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.