The Censored Life is Not Worth Living: Reflections on Our Land, Our Tradition and Our Lives

The poet Yehuda Amichai imagined what it would be like to go through the Bible and censor the parts that are distasteful or painful.

To explore this concept he wrote the following poem:

From the Book of Esther I removed the sediment

of vulgar joy, and from the Book of Jeremiah

the howl of pain in the guts. And from

the Song of Songs, the endless

search for love. And from the Book of Genesis,

the dreams and Cain. And from Ecclesiastes,

the despair, and from the Book of Job: Job.

And with what was left, I pasted myself a new Bible.

Now I live censored and pasted and limited and in peace.

A woman asked me last night on the dark street

how another woman was

who’d already died. Before her time – and not

in anyone else’s time either.

Out of a great weariness I answered:

Shloma tov, shloma tov

She’s fine, she’s fine.

The fantasy of living a censored life, adhering to a censored Judaism, pledging allegiance to a censored Israel certainly has its appeal.

To the question, how are we doing, on all fronts, we can say, “fine, fine” thank you for asking.

But I wonder – and I guess this may well be Amichai’s point – what is the cost of all of the censorship that we inflict on our lives, our religion and our land? 

We Change When We Need To: A Message for Yom Kippur 5776

Several months after my father died, back in 1996, Deanna and I and our boys, all younger than 6 at the time, moved from Roslyn to West Hempstead.  My mother said, a few weeks after we moved to the new house, I’m going to drive out to see you.

That may sound like nothing to you.  But she might as well have said to me, sweetheart, the day after Passover we’ll do brunch on top of Mount Everest. 

My mother didn’t like to drive.  She got anxious when she needed to drive.  She had a poor sense of direction. 

Once when my sisters and I were little, after we’d moved to New Jersey and she took us back to see our ophthalmologist in Brooklyn because my father couldn’t drive us at the time, she got lost on the way back.  She began a sentence with, “If we ever get home…”

When we were growing up, my mother only drove when she absolutely had to, only locally and she defined what was local.

Driving to Long Island from New Jersey, requiring the crossing of two bridges, to an address she’d never been to, was a big deal.

Yom Kippur is supposed to be about reflection and resolution and the possibility of change. 

In his book, Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik wrote that teshuva, repentance, change, is an act of self-creation.

Maimonides said that we’re not just supposed to change our actions, we’re supposed to change our personalities. 

Last month I got an email from the head of a rabbinic organization urging rabbis to talk to their congregations about Pope Francis’s encyclical regarding climate change and economic inequality. 

And I want to say, to Soloveitchik, to Maimonides, and to the author of the email about the Pope, “Don’t you understand that it’s really hard to change, forget about the global issues – it’s hard to drive from New Jersey to Long Island when someone else used to do it.  It’s hard to deal with life day to day when it throws us God only knows what.  And you’re asking us to think about self-creation and personality transformation and the relationship between melting icebergs and growing income gaps?”

I’m going to offer some Yom Kippur heresy and here it is.  Ladies and gentlemen:  we don’t change.