Remembering is Not About the Past - A Message for Hanukkah 5775

A large part of holiday observance is remembering events that happened in the past – leaving Egypt, defeating Haman, defeating the Greeks.  And then we eat, of course, but even the eating is connected to the remembering.

This morning I want to talk a little bit about how we remember.  Because the way we remember has an impact on us.  We can remember the past in ways that make us stuck in the past.  Or we can remember the past in ways that help us face the present. 

Forgive me if I spend a few minutes talking about Passover before I turn our attention to Hanukkah.  If nothing else, they belong in the same sermon because the two most widely observed rituals among American Jews are the Passover Seder and the lighting of Hanukkah candles.

Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt and how do we remember our time in Egypt and our leaving Egypt?

I recently heard a lecture about this by Micha Goodman, a Senior Fellow at the Hartman Institute.  He identified two models for how we remember Egypt – one which gets us stuck in the past and one which helps us face the present.

The Meeting of Desire and Decency: Our Role in a Crucial Conversation

I had a conversation recently with a colleague and friend who ran a Hillel for many years.

He brought up the recent high-profile stories about the harassment and assault of women on college campuses.  And he said that the problem, as he and other university professionals see it, is one of culture – a culture on campus that overtly and tacitly encourages some young men to feel it’s ok to overstep certain boundaries.

We read the Torah year after year because we believe it adds value to our lives.  The more I study, the more I feel that the impact of Torah on us is unhelpful if it’s simplistic.  The Torah says this, so do it.  Jacob did this, so let’s do it.  

Rather, the more carefully we analyze a particular story or dynamic in the Torah, the more profoundly we are likely to impact our approach to modern circumstances and dilemmas.

And so I want to spend some time looking closely at a story that I believe can deepen our thinking and action regarding a current reality that is quite disturbing. 

When Life Makes Us Dizzy

My son texted me recently:  “Did you the guys dangling near the top of the world trade center?”

I hadn’t seen the news yet so I googled it and saw a whole video of what transpired.

For those who may not have seen it, two window-washers at 1 WTC were left dangling in their window-washer contraption over 60 stories above the ground at a very awkward angle because one of the cables holding it up suddenly got slack and so the contraption went practically vertical.

As I’ve said on occasion, I have a particular fear of heights, so I had a sickening feeling just from my son’s text, which worsened the more information I got.  But I suspect that most people sitting here find the thought of dangling 60 + stories above the ground less than comforting.

I would go so far as to say that if I worked in the WTC, I would totally understand if nobody ever cleaned the windows.  My contribution to the psychological well-being of humanity would be to work in an office with filthy windows so no one would ever have to go through what these two men went through.

I want to talk this morning about psychological vertigo.  Now medical vertigo, to be accurate, is not generally connected with heights.  Although we have the association between vertigo and fear of heights through Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film by that name, medical vertigo is associated with loss of balance, sometimes accompanied by a spinning sensation.  It is occasionally associated with heights, though often not.

But I want to talk about "psychological vertigo", the sense that the literary scholar and biblical interpreter, Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, refers to in her commentary on the passage of the Torah that recounts the death of the matriarch Sarah.  In her book, Genesis:  The Beginning of Desire, Gottlieb Zornberg refers to the feeling we may get when we have a profound sense of how vulnerable we are.  

I want to explore different ways that we respond when we sense how fragile we are, when we experience the “near miss” of how differently something could have turned out in our own lives, when we allow ourselves to acknowledge the dangers and mishaps that we see around us.  When the world in some way feels like it’s spinning around us.