Sermons

Living in the Age of Undoing
Yom Kippur 5770
by Rabbi Sim Glaser

I joined Facebook this year after some amount of pressure from people to do it already. I learned a few things from the experience including some new words. For instance, I learned that the word “friend” can be a verb. Did you know that? I know. I’m behind the times. I’m still working on “party” as a verb.

So I got set to friend a bunch of people. But was told by a rabbi colleague of mine -who will go unnamed but he works on the same floor as I do and is younger and hipper – that I should not friend, but only be friend-ed by others, lest I offend the great masses who are out there just dying to be friended by me knowing that I friended someone else in the congregation and not him or her. Are you following this? Me neither.

So I signed up, put an old picture of myself at 15 years old, the last time I was cool enough for facebook, begged my daughter for forgiveness that I am setting up a Facebook page, and excitedly waited for “friends”. A Month and a half later…

Well, to make a long sermon shorter, I confirmed some requests, including one that turned out to be a sort of Spam situation – lots of ads, events I didn’t want to attend. So I asked the aforementioned unnamed colleague – what do I do? Simple, he said, you unfriend this guy. Un-what? Is that a word? Unfriend?

Immediately I was transported through time to the great cola wars of the 60’s and how the 7Up company, the top lemon lime drink of our generation, called itself the “un-cola”. I remembered Disney’s Alice in Wonderland: and a very merry un-birthday to you! I thought of all those great songs: Toni Braxton’s Un-break my Heart. The old country favorite How Can I Unlove You? Nefesh Shabbat used to be called Unplugged.

Intrigued, I did some research to un-cover the unknown. Way back in 1976 some computer guys discovered that it might be very useful to permit users to ‘take back’ at least the immediately preceding computer command by issuing a special “undo” command, and lo and behold, people took to it like elephants to un-salted peanuts.

I discovered some time ago to my delight that not only can you undo the last command, you can then undo the one before that, and the one before that. I was so excited about this I undid everything I had done on the document in the hope that I could keep going and start undoing all the things I had done last year for which I was sorry.

If only there were such a button for life…

A time travel movie comes out about every season. We love them at least in part because of the thrill of being able to move backward in time and undoing or reshaping our past . We dig it when Bill Murray keeps getting to live the same day over and over until he gets it right even though it takes him hundreds of days to get it right.

I think people spend a lot of time looking back and saying –if only – if only I had done this, if only I had said that – things might be different now. The reality is that we cannot be time travelers when it comes to going back in time, but we can be experts in moving forward in time, at least in our imagination, and to shape the future.

A story I tell every Yom Kippur without fail is about the man who storms into the small town newspaper office yelling: You printed my name in the obituaries this morning! I demand a retraction! The editor calmly says, well, it isn’t the paper’s policy to print retractions, but we will be glad to list you in the birth column tomorrow morning.

That’s sort of how it is with Yom Kippur. We have to admit today that the past is done, but we can be born into a new year. We are travelers only in one direction – we cannot control the past, but we can strongly influence the future so that when we get there we can look back on a better past.

I recently met a woman in her nineties who said she loved every minute of her life. I asked what she had done to have created such a good past and she simply said: it’s easy, do right by people and you will have no remorse. She also said that eating beets was very healthy for you.

But it’s so hard some times to do that, I kvetched. Well rabbi, she said, God is in everyone and if you can see that then you will treat them with kindness.

And she added, but you have God in you too, so you have to be patient with yourself and treat yourself well too. And then she recited the serenity prayer:  God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change; Courage to change the things we can; And wisdom
to distinguish the one from other.

We have to accept the past. We can not undo the past and if we live with constant anger or regret about the past we will only be harming ourselves. This does not mean we can not learn from our past history, global or personal, but we cannot, unlike with the computer command, undo it. Much of who we are is in our DNA, how we were born. That moment is past. We all have had disappointments, been treated unfairly, all have been denied what may have been rightfully ours, those
moments are past.

But there are two kinds of people: those who live in the present and those who live in the past. Those who live in the past will never be serene, never be at peace. Letting go of the past is not only wise, it is essential for a productive and meaningful life. In many respects this is what teshuvaon Yom Kippur is all about.

There is an old Chasidic tale about a fire that broke out in the city of Breslov. After the flames had died down, Rabbi Nachman and a few others went to see where the fire had been and what they could do to help. Rabbi Nachman saw a man whose house had burned down. The man had been sitting on the street crying, but then stopped and rushed into the remains of his home looking to see if he could find any pieces of wood or metal he could salvage to use in rebuilding his house. As he was collecting the pieces one by one, Reb Nachman’s students said to their teacher – he’s gone mad – he thinks he can still save his house.  Rabbi Nachman said to his companions, ‘‘Look more closely. Do you see? He is far from mad. Even though his house has burned down he hasn’t given up hope of rebuilding it. He is collecting everything he can, and he’ll use the same energy to get whatever else he needs when it comes time to build for the future.

The same is true in spiritual life, said Rabbi Nachman. The difficulties of our past life can battle with us to the point where we are almost completely burned out, but we must never give up hope. We learn from where we have been, we pick up the good points within ourselves, and collect them together from amid the troubles we have, and we move on into the future.

This year may the lessons of the past, and those things that cannot be undone guide us to a future in which we find ourselves looking back upon a glorious past.