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. 

So of course I’m imagining your break fast when someone asks you what did your rabbi talk about and you say, our rabbi said that we don’t change.   And he talked about his mother.

So I’ll temper my statement a bit.  We don’t change easily.

As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy reading biographies for a variety of reasons.  I read a biography of John Adams which I spoke of years back and am mostly finished with a biography of Thomas Jefferson.

As a young man, John Adams was brilliant, principled and obnoxious.  Regardless of what other people thought, he just plowed through.

As an old man, John Adams was brilliant, principled and obnoxious and he continued to plow through opposition.

As a young man, Thomas Jefferson was articulate, entitled, charming and highly sensitive to the criticism of others.

As an old man he was articulate, entitled, charming and, if anything, even more sensitive to the criticism of others.

I don’t think we change easily and when we do, it tends not to be a full-blown transformation.

My mother found her way to West Hempstead from New Jersey but did not become a calm, measured traveler.

Why did she start to drive from New Jersey to Long Island?  I’m sure you can well imagine why.  She wanted to see her grandchildren (and her children) and unfortunately her husband of over 40 years was no longer around to take her.  Knowing that she would see everyone less often if she didn’t drive to our house, she had a decision to make.  And she pushed herself.  It always required a push; it was never comfortable.

The crux of the matter truly is that we only change when we need to. 

Sometimes it’s readily apparent that we need to change; sometimes it’s not so apparent. 

So I want to take us on a gradual journey, from the obvious to the less obvious, from areas where it’s clear we need to change our attitudes and behavior to areas where it’s less clear, but no less important. 

The clearest impetus for change comes when our personal circumstances require us to rethink how we conduct our lives.

The person who used to drive us, or pay the bills, or handle a difficult member of the family that we have no patience for, is no longer around.

And all of these tasks fall on us.

Or we suffer a financial reversal.

And have to figure out how to manage with less than we had.

Or we have a personal health crisis.

And need to navigate the physical and emotional realities that emerge as a result.

And I’m sure we can each think of other examples that we’ve experienced.

Making changes in our lives in response to such losses and challenges can be extremely difficult for a variety of reasons, even when we clearly sense the need.  When it is clear as day that we need to make changes, it’s hard to actually make them.

Imagine, now, if the need to change is not so apparent.  This is often true when it comes to changing our approaches to things that don’t affect us directly.

In general, whoever is in a place of privilege doesn’t advocate for change for those who are less privileged. 

The advocacy comes from the less privileged.  It would be nice to live in a world where white people ask black people, and men ask women, and able-bodied people ask those with physical challenges, and people who are financially comfortable ask those who are struggling, what can I do to make your life easier?  What changes can I make that will increase your dignity and comfort?

But the world usually doesn’t operate that way.  In general, we take our privileges for granted.  We advocate for change when we need the change, not when others need it.  Each person needs to advocate for him or herself.

But when others say help me, we should help them.

Why?  Because we should come to realize that we need to live in a world where everyone’s dignity is acknowledged.  To the extent that we don’t, it bites us all in the tush.   If everyone isn’t safe, no one is ultimately safe.   Because every human being is vulnerable.

As I said on Rosh Hashanah, Judaism urges us to acknowledge our own vulnerability and to use that as a gateway to understanding the vulnerability of others.  

Our national story begins with our vulnerability and indignity as slaves. What a marvelously useful history or mythic framework, however you want to look at it.  So even if we aren’t quick to initiate advocacy for those less privileged than ourselves, we should at least be responsive when those who are less privileged ask for our support. 

I’ll riff on the famous comment by Pastor Neimoller, the German Protestant minister who was arrested during WWII for opposing Hitler:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.  Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

So here’s the riff:  first, they discriminated against the disabled but since I’m not disabled I ignored the clamoring for disability access and decided instead to check how many twitter followers I have.  Then they discriminated against poor people but I since I have enough money I said, I’ll just head to Everfresh to check out the produce.  Then they discriminated against trans people but hey – I’m comfy in my gender…You get the idea.  By the time someone discriminates against you and me, who’s going to speak up?

We need to acknowledge and respond to the array of under-privileges in the world and to make changes in our own attitudes and behaviors to the extent that we begin to recognize that we all need to live in a world in which privileges are shared.

And now, for a third realm of consideration, I want to move us even further away from needs that are readily apparent.  When people talk about melting ice caps in Greenland and rising seas, many of us start to glaze over unless the sea is rising onto our actual house.  When I first got the email saying, “talk to your congregants about the environment because Pope Francis will be raising the issue,” I had a vision of Al Gore on a cherry picker next to a huge graph and said to myself, “I’m not sure about this.”

It’s hard enough to be make changes regarding our own direct situations, harder still to respond to the situations of other people, but to think about what we’re doing to the earth and its wider impact?  It’s so abstract.  The need to change our behavior is not so obvious because by and large, for most of us, life goes on.

But we do need to think about the planet and we do need to change our behavior.  Because we’re already seeing the impact of our neglect on the earth and we should be asking ourselves, what kind of planet do we need our children and our grandchildren (and other people’s children and grandchildren) to inhabit well into the future?

In response to everything I’ve raised, what do we do?  A well-known Jewish response is, we do one thing at time. לא עליך המלאכה לגמר ולא אתה בן חורין להבטל ממנה Lo alecha ham’lacha ligmor v’lo ata bein chorin l’hibatel mimena.

We don’t have to finish the work but we can’t ignore it.

Regarding personal challenges when the need to make changes is most obvious, we do one thing at a time. We push ourselves to drive where we need to or to pay the bills or to learn how to retrain our bodies or to regroup emotionally as a child moves out of the house or a marriage comes to an end and I could go on and on.

Regarding the so-called “issues of other people,” we do one thing at a time.  Maybe we gear up the courage when we hear someone say something bigoted about someone else and we say, “That comment makes me uncomfortable and here’s why.”  Maybe we say, “I’m going to help make the synagogue more accessible to people with physical challenges.”

Regarding the planet?  We do one thing at a time.  Maybe we reconsider what car we drive.  Maybe we take a step to make our house more energy efficient.  Maybe we think more carefully about what we eat and where it comes from.

Hard is it may be, we need take the steps to make changes when it affects us directly and indirectly, individually and globally, today and tomorrow.

I want to conclude by offering two Yom Kippur images that are interrelated.

On Yom Kippur, in Biblical times, the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, would go into the קדש הקדשים Kodesh hakodashim, the holy of holies, for the purpose of atonement.

The Torah reading tells us that his atonement started with himself and continued with concentric circles beyond himself.

וכפר בעדו ובעד ביתו ובעד כל קהל ישראל

V’chiper ba’adu uv’ad beito uv’ad kol k’hal yisra’el.

He atoned for himself, then for his family, then for all of Israel.

I would suggest that the way we should apply this is not to think that we can do other people’s atonement for them.

Rather, we should apply it as follows:  In our own lives, we should encourage ourselves to make those changes in attitude and behavior that we directly need, move on to those that benefit our family, then our people, and we shouldn’t stop there because Judaism doesn’t stop there – we should go on to כל יושבי תבל kol yoshvei tevel – all humanity and כל העולם כולו kol ha’olam kulo – the world overall.  Often it won’t be in sequence, it will overlap, and that’s fine.

And now the final image, which I see as related.  Rav Kook, Chief Rabbi of Palestine in the early 20^th century, said a person should learn how to sing a four-fold song that includes the song of the self, the song of the people, the song of humanity and the song of all worlds.

All together the songs result in שיר השירים shir hashirm, the song of songs.

And what did the famous sage Rabbi Akiva call the Song of Songs centuries before Rav Kook lived?

He called it Kodash hakodashim.  Holy of Holies.  He used the phrase that the Torah uses to describe the center of the ancient sanctuary, the place where the High Priest would go on Yom Kippur. 

To the extent that we sense the need for making changes that impact ourselves but not just ourselves, to the extent that we learn how much we need to sing the songs of self, nation, humanity and cosmos in glorious contrapuntal harmony, to the extent that we discover, like my mother did in a variety of ways, that we need to cross bridges for the sake of ourselves, our children and our grandchildren, we each become the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest.

We each enter the Kodesh hakodoshim, the Holy of Holies. 

We don’t change.  Except when we need to.  And boy do we need to.

Delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on Yom Kippur 5776