What's In It For Me? - Eikev 5771

In the last scene of probably my favorite movie of all time, Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella is incredulous. For a very brief moment, he thinks he’s being invited by Shoeless Joe Jackson out into the mysterious cornfield where the spirits of the former ballplayers reside. “Not you,” Jackson says, “him,” instead pointing to acclaimed writer Terrence Mann. “Why him?” Kinsella cries, “you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.” Told bluntly that he simply wasn’t invited, after months of strain on his life, his finances, his family, he finally breaks down. “No, wait,” he says. “I have done everything I've been asked to do. I didn't understand it, but I've done it. And I haven't once asked what's in it for me." “What are you saying, Ray?" "I'm saying...what's in it for me?" Jackson looks at him and says, “Is that why you did this? For you? I think you better stay here, Ray."

“What’s in it for me?” It’s a phrase that appears in various guises, on numerous occasions, throughout the entirety of the Torah. Our ancestors the Israelites are not exactly depicted in the best light. They complain that there’s no one to fight for them, no one to step to Pharaoh and lead them out of Egypt, but when given Moses, they challenge and try to unseat him, saying “who made you so important” and “why not me?” Slavery was so crushing, so brutally harsh that they’re literally dying to be free, willing to make any sacrifice to end their bondage; but then they’re free and saying life was better as slaves. There’s no food, God gives them manna, but then they want meat. So it is no wonder that at many instances in Deuteronomy, God and Moses call the Israelites “a stiff-necked people.”

So what does it mean? It means the Israelites are unbelievably stubborn, persistent in all of the wrong ways. It means the Israelites were either incapable or simply uninterested in even trying to learn from the mistakes of their past. But I think more than anything, we get the answer to what it means to be “a stiff-necked people” right here in Eikev, this week’s parasha.

We read, “When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Eternal your God—who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage; who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your ancestors had never known, in order to test you by hardships only to benefit you in the end—and you say to yourselves, ‘My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.’ Remember that it is the Eternal your God who gives you that power.”

And by that criteria, we too are a stiff-necked people. By that definition, maybe we’re even worse. After all, I’m sure you’ve seen the t-shirts, worn by people of all ages and types, proclaiming “it’s all about me” and “it’s my world, you’re just living in it” and “I can only please one person a day, and today’s not your day.” I’m sure you’ve been to services, movies, concerts, and performances where the people around you talk the whole time, in full volume, the light of their cell phones destroying the darkness needed to focus, crumbling the wrappers and packaging of food and drink they’re so proud of themselves for smuggling in. I’m sure you’ve seen dozens of subway riders pretending to ignore the older man struggling with a cane or a walker, or the visibly pregnant woman trying to keep from overheating in 100-degree weather, just cause they don’t want to give up their seat for a few minutes. This morning I watched a mother stroll her toddler son onto the train, and I noticed that she might as well have been carrying a dufflebag or a backpack, cause she had headphones on, listening to music so that she wouldn’t have to expend any energy interacting with her son.

Why? Cause it’s all about me, that’s why. No one’s gonna help me out, no one’s gonna lay it all out for me on a silver platter, so I have to take care of myself, and to hell with everyone else. iPhones, iPods, iPads, soandso@me.com. All Apple has done is put a label on what we already knew to be true: it’s an iGeneration living in an iWorld, and because of that, it can be a very lonely place to be.

The Sages teach that each of us has a yetzer tov, an inclination for good, and a yetzer hara, an inclination for evil, which I believe is where the old cartoon image of the angel and devil on each shoulder comes from. But it’s not so simple, not so black-and-white as we’d like it to be, to wish we could just shut it out or even get rid of it entirely. Because, the Sages say, we actually need the yetzer hara, the so-called evil inclination. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to be creative, to come up with new ideas, to fall in love and have children; heck, we wouldn’t even be able to eat.

So I have a different approach to this concept. Rather than call it yetzer hara, the “evil inclination,” I call it yetzer sheli, meaning, “the inclination for me.” We all need to look out for ourselves, to take care of ourselves, to reach for what will fulfill us with meaning and make us happy. There’s nothing wrong with that. After all, that’s what Hillel meant when he said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"

And instead of yetzer tov, I call it yetzer shelanu, “the inclination for us.” Striving for the greatest good in the world around us, fighting to make it a reality, that is what the yetzer shelanu is all about. That is when we reach our highest potential, both as individuals and as a people. After all, “us” still includes “I,” still includes “me,” but now as part of something larger, with goals much loftier and far-reaching. After all, that’s exactly why Hillel’s very next line was, “If I am only for myself, what am I?”

My friends, I know that not all of us believe in God. And that’s okay. But even the atheists and agnostics among us have to acknowledge that there is something—something much greater than each of us, something that gave us the beauty of the natural world, the human capability to add to it, our bodies, our minds, our talents and gifts. Whether you call it God or the First Cause, spirituality or the soul of the universe, it doesn’t really matter. The message is one and the same: it’s not about you. It’s about us. All of us. It always has been, and always will be. And the question we should be asking, ourselves and each other, is, “What’s in it for us?"

AMEN.

Say It To My Face - D'varim 5771

I had dinner recently with a friend of mine from home. In getting caught up, somehow she and I ended up on a stroll down memory lane, recalling our experiences in middle and high school, the capricious twists and turns of cliques and friendships. She told me about the big end-of-the-year trip to Dorney Park for the 8^th graders, how excited she and everyone was to go, the group of girls with whom she thought she would be cruising the park on a glorious June day. Sadly, this was not the case. The girls had conspired against her, complaining to their teacher rather than speak to her, and suddenly, she was out. And a day she had looked forward to for so long, the chance to spend a school day with friends at an amusement park, was instead filled with hurt and sadness and loneliness.

Now, I’m not certain that it would have been any better, any less painful or hurtful, had the girls, or even just one of them, confronted her directly. I’m sure the sting would still have been palpable and crushing. But the social crimes of these middle-school girls were all the more devastating, because they didn’t even have the guts to say something to her face.

Tonight we begin D’varim, the final book of the Torah, and the name of its first parasha. It begins, Eileh had’varim, “These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.” What follows, for the entirety of the book, is Moses’ own recounting of the Exodus, which is why the English name for it is Deuteronomy, meaning “a second telling.” Curiously, this time around, some of the details have been changed or, in certain cases, completely omitted, so that many see the book as a work of revisionist history. What’s more, it is packed to the gills with criticism and swipes at the Israelite people. It is Moses’ farewell speech, albeit a rather long one at 34 chapters, and while it is certainly focused on his legacy and the constant reminders to adhere to the law of God, much of his talk lambastes the people as stubborn, stiff-necked, selfish, faithless ingrates. Like Jacob’s deathbed speech to his sons at the conclusion of Genesis, both make me think of Marge Simpson’s mother, who says to Marge upon arrival at their home for a holiday celebration, “I have laryngitis and shouldn’t talk so I’ll only say one thing: you never do anything right.”

And yet, as I studied the parasha this week, specifically the beautiful commentary of Rabbi Melanie Aron for the Union’s Ten Minutes of Torah e-mail series, I’m trying to see this farewell speech of Moses in a different light. I say that I’m trying, because I admit that it’s a challenge for me to get past what seems like some real deep-seated bitterness on Moses’ part. After all, he is dying, and he knows that he’ll never set foot on the Promised Land, the thing for which he worked, lived, and breathed for essentially his entire life. So I get it; and that’s pretty much all I’ve seen in his oration, at least up until now.

Rabbi Aron wants us to see more than just bitterness, more than just bitching and moaning in Moses’ speech to the people. For her, this is rebuke. And what’s the difference? The difference is in the intention and the goal. The purpose of rebuke is to confront someone or someones directly, head-on, yet constructively, with an eye towards the positive, so that the person or persons can learn from their actions, and become better people.

And yet we know that is so much more easily said than done. Sure, technology is an easy scapegoat, as e-mail and text messaging and Facebook and even Twitter allow us to spout off frustration and aggravation at each other without picking up the phone or—God forbid—speaking to someone face-to-face. But long before these advances in communication, we still got upset with a co-worker and marched directly into the office…of another co-worker to talk about that person behind her back. We still took the hurt that a friend or family member caused us, intentionally or not, and, at best, buried it deep within ourselves; at worst, complained about it to anyone and everyone, except for the person himself. And it’s not just not productive, and it’s not even just counter-productive, which it is both of those things. More importantly, it’s a missed opportunity.

In the Holiness Code, found in Leviticus, we read the following: “You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove, rebuke your kin, but incur no guilt on their account. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against members of your people. Love your fellow as yourself; I am the Eternal.”

The Torah’s message is clear: to confront someone, to rebuke them for the sake of bettering themselves, this is indeed a holy act. It is holy because, in the words of our old siddur, it helps us to “use our strength for good and not for evil.” It is holy because to do so must categorically mean that you care deeply about the person whom you’re confronting, that you truly love your fellow as yourself. And it is holy because it helps us raise each other up, to be better people, to be more God-like, when we see each other as God saw Moses, and as Moses perhaps tried to see the Israelites in his final words: panim el panim, face-to-face.

May we, in our lives, out of respect and love, have the courage and strength to confront our loved ones—constructively and positively—when we feel we have been wronged. Because when we do, we strengthen each other, we strengthen ourselves, and we bless ourselves with holiness.

AMEN.