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.