Beyond the Life of I

As of last Wednesday, the president of Syria was floating on a Russian warship off the coast of Syria, continuing to order the wanton destruction of his citizens, refusing any compromise, and adding that if things reach a certain point, his Syrian supporters should aim their missiles at Israel.

Political analysts across the board say it’s only a matter of time before he leaves the country permanently.

He had the opportunity to end the violence at numerous points during the previous year and did not, choosing to maintain a death grip on his country that has had disastrous results.

How does a leader become so desensitized to the needs of his own people?

There is a neurotic ego at work here, whereby a leader loses sight of the value of his constituents – when the “I” fills the room, there’s no room left for anyone else.

I’d like to examine an ancient showdown and the insight it provides for us about the danger of total self-absorption and the need to look beyond ourselves altogether.

I'll call this sermon, Beyond the Life of I.

Violence and Responsibility

I read a novel over the past week which I highly recommend.  It was written by David Grossman and it’s called To the End of The Land.  It takes place in Israel and the main character is a mother whose son decides to reenlist in the Israeli Army after his official army service has ended.

She is petrified that he will be killed in a dangerous offensive that he is part of.  She lives in persistent fear that she will receive a knock on her door, followed by the bearing of tragic news about her son.  So she leaves home and, with the boy’s father (not her husband but you find that out early on) embarks on a journey of discovery and memory.  Her magical thinking, which of course she recognizes as such, is that if only she stays away from home, no one can knock on her door and deliver the bad news.

It’s an amazing novel by an extraordinary author – among his close friends are Amos Oz and A B Yehoshua – a great story, superbly drawn characters, a complex meditation on memory and fear, life and death – and one of the themes it explores is the near obsession we have with protecting our children. 

The mother in the story feels helpless.  Her son reenlisted  and tells her he has done so at the last minute.  He is out of her sight and surrounded by danger.  And yet she does not act helplessly – she regales the child’s father with information about his son that he did not know, since he was detached while their son was growing up for his own reasons.

And during her son’s service, when she would see him on leave, she is not quiet about her opinions regarding the war and the occupation.   She is vivacious, intelligent, loving, with a strong moral compass and a recognition of the complexity of the situation.  She is quite capable of giving a “what for” in multiple directions – toward the Arab captors of her son’s father; toward her son for not speaking out when someone in his platoon left an elderly Arab man in a meat locker for several days.

Within her limited capacity, she acts and speaks with a sense of purpose.

A few days ago, the students at Sandy Hook Elementary started school again in a nearby location, painstakingly designed to reproduce their actual school as accurately as possible.

Do We Belong Anywhere?

Fair Lawn, NJ, circa 1980.  I was a freshman in Fair Lawn High School.  It was the holiday of Sukkot, a weekday, and I was walking to services, a little bit earlier than my mom.  I was walking to the local Conservative synagogue.  There was a group of kids my age walking to the Orthodox synagogue that I passed.  There was a group of kids walking to high school that I passed. 

Though I had friends in both groups, I felt, to invoke the Yiddish expression, nicht ahin, nicht ahier – neither here nor there.  I felt like I didn't quite belong anywhere.

This sermon is devoted to the part of us that is neither here nor there, the part of us that struggles to discover our identity as we navigate between worlds. 

We may navigate between family and work, between the traditions of our parents and grandparents and the inclinations of our children, between one part of the community and another.

And if we do that, we are likely to feel at times that we don’t fully belong anywhere.

TIWRA - Truth Is, We Are Accountable

Over 25 years ago I got invited to tea in England.  The invitation came from a professor that I got to know through my involvement in the Jewish community during my junior year abroad.

I was 20 years old and what did I know?  I’m not proud of this, but I’m telling the story to make a point.  I was ambivalent about attending.  By way of rationalizing, I suppose, I assumed he’d invited tons of people, that it would be crowded and no one would miss me.  I didn’t go. 

Turned out, he didn’t invite tons of people and if you understand English teatime you know where this is going.  I found out subsequently that he’d set four places at the table in addition to those for his own family, and one of the four was for me, the American who, according to most of the people I met, was spending the year learning English as a foreign language.  That place was quite noticeably empty. 

When I found that out I felt terrible and called to apologize and he "kept a stiff upper lip" and was most gracious and life went on.  But I never forgot the incident and I’ve tried to be more respectful and careful.

You may have read a recent article in the Style Section of the Times about how people are cancelling appointments last minute by text messaging.  SCUSS.  Something came up, so sorry. . .

High Resolution - Good to Look Closely

This past Wednesday evening, I attended the annual dinner for the Iranian American Jewish Federation, an organization that provides support for numerous worthy causes in Israel and locally.  The dinner took place, as it did last year, at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.
 

Last year, I was there simply to enjoy the event, which showcased the outstanding work of an organization that so many Temple Israel members are deeply involved with, an organization which supports medical research, outreach to the elderly, Israeli athletes training for the para-olympics and so much more.

This year, I had a role to play.  Not the standard rabbinic role, either.  Following the speech by Alan Dershowitz, a mentalist performed, someone who, I was told, could make successful predictions about the future.

I agreed to have him send me a prediction to my house, not to open it, and to bring it to Alice Tully Hall.

The Fed-Ex envelope arrived at my house while it was raining and so it got wet.  I put it on the counter and, the next day, took it with me into the city.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, toward the end of the mentalist’s show I was called onto the bimah of Alice Tully.  I participated in a card trick and read the letter inside, which accurately predicted things that would happen that day.

Finally, it predicted the color of my tie and, moreover, it predicted details about my tie that I myself hadn’t noticed before.

Is Progress Possible?

Perhaps in the brief moments between the recent storms in New York and the intensification of rocket fire in Israel, you had the opportunity to pay attention to the complex scandal in the US military.

It features emails, state secrets, the furtive crossing of boundaries – if nothing else, it’s an interesting diversion.

One of the comedians on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show wryly pointed out that you’re bound to have security problems when you allow straights into the military.

I looked at this whole situation as another reason to ask a question which I want to pose today and consider.

Do things ever change for the better?  Is progress possible?

People in power, men mostly, have been crossing inappropriate boundaries forever. 

Eros has clouded judgment forever.

People have not paid sufficient attention to the environment forever.

People have bullied one another and engaged in aggressive acts forever.

The question – is progress possible – is not just a question for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Post Sandy - of Land and Love

I remember a conversation I had with my family when I was growing up about another family in the neighborhood.  They were facing a particular challenge and I said, “I feel bad – look what they are dealing with.”

And my mother said some version of a Yiddish phrase the gist of which is, “Unfortunately, on a beautiful Tuesday morning after Passover these people had their challenges.”  Meaning, even before the crisis, things weren’t easy for them.  And the crisis of course just made things worse.

Life was challenging enough before the recent storms – everyone I know has challenges – but the storms brought things to a new level – it exposed cracks that were already present and it added new cracks.

There have been many conversations about infrastructure and resources and more will certainly be forthcoming.

I want to talk about what I believe really animates us, what really keeps us going.