The Doorman - Erev Yom Kippur 5775

(To hear this sermon as it was delivered at Temple Shaaray Tefila of New York City, please click here for the first part, and then here for the continuation.)

When Tali, Jonah and I “moved on up to the East Side” from Brooklyn a little over a year ago, there were some fairly major changes in our lives, changes that took some getting used to. Most of them were great. One was the reduction of my 45-minute commute down to, literally, a minute and a half. Another was the blessing of having Jonah here in our wonderful Nursery School, the ability to drop him off every day in the Tzahov Room and then take the stairs two flights down to work. And then there were the services, the conveniences all around us: a Duane Reade on every corner, the myriad delivery options accessible at all hours of the day and night through our new best friend, Seamless. Yes, we quickly realized that Manhattan was indeed a brave new world.

But perhaps the most dramatic, the most foreign of these changes, was the existence and omnipresence of The Doorman. June, Juan, Joseph, and Anthony, and sometimes Murat and Skander—they are our doormen. And they take terrific care of us. When our mail arrives, they hand it to us; when our dry cleaning comes in, they bring it right to our door. We put our garbage in the bins in the stairwell, they collect it all and take it out. We go away or come back home from being out of town, they help us bring all of our endless baby stuff to and from the car. We order through Seamless for the millionth time, they accompany the delivery guy to our door and escort him out. A person could get spoiled very, very easily.

There is, however, another side to all of the creature comforts and convenience of having doormen. What I soon came to realize, for better and for worse, is that these guys know everything. Everything. About me, about us, about the Stroms in 4F.

They don’t just know our favorite takeout places or where I get my shirts and tallitot cleaned. They don’t just know when the ConEd and Verizon bills come, or how often entire shipments of oversized boxes from diapers.com arrive. They know when drop-off is for Jonah’s class, when I take him out to John Jay to play baseball, or up on the roof to play hockey; they know how competitive he is because June has daily races with him to our door! They see me laughing with him; they see me disciplining him. They know Tali went into labor with Gabriel on December 18^th, that we drove down to Beth Israel, that we were sent home, and then came back that night in a taxi. They know our caregiver Glory’s schedule probably better than we do, know when Gabriel naps, know if they’re at home before I do. They see me when I’m dressed in a suit, heading out for services, a wedding, or a funeral. They see me contemplative or energized, exhausted or relieved, at the end of a long day. They see me soaked through with sweat when I come back from the gym, when I’ve been out watching football at the bar with friends, when I put Gabriel in the bjorn and take him out for a late-night walk with hopes of getting him to sleep. They may not see me when I’m sleeping, but they pretty much know when I’m awake. I’m not sure if they know if I’ve been bad or good. But they might. And that gives me pause. Sometimes I wonder if they know more about me than I know about myself.

And perhaps what Manhattanites consider part of the fabric of our lives is what the rest of the country and the world has only recently begun to figure out:

Someone is watching. Someone is always watching.

It might be your doorman or neighbor; another parent from your kid’s school or a member of the congregation; a friend of a friend of a friend who posts a picture of your t-shirt on Facebook because he thought it was funny or offensive or both; or some random girl you’ve never met taking a video on her smartphone of nothing to do with you and catches you in the background doing something you’d rather no one saw. Whoever it may be, someone is always watching.

It’s true, isn’t it?

Donald Sterling knows it. Until last spring Sterling was the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. He is indeed now, thankfully, their former owner, resulting from his ugly, bigoted remarks instructing his then-girlfriend to remove all black people from her Instagram account because, in his own unintentionally ironic words, “we don’t have to broadcast everything.”

Ray Rice knows it. The former star running back for the Baltimore Ravens punched his then-fiancee Janay in the face, knocking her out cold in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino last February, stepped over her unconscious body and dragged her out of the elevator like she was a piece of luggage. At that moment, it’s clear that Rice either thought this was a private fight, or didn’t care at all that it wasn’t.

Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, Rihanna, Lea Michele, Hayden Panetierre, Gabrielle Union—they all know it. They, along with several others were victims of the hacking of the iCloud, Mac’s famous cloud storage and computing service that has over 320 million users. Suddenly the most intimate details of these women’s lives were splashed all over the internet.

But it’s not just celebrities, those who make their living in the limelight, who need to be on guard. It’s all of us. In a May op-ed piece in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman spoke of four words he feels are “becoming obsolete and destined to be dropped from our vocabulary.” The first is ‘privacy.’ He wrote, “…in a world where everyone with a cellphone camera is paparazzi, everyone with access to Twitter and a cellphone voice recorder is a reporter and everyone who can upload video on YouTube is a filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure — and fair game.” He goes on to quote HBO’s Bill Maher, who warned, “Now that Americans are getting wise to the dangers of being spied on by the government, they have to start getting more alarmed about spying on each other.”

Scary, isn’t it. What we do behind closed doors, what we think is out of sight, away from the arena of public consumption, can so quickly and so easily be shared with the world. The boundaries we thought were there, that we thought were clearly marked, are now blurry at best, if they even exist at all. Every moment, every deed, every uttered word— intimate or shared, official or unguarded, on or off the record—can go public, even viral, in seconds, with the tap of a phone, with the click of a mouse. And that is certainly a terrifying prospect.

But this is nothing new. It's something we Jews have always known: someone is watching, noting, recording and judging everything we do. Take away the technology of modern times, the hyper-accessibility of the information super-highway, the fear that our deeds are being recorded and may someday soon come back to haunt us, has always been there. And in our tradition, this fear is warranted; we’re exactly right to be afraid, because it is very real. The second chapter of Pirke Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, states very plainly, “Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds are written in a book.” In the Un’taneh Tokef prayer we heard sung with such gorgeous power on Rosh HaShanah and will again tomorrow morning, we read the words: “Here is the truth of this day: You are judge and plaintiff, counselor and witness. You inscribe and seal. You record and recount. You remember all that we have forgotten. And when You open the Book of Memories, it speaks for itself—for every human hand leaves its mark, an imprint like no other.”

And it is not just on these High Holy Days that we should be aware that we are being watched, that our actions are being recorded.

The Talmud relates the story of the great Yochanan ben Zakkai who, as he lay on his deathbed, was asked by his gathered disciples for a final blessing. What did he tell them? What was his final benediction, his golden nugget of sage wisdom for his devoted followers to carry forward? “May your fear of Heaven be as strong as your fear of human beings.” Stunned beyond description, they asked him, “Is that all?” To which he responded, “Yes, would that it were so. For you should know that when a person does something wrong, he says, ‘I hope no one sees me.’”

And the story is told of the Chofetz Chayim, the influential 19^th and 20^th century rabbi, who hitches a ride home with a cart-driver. Riding along a beautiful orchard, the driver stops the cart, telling the rabbi he’ll be back with a few of those apples, only asking that the rabbi keep a lookout and let him know if someone can see. Just as the driver is about to take a delicious red apple, the rabbi yells out, “Someone can see! Someone can see!” Scurrying back to his cart, finally catching his breath, the driver says to the rabbi, “What do you mean, someone can see? I have looked in every direction and there is not a soul for miles. Why do you tell me this when certainly there is no one who can see?” With a finger pointed to the sky, the rabbi says to him, “My friend, you are mistaken. God sees. God always sees. Even when people cannot see what we do, God sees, and God knows. And so do we in our hearts.”             

Speaking to the disciples, the driver of the cart, and to us, Yochanan ben Zakkai, the Chofetz Chayim and the words of our liturgy tell us clearly: ‘You’ve got it all wrong. It’s not other people you have to worry about seeing what you do. It’s God. And God sees everything.’ Perhaps what our tradition is implying, if not stating outright, is that God, after all, is the Ultimate Doorman.

But even if we don’t believe in a God who works like that, or any God at all, there is that spark of the divine in each of us, that voice that knows, that sees. What we've done, what we've said, what we hope in our heart of hearts no human being could possibly bear witness to: we are the ones who know the truth. Perhaps the Book of Memories, the Book of Deeds our liturgy speaks of is the iCloud of our lives. And whether or not there is a God managing the mainframe, we have access to it, and we are the ones who know what is stored there.

     

But maybe our awareness of God the Watcher, with the eyes of the world as His messengers, can help us to be better people. Just as the 24-hour surveillance cameras of our buildings, our workplaces, our places of leisure are there to protect and keep us safe from harm, perhaps knowing the iCloud of our lives exists can protect us from the yetzer hara, the evil inclination within each of us, when temptations confronts us. Maybe a fear of regret, of having to live the rest of our lives knowing what we have done—even if no other soul does—maybe that can stop us in our tracks when we contemplate cheating on our spouses, falsifying our tax forms, exaggerating our billable hours. Maybe it keeps us from sneaking out for a cigarette or a drink when we’ve told our family and friends that we’ve quit. More than just keeping us from the bad, maybe it can even propel us to do more g’milut chasadim, more acts of loving-kindness. Maybe knowing that we’re being watched leads us to hold the door for the mom with the stroller, to ask the bus driver to wait an extra few seconds for the elderly man to catch the crosstown, to help the blind woman cross the street. Maybe, just maybe, it can make us more thoughtful, more intentional, more trustworthy, more likable and lovable, both to others and ourselves. Because, as Rabbi Amy Scheinerman wrote, “The measure of integrity and morality is not what we do when the blaring spotlight illuminates our every move. The measure of integrity and morality is what we do in the dark, when no one knows.”

On this Yom Kippur, this Day of Atonement, this day when even the hosts of heaven are judged, may we judge ourselves fairly and truly. May we look back upon the past year with honesty and integrity, praising ourselves for things done well and right, confronting ourselves with where we went too far or fell short. May we know in every moment that there is a seeing eye and a listening ear above us, and that all our deeds are recorded, whether by God, other people, or ourselves. Rather than fearing that our innermost thoughts and desires will be exposed as impure or evil, let us change what is there, in our heart of hearts, so that there is nothing within for us to hide or be ashamed of. And may this new year of 5775 find each of us written and sealed in the Book of Life: the most caring, decent, kind, and loving human being we can possibly be.

AMEN.