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. 

The Dirtiest Word - Yitro 5773

I’m warning you now. I’m going to begin tonight with a dirty word. It may shock you. It may upset you. It’s upset many a person throughout time. But I’m going to say it anyway. You ready? You sure? Okay. Here goes:
   
God.
  
There, I said it. God. You all thought I was going to utter some nasty four-letter word, didn’t you. I may not be the brightest bulb. But I’m not that stupid.
  
And yet, for some of us—perhaps many of us—that three-letter word, “God,” is actually quite a bit more disturbing than any of those curse words. And what I want to know is: why? Why is it that we can talk about anything we want in today’s society—anything: money, sex, drugs, violence, people’s private lives and innermost secrets and intimate details that somehow appear daily on the front page of every newspaper we see—why is everything fair game for discussion except God?

And why am I thinking about God so much this week? I could answer the question glibly, saying that, well, it’s my job to think about God. And while that is definitely true for myself to the point of being obvious, even as I say that aloud, I know that I have many, many colleagues who feel the same way about that dirty G-word, men and women in this holy work who wouldn’t broach the topic, publicly or privately, with a ten-foot pole.

Beyond that, however, there are a couple of reasons that God is especially in the front of my mind this week. One is that a few of you over the past couple of weeks have shared with me the January 6th op-ed from the Times entitled “The Blessings of Atheism,” with the tagline reading something to the effect of, “We atheists need to stand up for what we believe.”
  
Now, I must confess. The idea of atheists standing up for what they believe made me laugh at first. It smacked of self-contradiction, like the scene from Stranger Than Fiction, where Will Ferrell’s IRS agent is questioning Maggie Gyllenhaal. After explaining to him the detailed rationale for paying most, but not all of her taxes, the following conversation takes place:

“Miss Pascal, what you're describing is anarchy. Are you an anarchist?”
“You mean, am I a member of...”
“An anarchist group, yes.”
“Anarchists have a group?”
“I believe so, sure.”
“They assemble?”
“I don't know.”
At which point she leans in close to him and says:
“Wouldn't that completely defeat the purpose?”

So you’ll forgive me if that’s what came to mind when seeing the topic of atheists standing for what they believe. But I am very glad I read the piece. For one thing, I found myself in surprise agreement at the frustration felt upon hearing the phrase, “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” of which author Susan Jacoby says, “[when] translated from psychobabble, can mean just about anything.” True that, as they say. I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure as to what that means.

But I was greatly agitated by her central thesis, which was, essentially, this: that atheism is the best way for people to focus on and emphasize the here-and-now, because affiliating with a faith group and, particularly, believing in God, somehow precludes us from doing so. Her assumption is that those who believe in a higher power also necessarily believe in an afterlife, and as such, are not adequately attentive to what’s going on in front of our eyes, specifically in response to the grieving, the bereft in our community. And while that may be true for many of our Christian brothers and sisters, my friends, it is not true for us. While it may deeply upset her, as it does me, to endure such hollow, ultimately meaningless and useless explanations as their loved one “being in a better place,” or how “God must have His reasons” or “somehow needed him or her in Heaven” to those who have suffered through tragic loss, her logic is flawed. It’s flawed because hers is a blanket statement, a generalization that does not apply equally across the board. The truth is everything she espouses in this piece—to be here, to be now, to focus on the only life we know for sure, especially in comforting the mourners in our midst—is completely, 100% consistent with Judaism and Jewish teaching. The Sages of our tradition, detailed as they were, almost to a flaw, were incredibly vague on notions of Olam Ha-ba, the World to Come. And, in my opinion, this is no accident. Even these men, certain as they were in their convictions on virtually everything, were okay with their uncertainty here. There is no dogma about life after death, about heaven or hell or purgatory, no tenets to which every Jew must subscribe, no company line or stock answer to recite. They’re vague because, at the end of the day, who really knows? They didn’t. And at least they knew they didn’t.

This week we read Parashat Yitro, famous, of course, for Aseret Ha-Dibrot, the Ten Commandments, the first of which is simply this: “I the Eternal am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”

Doesn’t seem like much of a commandment, does it? Okay, fine. So it could be helpful to realize that a better translation of Aseret Ha-Dibrot would be “The Ten Utterances,” as this first one seems more a statement than a commandment. Or maybe it is a commandment. Maybe it’s a statement of the given, tacitly understood as what we are all to believe.

Or maybe it’s this, one of my favorite phrases, taken from a not-so-G-rated scene in the 2000 film Boiler Room:

Act as if.

It’s true, no one knows for sure either way. I know that with my experiences, the way I’ve come to see my life and the world over time, that it might come a bit easier for me than for others, and that I’m as convinced as I think a person can be that there is, in fact, a God. But I don’t know. No one does. And that statement is just as true for both sides of the timeless debate, and everything in between. We just don’t know. And who would dare to be so arrogant as to say that they did? That’s why the word “atheist” bothers me, in all honesty. How can anyone truly know, with perfect infallibility, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there is no God, that God for sure does not exist?

The truth is, whether we consider ourselves believers or not, we’re all agnostic. We may, at best, think we have it figured out for ourselves in a way that makes sense to us, in whatever direction that may be. But we all have doubts. And as my teacher Dr. Kravitz used to say, “Out of certainty comes doubt, but out of doubt only comes certainty.”
  
Act as if.

And for us, that means act as if there’s a God. Act as if there’s a Being who created the universe and everything, everyone in it. Act as if there is a spark of that God in every living thing, in every human being. Act as if there may be some kind of World to Come, some heavenly reward for our good deeds here, but know in your heart that you don’t know for sure, and that, ultimately, it’s irrelevant. Because to be a Jew who believes in God means that we are all the more focused on this life, this world, the only one we know for sure, and the people that make this one life something special, something sacred.

Act as if there’s a God. And maybe, just maybe, our lives will be that much more meaningful in the end.

AMEN. 
   

Israel and the Struggle Within - Vayishlach 5773

Truth be told: I never got into wrestling. It was just never for me. No disrespect to those of you who did or perhaps still do. I had friends growing up who would come into school on Tuesday chomping at the bit to unpack all the drama of Monday Night Raw. A close friend of my brother’s would always play Jeopardy on the computer with us using the name Ric Flair. And my cousin David, as a little boy, would refer to his younger brother Jacob as Jake the Snake, while adoring, as he would say it, “Bwutus the Barber Beefcake.”

So I get it. I get the appeal as kind of a soap opera for men and boys. But it’s not for me.

The one time a year where I get into wrestling is this week. It’s this week on the Jewish calendar where we read one of the most well-known passages in all of Torah, in Parashat Vayishlach. It has been twenty years since Jacob last saw his twin brother Esau, when Jacob and his mother Rebekah conspired to steal from Esau the innermost blessing of their father Isaac. Not the first time Jacob increases his gains at his brother’s expense, Esau is a crushed and broken man, who vows to kill Jacob once their father dies.

And now, it is the night before the brothers are to see each other for the first time since that fateful day twenty years earlier. They each have brought with them all of their families, all of their servants, all of their soldiers, all of their sheep and cattle and belongings. Uncertain of Esau’s intentions, of whether he still bears on his shoulders the weight of that terrible, yet justifiable grudge, Jacob lays down to sleep by himself near the Jabbok River. But he doesn’t sleep much. Instead, we read that “a man wrestled with him until the rise of dawn.” Talk about a steel cage match; Monday Night Raw is only three hours! And it would have gone on even longer. The man says to Jacob, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But Jacob refuses, saying, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Learning Jacob’s name, the man says, “No more shall you be called Jacob, but Yisrael, Israel, for you have struggled with God and with human beings, and you have prevailed.”

This is it. This is the moment where we, as the Jewish people, get our name. We are bnei Yisrael, the children of Israel. The land promised to our ancestors as a holy land, a land flowing with milk and honey, is Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. And, of course, the modern Jewish state on that land, M’dinat Yisrael, takes its name from this story as well.

So you can imagine how recent events in that part of the world have added new layers to this powerful, seminal moment from our Torah. In the three weeks since we last gathered together, the government of Israel decided enough was enough, that 12 years and more than 12,000 long-range rockets fired upon its citizens, upon its men, women, and children, could no longer be tolerated. And so Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense, a series of intricate military strikes on the storehouses of Hamas’s weapons and ammunition, as well as those masterminding and executing these terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

On the one hand, let me say this: I fully and completely support Israel’s right to defend herself and her citizens, just as I would support that same right for any nation of the world. If right now, here in New York City, we were being assailed by dozens of rockets fired from a specific location we knew, by people we had identified as terrorists bent on our destruction, do you think people here would simply turn the other cheek and let it go for 12 days, let alone 12 years? Not a chance. Imagine several times a week hearing sirens go off in your town, disrupting your attempts at making a living, your children’s schooling, your infants’ daycare, allowing you and your family, in some places, just 15 seconds to get to the nearest shelter. Imagine the onset of facial twitches and tics caused by the blare of those sirens, a post-traumatic stress disorder that never goes away because of each day’s fresh trauma, teenagers who wet their beds because over a decade of fleeing rocket attacks to a shelter has so stunted their growth that they are developmentally equivalent to toddlers. Would you want your government to sit back and do nothing beyond just hoping and praying that, somehow, it all just blows over? No. Way. Yet, in a display of astounding hypocrisy, that is exactly what so much of the world expects Israel to do. And by the way, it should be noted that Israelis, famous for not being able to agree on much of anything, were overwhelmingly in favor of this operation, to the tune of almost 90 percent.

On the other hand, there is the ever-important question underlying it all: will this help Israel make peace? Is this, in the long run, the right move? Or is the current pattern of rockets-rockets-IDF operation-cease-fire one that will beleaguer Israelis and Palestinians for years to come? After all, as my favorite music group says, “If you can heal the symptoms, but not affect the cause, you can’t heal the symptoms.” Is Israel trying to heal the symptoms without going to the heart of the issue? Will anything really be accomplished if we can’t move beyond the status quo? How can there be progress while fingers are endlessly pointed, where each side paints the other as unwilling to negotiate at best and the spawn of evil at worst?

The answer? I don’t know. But perhaps the first Israel can help us out. See, the Rabbis wanted to know, like we do: just who is this man who wrestles with Jacob? Is it some sort of messenger of God? Is it the guardian angel of Esau? Esau himself? Maybe Jacob’s entreaty to be blessed hints that it’s his father Isaac, from whom he stole the blessing meant for Esau. Maybe it’s a dream in which he grapples with all of these ghosts of his checkered past conflated into one daunting opponent.

But what I believe, what I see when I read this text, is that the man with whom Jacob struggles so passionately is none other than Jacob himself. At this crossroads of his life, both figuratively and literally, Jacob is blessed with the opportunity to reflect upon his life until now, to put himself and his deeds on trial, so to speak. His wrestling is a coming to terms with the motivations behind and the results of his actions—good, bad, and everything in between. It’s an honest and thorough evaluation of who he’s been, who he is, and who he hopes to be, in which everything is on the table and nothing is hidden away. And while he comes away physically injured, walking with a limp, we read in the verses immediately following the beautiful reunion with Esau that Jacob arrived in Shechem, the next city of his journey, shalem—whole, intact, complete, and at peace.

And so I pray that it is for us: for the State of Israel and her people to struggle amongst themselves and with their neighbors to eventually achieve a true and lasting peace. But also for all of us, all of b’nei Yisrael, the children of Israel, to learn from our shared namesake, and remember, no matter how vehemently we may disagree on the paths to peace, no matter how heated our debates and arguments may be, that it stems from the passion and fervor and love for Israel that we all share, that common bond we all feel to the depths of our hearts and souls. And I pray that, like Jacob becoming Israel, each of us, all of us, will be strengthened by the struggle, within and without, so that we arrive at our destination shalem—whole, intact, and at peace, with ourselves, with our community, and with our neighbors.

AMEN.