As is my custom, I will both begin and end my comments today with a story. The first story is one that Renana sent me from camp this summer. I came home from work to find a letter waiting in the mailbox. Renana wrote that she didn't have time for a real letter, but that she had just heard this story at camp and she wanted to write it down and send it to me before she forgot it. This is what she wrote.
There were two friends in the desert and they only had one canteen between themselves. They got into a fight about who would get the last sip of water and one of them hit the other. The friend who received the slap in the face said nothing, but after a few moments he bent down and using his finger, he wrote in the sand, "Today my friend hurt my face." The other friend said nothing, but looked ashamed and kept walking.
A few hours later they saw a pool of water, trees and an oasis. They ran to the water and pulled off their clothes. The two friends dove into the water, but only one resurfaced. The friend who had received the slap in the face earlier was nowhere to be found. The other friend dove to the bottom of the pool and saw his friend tangled in some weeds growing in the water. He broke the weeds, grabbed his friend, and carried him to safety. After catching his breath, the friend who had nearly drowned took two rocks in his hands and carved the following words into one of them using the other as a tool. "Today my friend saved my life." The second friend was thoroughly confused and finally asked what the two writings had been done for.
The hurt friend answered, "When you hurt me, it wasn't deep and you didn't mean harm and I didn't want to remember it forever, so I wrote it in the sand. I knew that soon enough the wind would blow it away and it would be as if it never happened. However, when you saved my life, I wanted it to be remembered forever, so I wrote it on a stone which will never be erased." In this way God forgives our mistakes like words in the sand, but God remembers our acts of selfless good forever.
Taking a closer look at this story should bring us to a better understanding of this season of repentance. Some people would say that the first part of the story is about Rosh Hashanah and the second part is about Yom Kippur. Rosh Hashanah, to some extent the month of Elul preceding it, and certainly the 10 days following it, are days when we are supposed to be thinking about our mistakes and asking God's forgiveness and the forgiveness of our fellowman. Yom Kippur is the final day of accounting when God weighs our sins against our good deeds. If we have done true teshuvah, then the scale should be tipped in favor of our acts of Hesed.
What is forgiveness? One might say that forgiveness is giving to the utmost, giving that which is hardest to give--you can only forgive someone if you are ready to accept him as he is.
The Biblical concept of forgiveness seems to be associated with a vocabulary of cleanliness and purification. The priest performs a ritual of atonement for the sinner, but forgiveness itself, is granted by God. It is not enough for man to hope and pray for pardon, he has to take an active role by humbling himself, acknowledging his wrong and promising not to do it again. The rituals of penitence such as weeping, fasting, rending clothes and donning sackcloth and ashes are seen as useless by the prophets if they are not accompanied a change of heart . Remorse must then be translated into good deeds. Take a look at the root of the word Teshuvah, shuv, meaning to return. Man has been empowered by God to turn back and turn his evil into good. The act of "turning" will lead to forgiveness.
Shortly before I received Renana's letter from camp, I attended a wonderful presentation by two of my favorite storytellers , Corinne Stavish and Barbara McBride Smith, entitled : From Fortune to Misfortune to Forgiveness . In their presentation they were looking at what they called "The Bad Boys in the Bible: Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah, Jacob, Joseph and more..." examining the moment of choice when they had gone from Fortune to Misfortune. As the group of participants tried to brainstorm a list of who the Good Boys of the Bible were--we had trouble finding any who were solely good. For each one that we named, there was some point in time when they faced a conflict and made what we might call a bad choice. As I listened to Corinne and Barbara talk I immediately began thinking of the Akedah. Here was Abraham, the man whom some call the best Jew. It seems as if he passed God's test of faith and yet, every year at this time I struggled with the problem that he didn't pass my test in terms of the morality of his behavior. What kind of moral example was a man who agreed to sacrifice his only son with no argument, and moreover who didn't even discuss it with his wife. He just snuck off to Har Moriah without even giving Sarah a chance to counter his decision or say good-bye to her son. How could I use their point of reference to help me come to terms with my dilemma?
One definition of fortune is a person's condition or standing in life determined by material possessions or money. Another definition is the good or bad luck that befalls someone. If we take the first definition, prior to the Akedah we see that Avraham is in a state of good fortune. He has a wife, two sons and God has promised him that he will have descendants as numerous as the stars. He has a servant who will do his bidding and he seems not to be wanting for food or shelter.
In Greek mythology a man of fortune is living at a point of having too much, where others envy you or where you have excessive pride or hubris. We can apply this to Avraham in that he is so confident in his relationship with God that he ceases to question--this is his hubris. Only a few chapters earlier he argues with God about the fate of S'dom, but here when it comes to the fate of his own son, he believes that he is on God's good side and he doesn't need to argue anymore. For me, the point that makes him pass God's test is exactly the point where he fails my test. I don't want him to disobey God, but I want him to ask a question. In my mind, even though Isaac is saved, Abraham's life now changes to one of misfortune--you never see him interact with Isaac again, in fact you aren't sure from the text if Isaac even comes down the mountain with him, Sarah dies (perhaps of a broken heart) and Avraham's station in the world has changed. The wealth and security of being part of a strong nuclear family is gone.
In using Corinne and Barbara's techniques, I need to develop a midrash that focused on Avraham's ability to turn back the clock and re-evaluate his own behavior at his moment of choice. There are several moments in the text when we wish we might have heard more than was revealed.
1. When God asked Avraham to offer up his son, his favorite son, Isaac, whom he loved?...
Avraham , the man who argued about S'dom must have at least had a conversation with God to understand this request or gone back to Sarah to tell her what was being asked of him. If he has the faith that is attributed to him, I want to know how he communicated it to Sarah. Taking Isaac off to sacrifice him in secret is not only an act of faith, it is a also an act of deception.
2. When Isaac asks his father, "But where is the sheep for the burnt offering."... If Avraham is such a man of faith, would he not take this opportunity to expound upon his beliefs to his son? Can we hear more of this conversation?
3. When Avraham comes down from the mountain...What does he say to Sarah? Does he tell her what happened on the mountain? Is she already dead? How does he grieve for her? Does Isaac know that she died?
4. When Avraham sends Eliezer to find a wife for Isaac....Is this some sort of atonement for his behavior at the Akedah? Is this a promise he made to Sarah? What does he tell Isaac about the need to marry within the clan and to show allegiance to his people?
Why do we read this passage every year on Rosh Hashanah? I think that it is precisely because it is such a hard passage. God is asking us to go back, to create our own midrash, to relive that moment of choice and to redefine ourselves with acts of faith based on the new concepts we have found in the unwritten parts of the story.
Rabbi Isaac Kook, the first chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Jerusalem observed that "what we desire is tied up with what we have done." In this way, the present can change the past. Teshuvah, the act of returning to whom you meant to be, can change who we were. It can't change what we did, but it can change the meaning of what we did. Lawrence Kushner in Eyes Remade for Wonder says that we shouldn't make teshuvah because it will make pain go away, but rather because it will send you back to who you were, change you into who you were meant to be , and in so doing change you into whom you can still become. "We not only acknowledge, regret and repudiate what we did, we devote ourselves to repairing the damage. We turn ourselves into finer people, so that we heal the pain and now in the light of our present turning, both the one we injured and ourselves regard our original transgression as the initiation of this greater intimacy and love."
Earlier I spoke about Rosh Hashanah as the time we think about our misdeeds and ask for forgiveness and Yom Kippur as the moment that our good deeds are added to the scale. In the unetaneh tokef prayer we speak about the fact that our fate is written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur. I would like to suggest a different reading of this prayer. The key to this prayer are the lines "Ut'shuvah,t'filah utzedakah ma'avirin etroa ha g'zeirah" But penitence, prayer and good deeds can modify the severity of the decree. I think that we cannot view the decree as life or death in the coming year. In the next paragraph of the prayer it talks about the fact that man's origin is dust and his end is dust. When our time comes, we all will die. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are our yearly reminder to look back and take an accounting, to make sure that we have lived the best lives that we could, to right our wrongs and to take on new mitzvot, so that when we die we are on the highest plane. In the past few weeks we have seen the loss of many wonderful people--three members of the Weiner family, the Applebaum family and most recently Sue Ellen Schwartz, a beloved colleague and friend. We hope that given the wonderful role models they were to us all, they died at a moment when the scales were weighted down by all of their good deeds.
I promised to end with a story and I will, for I know that while you may not remember my philosophy or my citations, at least a story is something you can take with you and mull over later in the afternoon.
This is the adaptation of a story from Elisa Pearmain's book called Doorways to the Soul entitled "The Messiah is Among us."
Once there was a little shtetl that had fallen upon hard times. Some of the residents had moved away, and no new families were moving in. Once there had been a great yeshivah there, but now all that remained was a small shul in the corner of town. There were but a handful learned Jews still studying there with the local Rav. They began fighting among themselves, each blaming the hard times on the faults and failings of the others.
One day a visiting rabbi stopped at the town's synagogue to daven. He ate, and prayed alongside the other members of the shul. The next day, as the visiting rabbi prepared to continue on his journey, the local Rav drew him aside. He told him of the problems of the town and asked him for his observations and advice..
Upon hearing the Rav's woes, the visiting rabbi was quiet for some time.
"Can you not give me some advice to help my town to thrive again and to help us rebuild the yeshiva?" the Rav begged.
"Your people will not listen to my advice," the rabbi replied. "But perhaps they would benefit from an observation. The Messiah dwells among you here in this shtetl."
"One of us?" asked the Rav astonished. "Which one?
"Oh that I cannot say," he answered. "Share this with your brethren and in time it shall be revealed to you."
The Rav thanked him and sent him on his way. He then gathered the townspeople together, who listened in amazement to the news.
"One of us! But who?" each one asked out loud. Then to themselves they wondered, "It couldn't be Shmuel the tailor--or could it?"
"Surely not Mottel the cantor's son, but then there are times when..
"Not Yitzhak the water carrier, well, maybe..."
"Perhaps it is the Rav himself?"
"Could it be me?"
Soon things began to change in the town as each began to see the Messiah in the other and to hear the Messiah's words in each word spoken.
Soon people began to wander back to the town, and in time it flourished again as a center of Jewish learning.
If each of us were to take the example of the first story and apply it to the second story, how different our lives would be. Each day we must take the little sins of others and write them in the sand to be blown away by the wind. Then we must take the good deeds and engrave them in stone to be remembered forever. Then we will be able to live in greater peace and harmony as we cease to dwell on the faults of others, and instead bring to life the sparks of the Messiah found in all of us. Let this be the challenge of the coming year.
Shanah Tovah.
Go home.