YOM KIPPUR MORNING

10 TISHRI 5768  / 22 SEPTEMBER 2007

Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman

There are many ways to begin a sermon for Yom Kippur and I no longer remember how many of them I have used in the 63 years I have been trying to do it since my student days.  I do know that sometimes, and with some hesitancy, edging my way into the occasion, I made use of a poem as an epigraph.  Today, thinking of age and time, as someone my age must do, I could bring you the words of the Polish Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, “I see in evening air/ How slowly dark comes down on what we do.”  Or his summing up of what it means to be truly human, “Not that I want to be a god or a hero,/ Just to change into a tree,/ grow for ages/ not hurt anyone."

Or another way would be in tribute to my friend, Anthony Day.  Tony Day, the brilliant editor of the editorial pages of the LA Times, in its glory years, died two weeks ago.  On June 7 of 1970 his then striking editorial appeared under the headline “Get Out of Vietnam NOW.  “The time has come,” he wrote,” for the United States to leave Vietnam , to leave it swiftly, wholly, and without equivocation.” 

The analogy is too obvious: This is Yom Kippur, the day of repentance.  No time could be more appropriate to seek repentance for the human agony we have helped to bring to Iraq .  The time has come to leave it swiftly, to leave it, without equivocation, NOW.

Or, I am certain you all read the news last month of the death of the distinguished writer and poet, Grace Paley.  She once told the story that when here father was old and ill, his heart very weak, sitting on one pillow and leaning on three, he offered her some last minute advice and made a request.  “I’d like you to write a simple story…the kind Maupassant wrote or Chekhov, Just recognizable people, and then write down what happened to them next.”

 “Why not,” she said. “I want to please him.  I would like to write such a story, if he means the kind that begins: ‘There was a woman,’ followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised.  Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away.  Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

I have a feeling that my father and mother, zichronam livrachah,  although they never uttered it, would have wanted something similar from me on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur when they once sat here in this sanctuary.   A simple sermon, the absolute line between two points, something recognizable.  Something you could describe in a single sentence when it was over, if someone asked you what the rabbi had said.

 Of course, every rabbi knows:  These holy days are a sacred time of enormous power, and need no rabbi to give them force or significance.  So what this moment may need from me, at most, is indeed something very simple and direct.   Nothing struggling to be profound, nothing reverberating with high cause or theological niceties or literary allusions.  And surely nothing tormented with Judaism as it applies to war and peace and poverty, tormented with Israel and the Palestinians, tormented with questions about the justice and the agony of the mothers and fathers whose children were killed by terrorists and anti-terrorists, the horror, the horror of it, and the moral responsibility of Jews who attend a synagogue in the well-guarded comfort of Bel Air.  No, none of that raucous stuff.  No, something more religious, something more spiritual, something, even, some of you might be thinking, something more Jewish.

I remember years ago at the conclusion of a children’s service on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah at which I had spoken. One of the parents came up to me, full of appreciation, in a voice gently pleading: “Why don’t you speak like that to us, to the adults in the congregation?”   And here (I found this in an old sermon) is what I had just said to the children:

On Rosh Hashanah we wonder about ourselves.  About things that happen, deep inside of us.  Sometimes we are kind.  Sometimes we are mean.  Sometimes we love.  Sometimes we hate.  Sometimes we’re happy and then we’re sad.  What makes us like that?”

There is a story about a man named Zusya that might help us.  Zusya was a good man.  Zusya tried to be helpful wherever and whenever he could.  But as much as he tried, when he looked inside himself, he saw he had not done enough.  There was always more to do.

One day Zusya prayed to God, and said: “Oh God, if you would make me an angel in heaven, then from morning to night I would do only good things.”  God heard his prayer and made him an angel in heaven.  And not long afterwards, Zusya came running to God, with sadness in his voice saying: “Oh God, I don’t want to be an angel.” “ Why not?” asked God. “Aren’t you happy doing good things that only angels do?” “No, Zusya.” answered.  “Angels are only good.  They never forget, they never make mistakes.  They are always the same.  They never change.  I’d rather be Zusya again, as I used to be-- Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes helpful, sometimes hurtful, but always trying to be someone better.”

 And God was happy with what Zusya had said, and made him Zusya again.

          Something of that sort would do, would it not?  On Yom Kippur we do wonder about ourselves, about the things that happen deep inside of us, about the crazy contradictory lives we lead. Our lives are so full of conditions, demands, requirements, obligations, that we often wonder what is expected of us.  What does it all mean? If only we could reach into ourselves and discover there our own freedom,  “For a woman or a man who is free within creates a space where others feel safe and want to dwell,” as Henri Nouwen once said.   And when we meet a free person there are no expectations, only an invitation to reach into ourselves and discover there our own freedom. Can I be that person? And is that where God is, where true inner freedom is?

If only I could go on from there for a brief while, and bring to a close the simple sermon, the almost absolute line between two points.  Is that what this Day of Atonement asks of me?  I feel that it wants something more.  Something much more…..

So I must go back and consider what lies at the heart of Yom Kippur.  It is the conviction of our Jewish tradition that there is a kind of warfare taking place in the soul of every human being.  Two contradictory impulses, the good and the evil inclination can be found in every one of us.   According to this old notion, the evil inclination, the yetzer hara, is dormant for the first nine years of life, but in the tenth year it becomes a visitor, then a permanent resident when it turns our hearts into an arena where good and evil are forever at war.  They yetzer can never be destroyed.  It flattens itself out in the shadows and at the first sign of inattention it lifts itself up and moves out into the broad daylight.

 With incredible adroitness of thought, the ancient rabbis, 1800 years ago, wrestling I assume with themselves and their own passions, came to the conclusion that the evil inclination was also the source of ambition, competition, generation, creativity.  It was a power transformable. It could be stalked, cornered, corrected; love and good deeds could control it. It could even be sublimated in study.  But without love and good deeds the yetzer could become master over us.  It could burst forth with all of its surging, destructive power.

  Those ancient teachers knew what we know, that there is in all of life, the power to negate life.  There is always the impulse to dominate, to build our own security on power over others.  This can occur within individuals and it can occur within nations.  And history records those eruptions of the barbarism of war where the use of power became justified in the name of the common good, national honor, Aryan purity, the justice of God, freedom, democracy, the possession of weapons of mass destruction, or protecting the world from the spread of this or that. 

Tragically, we have come to see that in our own country.  American policy is powered by the fantasy of manifest destiny and the unrelenting need to demonstrate our power; and combined with this the insistence on seeing our enemies as totally evil, depriving them of all human attributes.  Nothing so clearly demonstrates this as the ongoing horror of the war in Iraq .

Look my friends: Most of us are good people and we live honorable lives, and everywhere bringing a full measure of compassion, and surely adding something significant to the store of human decency. We are indeed a cause for celebration. Yet many of us have managed to live with the unpleasantness of this war, and go on with our lives as though nothing significant has occurred about us.  On the other hand, those of us who are utterly appalled by the war, many of us before it even began, find that it relentlessly invades our lives and our imaginations.  We retch at the thought of its blood and its pus and its gaping wounds,  We mourn over the almost 4000 young dead American soldiers, and grieve at the unremarked and unremembered  80 thousand and more dead Iraqis; the 4,000,000 hopeless refugees who have fled from their homes, half of them across the border to Syria and Jordan.  Our lips as we pray form the words Grant us peace,  and we wonder at the mockery of these words in a nation that is actively pursuing not peace but a brutal violence, because it arrogantly presumed that it had the wisdom and the power to invade and occupy another country, homeland of an ancient civilization , determined to transform it into an instant democracy, there on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the very place, the Torah tells us, where Abraham received the call to go forth-get out, get out for God’s sake, get out of this place. And that is the call that comes to us now.

This is a day for seeking forgiveness.  Are we to be held accountable for this violent rampage on which we have been engaged, and the more violent one we helped to unleash?  We sent forth our army on a mission based on our sense of empire or the illusion we were fighting selflessly for freedom and democracy. Should we be held responsible for the consequences of our behavior, or are we alone among the nations to be allowed to bring death and destruction without being called to account?

“When the big powers act with impunity,” Rami Khouri has written—“entering, destroying and leaving distant countries at will-- smaller powers and ordinary people understand that we are playing without rules.  When nobody is accountable, nobody has an incentive to act rationally or peacefully.”

We don’t have to wade in blood to reckon with the dangers of terrorism, or to illuminate the beauty of democracy. War is not the answer.  Religious communities cannot give their blessing to war, as my friend George Regas has been saying forever.

Fear is the greatest danger we face. Fear, as Brian Jenkins, the expert on terror at Rand , declared, “fear can erode confidence, and provoke us to overreact, and tempt us to abandon our values.”  And we have seen that happen.

And fear in these troubled times has become a particular problem for us as Jews.  And our fears have brought us to very edge, often over the edge of intolerance. Many of us, the older the more likely, are afflicted with a visceral feeling of vulnerability, for reasons that are well known to us, and regardless of our privileged station in life. And that makes us hyper sensitive to anything that might be perceived as critical of Israel or of Jews.  I feel some of that myself; I get defensive when I hear non-Jews being critical of us or of Israel .

          Look at what happened to Jimmy Carter.  He wrote that “notorious” book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, a title obviously chosen to be provocative. He used the word apartheid, used it to refer not to Israel itself, but to the occupied territories. Hardly a surprise, some Israelis have been using it for years.  And I myself have employed the word on rare occasions, particularly after my visits to the West Bank and Gaza where I saw the conditions under which the Palestinians live.  It’s a word that would very well come to your mind if you were to go there instead of limiting your visits to Israel proper.  Carter, who did write a few objectionable things in his book, was attacked from all sides.  He was accused of being a liar, a plagiarist, an anti-Semite.  At any event, our Jews were so aroused by his book that we helped to catapult it into becoming a best seller, a work, not being particularly profound, that might have gathered dust without that attention.

 Carter was invited by Brandeis University to speak there last January, and when some critics complained, the invitation was suddenly changed and Brandeis said he could come only if he debated Alan Dershowitz.  When he refused to come under those conditions, the original invitation was honored, with the understanding that Dershowitz would speak at a separate time on the same day.  2000 students came to hear President Carter and gave him a standing ovation-- as if in confirmation of the recent study whose lead author was Steven M. Cohen of the Hebrew Union College , a report which showed that Jews under the age of 35 show far less caring for Israel than their elders.  But he also got some tough questions from the students, which led the moderator of the event to say, “No soft matzah balls here, Mr. President.”  

 So it was that two months later, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinic association to which we four rabbis belong-- Chasen, Lewis, Ragins and Beerman-- after having scheduled a visit to the Carter Center in Atlanta where our conference would be holding its annual meeting, then, as an act of public protest, cancelled the visit. I thought that was an ill considered, infantile, insulting act to a man whom I often couldn’t bear when he was president but who has been making such remarkable contributions in his retirement; moreover, in 1978 he had brought about a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt which has endured to this day.  So I, who had no intention of attending this conference, then decided I would go to Atlanta just to visit the Carter Center , joining a small number of colleagues who felt the same. But I cancelled the trip to Atlanta , when I received an invitation from the Nation Institute to present an award to Carter at the National Press Club in Washington .  I did this in early April and said there that he had displayed a persistent moral sensibility, even about the most sensitive and contentious issues, such as the rights of the Palestinians, and that he had crossed every green line, every barrier, every fence, every wall, and that at his best there were no borders in the geography of his conscience.

It is out of fear, I believe, that the major Jewish organizations try to enforce a political orthodoxy  where Israel and the entire middle east is concerned, trumpeting the invasion of Iraq, and now the importance of military action against Iran. They try to give the impression that they represent the thinking of American Jews.  Which they do not.  Although they have successfully intimidated the members of Congress, and all of the candidates for president. They are not serving Israel or us by trying to shout down every criticism of Israel . That is why it is important for those of you who agree with me, to raise your voices.

In Israel, there is a mother named Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a member of the faculty of the Hebrew University, whose thirteen year old daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber a few years ago.  She became one of the founders of the Bereaved Parents For Peace, a forum for Israeli and Palestinian mothers and fathers encouraging dialogue.  “Having a dialogic approach,” she wrote, “means being willing to detain your truth or your personal or national narrative and make room in yourself for the truth of the other.  Dialogic people do not believe in eternal realities.  In fact, in Hebrew the terms finding, reality and invention all have the same root.  And that means that reality is what we invent, and it can be changed.”

 “We, the victims of either terror or anti-terror terrorism, are the only ones left to tell the world that there is no civilized killing of the innocent or barbaric killing of the innocent, there is only criminal killing of the innocent.  And there is no clash of civilizations, that in the every-growing underground kingdom of dead children there is no clash of civilizations.  On the contrary, true multiculturalism prevails there, true equality and true justice.”

 “We are the ones who remind the world that after the death of a child there is no other, that no one can avenge the blood of a child because the child takes into her small grave, with her small bones, the past and the future and reason for war and its consequences. Therefore we are the ones who would end war, because we know that it doesn’t matter what flag is put on what mountain, it doesn’t matter who looks where when they pray, and that nothing is more important than to secure a young girl’s way to her dance class.”

“We are the ones who cried like the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, when we saw our little girl or boy for the last time…: Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of your cheek?”

My parents were part of a generation of Jews whose highest ideal was embodied in the Yiddish word, Menschlichkeit.  As Irving Howe once defined it, “the readiness to live for ideals beyond the clamor of self; An ability to forge a community of moral order even while remaining subject to a society of social disorder, and a persuasion that human existence is a deeply serious matter for which all of us are finally accountable.”

Here we are, a congregation of Jews who persist in believing, as naïve as it may seem, that there is in every human being the possibility of what is humane, sometimes just a senseless decency, and that every moment we are given the opportunity to transform the human situation.  Because we have the extraordinary power in the midst of the vulgarity and brutality of contemporary life to recognize that every human being (as Heschel once taught us) is a disclosure of the divine, all of us knowing the fragile brevity of life and love, and all of us wanting to believe that our lives don’t have to be just the absolute line between two points; that everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.