Training for Life

Every Friday morning, Rabbi Adelson and I do singing and a little praying with the students in our Beth HaGan preschool.

The other day, we were speaking with our director, Rachel Mathless, about what songs to sing for Thanksgiving.  And we started with all of the songs about turkeys – including the famous “gobble, gobble, who is that?  Mr. Turkey, big and fat.”

And halfway through our conversation, we said to each other – you know, it’s nice to sing about turkeys, but we should also find a song about saying thank you.

And it didn’t take long for us to realize that we should do some of the songs and prayers that we do whenever we are together that have to do with expressing our thanks.

So, at the Thanksgiving gathering, we sang a song that we sing every time we’re together that introduces the prayer מודה אני לפניך modeh ani l’fanecka, I thank you. 

And it goes like this:  It’s another wonderful morning and I’ll start it with a song.  I will sing my modeh ani would you like to sing along?  All you need to say is thank you.  I’m happy that I’m me.  Modeh ani l’fanekha I’m as thankful as can be.

Many of us had a nice turkey dinner a few days ago and perhaps we’re still eating leftovers over Shabbat.  When tryptophans are at work, rabbis have to work fast.

So here’s my thesis:  religion is about training.  Training us to live differently than we otherwise might.  And that’s a good thing.

So, for example, our prayers are designed, in part, to train us to express gratitude and we help our children to do that from an early age.

Now as they get older, we expand the concept of gratitude and we ask them to consider what to do when they’re having a lousy day or feeling ungrateful for any reason, to consider the relationship between their inner lives, the community, and the words and rituals they offer.

Training need not be about blind indoctrination.  It can be, in a religious context, about giving us the basic tools to learn how to walk in the world with gratitude, sensitivity and responsibility.    

Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt, who spoke here last spring, claim that human beings innately are grateful and sensitive, though often the sensitivity evolved out of expectation of reciprocity – for example, I will help you gather your berries when you need help, with the expectation that you will help me when I need help.

But to strengthen these innate impulses, to enable them to transcend expectation of reciprocity, requires training.

I want to share with us today a few examples of such training in Jewish tradition.  It’s actually pretty subtle at times.  And we can learn from these examples.

First example.  You’re walking down the street and you see an object that usually isn’t there.  Some scattered fruit.  A loaf of bread.  A jar.  Or a donkey walking around without its owner.   Occasionally we’ve all seen donkeys near the Great Neck train station and wondered what to do.

So now we’ll know.

The Torah says you have to return the object to its owner. 

Simple enough.   Except that the rabbis who interpreted the Torah, centuries later, were living in a more complicated world than their Biblical forbears and so they insisted that a person who found objects in the public sphere needed to figure out a few things.  Was the fruit scattered haphazardly or in a bundle?  Was the bread from a bakery or an individual home?  Did the jar have any distinctive markings on it?

The point of those questions was to determine if the owner had likely given up any realistic expectation of recovering the lost property.  The less specific the object, the more random the configuration of multiple objects, the more likely the owner is to have given up – the Hebrew term is מתיאש mit’ya’esh – of ever reclaiming it.

In other words, the series of questions that rabbis imposed were designed to train the person walking in the public sphere to get inside the head of another person, to understand, and to care about, what the other person, the one who lost the property, was thinking and feeling. 

Second example.  The Torah portions we’ve been reading have to do with Joseph and his brothers, and Joseph - dreamer, spoiled young man - is clearly a main character in all this.  But no less significant a character is Judah.

Judah undergoes moral training in the Torah – not an explicit moral training, but rather a subtle process of self-discovery.  Judah tells his brothers not to kill Joseph, but rather to sell him to a band of Ishmaelites כי אחינו בשרנו הוא ki acheinu b’sareinu hu – for he is our brother, our flesh. 

From his experience with his daughter-in-law, Tamar, Judah learns a deeper lesson about accountability and will subsequently say to his father that he, personally, will take responsibility for Jacob’s son, Benjamin.  From selling a brother into servitude to putting his own life on the line for a brother, Judah has made progress.  He has, we might say, undergone responsibility training.

The religious enterprise – expressed in Judaism in Biblical and Rabbinic stories and laws – is, in large measure, about training us to be more sensitive and more accountable. 

Untrained, we are vulnerable to being overtaken by our less savory impulses.  With proper training, gratitude replaces jadedness, responsibility and accountability overpower selfishness.   

We have a chance, each of us as individuals, to contribute to an overall atmosphere of gratitude and responsibility that we would like to see and experience in the world.

Tomorrow, at our annual Hanukkah party, our teens will be running a carnival to raise money for American Jewish World Service relief efforts in the Philippines. 

This is about training, unapologetic training, for our teens to understand that there’s a big world out there that they need to worry about, that they can inspire the adult community to care, that Jews need to care about all of God’s creatures, that Hanukkah is about spreading light, that Thanksgiving is not just about your satisfaction, and on and on. 

Over half a century ago, the great-grandmother of this morning’s bar mitzvah was instrumental in identifying a core group of individuals who would become the founders of this congregation.  A house was identified  and, among the many tasks required for establishing it as a synagogue, seats from a nearby movie theater that had closed were transported for use in the new congregation.

Imagine the impact on this group, and on their children, who implemented and witnessed the creation of a new synagogue, the thought and dedication and hard work necessary for this holyp enterprise.

All of that was a training process for the founders and for their children who came to appreciate deeply the importance of sacrifice in creating and sustaining a community.

On the weekend of Thanksgiving, in the midst of this holiday of dedication, we owe that small group a huge debt of gratitude for their dedication, without which we wouldn’t have this beautiful institution in which to train successive generations to internalize and strengthen important Jewish values.

How to wake up and say thank you.  How to walk through the world caring about people other than ourselves . How to be responsible and accountable. 

The rabbis said that the mitzvot, God’s commandments, were given לצרף בהן את הבריות l’tzaref bahen et habriyot – to refine people.  It’s about proper training, which we all need, throughout our lives. 

It’s another wonderful morning.  We start it with a song.  We say modeh ani.  And from that point on, here in our synagogue and way beyond its walls, we see the world with new eyes.  

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on Shabbat Hanukkah, November 30, 2013