Sermons

Grow Up
Yom Kippur 5769
by Rabbi Sim Glaser

Well gosh darnit I don’t know about you folks on Yom Kippur, but I’m gettin’good’n hungry. Like right about now I could go for some tasty spaghetti sauce over some pasta… or no, no, maybe a nice salad with that perfect Italian dressing with all natural ingredients, or something dipped in that delicious salsa, perhaps peach flavored, or my favorite cookie – the fig Newton, made, of course, only with all real fruit to assuage my guilty pleasure..

But how could I possibly do such a thing? It’s Yom Kippur? How could I indulge myself… unless! Unless my fressing somehow contributed to the greater good! I know, I’ll use only products that the manufacturer donates 100% of his profits to charity! Yes, only if they wind up giving $120 million dollars to causes and set up summer fun camps for severely ill children. Then it will be nutritious, delicious and meretricious! Kosher for the Kippur.

God, I miss Paul Newman.

A Hollywood star, but humble; successful product businessman whose smiling face appeared on every bottle and jar as a way to help sell the product, but who gave away all the proceeds to foundations and causes. A blue-eyed hunkasaurus, a veritable babe magnet, dodging autograph hounds and women stalking him at hotels during movie shoots, but remaining devotedly married to Joanne Woodward for 50 years. He was Butch Cassidy! Hud! Henry Gondroff. Shady characters and still you couldn’t help but love him because he radiated, oh I don’t know what – (My stage direction here says “swoon” I don’t know how to swoon)

I know this sounds like a eulogy, but what I really want is to give Paul Newman a Bar Mitzvah. Newman passed away two weeks ago at 83, precisely the age determined for the second Bar Mitzvah. Let me explain. There is a Jewish tradition for a man who has reached the age of 83 to celebrate a second bar mitzvah. The Mishnah says a "normal" lifespan is 70 years and is considered the age of wisdom, so that an 83-year-old can be considered 13 in a second lifetime. The wisdom of age plus the thirteen years of deeds…

But this is really why I want to give him a Bar Mitzvah. Paul Newman was a big kid and a magnificent grown-up at the same time. He never wanted to be a Hollywood icon. He thought it was too self oriented, image-based, he didn’t want to be known for his appearance. He understood the passing folly of ego and vanity. He said he feared his epitaph would someday read: Here lies Paul Newman – a failure because his eyes turned brown. He didn’t want his face on movie posters, he wanted it on bottles of salad dressing and bags of organic popcorn as though to proclaim that everything we do, eat, sell, consume, say, stand for, promote, endorse, purchase or admire should have a positive connection with the world as a whole.

Paul Newman was the hero of Exodus, but it wasn’t really enough to be a hero and save lives only on celluloid. Like the race car driver he was, he got behind the real wheel. Sally Field once said sometimes God makes perfect people, and Paul was one of them. He was so handsome. So sincere, So, so, so half-Jewish. (that’s me, not Sally Field) He had the marvelous enthusiasm of a child; he said that to be an actor you had to be a child; but I don’t think he was satisfied to remain a child.

Newman taught that true success means your actions and goals are enthusiastically connected to healing of your world. He said: “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster.” But he did better than that. When asked about his achievements Paul said: “I'm not running for sainthood. I just think in life we need to be like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

If that isn’t a saint I don’t know what is. I think we should name a city after him right here in Minnesota. I’ve got it, St. Newman! No, that doesn’t work. I’ll think of something…

Yes Paul Newman deserves a Bar Mitzvah, a true celebration of coming of age - when a person demonstrates the movement from self to the world – from ego to relationship. From “the world exists for me” to “the world breathes through me”.

At what age do we really grow up? The ancient rabbis of the Mishnah said that at thirteen one takes on the responsibility of the commandments, at fifteen the laws of the Talmud. At 18 one is ready for marriage, at 20 you get a job! At 30 we possess full strength (whatever that means) at 40 we achieve understanding. At 50 you can give advice to others. 60, I’m sorry to tell you, is old age. And ah, 70, – the fullness of years, etc. then I guess you’re dead or something…

That seems to be one side of the story. But if maturity is measured in chronological years, why is our great patriarch Abraham commanded at a ripe old age to, and here I quote an Aramaic translation of the Torah: “Get out of yaldutecha your childhood?” Grow up, Abraham!

If maturity is in lock step with chronological age, how come so many people, as their years advance, seem to become less and less concerned with the world around them and the future of the coming generations? Haven’t we all known 6 year olds with the care and altruistic compassion of age, and 85 year olds so self-absorbed that true responsibility for their world eludes them still. What is a grown up?

What is the sign of maturity? When do we really come of age? When we are old enough to drive? Old enough to drink? Old enough to know we’re not supposed to do the two at the same time? Old enough to serve in the military? My teacher Rabbi Joe Edelheit was telling me about one of his university students – only 18 years old, and already he has seen three tours of duty in Iraq. He is chronologically young but possesses the wisdom of age. Not old enough to be Joe Six-pack, but has served alongside his fellow soldiers, witnessing courageous heroism and death first hand. Risking the supreme sacrifice for another. If that isn’t a grown-up, what is?

How old was the author of the book Night? In our collective minds Elie Wiesel will always be that 15 year old boy. In fact he was 29 when pen finally met paper to become the memoir we now know as Night. It took 13 years to move from the petrifying personal experience of the Holocaust to come and serve the greater world and educate all of humanity on the inhumanity of the Shoah. (a lesson, as it turns out, we would need to learn again and again). Night was written in Wiesel’s “bar mitzvah year” since the birth of his brutally forged identity.

Are we old enough to be president when we reach a certain chronological age? Barack Obama is the youngest candidate since Kennedy. John McCain the oldest ever for a first term run.

How do we know we are getting an adult for a president? One way we might determine this is to see if an “I–Me–Mine” ego is on its way to the White House. How much of the desire to be our national leader is caught up in ego and how much is it the desire to work for the good of the American community, or, for that matter, the world?

My debate challenge would be: Tell us what you really think! Grow up and tell us, when you are asked, what you’re really going to do? Grow up and take responsibility for your voting record. Were those votes cast for your status or were you focused on something outside your alliances and your reputation? You did those things, you made those decisions. Were they for the nation and the world or were they for you?

A rabbi in the early 60’s reflected on John F. Kennedy’s decision making during the Cuban Missile crisis. Advised by many to meet the ensuing threat with the full force of American might, he weighed the consequences carefully, considering the matter of American character, destiny, and history, and decided that we would be false to ourselves were we to execute a Pearl Harbor against another people. A young president, his actions were graced with splendid maturity: he was forceful, but not overbearing, powerful, but not pulverizing; he knew when to hold back. He was not focused on becoming a “war president” of force and might. He was not flexing king-of-the-world muscles. As history now reflects, it is a good thing Kennedy did what he did.

Immaturity in a child may be annoying. In an adult it is awfully disturbing. In high places of government it is deadly and disastrous.

Growing up doesn’t ever have to mean leaving the child within us behind. God knows, this is one of the best parts of us. If we lose the child inside we’ll forget about the beauty of this planet now in peril. If we lose the child inside we’ll forget how fervently our own children want to live in a peaceful and ecologically viable world. We’ll lose the imaginative faculty that propels us to dream and hope.

Growing up might well be the moment in which we understand that everything we do in life is not supposed to be designed for payback, for reward. Newman the Tzaddik seemed to realize this early on when he stopped signing autographs and celebrating himself through self ego inflating interviews. Or when he eschewed his own star status to direct and promote movies featuring his wife. Or when he invented a legitimate enterprise to facilitate American consumers voting with their pocketbooks at the grocery store.

Our wonderful TIPTY choir are a bunch of mensches over there, none of whom gave their time and effort for a tangible reward more than the occasional Chinese food or pizza. Any one of them can tell you that just before their B’nai Mitzvah services a few tears ago they signed a document in which they pledged to continue “growing up” Jewishly as the years progress. Their very presence here demonstrates they know rare is the person who is a spiritual grown-ups at 13.

If it were mine to invent all over again, I’d change the age, bump it up a bit. Maybe the early reformers had it right with confirmation being the more appropriate age. 13 is pretty young. We shower our kids with praise and celebrate their achievement with fun parties. We’ve taught them how important it is to us.

Our children, thank God, will never doubt our love for them. They understand why we do things for each other within our homes. But the questions of what it means to be a grown up should always remain before us: Why do people extend themselves, sacrifice their time and energy, forgo personal pleasure for neighbors, for fellow citizens, for members of their synagogue or for people they’ve never even met?

25 years ago the big news in social justice was about a kid named Trevor Ferrell, a 6th grader from a suburb of Philadelphia who saw a news report about street people on a night so cold that they were being taken into shelters.

The 11 year old pestered his dad until he took him into the city where he gave one guy one blanket and discovered a world inhabited by thousands of hungry and homeless men, women and children.

Soon Trevor and his parents, brother and sisters were making nightly trips to feed and comfort the homeless. Word spread quickly about this saintly little boy. Before long, he and many church group volunteers were serving hundreds.

In less than two years, "Trevor’s Campaign" was a million-dollar nonprofit with hundreds of volunteers, a homeless shelter (Trevor’s Place); a book deal for his dad and a TV. He was compared to Jesus and Ghandi. The rest of his childhood was filled with speeches, TV interviews, introductions to the Pope, Mother Teresa and Steven Spielberg. President Reagan introduced him during the 1986 State of the Union address.

When the story first got big every rabbi in America was writing about this kid, myself included. Can you imagine a better role model? An 11 year old who could not resist the call to help those less fortunate than himself. Talk about growing up!

I’m revisiting Trevor now 25 years later because I read the other day what became of him. Not a whole lot.

Because he was never in class, Trevor failed the sixth and eighth grades, and summer school one year. He says he had a "great" childhood before he was famous and a "good" one after. Eventually he got an unlisted phone number and took a job working construction, spent a couple of semesters as a communications major at a local College, gave acting a try. A few summers ago he took a job as caretaker of an estate so his family can live rent-free in their carriage house.

He still rents a space jammed with the essentials for day-to-day living and provides things free of charge for graduates from homeless shelters they need to start their lives over.

Trevor never got rich off that deal. His two daughters have no idea how famous their daddy was for a time. This may trouble you and me to hear, but Trevor himself has never particularly cared. Not then, and not now. You’ll probably never hear his name again after this morning. But for a small stretch of time he fascinated the nation.

In Jewish literature there was a wise old woman known as Gluckel of Hamlin. She lived in Germany about the same time as Shakespeare was writing in England. Gluckel was a simple woman from the old school. In her autobiography, Gluckel sends a letter to her children. Her husband has died and her children have moved to another city. In this letter, she advises them how to live by telling the following parable:

"There was a bird with three fledglings. One very windy day the father wanted to help each of his children to cross a mighty river. He placed the first fledgling on his wings and when he reached half-way he said: ‘You see how I struggle. When you grow up, will you do as much for me?" And the first child responds: “Bring me to the shore safely and I will do even more for you." He returned the surprised young bird back to the original shore. "He then asked the same question of the second young bird on the next flight over, and received the answer: yes do this for me and I will repay you with my total allegiance. Again unsatisfied, the father bird returned that fledgling to the first shore. When he asks the same question of his third child, she replied: Yes, my father, in truth you have struggled mightily on my behalf. When you become old, it would be wrong not to repay you according to the best of my ability. But this I promise, as you have done for me, I will do for my children. As you have struggled and taken risks on my behalf, and for others so I will do for the next generation." The father bird replied: “Well spoken my child.”

And he brings her to the other side.