Standing By and Standing Up - Rosh HaShanah 5775

(To hear this sermon as it was delivered at Temple Shaaray Tefila of New York City, please click here.)

The boy was just 11 years old. Just two weeks earlier he had marked his graduation from elementary school and his 11^th birthday. The eternity of the school year, the countdown to the summer, were both finally over, as he made his way up to his favorite place, his home away from home—summer camp. He had requested to be in the same cabin as his two closest friends from the previous summers, and his wish had been granted. The anxiety of switching from second session to first, an almost entirely new group of kids, eased enough for the excitement of camp to reach its annual feverish pitch. Now he had every confidence that his fourth summer at sleep-away camp would be his best.

But the boy was sadly mistaken. Shortly after his parents helped him unpack, shortly after the long hugs and kisses goodbye, he discovered that all of the other boys, including the buddies he had requested, were actually about a year older than he. And, as most of us know from experience, if there is any year in a child’s development where the changes are the most dramatic, it is almost certainly that year between the ages of 11 and 12. Instantly, he felt intensely out of place, a feeling that grew to overwhelm him, dashing his hopes and dreams for another magical 4 weeks in the Pocono Mountains. While the daytime was challenging enough for the boy—with all the cliquish-ness and exclusion, the artificial caste system of “cool,” the taunts of “nerd” and “geek” and, perhaps the harshest of all, “loser”—the nights were far worse. Now, when the counselors were out for the evening, when the only protective adults were two staff members stationed somewhere equidistant from the 4 or 5 cabins they supervised on night duty, only accessible if a boy dared call out to them, the bunk became the playground of the bullies.

Under cover of darkness, they could let their true ugliness shine through. Pummeling the boy with taunts too cruel even for daytime use, too sickening and obscene to share in a sermon, the other boys, including one of the two he had requested, a boy he thought was his friend, celebrated with gleeful laughter the boy’s torment, the tears that wouldn't stop streaming down his face, the words he could barely get out: "I just want to go home." What could he do? Call out to shmirah, to the two counselors who would rather have been anywhere else in the world than bound to those uncomfortable lawn chairs while their friends were all out enjoying themselves? No way. That would have only made things worse, once idle threats had been unleashed and they left, the brief illusion of security disappearing with their exit. Burying himself under the covers, clinging to his stuffed animal, the only remnant of the safety of a home that seemed impossibly far away, all that was left for the boy to do was pray with all his heart for sleep to take him away, even as he feared what they might do to him once that happened. Four weeks of such cruel punishment would be more than enough for anyone. But for an 11-year-old boy, it seemed an endless nightmare.

That 11-year-old, that little boy, was me. And it was the worst summer of my life.

But I was one of the lucky ones. While the emotional and psychological scars still run deep, still surface when people treat me like those boys did, I was fortunate that the physical scars were few and faded fast. I was lucky, too, that I had a loving and supportive family to come home to. The teachers and principals of the middle school I would enter that fall were attuned to the dangers of bullying, the incredible peer pressure of being a 6th grader. I had my synagogue community, families we had known from before I was born, friends from the junior youth group who loved me and accepted me for who I was. I was lucky, you see, because after that terrible summer I never felt alone, because even at the age of 11, I knew there would be something beyond that moment. Not every victim of despair has that awareness.

I wonder if Avraham Avinu, Abraham our patriarch, felt the same way. I fear, however, that he didn’t.

Moments ago, we heard chanted the heart- and gut-wrenching story of just how close Abraham came to sacrificing his son Isaac. Earlier in Vayera, the very same parasha from which this difficult story comes, is another famous biblical scene, where God reveals to Abraham God’s plan to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. You remember how brazenly he stands up to God, with words of defiance, “Will you indeed sweep away the innocent along with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty innocent in the city—will You indeed sweep away the place, and not spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent who are in its midst? Far be it from You to do such a thing, killing innocent and wicked alike, that they should suffer the same fate. Far be it from you! Must not the Judge of all the earth do justly?” And God says, “If I find fifty innocent people in Sodom, I will pardon the whole place for their sake.” You remember how even this isn’t enough to satisfy Abraham’s sense of justice, how he bargains with God down to 45, 40, 30, 20, and finally 10 good souls that, if found, will redeem the evil cities from being destroyed.  

But in the end, it is to no avail. God rains fire and brimstone upon the cities, destroying them and all their inhabitants entirely. What is left is as desolate a scene as in any post-apocalyptic novel; the text reads: “Abraham rose early in the morning and went to the place where he had previously stood before the Eternal. As he gazed down upon Sodom and Gomorrah and upon the whole face of the plain, lo—fumes were rising from the earth like fumes from a furnace.”

In literally the very same place where he had stood and confronted God, he now stood looking down upon rubble, upon smoke and ashes, all that remained of a people whose lives he had pleaded for before the Eternal. And he must have been crushed.

I used to read this parasha with anger, disappointment and judgment. How is it, I would ask, that Abraham would be so bold as to argue with the Eternal God, the Master and Creator of the Universe, who blessed him with fortune and fame and a son by his 90-year-old wife; how is it that the same man who challenged God on behalf of people he didn’t know and never met, when commanded to sacrifice his beloved son, says nothing? Nothing. Not one word. Instead of railing – or even bargaining on his son’s behalf as he had done for the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, he just wakes up in the morning, saddles his donkey, and sets out on his way, to the place God will show him, where he will slash the throat of his son as an offering to God.

But now I see it differently. Now I wonder: what if Abraham was bullied? What if God was his bully? What if Abraham felt beaten down by all of God’s constant tests and trials and simply couldn’t take anymore? What if looking down upon the decimation of Sodom and Gomorrah from that horrible vantage point was what finally defeated him? What if his silence wasn’t obedience to the Eternal but rather an expression of the unspeakable despair only felt by the relentlessly bullied?       

In the eternal gratitude I still feel to this very day—for the foundation of love and support that empowered me to survive my torment—I am haunted by, devastated for those who weren't so fortunate, who, overcome by total despair, threw their hands up, and gave up everything. Everything.

There was Megan Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl dumped online by a fictitious boy, created in part by the parents of a girl Megan had been friends with, had even gone on family vacations with, before they had a falling out. Having struggled with depression and with weight loss, but feeling a positive change brought about by the interest of this fictitious young man, Megan was devastated when their online relationship suddenly ended. She hanged herself in her closet, dying just three weeks before her 14th birthday. The last message she received from the boy who never existed was: "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. The world would be a better place without you."

Then there is the story of Rebecca Ann Sedwick. Just 12 years old, the Lakeland, Florida girl ganged up on by as many as 15 other girls over a "boyfriend issue," told by cowards hiding behind a computer screen that, "You should die" and "Why don't you just go kill yourself." And so she did just that. She climbed a tower at an abandoned concrete plant, and leapt to her death.

There is the ongoing story that began just a few weeks ago in Bay Village, Ohio, where a 15-year-old autistic boy was convinced by other boys to take the Ice Bucket Challenge. But instead of ice cold water, the boy, standing in a driveway in nothing but his underwear, had a bucket full of urine, feces, cigarette butts and spit dumped upon him, recorded, of course, on cell phone video and posted on YouTube, for all the world to see.

And still, four years later, I am absolutely devastated when I think of Tyler Clementi, the Ridgewood, New Jersey native who attended Rutgers University, whose roommate Dharun Ravi used a webcam to spy on Clementi's private moments with another man. Ravi invited his friends and Twitter followers to a viewing party for the next encounter, with instructions on how to access the feed remotely, with a tweet that said, “Yes, it's happening again." Though Clementi caught on to the presence of the webcam, unplugging Ravi's power strip, he too was overcome by shame, pain, and despair. The next evening—four years ago this very week—Tyler Clementi said goodbye to the cruel world he knew, and jumped off the George Washington Bridge.

Tragedies, all of them. Worse: they are tragedies of our own making, tragedies visited upon one human being by another. Worse still: these are just some of the many horrible tales of bullying and cruelty. And lest we think that bullying only goes on in our schools and our camps, that it is something only children do, we need only look around us to know that bullying is just as prevalent, if in different ways, in our lives as well.

We see it in our economy, where large corporations—the Walmarts and Starbucks and Amazons of the world—continue to squeeze out the smaller, home-based, mom-and-pop operations, would-be entrepreneurs lacking the enormous resources needed to compete in today’s marketplace.

We see it in the world of sports, where former Miami Dolphins lineman Richie Incognito was himself exposed as a bully in his relentless tormenting of teammate Jonathan Martin. An investigation uncovered Incognito’s threats to hurt and even kill Martin, racial slurs, obscenities toward his family, even forcing him to pay thousands of dollars to finance a Las Vegas trip for a group of teammates, all stemming allegedly from their coaches’ ordering Incognito to “toughen Martin up.”

We see it in the workforce, in the treatment of women, not only in salaries that pay them, on average, 81 cents for every dollar earned by men in equivalent positions, but at the same time being forced to endure the gender stereotyping, objectification, and sexual harassment that often prevents them from rising to such positions in the first place.    

But we don’t need the Nightly News or the Wall Street Journal to alert us to the bullying of our world. Chances are we see it and hear it every single day—in our places of business, around meeting tables and board rooms, in the cafés and restaurants we frequent on our lunch breaks, with the supers and doormen and elevator attendants in our buildings. You know what I’m talking about. The angry, aggressive tone; the finger-pointing and shaking; the constant interruption, the talking right over and through each other; it all adds up to a blatant disregard for, and utter denial of, the humanity of the being on the other end of the exchange. He or she is not even a person anymore; he or she is a thing, an object obstructing the bully’s path towards whatever it is he believes he is entitled to; an obstacle to be removed or destroyed or simply flattened by any means necessary.       

On the one hand, we can understand where it comes from. For some it’s a sense of taking control, of seizing power, in an unpredictable and frightening world. For many it is a learned behavior, a pattern passed on from generation to generation, the sins of the parents visited upon the children, the freshman shoved into a locker becomes the senior taking kids’ lunch money. For all of them, it seems that bullying is an attempt to fill the holes within, where something is profoundly lacking, the voids where unconditional love and support should be.

On the other hand, try as we might to understand it, bullying must never be tolerated. Ever. So how do we do that? How do we put such strong words into even stronger action?

Studies have shown that the people who have the greatest potential to stop bullying are those who witness it. The Department of Health and Human Services reports that 70 percent of teens have seen bullying in their schools. And yet, they also report that instances of bullying stop within 10 seconds 57 percent of the time when a bystander intervenes. These statistics together tell us that the best way to stop bullying is to get off the sidelines when we see it taking place. Stop being a bystander, and be an “up-stander” instead.

That’s what all of the anti-bullying campaigns say: the Tyler Clementi Foundation, the Megan Meier Foundation, a non-profit known as Everything Starts With One. They all speak of “choosing to build people up rather than tear them down;” of “voices not falling silent until a difference is made;” of “empowering our society to create a safer and kinder world.”

And our tradition very clearly agrees. The Holiness Code in Leviticus, which we’ll read on Yom Kippur afternoon, famously says, Lo ta’amod al dam re’echa, “Do not stand by the blood of your neighbor,” adjuring us to stand up for him or her instead, just as we are commanded to do for any of the vulnerable in our midst. In Deuteronomy we read that when ill befalls our fellow man, lo toochal l’hit’alem, we cannot—we must not—remain indifferent or turn a blind eye. The creation of the world in Genesis says that each and every human being that has ever lived and will ever come to be is fashioned b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. The Talmud reminds us that all of humanity descended from our shared ancestor—Adam—so that no person could ever assert his superiority over any other. And the same passage concludes with the words known to so many of us, that “One who saves a single life, it is as if he has saved the entire world.”    

On this Rosh HaShanah, as we celebrate the creation of the world and everything in it, may we come to a deeper understanding of and greater appreciation for all of God’s creatures. May we raise ourselves and each other to a higher standard of existence, to stand up to the ugliness of bullying—whenever, wherever, however it may occur—rather than merely standing by it. And may we—each of us, all of us—come to respect and treat each other as beings created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, with a spark of the divine within each of us. In this way, God willing, we will leave our children and their children a better world than the one we found.

AMEN. 

Outdone - Rosh HaShanah 5774

(AUDIO: To listen to this sermon as it was delivered at Temple Shaaray Tefila, please click here.)

When my brother and I were kids, we used to do radio shows in our basement. (Hey, we were suburban.) From bar mitzvah gifts and elsewhere, Adam had actually put together some decent studio equipment, considering his age and it being the early 90’s--a microphone, a CD player, and a double tape deck so we could use our cassettes and still record everything. Whether these radio shows were just the two of us, or one of us with a friend, we tried to make it a real experience, even though we knew no one would ever listen to it. That meant song introductions, sports updates, pretending to be special guests, and even bringing in a speaker phone so we could call in from the other line to win imaginary trivia contests. And, of course, what radio show would be complete without commercials? For those we used the real thing, a collection of old radio and TV spots for different products called Tee Vee Tunes. One of the ads we liked to use was for Ken-L-Ration, and I’m sure some of you know still remember it. It goes like this:

“My dog’s better than your dog, my dog’s better than yours. My dog’s better cause he gets Ken-L-Ration, my dog’s better than yours.”

The next verse is the same, hammering home the point with further assertions that my dog is faster, and smarter, than your dog. And we know why.

Every so often this catchy little jingle will pop into my head. And I find myself smiling and laughing at the memories made in our little basement studio in Yardley, Pennsylvania. But the laughter and the smile fade, as I realize what so often triggers that childhood flashback. It’s that never-ending competition of our lives, and it seems like it’s everywhere we look.

You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The ads on TV? One of my favorites is for Burlington Coat Factory, where a child’s birthday picnic is turned into a battleground of the self-satisfied. “Her outfit looks great,” the woman says, “but I saw it at the department store for $96.” Cool Mom responds, “I got one just like that for $38 at Burlington.” But that’s not enough. Not anymore. 20 years ago, maybe. But not today. And so she continues, “and this outfit for my husband, and play clothes for the twins.” Enough, right? We got the point now, right? Wrong. “I saved so much, I got backups,” and flashes those backups pretty much right in the other woman’s face. The kicker? The slogan: “Brag about it.” “Brag about it.” That’s the slogan. And doesn’t that about sum it up perfectly. (Watch the ad here.)

How about these flash-mob wedding proposals, custom-made to get a million hits on Youtube? Cause there has to be a story, right? Can’t just take a girl out to a fancy dinner and get down on a knee anymore. Now there has to be an intricate plot, a ruse of sorts, with many moving parts and several people in on it. It has to be public, and it has to be big. And why? Because the bigger it is, the more it must mean. I’m not saying a proposal shouldn’t be thought out, planned, and done right. It should. But there’s something very wrong when we confuse the magnitude of the production for the depth of feeling. And the worst part, I think, is that we fall for it. In reading the story of one of these crazy proposals, I saw the testimony of a parent, who had shared the tale with his daughters and told them, flat out, that this was the kind of thing they deserved to have one day, that anything less would not be acceptable for his little girls.

How about Sam’s bar mitzvah? You saw this, right? Almost 900,000 people have. Bar mitzvah kid wants to have his moment and be announced formally as he comes into the party? That’s fine. Want to have him enter to his own number? Okay. It’s his moment. But hiring an entire troupe of professional dancers to do a special number? Spelling out his name on the stage with 15-foot electronic letters? Lowering a humongous cake from the ceiling and having him appear from within to join the routine? It’s so far over the top, you can’t even see the top from there. And don’t forget, as the note below the clip tells us, to change your viewing quality to HD, if desired. Wouldn’t want to miss that. And yet, once again, we eat it up with a spoon; Good Morning America brings Sam, and his dancers, to Times Square to re-enact the whole thing, and extend his 15 minutes. After all, it was the number one trending video at the time. When I think about how much those 2 and a half minutes must have cost, never mind the rest of the affair, and all the good places that money could have gone instead, I’m left shaking my head.  

It used to be about having the nicest home, the priciest car, the latest technology, the coolest gadgets and gizmos. It used to be about “keeping up with the Joneses,” about “he who dies with the most toys wins.” Now it’s about outdoing, outperforming, outlasting, outsmarting, out-everything everyone. It’s no longer about the Joneses; it’s about the Joneses, the Goldsteins, the Hanrahans, the Patels, the Changs, the Schafers, and the McManuses. And keeping up with them? Why, to be an also-ran? Forget about it. That won’t do. Not anymore. Now Charlie Sheen is our unlikely prophet, where everything is about winning, and winning big. Now it’s about being so far ahead of them that they’re all left in the dust. But not too far ahead. Because, if no one’s around, who’s going to hear us when we “brag about it”?

Winning. It’s why, I think, we love sports. However each game is scored, it is quantifiable, measurable, and when there’s a winner, there’s a number, a statistic to point to, that proves the outcome, and is written into the record books. To be 1^st place, the champion atop the medal stand, the king of the hill hoisting a trophy, looking down below upon rivals gleefully crushed along the way—this is the ultimate quest of the athlete. And for some, when that quest becomes a holy grail, there is literally nothing—no laws, no morals, no ethics—that will stand in their way. We saw it this past year with Lance Armstrong and Alex Rodriguez and Jewish former-hero Ryan Braun, all for whom it wasn’t enough just to cheat and then to lie about it; it was taken to a whole other level with angry accusations and even threats to those who challenged their credibility. 

But it certainly doesn’t end with sports. We drive like it too, don’t we. Doesn’t matter where we’re going or how much time we have to get there, we’ve got to be first. We pretend we’re NASCAR drivers, weaving in and out of lanes without as much as a look, forget using turn signals. We either don’t know or don’t care about the danger we constantly put ourselves and our loved ones in. When we’re stuck in traffic, when a lane is closed, when letting someone in or, God forbid, an alternate merge, won’t make a 5-second difference, we gun it, scratching and clawing to claim, if but for a moment, those precious few inches of road. Cause letting someone get there first, that would be losing. And in the immortal words of Ricky Bobby’s dad in Talladega Nights, “If you’re not first, you’re last.”

Quality, it seems, is dead. We’ve sacrificed it at the altar of “bigger, faster, stronger,” with a choir singing “My dog’s better than your dog” in the background. Quantity is everything. Less isn’t more, the car commercial reminds us. More is more. And, really, how can you argue with that?

Abraham didn’t.

Every year on Rosh HaShanah we hear the haunting tale of Akedat Yitzchak, the binding and near-sacrifice of his son, Isaac. It is terrifying for anyone to hear, all the more so for parents. And every year, we find ourselves angry all over again, dumbfounded to the point of incredulity: how could a God—our God—actually desire this of Abraham? How could Abraham even consider going through with it? How is it possible that the founder of our faith came within inches, knife raised in the air, of cutting his son’s throat? Suddenly all of his deeds and attributes—his bravery in leaving his homeland, the rescue of his nephew Lot; the hospitality shown to guests who turn out to be angels, the sheer chutzpah of challenging and bargaining with God for the souls of those in Sodom and Gomorrah—all of it seems to fade from the picture when the camera’s focus is on a man ready to take his own son’s life.

For us, calling this text “difficult” is an understatement of, well, biblical proportions. It shakes us in every fiber of our being. It cuts to the very essence of what it means to be a human being. If this is a test of God, we say, surely Abraham failed. Surely a man who dares talk back to God regarding the lives of strangers in Sodom and Gomorrah, yet who utters not a sound, nor bats an eyelash to this outlandish demand, has come up terribly short.

But for our sages, the rabbis and scholars of our tradition, this is as simple as it gets: Abraham is The Man. Such a loyal, devoted servant of God is he that there is absolutely nothing he wouldn’t do for God. Nothing. Even if it meant offering Isaac as a sacrifice. Even more than this sheer exaltation, some of our sages are, in fact, jealous of Abraham! Would that they could be so deeply loved by God to have had that asked of them! How, they wonder, could anyone be as fortunate as Abraham, to have received such a level of providence? “How easy it is for you,” they would say to us, “to sit and wag your fingers at him! You should be so lucky!”

And so I wonder: what if Abraham was so obsessed with being the best, the wisest, the closest to God that no request was too large or too small to enhance that image? What if there was nothing that could keep him from figuratively shouting from the mountaintops as he did, “My God’s better than your God!” What if the Binding of Isaac is a red flag of warning melodramatically waved in our faces each Rosh HaShanah? What if it’s the ultimate cautionary tale, almost satirical in its hyperbole, asking us, “Do you see what happens when we make winning—being the greatest, the biggest, the best—into the worst kind of idol?” What if this is the real reason why we read it twice a year? What if we’re not as far removed from Abraham as we like to think we are, after all?

Well, then, we've got to turn it around. And we've got to turn it back.

Many of you know that t'shuvah, usually translated as "repentance," has "turning" and "returning" at its Hebrew root. And the shofar is very simply the alarm clock for our souls. So on this Rosh HaShanah, this turning of the new year, let us be moved to turn away from the pettiness, the competition for competition's sake, the obsession with "anything you can do I can do better." Let us turn away from these vainest of pursuits, because they satisfy nothing, and couldn't be further from what makes our lives worth living. Let the blasts of the shofar wake us up to what truly matters, to push the reset button on our perspective and our priorities.

How? Cheshbon hanefesh. Cheshbon hanefesh means "accounting of the soul." It's what we're supposed to be doing this time of year, taking stock of where and who we've been this past year, who we want to be in the year to come. Now, the word "cheshbon" in modern Hebrew means the bill or the check, so that at the end of a meal in an Israeli restaurant, you would say "Cheshbon, b'vakashah," "Check, please."

Well, today, on Rosh HaShanah, we get the bill, the cheshbon, for the year. It is the ultimate performance evaluation, only this time the job is our lives, and the boss is, well, The Boss. And this work of cheshbon hanefesh, of the accounting of our souls, requires us to be honest with ourselves: what am I really doing with my days, with my hours? More importantly, why? Am I spending 20 hours a day in my office or at home with my kids because there is some societal voice whispering in my ear that "that's what a GOOD lawyer/doctor/manager/agent/parent should do"? Is it to satisfy the needs or appease the criticism of others that we have projected upon ourselves, keeping a tally of real or imagined "billable hours"? Are we sacrificing the quality of our lives for quantity, risking the resentment of others and, worse, ourselves, in trying to be who we aren’t? Or do we do what we do because we love it, because it is meaningful, satisfying, and fulfilling, for ourselves and those around us? Are we striving towards reaching our highest potential, aiming to achieve our own personal goals, or those we feel others have set for us?

When we confront these questions honestly, re-calibrating our lives, we can begin t’shuvah, the turning--or returning--to our most authentic, and best selves. This is what Maslow meant when he put the idea of self-actualization at the top of his hierarchy of human development. It means satisfying, if not transcending entirely, our deficiency needs. It means pursuing a value in the world beyond merely ourselves. It means being more concerned with what we're really doing, who we really are, than trying to be what we think society wants us to be. And it means moving from conformity, from trying to fulfill the expectations of others, to autonomy, where we do what we do because it fills our lives with meaning, with purpose, and, ultimately, with happiness and contentment.

The sacrifice of quality over quantity isn’t yet complete. Even as we’ve raised the knife, like Abraham, ready to strike, there is still the opportunity to intervene, to prevent it from taking place. There’s still a moment left to stop the loop of Annie Oakley from the speakers singing, “Anything you can do, I can do better.” There’s still the chance to take it all back, to turn away from being the best by comparison, and turn toward the best versions of ourselves, the most fulfilled, most purposeful people we can be. That chance is called cheshbon hanefesh, a true accounting of our souls. That opportunity is called the rest of our lives. And it can start today. Right here, right now. But only if we’re ready to pay the bill when it comes.

AMEN.