CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

Rosh Hashanah 5767

by Rabbi Sim Glaser

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Screen Rabbi: A good Yontov, and welcome to mypulpit.com. I had the sense that perhaps my appearance on this monitor would further enhance my words to you this Rosh Hashanah, as I know many of you are accustomed to greeting the world through screen images, and quite frankly, I think you’ll pay better attention. It might be less threatening to have a virtual rabbi greeting you this yontov than the real deal.

It’s troubling to consider what these gadgets have done to our interpersonal skills. I’m a flexible rabbi. I can get used to almost anything – people glued to their machines, kids who have trouble talking to me because there is no escape or delete button on my face. I’ve become accustomed to cell phones going off during services, counseling sessions, lessons, classes and brisses (which, let me tell you, can be dangerous) – and this year we broke new ground with a woman who took a call during a eulogy I was delivering, and continued talking in her seat for five minutes. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, maybe it was the deceased calling in with a rebuttal…

And all this screen time, it has to be pulling us away from one another. You know, thousands of years ago the philosopher Plato warned that the advent of reading would be the downfall of the oral tradition, the end of collective and individual memory. He was right! The ancient rabbis felt the same way. They never wanted to put the Talmud down in print – they were afraid people would stop talking to one another! They were worried individuals taking in information without being in the active presence of another human being might lead us to isolation from one another!

Think about this morning’s Torah portion – the Akeda. Look, what if the Abraham and Isaac story had taken place in a time of cell phone technology: “Abraham – take your son, your beloved… gather the wood for offering, the rope for binding and the blackberry to receive my instant messages and phone calls.”
And Abraham started up the mountain – And God cried out: “Avraham, Avraham, can you… me now? Can you hear me now?!”
And Abraham responded unto God: “I’m sorry, we have a bad signal – I’m way up on a hill, I may be out of range… Can I call you back from a land line? It’ll be about 10 minutes. I have something I need to do.”
And Adonai spoke, saying: “No, no, wait! Check your computer for an instant message, and don’t worry about having enough memory! I will provide the RAM!”
And then an angel of God appeared on call waiting and cried out: “Do not lift your hand against the boy – do not harm him!”
And Abraham said – “Say what? What?? You’re breaking up. Text it to me., I’ll pick it up in an hour or so and get back to you. And then Abraham’s phone screen flashed: “roaming charges now apply” and he hung up.

Do you see the inherent danger? There is no real hineini – no real “I am here”. None of that if it is done electron -

Rabbi Glaser: Alright, enough already with this – it’s gimmicky.

Screen Rabbi: No,wait,I’m telling you, this is the only way to keep people’s attention!

Rabbi Glaser: You’re wrong. Your whole thesis is wrong.

Screen Rabbi: Hey who’s giving this talk, you or the screen rabbi?

Rabbi Glaser: I am. I’m giving the sermon.

Screen Rabbi: Hah! Mortal preacher! Do you think you have greater power than a screened image??

Rabbi Glaser: Who has the remote?

Screen Rabbi: uh – oh.

He is wrong. I mean, I was wrong. I like to cite my favorite bumper sticker of the year, and this year’s was Don’t believe everything you think. My intention this morning had been to speak about the isolation, the disconnect that has come to us by way of the cell phone, the internet, the ipod, the blackberry, and the video game, and the endless staring into individual screens. But I started reading about it, looking into it, and discovered, in fact, that it is narishkeit, nonsense. There’s no proof of this. Dontcha hate it when you have this great idea for a sermon and it turns out to have no basis in fact whatsoever?? Does that ever happen to you?

Here’s what I read (on line, of course): Scientists have said that contrary to the fears of many parents and teachers, chat rooms and message boards and cell phones have not created an individualistic self-centered generation that shuns social interaction or community involvement, but are actually fostering a new public spirit among young people and helping them to develop their personalities and make friends! Dang! But then I thought, hey, I’m the spin-meister. I can tweak this puppy.

I became even more aware of this while working out for the holidays, pumping irony, lifting heits, exercising for expiation, getting toned up to atone and benching rams’ horns. It was then that I remembered what I like best about the Shofar blasts. Not only are they a symbol of communication, listening, attentiveness, call and response – they represent the desire for wholeness and our connection to one another.

But they do have to be listened to while surrounded by community! For instance, here is how not to listen to the Shofar calls: I have had the Shofar calls recorded digitally and loaded them on to my Ipod so that I can hear the call any time and any place I wish. Allow me to demonstrate. (Tekiah –Shevarim - Teruah). God that rocks. But clearly you see it doesn’t work so well...

Let me demonstrate 3 valid interpretations of the Shofar calls for this Rosh Hashanah.

This is the birthday of the world, right? So let’s celebrate the big bang that Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, teaches about. We begin with the oneness prior to the creation of the universe –
Tekiah – (put hands together) and it sounds like this.

Then there is Shevarim (hands part)– then the great release of light when God’s emanations explode into a universe that cannot even contain it, inadvertently pulling us away from God and from one another. And it sounds like this.

Teruah – (fingers flicker) with our help, trillions and billions of sparks of divine essence struggle to become reunited. To recreate a broken wholeness. Tikkun Olam as the mystics called it. This is how it sounds.

And here is an interpretation related to these holidays:

Tekiah - I started out the year whole. I was in pretty good shape after last Yom Kippur. A pretty together person.

Shevarim - over the year I became broken, apart from my family, distanced from my friends, strayed far away from the God I am actively trying to seek today. And I separated from who I really was. The talk I talked didn’t always match the walk I walked.

Teruah: And here I am trying to become whole again. Seeking integrity. And I know I can only do that in connection with others.

Tekiah gedolah – representing a world completed and healed, and we are not there yet.

The Shofar calls also tell us about the very journey of our lives:

Tekiah – (hands together) When I was born I started out whole and physically linked to humankind - I was inside my mother - one with humanity.

Shevarim - then I broke away, growing up young brash, independent, striking out “on my own” – sometimes lonely. For so many years I thought I was the universe. Just like everybody else thinks they are the center of the universe. I thought I could exist by myself. I found ways to inform myself by myself, entertain myself on my own, create things individually, play games alone, stand in a crowd of people and still manage to talk to someone who actually wasn’t in the room, as though there were no others in the room, receive communications from people I would likely never see or meet…

Teruah (flickering fingers) - (hands flickering touching the person next to you), reaching out to feel others, to communicate. Struggling to be reunited. This motion works on a keyboard as well. Our attempts to connect with one another, to emote with each other, to touch one another are as honestly human as breathing itself.

We live at a very interesting time in the history of communication. Maybe this is a good time to recall the biblical story of the dawn of that technology – when the very first broadcasting tower was built – the Tower of Babel – the hubris of attempting to reach heaven itself and take on God. They were very excited about their new technology, but they did not succeed. What, asked the rabbis of the Midrash, was the sin of building the tower of Babel? Their answer was the intention of the builders. In their great desire to ascend upwards and gain power, they forgot the dignity and importance of the individual human being. The Midrash tells us, when a brick tumbled off the construction the workers stopped and mourned the loss. When a human being fell, he was ignored. They worshipped their amazing tool of progress, but ignored its most important reason for existing – to bring humanity closer together.

A community that rises from our use of technology to communicate with one another is wonderful stuff. But when we retreat into these wondrous devices at the price of human contact, hmmm, maybe not so good.

This has been a tough year – images and news flashes coming at us rapidly and endlessly from our electric tools, often coming at us like a bad email, you know, like when the person hits send before they think about the impact of their message. The networks all screamed the fear index at us, letting us know how scared we should be, but how often were we instructed as to whom we should turn to talk about it?

Like life itself, the internet, PDA’s and cells provide a beautiful ease of communication for us, but gives us many opportunities to leave one another and dwell in a world of the self. We can amuse ourselves for hours playing games by ourselves, but… should we? We can access information about a troubling world any time we want to, all by alone in a dark room, but… should we? We can dance and sing along with any song we want to that is only in our own head, but… should we?

An important message of Rosh Hashanah is that each and every moment we cry out to be one with each other and one with the universe. We cry out to be listened to and to hear others speaking. Whether this is through conversation, phone calls, or the millions of ways people are using the internet to establish or reestablish relationships. My friend David Friedman, Kabbalist and artist in Tsfat maintains that neither the big bang theory nor the internet are any threat to Jewish mysticism. They both prove the central point that the entire universe was at one point whole, and is in the constant process of endeavoring to reconnect.

Another important Jewish message in a year of increasing national and international division is that the God whom we worship is universal. Any sect or religious faction asserting that their God is commanding them to tear the world apart, to accentuate differences between us, to destroy the “disbelievers” or those who are not like them in race color or creed should be deeply suspect.

For that matter, any American political party that believes that its God is exclusively supporting their sole ideology at the expense of others, and using religion to politically divide the country are also missing the boat. Politicians and politics in general should be pulling the community together and uniting the center. Though there are those who would tell you otherwise, I am almost certain that God is not partisan, and God is certainly not hung up on any one or two issues. In this political year, look to the uniters, not the dividers. In a year of confusion over terror and violence, look to those who are conciliatory and who seek negotiation and compromise, not those whose endgame is to squash the opposition, or disenfranchise an entire segment of the nation in the name of what God tells you to do, or eradicate the presence of another group of people from their midst.

Judaism doesn’t want us to isolate ourselves, but to connect up, and the more people we can contact and the further into the world our Teruah natures can reach, the better.

This, by the way, is not my discovery. The prophet Isaiah figured it out 2700 years ago. The Assyrians had expanded as a major global power. People who had spent their lives in tiny villages among a small circle of family all of a sudden were exposed to a world of varying cultures and languages and customs laid out in front of them like an ancient Google search engine. Their reaction to differences was to pull their head inside the proverbial turtle shell and call on their God to shield them from the other. Isaiah witnessed responses of his own people and other nations, striking against the prevailing power, using their God to bash those who were unlike them, who challenged their values and attitudes and made them uncomfortable.

And Isaiah said: You can’t use God like that. My God, said Isaiah, is mightier than any single army, because my God is the God of all humanity. God does not dwell within the city, or state, or political party. God dwells in the individual. And the more people you get to know, the better you will understand this.

This may not sound revolutionary to you now, but 27 centuries ago it was big stuff for Isaiah the prophet to get up on his soapbox and assert that God was not one of your Commanding Officer, your CEO or your campaign manager. A millennium later the Talmud expanded on Isaiah’s radical notion: When Elephants were created God made them in herds. Geese were created in flocks, fish in schools. But people? On the sixth day only one person was created, to teach us the infinite value of each and every human being, and to let us know that we cannot separate ourselves from one another no matter how hard we try. The instinct will always be to reconnect. No matter how far away from each other we may be geographically or ideologically, we are destined to be one.

This is a God who wants us all in the same chat room. This is a God who wants Myspace to be Ourspace. This is the God who gave the Torah, which if you think about it is the original text message! (aka: the “five blogs of Moses”) It is a Torah that was broadcast from the towering Mount Sinai in the ancient version of cyberspace – the democracy of the wilderness – a public place, open to all peoples - but never ever intended to be crammed down any one people’s throat. Basically, the Israelite people had the most hits on the site, and that’s why they call us chosen. And having chosen buy into that web, this is the God who transmits to us on regular occasion and asks: “Can you hear me now?”

Once upon a time, five long years ago, on an island in the Atlantic, in a giant city of one and a half million people of every race color and creed living in relatively stable harmony there were two towers. And they were twins, like Ephraim and Menasheh, who, we are told were apparently the first two brothers in Biblically recorded history to actually get along with one another. And those buildings were called the world trade center, symbol of international commerce and the interconnectedness of all God’s people. The very purpose of the attack that brought down those towers was to rip apart humanity. Using God as a scalpel to divide the us from the them, to separate the faithful from the infidel. To create Shevarim – the chaotic shattering that leaves humankind lonely and fearful when we are rendered asunder.

But it didn’t work. This year, on the fifth anniversary of the attempt to pull America apart and scatter our souls flailing into the wind like the shards of shattered vessels, the human spirit is more determined than ever to join with each other in harmony. This year, in the midst of many memorieals, we revisited in essays, film, song, poetry and documentary TV, yet again, the events on that terrible day.

In one documentary, a camera capturing the devastation pans up to the burning floor in the middle of the sky. It focuses in on two figures jumping. In reviewing the film the editors zoom in, still not close enough to make out precisely who the two people are, and we will never know their names. But the camera is able to reveal this about them that we may not have originally seen: they are holding hands.

One witness at the time wrote these words: I doubt if they were married or lovers. I think it was just two people, alone, desperate, black, white, oriental, who cares? The telescope didn't allow me to distinguish age and race. They would just pair up and jump. I think if I were on the roof, and I saw flames on all sides of the building, and if I saw another trembling human alongside me, I’d be much more secure holding their hand, and jumping as a pair. Somehow to jump as half of a pair, even if the other half is a recent acquaintance, seems to me an infinitely more human way to pass on to the next step, than to take the next step alone.

We are told that the last words on our lips before we depart this earth are supposed to be the shema – attesting that God is one. These two people, facing certain death, and a mammoth attempt to deify differences, to hack apart humanity, to celebrate the separate, chose in their last moments to embrace a physical shema, declaring to humanity and locked in American memory for eternity, that we are, as the mystics taught us, and as we confirm on this day, all one. We know this in our hearts, and we are always trying to get back to that place. With kisses and keyboards, sentimentality and cell phones, emotions and emails. With tenderness and text messages. With Myspaces and smiling faces.

This is Shema – This is our space – This is the promise of Tekiah Gedolah. And nobody can knock that down.