ACTION IN THE FACE OF FEAR

Yom Kippur 5767

by Rabbi Sim Glaser

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The Yamim Noraim are most famously known as the “days of awe” but the word norah can also be translated as fear. The fear, or awe on these days is supposed to be inspired by God’s proximity to us, but these days fear seems to be year around and all over the place.

Personally, I feel I am abundantly qualified to talk about being scared of things. I, myself, am a fearful person and have been all my life. I am scared of almost everything. Barb and I are empty nesters this year for the first time in our married life. When we got home from our places of employment that evening after Hannah had gone off to school it was depressing and scary. For….. about 10 minutes. We adapt quickly. Now the new fear is: OmyGod – next stop, grandparenthood. Gevalt!

Another more immediate source of fear is that it is terrifying to follow Cantor Abelson’s music with a sermon. His wonderful new CD has already risen above my Rabbi Sim and the Glased Donuts CD on the Temple Israel charts, and outsold it. The CD is called Beyond Words, but you should know that it was originally entitled Better Than a Sermon. He changed it to Beyond Words, a slightly less harsh way of saying: if you’re tired of the yadda yadda, my CD is Beyond… Words.

As if things weren’t scary enough, somebody just sent me another version of Janowski’s Avinu Malkeinu, Cantor’s opening cut, by Barbara Streisand, and this too scares me very deeply. “Avinu Malkeinu, we have sinned against you by saying this is absolutely our last tour and then going on to tour several times since.” Hard to listen to on Yom Kippur. It’s like buttah.

There was a lot of scary stuff on people’s plates this year. You came to us for counseling, arriving in our offices saying: Rabbi, how am I to live my life now that Pluto has reduced to the status of a dwarf planet? And I felt your pain. We were just this shy of a galactic minyan… now we’re down to only eight. What do we do??

And as if that wasn’t troubling enough, how many of us lost our sense of direction when Marshall Fields became Macy’s, seemingly overnight. They tried to hide the troubling truth from us for a while by putting a Marshall Fields banner over the Macy’s sign, but I could see the bright star behind it shining through like an orange alert, and I knew in the depths of my soul that strange and dire change was ahead. We held grief counseling sessions where people spoke openly about how they were only still getting over the loss of Dayton’s. You may think I’m joking but in all seriousness, do you know that people were picketing Macy’s??

It feels good to laugh, but in fact it has been a tough year. And while I am making light of some of the less significant sources of anxiety, there has been plenty to worry about. Many of you have, in fact, approached us saying: Rabbi, I don’t know how you plan on choosing what you are going to be talking about this year, but I’d really just like to know, how do I make sense of things? It seems like the world is going crazy. What do I tell my children about what is going on? What do I tell them about the war against terror? What do I do about Darfur? What’s going on with Israel? Is it true what they are saying about global warming?

What does one do about these things to reduce the stress? To live life as a normal human being?

Clearly, there’s some bad stuff out there that no matter what we try to do to curb it, it will happen and may always be a source of stress. When we see an injustice go unpunished, or even worse, rewarded, we have this sense that nothing we can do will matter. We either become numb or deeply cynical.

A remarkable passage in the Talmud [Avodah Zarah 54b] poses the problem: “Suppose a man steals a measure of wheat and plants it in his own field. In a world that is ordered and makes sense it would be right that the wheat not grow.” After all, it’s stolen wheat. But the passage ends by saying that the wheat will sprout anyway, because “nature pursues its normal course -- olam k’minhago noheg.”

Nature is morally neutral – earthquakes, hurricanes and incurable diseases do not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked; brakes tragically fail and cars crash, rains come in floods; lack of rains cause draughts, and our loved ones become ill, not because God is plotting the action but because that is the way the world works.

Reflecting on the midrash to the book of Exodus helps me work through some of this stuff. It is instructive to look at that classic moment when the Israelites are poised at the Red Sea and Moses, standing in prayer before God as God says to him, “Moses, My beloved children are in danger at the sea, and you stand here praying?” Moses says, “But Master of the universe, what can I do?” And God answers: “Speak to the children of Israel and move them forward!”

It’s an interesting moment. In what seems to be an insurmountable, stunning, paralyzing barrier, the Israelites are being told to swim first and ask questions later. Soon after, the Israelites see Moses descending Sinai with the tablets of instruction in his arms and they see these strange new rays of light, karnei or, bouncing off of his forehead, and they are moved to accept the covenant even before they are entirely aware of its contents. After spending 400 years in the dark narrowness of mitzrayim there is something in the light of newly revealed truth that is liberating in a way that surpasses even the breaking of physical chains. These brand new instructions are telling them the antidote to despair is action!

There are so many opinions, facts and figures coming at us daily that we get the sense that if we don’t understand the entirety of the issue our action is not justified. Nonsense. Judaism does not ask us to have total command of the problem, only to wrestle with it, shed light on it and act upon it.

Everybody reacts differently to stressful situations and we certainly are not the first to live in stressful times. The Talmud tells the well known tale of four great rabbis who wandered through the PaRDes, the orchard, and witnessed a terrible crisis that seemed to violate everything in the world their faith had promised them. A boy climbs a tree to perform a mitzvah of shooing away the mother bird before taking her eggs and subsequently falls to the ground breaking his neck. The graphic display of apparently divine injustice causes one rabbi to grab his chest in shock and fall to the ground dead. Another is so overwhelmed by the disaster he goes insane, retreats to his abode and never speaks again. Won’t even turn on CNN. The third sage is so dumbfounded he leaves the faith, denies God’s very existence, and seeks only rational explanations for why things happen.

But the fourth sage, a supreme hero in the Jewish tradition emerges more convinced than ever that God’s plan is far more complicated than any one incident can determine (define) and is determined that his human action, his study and God’s very plan must go hand in hand.

That figure was Rabbi Akiva who became the greatest scholar in our tradition and not insignificantly also the man who got going when the going got tough, standing behind the rebel Bar Kochba in the revolt of 135 against the Roman attempt to destroy Judaism. Akiva’s learning, his wisdom and his piety were never separate from his sense of action. Judaism always teaches, do something. Anything. But don’t stand still.

The heroes in Jewish tradition never stood still. Some failed, many were martyred. Some even made regrettable decisions. But those who are vivid in the imagination of the Jewish people did not remain stupefied and unable to react. Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who will be profiled here in a few weeks when Rabbi Michael Marmur comes to teach us, is such a man, praying with his feet in Selma, and imploring us to turn our ideology into action, for our own sakes and the sake of the world.

If Heschel isn’t vivid enough, think of the Hashemona’im, the Macabbean rebels who basically said the Greeks cannot keep us from lighting our lamps. We have a wide eyed vision of who we are supposed to be, and the lights of rededication will outlast the darkness of Greek tyranny. Or skip two millennia to the same embattled sliver of land and bear witness to the early halutzim – the pioneers of Israel who arrived in a largely inhospitable land, drained swamps and planted forests in the desert, and let the light of Zion shine forth. To this day, Israel, unlike practically any other country in the world, when called upon to investigate itself internally, to shine light on its own faults, atones publicly, even as it stands resolute in the right to defend its borders.

A sense of fear and relative helplessness overtook me this year in a surprising way as I sat in the darkened Lagoon Theater viewing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. As I meditated on his off-the-charts graphic depictions of a rapidly warming earth with the potential of melting ice caps and massive flooding perhaps even within a few decades, I was pierced with sadness and shame about the future of my own children and grandchildren and our inaction.

As the film and countless environmentalists have pointed out, there will be those who will insist that this heat wave is a common fluctuation in earth’s varying temperatures over billions of years. That our fears are unwarranted.

But what is far more likely is that we are covering the light of truth with a blanket of darkness in order that our lives today will be calmer, the current situation more palatable to us, even at the expense of our children’s future. When we push aside action, the stress factor grows.

An analogy is employed in the film by the self described “Almost President of the United States”, telling us that if a frog were to dive into a pot of boiling water, he’d jump right back out, startled by the water temperature, but if he is sitting in that same beaker of water and it is heated slowly, the frog will not notice the rising temperature and eventually slowly and agonizingly perish. This analogy was obviously pointed at our unwillingness to accept that the 10 warmest years in the history of recorded weather have occurred in the last 15 years. But the symbol is equally descriptive of our human predisposition for sitting by while danger slowly but steadily envelops us. We have become immune to the incremental. And this, I would argue is the true source of our stress.

And then I fantasized speaking to my own grandchild and saying to them: “I certainly hope the earth doesn’t continue this warming trend. We saw this coming a long time ago.”

“And what did you do about it grandpa?”
“Well, I, I…”

The only thing that kept me from complete despair watching this movie was when Gore reflected on how the world, when “exposed” to a significant truth about the depletion of the Ozone layer, actually reversed the process through activism and enacted legislation involving fluorocarbons and auto emissions. People decided they could make a difference and they did.

This year we opened our religious school with a strong message to the children that Temple cares about their future. Solar panels were installed on the roof of our building, and we told the kids they will catch the sun, transform it into usable energy, and will power the Ner Tamid right there. We wanted to be concrete.

Now, just between you and me, we couldn’t really prove to these children that the actual solar power absorbed through these panels will directly power that Ner Tamid, but this isn’t the point. The point is we told them that sustaining their world for their future is reliant on our actions now, and we were in it with them! That we will not sit in the beaker like ignorant frogs as the water warms up leaving for their future an uninhabitable planet.

Ner Tamid doesn’t mean Eternal Light or Eternal Lamp, but comes from a verse in the Torah that contains the words “a fire to burn continuously”. The Ner Tamid is not a supposed to be a symbol of physical light. It should be to us and to our children a symbol of confronting the truth by shedding light and then acting upon it. Eternally.

The fear of the rising tide of terrorism is perhaps the most challenging element to our sense of well being. Terrorism is a tool designed to cause us to cower and be immobilized, it’s actions purposefully directed at ripping apart humanity. Terrorism fools us into declaring a constant state of emergency which contributes to immunity against the incremental. Do we need to be aware? Absolutely. But we have to ratchet down the alarm level.

The old standard about the cat and the mouse reminds us that when a mouse is pursued by a cat he can run away from the cat but the cat has a greater gait and will snag him and leave him on someone’s doorstep. Sometimes, we know, the mouse will close its eyes and play dead until the cat loses interest and goes away, which can be effective. The only problem is you can play dead for only so long.

We are caught in the tricky position of needing to react to the source of our fears, but not allow them to overwhelm us. The only logical option seems to be to look through the paralyzing enormity of a world in trouble, and be practical, biting off a single piece that we can actually chew.

I dealt with it this way this year. The daily reports each morning of the situation in Darfur were tragic and huge. We are confronted with numbers like 400,000 killed and two and a half million displaced. A million and a half in refugee camps. My fear is that a few years from now those numbers will mean about as little as the 800,000 killed in Rwanda and even the fading power of the 6 million that has been our symbol of martyrdom.

For me the fear about Darfur, again, was in saying to my grandchild one day, yes I am the grandson of Auschwitz victims, and yes I was alive in a time when a million people lost their lives in the first genocide of the 21st century. And no, I didn’t do anything about it because I assumed that in a world filled with news reports and constant streaming information and the bright spotlight firmly aimed at the Khartoum government in Sudan that someone would take care of it. The United Nations would engage. No one would allow the Sudanese government to expel aid workers and African Union troops. No, not with the whole world looking, and not with an American President declaring that such a thing will not happen on his watch. And I was wrong.

There is no record of how the darkness of slavery fell over Egypt and continued for hundreds of years. Only that the Israelites slipped into the morass of inaction and acceptance of an evil until they were powerless. In the plagues of the Exodus story the big numbers never counted. When the entire Nile became a huge river of blood – this large gory symbol of death and decay, it clobbered ancient Biblical Egypt, but it motivated no one to action. When the plague of physical darkness covered the earth, they stumbled and feared, but nothing really happened. Billions of locusts attack, blackening the sky, but there is no change.

It is not until the last plague in which children are dying in Egyptian homes and pharaoh is forced to confront individual suffering, that anyone takes notice of the tragedy befalling Egypt.

The number 6 million used to frighten the world. It doesn’t anymore. Big numbers are so prevalent and so amorphous that ironically they become comforting. We are shielding ourselves from the light of a truth. It is easier to play dead until the cat goes away, but the cat comes back. As has been historically evident, the genocidal cat returns to the world just about every twenty years, sometimes less, because people forget, because we shroud ourselves in the darkness of large numbers. Because we play dead too long.

On October 29th – in just four weeks, our Minnesota Interfaith Darfur Coalition, along with the hunger relief organization Feed My Starving Children, is holding a Day of Action and enlightenment for Darfur, a day to pack food, to learn and advocate, to turn away from the darkness of large numbers and depictions of a land mass the “size of Texas” and address the needs of individuals.

Now I’ll be honest with you, the question arose – with the difficulty in getting supplies to those in need, what sense does it make to pack food? It’s a valid question. Our only response was when you are assembling a package of food to eventually be a meal for six people, and you are feeding them from afar, it is very difficult to think of them as a big number. It is our way of removing the darkness of numbing statistics and acting. Shedding light where there has been very little light. If this is part of what haunts you these days, I hope you will consider joining me on that Sunday. The Yom Kippur service shell has information on it.

A few weeks ago I was working with a Bat Mitzvah student on her speech for Bereisheet, the first portion in Genesis depicting the creation of the world, day by day. I asked my student: If the light of the sun, moon and stars was created on the fourth day, what then is that great light that appeared on the first day? She thought for a moment and responded: it must be the light of goodness and honesty. And the darkness? She said: It must be when you are blind to that goodness. To which I said: Thank you dear, you have just written my Yom Kippur sermon. And she said “Will I be credited for this, Rabbi?” and I said “No my dear, you will not. And thus the child learned about the prerogative of the pulpit.

As Rabbi Zimmerman pointed out last night, the prophet Isaiah is full of terrific one liners, and comes through again, saying: “When you offer your compassion to the hungry, and satisfy the famished creature, then shall your light shine in darkness, and your gloom shall be like noonday. God will slake your thirst in parched places, and give strength to your bones.”

How mysterious these verses. Our light shining in darkness, gloom like noonday?? Drinking your fill in the middle of a desert. Our bones gaining strength. What is he talking about? Isaiah understood that real light is that of awareness and action, and real darkness means playing dead in the brightness of noon. Isaiah undertood that the most devastating Osteoporosis is that of our spiritual core. Frogs in an ever warming beaker, mice thinking the cat will go away, eyes wide open and still a shroud of darkness?

I was originally going to talk about this at the creative service downstairs, but I didn’t have the guts. I don’t want to fill their lives with an abundance of concerns and dire predictions of a future that may not come to pass in my lifetime but may indeed happen in theirs. Of telling them that our decisions hold their future hostage. That the legacy of my generation means a poorer one for them. It doesn’t seem to keep with that time honored Jewish tradition that each subsequent generation should outshine the previous. That each year should bring us closer to a messianic hope.

I don’t think they want to hear us harp on the fears. And I don’t think they want the world of a non-stop orange alert and an adrenal system that won’t quit and mice playing dead. I don’t think they want to see the This is your brain on drugs commercials. I think they want models of positive action and hope from us, no matter how small and seemingly inconsequential our actions may seem. I think they want us to explore alternative sources of fuel, and ways in which to confront the global differences between us, and I don’t think they want to think of numbers of dead in the millions, but want to know what they can do for one single person or a family.

I conclude with a story told about a King who has three daughters and he has decided to leave his entire inheritance to only one of them. He devises a test of their wisdom by presenting to them three rooms and tells each daughter to fill it to its absolute capacity. Whichever daughter does so most successfully will gain the King’s inheritance.

The first daughter has her servants remove an entire barn full of straw and stuff it into the room until the walls cannot be seen. The king is dutifully impressed. The second daughter has her servants shovel as much earth as is humanly possible into the second room until it literally tumbles out the door. The King is even more impressed. There does not seem to be a square inch of space in the room. The third, youngest daughter without the aid of servants walks quietly into the next room, looks around, and lights a candle.

The King’s inheritance goes to the youngest daughter, for she has filled the room most entirely and most effectively. And she has done it with light. This is what the youngest, our inheritors, want for themselves and they want it from us. They do not want our despair and our dirt and our straw. They want light. And it only takes one person to hold a candle.

On this Yom Kippur, this holiest day of the year, when we strip ourselves of shadows and the ill fitting costumes of self deception, let us reveal the world to ourselves and bring the great primordial light of truth to shine on the world’s problems for precisely what they are. And may we, as individuals, step forward, with real hands and real feet of action, to bring the light of truth and righteousness into a world still waiting to be redeemed. For our sake and for the sake of our children.

Only in darkness can despair dwell. Where there is light, there is hope. Where there is eternal light, there is eternal hope.

Keyn y’hi ratson.