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Tonight, says our tradition, begins the last day to plead our case. The gates are swinging shut, and will lock with a resounding thud at Neilah, 24 hours hence. We want to squeeze our last atonements, prayers, and actions through, before they close completely. We want to be written in the book of life.
Tonight, we carry not only the annual burden of these Yom Kippur themes, but the extra weight of the first anniversary of last September 11th, just a few days ago. The tears are once again scarcely dry on our cheeks. The national period of zichronot (remembrance), and of introspection, has gone as quickly as it came – our culture does little to encourage sustained reflection on anything of import. But some lessons of this last year-plus-a-week remain for us to learn. Or, to forget. This choice – just like the choice between life and death, blessing and curse, in tomorrow’s Torah reading – lies with each of us.
To find a suitable frame for those lessons, and those choices, I want us to back up – about nineteen hundred years, to a Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya. Elisha was a great Torah scholar, renowned teacher, and sensitive soul – yet known by his contemporaries as a heretic. Why? The Talmudic story – retold 50 years ago in As a Driven Leaf, by Ira Eisenstein’s dear friend and colleague, Milton Steinberg – is that Elisha watched a young boy climb a ladder at his father’s request (thus honoring him), and shoo away a mother bird from its nest to take the young (per Deut. 22:6-7) – "two commandments, the reward of which is expressly stated as length of days" – immediately after which the boy fell to his death (Kid. 39b; cf. Maharsha; Leaf 249). In Steinberg’s account: "Elisha trembled from head to foot. A cold perspiration covered him. Nausea writhed through his entrails… a wild protest stormed up in him against the horror of it, its senseless waste of life, its wanton cruelty."
Pausing the story here, we’re struck by the painful parallel to our own reactions upon seeing innocent people fall to their deaths, in our day. Like Elisha, we too trembled, we too felt wild protest storming up in us against the horror of it. But where most of us managed sooner or later to get on with our lives, for Elisha it was a point of no return. [Quote]: "A great negation crystallized in him. The veil of deception dissolved before his eyes… ‘It is all a lie,’ he said with a terrible quiet in his voice. ‘There is no reward. There is no Judge. There is no Judgment. For there is no God." And with that he exited his companions, his religion, his profession, and, as a result, his people.
Today’s theology is liberal, not literal – the death of innocents already factors into our world-view, however uneasily. Still we resonate with Elisha’s devastation, which the Talmud elaborates in one of its great stories: arba, four renowned rabbis, nich’n’su, merited to descend l’pardes, through God’s mystical orchard. Ben Azzai, the greatest scholar of his day, looked, and died. Ben Zoma, whose wisdom endures in Pirkei Avot, looked, and lost his mind. Only the great Rabbi Akiva entered and departed in peace (Hagigah 14b; Tosefta Hag. 2:3-4).
The fourth in this pardes, this orchard, was Elisha ben Abuyah -- who looked, and katzatz b’n’tiyot: "cut the shoots". This expression is usually taken as ‘he denied the root of faith’, and became an apostate. The kabbalists, mystics, said that he separated the s’firot, the unified spheres of divine emanation, one from the other. In the Talmud Ben Abuyah had wondered, aloud, if there aren’t one but two great Divine forces – a question straight out of Greek dualistic thought, which Elisha was known to have studied. Art Green, past RRC president, suggests that he tried to separate the two primordial trees in the one garden: he wanted knowledge of good and evil, the rational; without life, the spiritual. However we understand "cutting the shoots", Elisha looked for dichotomies within our world, ignoring its underlying unity. He sought to exclude parts of reality, to send them away -- to treat them as "other."
There are parts of reality we too would like to send away! We know that we cannot – yet in many ways, we try. With or without knowing it, we too treat things or people as "other." We exclude them from our circle of concern, from our world-view. Elisha ben Abuya knew from being excluded: he goes down in history as "Acher," "the Other." Questioning Torah and God, he becomes an apikorus – a knowledgeable disbeliever (the most threatening kind!). Ben Abuya is stripped of his name, of a piece of his humanity. Yet his teachings survive. The tradition and its adherents are repulsed and attracted at the same time. In some way, we remain in dialogue with him. Acher is other, yet the same.
Today, our "otherization" is rarely so nuanced. We live in a world defined by otherness. We ‘otherize’ all the time. And while the past year has given us many openings for transcending these false dichotomies, instead we seem to have drawn them more firmly than ever. So keep Acher’s story in mind, together with the communal confessional we’ll offer five times today, as we now consider some of our and our society's shortcomings in this past year – all through the lens of "the other" – and through the lens of this sermon’s title: "Nation In Crisis: Missed Opportunities."
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For the sin we, as Americans, have committed against You: responding to threats by treating people as "other," in ways that violate the very values and strengths of our nation. For this, O God, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.
* We treat as other those whose views we fear, or disagree with. In much of our country during the last year, not having an American flag fluttering over the window of your SUV marked you as unpatriotic. Columnists who question the direction of our ‘war on terror’ are inundated with hate mail. Even in our own circles, we otherize those who veer too far from our own viewpoint – a sin common to left and right alike. The same Talmud that calls Elisha "Acher," the Other, still goes out of its way to record minority opinions. It says there are 70 faces to the Torah, meaning there are scores of truths besides our own: no one has all the answers. Yet in our world, the right of dissent is narrowing.
* We treat as other those whose religion we fear, or do not understand, or stereotype, or single out as uniquely dangerous. Popular anti-Muslim sentiment, so blatant in this past year, cannot be justified by our grief or our anger. Our country and its ideology are predicated on freedom of religion; yet today, in ways large and small, we have acquiesced in its impingement. We have spoken of "Muslims" when we mean "Islamicists" or "fanatics". As individuals, we have not reached out enough to our Arab and Muslim neighbors, a slim opening after 9/11 that we largely chose to ignore.
* Likewise, we have made people "other" based on appearance or ethnicity. We as Jews know all too well the sting of anti-semitism – which technically means "prejudice against those of Levantine origin". We also know how anger at some Jews (or at actions of the Jewish state), whether or not we find that anger valid, can cross the line into hatred of or prejudice toward all Jews, with toxic effect. Here we and the very people we often otherize are, oddly enough, in this together. As mentioned last week, one lesson of Jewish history is our need to work for an open society, for only in such open conditions for others, do we too flourish. Instead, our society is closing – and even if not guilty, our relative silence makes us complicit.
We’re taught that diversity is part of the Divine plan – that’s why Noah’s children became the 70 nations, who on some future eschatological Sukkot will all reunite at the Temple to offer praise to the one God known by 70 names. Perhaps, sadly enough, we came close to that in the Trade Center and the Pentagon, where there was ‘neither white nor black, Jew nor gentile, rich nor poor’. One year later, how deep do these divisions remain?
These examples of ‘otherness’, of missed opportunities, share something in common. Though we should put little stock in anything they say or do, al-Qaeda (and others) claim to hate us for "reasons". Many of their grievances we reject outright – they resent the very things we love about our country: diversity, free speech and free press, basic civil liberties for all our country’s inhabitants, freedom of religion and of dissent. And yet those very values are being eroded, as we respond to those who seek to obliterate us and our values! When we respond by otherizing – restricting liberties, ignoring inequalities, marginalizing those who pray or think or act differently from us – who really wins?
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But there’s more. We don’t just otherize in ways that make us a little more like our enemies; we also otherize in ways that alienate even our friends, our allies. So: For the sin we have committed against You by treating people and things as "other," in ways that serve neither our own enlightened self-interest, nor that of others: forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.
* For starters, we treat as other those unfortunate enough to be among that 96% of humanity not blessed to live here in the U.S.! Our unrivaled national power, wealth, and consumption have long made us conspicuous, and often unpopular, on the international scene. We were isolationist and unilateral even before 9/11, rejecting in short order a comprehensive test ban treaty, land mine ban, and the Kyoto protocol for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A year ago our nation was jarred out of its insularity, and we sought to create a worldwide coalition around one set of urgent interests. Elements of that coalition remain, though focused around a narrow definition of ‘security’ – while again, isolationism and unilateralism define our actions.
This is a national ‘sin’, so to speak, but one we each mirror in our own lives whenever we try to ‘go it alone,’ put our own interests first, think less than we should of the desires or needs of others. This jingoism too may be ‘human nature’; ours is not the only country to think that way – and neither is ours not the only religion to think that way. But as Reconstructionists, we have said that a decisive break is needed: we reject chosenness, and embrace universalism. If God has not chosen the Jewish people from among all the nations for unparalleled blessing, neither has God ‘chosen’ the U.S. – or ‘us’.
* We especially treat as other those who live in distant lands, whose faces and names we rarely know or see, whose deaths we reluctantly rationalize through the cold, dehumanizing language of ‘collateral damage’. In the grand sweep of history, our nation is doing better: we clarify, and to our government and military’s credit we seek to ensure, that our war is against the government, not the people, of the nation we attack. Yet dehumanization – otherization – remains part of warfare, even in these enlightened times. Our tradition’s directives here are by no means clear, and we must own a certain militarism in our own sacred texts – but in the end, Psalm 34 tells us what we must do: bakesh shalom v’rodfeihu, seek peace (which the midrash interprets as ‘in your own place’), and pursue it (midrashically, even to another place). Peace in Afghanistan and Kashmir and Gaza and Columbia and Angola are all ‘our business’. And once involved, we must be certain that we working on behalf of all the people of those nations, for the long-term.
* On a different but no less important note, we treat as utterly other that which is not human. We are created somewhere between animal and divine, says our tradition – but biologists note that according to our genetic makeup, we’re almost 99% the same as chimps. We are more a part of nature, than we are set apart from it (cf. Phyllis Trible). Yet our actions – both nationally and personally – ignore this. Every house built further out into exurbia on larger plots of land; every water quality regulation watered down; every appliance built or bought without the Energy Star label – is an affront to our shared creaturehood. Maimonides, eight centuries ago, said we shouldn’t think the world was made just for us; it exists for the sake of all the creatures (Guide 3:13). Earlier, a midrash has God telling Adam, "take care of My world…for if you spoil and destroy it, there’s no one after you to repair it" (Qo. R. 7:13). Spiritually, ethically, and even biologically, we cannot assume our ‘right’ to consume at will – our needs must be balanced with, and sustainable for, the rest of Creation.
How can this be considered a missed opportunity in the wake of the last year? Easy. Our current entanglement in the Middle East and Central Asia provided clear impetus for rethinking our dependence on foreign oil. We could’ve required better mileage of our vehicles, which can be done cheaply and productively; we could’ve pursued other vital energy-saving measures. Instead, Congress votes down increases in fuel economy, while the White House presses for oil drilling in ever further flung corners of God’s good Earth. And each of us buys into this rape of Creation, as consumers and as citizens, every day. If I had to choose one most salient, painful lesson unlearnt over the last year, this would be it.
* Along these lines, one more way we otherize deserves mention: in today’s short-sighted culture, our actions blatantly disregard future generations. Whether it’s spreading racism and hate; widening inequality between rich and poor; still-rising global warming emissions; or still-falling biodiversity as our actions make thousands of species extinct each year: we sit atop social and environmental time bombs, the detonation of which could make our present challenges pale by comparison.
A Reconstructionist colleague planned to give a sermon today about ecology, since [I quote], "at the moment, permafrost melting in Alaska scares me more than Hamas or Al Qaeda terrorists." The war on terror is urgent, to be sure: but so should be the war on poverty and disease, the shift to renewable energy, the reduction of inequality between global haves and have-nots. We risk saddling our descendents with a world of problems that we ourselves would never willingly inhabit. But tomorrow’s Torah reading says "choose life, so that you and your children may live"! They must be at the center of our concern, not at the periphery. We must stop treating as ‘other’ those who will come after us.
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For all these sins, O God of mercy – our political, ethnic, racial, ecological, and intergenerational shortcomings – help us change. Forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.
All these sins have both personal and national components – thus, we each have multiple categories of tshuvah to do over them. I’ll clearly identify a few, hoping that these questions might serve as an outline for our introspection and change, in the remaining hours of this Yom Kippur:
There's the micro, or the personal: what we purchase, which companies we invest in and support, what cars (or VEHICLES-larger-than-cars BUT exempt from air quality regulations!) we drive. Who our friends are, who we learn from and listen to, at whom we look askance. The choices we make that affect our children and their children.
And, there’s the macro, or the political: who we vote for, what we advocate, where our tzedakah dollar goes, how much of a difference we’re content to make. What we choose to learn about, to become concerned over, or to just let go. How we acquiesce to unjust systems, of which we are a part.
Yom Kippur is an opening for us to question our habits, our assumptions, the norms of our society that upon closer examination, may require ‘reconstruction’. The anniversary of 9/11 offers us a chance to check the direction of our society and polity and world – to assess if we’re on the right track, and where we’re not, to get us there. In both cases, our mistakes are similar: we’ve drawn our circles of concern and compassion too narrowly. We must widen them, and include that which was formerly outside, that which was "other." Our archetypal Other – Elisha ben Abuya – continued to teach, even after he became a 'heretic'. So we too must remain in dialogue with, and include, "the other." Our spiritual and religious teachings expect it of us; the reality of our world makes it necessary; our own survival may depend on it.
I close tonight with one final level of otherness that we allowed to slip by us in this past challenging year. It’s not national or political, but rather completely personal: we have otherized even those around us. One more great opening after 9/11 is now lost, but not irrevocably so: we had the chance to make the most of interpersonal connections. In the days and weeks after the tragedy, strangers started talking with each other, looking out for each other. Generosity, volunteerism, and concern for others all spiked upward. There was a shared altruistic spirit. Folks on the subway struck up conversations (I say ‘subway’ rather than ‘Metro’ advisedly, since if it could happen in NY, it’s really significant!); passengers on airplanes said they were 'in it together'. Drivers were letting others go first!
A month or so later, in discussion one Shabbat here at Adat Shalom, people noted that road rage was already back. A year later, indications of volunteerism and even blood donations have now returned to dismal pre-9/11 levels. Have we really changed? Have we learned the lessons of one year ago? Those are questions for us to ponder these next 24 hours -- when the unfortunate gift of 9/11 demands us to align our actions with our values; when the annual gift of YK bids us to seek forgiveness and change.
At the end of the day, we are all one. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a few days ago at the National Cathedral, proclaimed: "We are family. We can be human only together. We can be free only together. We can be safe only together." To be human and free and safe, we must give Elisha ben Abuya back his name – we must end otherizing, as we open up to and help others. And, at the same time, we must avoid replicating Ben Abuya’s mistake of dichotomizing, of separating one element of reality from another.
We are family. We are all one. And in some way, we are all other. When we truly learn that, we may choose life – that we and our children may live. Gemar tov.
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