple’s building and on ourselves. This proves the adage: it takes a community. It certainly does!

Ironically, it is a truism that hard times do teach us more lessons than easy ones. It is when we are most down that our spiritual batteries kick in and we can rediscover the meaning of gratitude and, often, through prayer, we once again get in touch with what it means to live with a sense of deep thanks for all the good things we do have.

That we enter this New Year with loving families and a community of friends is a blessing we ought to remind ourselves of. That we live in the richest country in the world which still holds out the promise of goodness and achievable dreams is a blessing we ought to be reminding ourselves of. That we may have our health and the ability to appreciate and be appreciated, to give and receive love is a blessing that we ought to thank God for.

Rabbi Harold Kushner closes his book, Overcoming Life’s Disappointments, whose theme is mirrored in what I have been saying here, with the following thoughts about the life of Moses and how his experience is reflected in us all: The sad but inescapable truth is that very few people make it to the ‘promised land.’ Few people get everything they yearn for, and most of us don’t get everything we deserve. I too wish it were otherwise. I wish there was a world I could move to where everyone who loved would be loved in return, where every kind person would be treated kindly by fate and by her neighbors, a world where all ailments could be cured by the weekend and the all the biopsies turned out to be benign. But I don’t live in that world and neither does anyone else. Ask too little of life and you run the risk of coming to the end of your days never having tasted many of the pleasures God put on earth for you. Ask too much of life and you virtually guarantee heartbreak, disappointment, and the risk of thinking of yourself as a failure.

Rabbi Kushner has stated the attitude with which I should wish to enter this New Year, 5770. It really isn’t all about winning and losing. What it really is about is trying and the journey. It isn’t about having all our wishes and dreams fulfilled, but in savoring what we do achieve; and it’s about learning and growing from the times we fail. It’s about being brave enough to love and to be loved, to take this moment to take a-hold and squeeze the hands of those around you whom you cherish and whom you want so in your live for the coming year. It is about knowing that we are each glad to be alive, able to look to the future with an understanding, regardless of our circumstances, of just how wonderfully blessed we actually are.

If we carry these pieces of wisdom into this New Year about what it is to have tikvah, enumah and optimiyut; hope, faith, and optimism…these ingredients necessary for truly succeeding in life, then I am certain that we shall all prosper mightily in the coming New Year.