(AUDIO: To hear this sermon as it was delivered at Temple Shaaray Tefila, please click here.)
5773. Maybe we’ll call it the Year of the Pope. After all, as
Benedict XVI stepped down citing failing health, and Francis was elected, for
the first time in history, the Catholic world has a Pope Emeritus. Such
unfamiliar territory was this, that even the choice of that title wasn’t easy.
And yet, perhaps lost in the shuffle of this strange situation and the 24-hour
news-cycle world in which we live, was the fact that this was a pretty radical
move by the Catholic Church. Though not usually known for pursuing courses of
action not considered safe or conservative, the cardinals’ choice of Jorge
Mario Bergoglio as the new Pontiff, the face of 1.2 billion believers, was nothing short of revolutionary. Why? Because
Pope Francis is the first Jesuit pope ever, the first pope from the Americas,
and the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere. Only somewhat less of a big
deal is the fact of his being the first pope ever on Twitter, with handles in
at least nine languages. (In English it’s @pontifex, if you’re curious.) So
yes, the ascension of this man to pope, the donning of the illustrious white
robes and skullcap, is a pretty big deal, no matter which faith you may
practice or abstain from.
Now I’ll bet you didn’t expect the rabbi to begin his Yom
Kippur sermon by talking about the Pope. But there’s another reason I’m calling
this past year the Year of the Pope. And that is because of Olivia Pope. Olivia
Pope is, of course, the central character in ABC's smash political drama
Scandal, a strong-willed and decisive power player in the convoluted and
interwoven world of our nation's capital. Played by the illustrious Kerry
Washington, Pope makes a living out of leveraging her contacts and
relationships to solve problems for Washington's elite, but meticulous in
choosing which cases she and her firm of "gladiators in suits" will
take on. You see, the image in her mind, and one that continually shows up in
the characters' dialogue, is of "wearing the white hat," hearkening
back to the old Westerns where the good and bad guys were distinguished to the
viewing audience by the white or black hat they wore. So it is no coincidence
that Shonda Rhimes' lead character, with the last name Pope, would aspire to be
the constant savior and heroine, to always don the symbolic white hat.
And while she may not have as many accounts or followers as
Francis, this Pope--or, rather, the actress who portrays her--is also on
Twitter. And ABC is smart. In this day and age of Tivo and DVR, where we need a
solid reason to endure the hardship of commercials and watch a show live, they
tried something out, and it's working. They've got all of the show's cast
live-tweeting the episodes--commenting, retweeting, responding to the quotes,
observations, and predictions of regular Joe Shmo's like you and me, during
both the East and West Coast broadcasts. It's fun and interactive, and from the
network's standpoint, it makes it that much more likely that I'll pay a sliver
of attention to one of their paid advertisements. And somehow, some way,
there's always, without a doubt, a thread asking @KerryWashington:
"Who are you wearing?"
Not "what" are you wearing. Who. We NEED to know.
Is it Vera Wang? Is it Oscar De La Renta? Could it be Versace or Louis Vuitton?
No no. It must be Christian Dior. Or perhaps Alexander McQueen. But please, for
the love of God, just tell us who you're wearing!
Clothing. In Hebrew b'gadim.
Ever since Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden and
ran to hide their newly-discovered nakedness with fig leaves, we have been
obsessed with the clothes we wear. And while it is true that clothing, along
with food and shelter, make up the three most basic needs of human beings, we
know all too well that our fascination goes far beyond any concept of
necessity. Now we watch the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Grammys not to see
who will win Best Actress or Best Director or Artist of the Year, but to see
who will win the night in fashion and make the tabloids' Best Dressed lists.
Indeed there are a number of us who actually turn the channel once the
can't-miss red carpet specials are over because, after all, watching to see how
the rich and famous arrive and who they're wearing is the best part of the
evening. Isn't it?
Personally, beyond the surface level of "that's a
beautiful dress" or "what on earth is she wearing?," I really
couldn't care less who the designer is. But I am, if you will, fascinated by our
fascination with b'gadim, with
clothing, as I think it speaks volumes about who we really are, both as
individuals and as a society.
Just a few moments ago, we chanted the famous alphabetic
acrostic of sins we have all committed as a community. Together we bear the
collective responsibility in the first-person plural, where each confession
ends with the Hebrew suffix "nu."
The aleph is ashamnu, essentially the
topic sentence: we are guilty, we have sinned. The bet? The bet is bagadnu, a phrase perhaps best
translated as "we have been treacherous,” or, as rendered by our new machzor, “we have betrayed." And
the root of bagadnu and b'gadim, clothing, are exactly the same:
bet-gimmel-dalet. Right in
alphabetical order, almost an acrostic within the acrostic. And this, my
friends, is no accident, no mere coincidence. We are traitors and
deceivers--all of us. The clothing we wear, both literally and figuratively,
the coverings not just for our bodies but our souls as well, belies who we
really are underneath our skin, amidst our flesh and bones, at our very
core.
Our tradition knows this all too well. It begins with Jacob,
the man who would become Israel, the one for whom our people is named! We read
of his mother Rebekah’s plot to disguise him as his brother Esau, fooling his
near-blind father Isaac to receive the innermost blessing meant for his older
twin. I’m always struck by what he says to her, his very first response after she divulges her devious plan. What does
he say? He says, “But my brother Esau is a hairy man and I am smooth-skinned.
If my father touches me, I shall appear to him a trickster and bring upon
myself a curse, not a blessing.” In other words: “But Mom, I’ll get busted!” No
moral reservations, no voice of reason, no angel on his shoulder saying maybe
this isn’t a very nice thing to do. Nope. “I’m down, Mom,” Jacob is saying.
“But if we’re going to do this, I can’t
get caught.”
And so he goes into Isaac, draped in animal skins, aiming to
convince his father that he is really Esau, in the end receiving the prophetic
blessing of his father’s heart. Was Isaac really duped, an addled old man
struggling to beat back senility? Or did he know that the one standing before
him was a sheep in wolf’s clothing? The text is such that we’ll never really know
with any certainty. But we do know that Jacob is very much the “trickster” he
didn’t want his father to discover. What
is beyond any doubt is that with beged,
the clothing, hu bagad, he was
treacherous.
And it continues with Joseph, the man who gets more airtime
in the Torah than anyone other than Moses. We know the story: of the of the k’tonet ha-passim, the amazing
technicolor dreamcoat—perhaps by Missoni—a gift from his father that both
marked him as Jacob’s favorite and painted a target on his back for his
brothers. We know how they threw him in a pit, sold him into slavery, dipped
the coat in goat’s blood, and showed it to their father as proof of Joseph’s
supposed demise. But the begged bagad,
the clothing betrayed him.
And so it is with us. Every day, we wake up, and we put on
our costumes. A shirt and tie, a pants suit for some; medical scrubs, cargo
pants, utility belts for others; full uniforms for the men and women looking
out for our safety and security. And yet, when the workday ends, when we’re
home and off the clock, so to speak, the first thing we do is take off the
costume, changing into something more comfortable or whatever it is we really want to wear. And I wonder: is
that an authentic expression of our diverse personalities, where both represent
parts of a greater whole? Or is one of
them the real us, the other a put-on,
a glorified game of make-believe the world expects us to play?
And yet, we know the confession of bagadnu, that we have betrayed, goes deeper than just b’gadim, the clothing we wear. It’s the
treachery, the deception we practice every day, trying to convince others we’re
something we’re not. It’s the acting, the role-playing, the long con we’ve
committed to so deeply that there’s no escape. Is it any wonder, then, that we
use expressions like “fleecing” and “pulling the wool over their eyes”? Is it
any wonder that so many of the most popular TV shows in recent memory—Mad Men,
Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Americans, to name just a few—center around
characters living, it seems, multiple lives? Ever since Tony Soprano visited
colleges with his daughter, if not before, we have been captivated by the best
of the duplicitous, either unaware or in denial of the mirror they hold up in
front of our very faces. You remember it? How Tony is late to pick Meadow up
from Bates because he’s just taken out a mob informant in the Witness
Protection Program—a turncoat, if you will—with words in his ear about taking
an oath, about how “the hustle never ends.” You remember how Tony, sitting on a
bench during her interview at Bowdoin, looks up to see a quote from Nathaniel
Hawthorne, the school’s most famous alum, that, frankly, says it all—of the
show, yes; but even more so, about us:
“No man can wear one face to himself, and another to the
multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.”
Maybe we’re like Tony with our never-ending hustle. Maybe
we’re like Jacob, carrying on a charade, portraying an alter-ego for some
ill-gotten gain, thinking only of ourselves and how to avoid being caught. Maybe
we play up our titles, exploit our spheres of influence, tucked away in an
ivory tower. Maybe we drape ourselves in the false security blanket of the
internet, mistaking it for a cloak of invisibility, hiding behind blogs,
Facebook pages, Twitter handles, Instagramming pictures of everything, everyone,
but the photographer himself.
But today, Yom Kippur, is the day it all catches up with us.
Today is the day we stand figuratively naked before God and our community,
stripped of all pretense and posture, hitting our hearts, confessing ashamnu, we have sinned, bagadnu, we have betrayed. Today we are
judged for what we’ve really done,
what we’ve really said, who we really are. We say to God, “As the
shepherd examines the flock, causing each sheep to pass beneath the staff, so
do You collect and consider, record and recount every soul, setting the bounds
of every creature’s life, and decreeing its destiny.” We say to God, “You will
remember everything that has been forgotten, and You will open the book of
memories. What is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of
every human being.” Reflecting on this, Rabbi Maggie Wenig wrote, “Our
lives are an open book. Nothing remains a secret. Secrets have a way of seeping
through the cracks and bubbling to the surface. It is only a matter of time
before we find ourselves exposed, as naked as the day we were born. Lies, half
truths, obfuscations ultimately fail to convince. Better we should live our
lives assuming that all our deeds, phone calls, e-mails, text messages, and
financial transactions are known, recorded, remembered, and on permanent
display in the Library of Conscience.”
Perhaps the Library of Conscience is where Joseph spent his
time in the pit his brothers threw him into. Perhaps he had a few hours without
food or drink, just like we do today, to contemplate who he really was, and who
he wanted to be, now stripped of his outer garb. Perhaps he realized in that
moment that sometimes the clothes don’t make the man, that the “dazzling coat
of many colors” was not an accurate reflection of the person underneath it.
Sold into slavery, the
handsome young Joseph rises to the highest post in the household of Potiphar,
officer to Pharaoh, where he quickly becomes the object of obsession for
Potiphar’s wife. She propositions him, again and again, to lie with him, to
which he never accedes. And yet, despite his steadfast refusals, it is once
again a piece of clothing that gets Joseph in trouble. Wriggling away from one
such attempt, Joseph leaves his robe in her hand, which she uses to accuse
Joseph of exactly what she did to him. And why is it that Joseph won’t give in
to her adulterous demands? He says to her, V’eich
e’eseh ha-ra’ah hag’dolah hazot, “How then could I do this great evil,” v’chatati lElohim, “and thus sin against
God?”
You see, for Joseph, the sin is not so much against
Potiphar, his master, though it is most certainly that. Much more importantly,
it is, as he sees it, a sin against God. Even if no earthly creature is
watching, even if he could get away with it without another soul ever knowing, he would know it. And God would too. Here,
though the beged bagad, the clothing
betrays his intent, here we have the opposite of what he went through before.
Stripped of his clothing, he stands literally and figuratively naked, knowing,
no matter the consequence of her false allegations, that he had done right, in
the eyes of God, and of himself.
And then it all comes full circle. Joseph’s brothers come to
Egypt to buy food during the famine, completely unaware that it’s him they’re
pleading to. His clothing, his hair, his appearance have changed beyond
anything they knew of him. Unable to bear it any longer, Joseph sends everyone
else away from the room. As he reveals himself to his brothers, they quickly
realize that the reason he was unrecognizable to them wasn’t as much about his
physical appearance as it was about the man underneath the high Egyptian
fashion—a man who had reconciled the gap between who he really was and how he
portrayed himself; a man ultimately changed for the better. Underneath the
clothing and all of the outward changes Joseph had made, here, standing before
the very people who had wronged him so grievously, was a man who had learned to
be his authentic and best self. Here stood a man who had looked in the mirror,
had confronted himself with honesty and integrity, a man who had earned the status of
wearing, if only figuratively, the famed white hat of the hero.
Adonai our God, so too may it be for us. On this Yom Kippur,
as we look back on the year that was, and look ahead to the year yet to be, may
we stand before You honestly, truthfully confessing bagadnu, our betrayal—of each other, of ourselves, of You. May we
have the courage to confront our faces in the mirror, to gaze beyond our clothing,
beyond our outward appearance, and into the depths of our souls, to see what’s
really there, and to fix what is broken. And may we, in learning from our
mistakes, in the ultimate work-in-progress of our lives, come ever nearer to
what You intended us to be—the best, the truest, the most authentic versions of
ourselves we can possibly be.
AMEN.
