Yom Kippur Morning 5780 - Main Sermon
Shanah Tovah.
“Jewish and Imperfect Humans.” That is my topic for this morning. Many of you have probably heard by now, that my theme for this entire High Holiday season is “Jewish and…”, looking at various ways that our individual AND communal identities are multi-faceted. They need to be. We are not, nor can we be, one thing all the time. We’ve talked about skin color, sexual orientation, religious history and culture, all of which add nuance and difference to our conglomerate identities. We also discussed our congregation consisting of Jews AND non-Jews, and that our obligation to our neighbors and ourselves is to keep expanding our fences, widening our circle, and examining who we are. To be in relationship, we need to make (more) space for ‘And.’
Yesterday, I also talked about being Jewish AND American AND a Zionist… AND often quite conflicted. But it also took me nearly half my D’var Torah before I finally named the topic! So today, I wanted to shift my approach. I led with the title instead: “Jewish and Imperfect Humans.” Not only are we multi-layered as people and as communities… but we also have to learn to accept our limitations. ‘Accepting’ is even too passive a term. Perhaps one might wish we could leave it at that; “Ok, I accept that I am limited, that I am not perfect. I accept it…” The problem is, it just isn’t enough. You have to LEAN into it. If, and when, an opportunity presents itself to stare directly at some uncomfortable, unpleasant realization about ourselves… we need to cultivate ways to run TOWARDS that opportunity. Because running away isn’t working. It may feel like it, for a time, but it isn’t. Yom Kippur comes to tell us that being imperfect and making frequent mistakes, ones that potentially hurt both ourselves and others, IS an integral part of being human. And sometimes we’re even begrudgingly willing to accept that; acquiescing that it’s an unavoidable aspect of being a homo sapiens. But actively run TOWARD it?? That’s too much. Isn’t it?
You know, we have a lot of brilliance right here in our community. Not perfection, of course, because we already know that’s impossible. But scholarship, wisdom, accomplishment, expertise; we’ve got it all! Recently, two members of our community demonstrated their talents in a new joint publication. Rabbi Helen Plotkin and Stephen Lehmann worked together to translate and annotate a never-before-published set of essays written by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Fifty years ago, Heschel was one of the most recognizable figures in America, marching arm-in-arm with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and both speaking and writing publicly in support of social causes and against hatred. But before he fled from the Nazis just before World War II, Heschel lived in Germany, and was a prolific writer there as well! But much of his early writing was never translated out of the German. Enter the crack team of Lehmann&Plotkin, together with another translator, Marion Faber. And I bring up this new volume, entitled “In This Hour,” because Heschel wrote these compelling articles in Germany in the 1930s, yet they carry unspoken weight that even he couldn’t have imagined, but which we - on the other side of the Holocaust - feel SO powerfully. He is writing in a moment in time… but his reflections resonate to this very day, and beyond. In her introduction to the book, Rabbi Plotkin writes, “Even as he teaches history, Heschel teaches more than history: the old becomes new, and the struggles of one era shed light on another… his words address the issues of his own time and speak urgently to ours.”
And I thought about this concept a lot. Back in June, for Shavuot, Stephen came and presented some excerpts from the book, which were truly fascinating. And some of what Stephen presented back then directly informs what I wanted to say to you here today. Why must we run TOWARD our imperfections and our insecurities? Why can’t we just talk about, say, the weather, the suddenly successful Eagles, or about infuriating traffic conditions around the county? Because we cannot escape the flaws we need to see. Running from our challenges actually makes them WORSE. Heschel writes, “as they flee, they are losing the last remnants of their dignity and piling misery upon misery. We have been challenged by the darkest powers, and no indignity could be more shameful than crawling away. What is our answer?”
Now, you might want to respond, “But Heschel is talking about fleeing something MUCH more terrifying and tangible!” Well, I would respond that Heschel isn’t suggesting armed rebellion, but introspection and self-reflection at this crucial time… In This Hour. Furthermore, if Heschel urged the Jews of THAT moment to face the horrifying reality of their situation, how could you and I possibly claim that our demons are too scary to look at or face?
Here is another reason why it is so important to talk about how we are “Jewish and Imperfect Humans”: We need to interrogate our own stories. We tell ourselves that we are strong, courageous, independent, and open-minded… but THOSE people, The Others, are intolerant, ignorant, hypocritical, and they stay in their silos, their echo chambers, and don’t consider others’ opinions! These are all stories we tell ourselves. Because life is made up of stories. We each have a narrative that is ours; origin stories of where we grew up, and journey stories of how we came to, or remained at Ohev. We have stories about our professions, about our country, and mythical stories in our families that get retold and retold over and over again. Stories are fundamental to who we are, to human existence… and every story crashes.
Nearly a year ago, I was at a conference in New York, and heard an incredible presentation by Lannie Solomon, a teacher at a school called SVARA. Their website states: “SVARA is a traditionally radical yeshiva dedicated to the serious study of Talmud through the lens of queer experiences.” And whenever new students come to learn at SVARA, they always begin by hearing “The Crash Talk.” Solomon gave us the abridged version… which I am now going to abridge further for you. Lannie Solomon explained what I just shared; we all tell stories. And, they said, every story crashes.
Think about it, as young children, we often think our parents are invincible… until we become teenagers, and that idea crashes. We believe that what we learn in school is all fact, and not at all biased by history or politics… crash. The role models we idolize at one point or another - whether musicians, actors, politicians, world leaders, activists - they are supposed to be flawless and beyond reproach, impervious to scrutiny!! Crash. And people often say to me some version of: “I know that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, Miriam, Esther, Deborah, King David, all those people were fearless, brilliant, and sin-free, but I just can’t live up to that standard…” Crash. Ok, well, at least God is perfect, right? Never messes anything up??? … crash.
Then, SVARA teaches, there are three responses to the inevitable crash. One is, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no crash. I see nothing. My world is perfect. I’m not wrong, YOU ARE! Everything is great!!! La, la, la, la, la, LAAAAAA!” Willful ignorance and radical insistence that some crashes Simply. Cannot. Happen. Period. Option two is, run like hell. Abandon ship, erase all evidence, burn the surveillance tapes, delete, delete, delete!! The coping mechanisms in our brain, the fight or flight instinct, says pretend none of this ever happened, and never, EVER look back. Sometimes this feels right. Anything else just seems too, too scary. Though we cannot forget what Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, in December of 1939 in London, that “no indignity could be more shameful than crawling away.” That is when SVARA introduces option three.
It’s called “The Torah.” Several generations later, it was also presented in the form of Midrash. Last night, I talked about anti-Semitism, and all the many times that our stories crashed… violently. Later today, in our service, we’ll be reflecting on the Eileh Ezkerah, a part of the service that memorializes the martyrs of so very many generations of our ancestors who were killed, and whose stories were literally burned to the ground. But the texts of our tradition talk directly ABOUT those destructions; they do NOT shy away from them. They talk about our ancestors’ flaws, their insecurities, their narcissism, and all their worst choices and decisions, AND it incorporates those weaknesses into a new story.
That is SVARA’s brilliant reframing, which blew my mind. You can’t actually say “no crash happened.” Nor can we really say, “forget this, I will never tell another story as long as I live.” No, the only real option is to look squarely at our history, our lives, our truths, accepting the good AND the bad, and incorporating ALL OF IT into constantly-generating new stories. The first generation of rabbis were the ONLY ones in their time to say, “Yeah, this just happened. Our Temple was destroyed, sacrifice is gone. God seems to have thrown us to the wolves… But we also love the Torah. We aren’t ready to be done. So we bring it with us, and we write a new story that ALSO mentions destruction, sin, rebuke… AND then rebuilding. Lannie Solomon said, and I thought this was SO powerful, that the Talmud itself is like a guidebook or a work plan to survive any and all proverbial “end of the world” scenarios. Crashes WILL come and go. They just will. But we are still here. Let’s write a story about it.
We here at Ohev Shalom are the inheritors of one such incredibly powerful story. It is about a small town in Moravia, deep in Czechoslovakia, that was destroyed nearly 80 years ago. By now, many of you are familiar with the town of Lostice, which, I must tell you, makes me so happy.
Their community was annihilated by the Nazis in the early 1940s, their Torah scroll was saved by the Jewish Council of Elders in Prague, who offered to catalog for the Nazis all the stolen artifacts they had looted from the smoldering ashes of Jewish life that they left behind. Secretly, the Prague Council was hoping to delay, delay, delay, so that all their work would be a damning indictment of the Nazis, if the world should ever recover from this lunacy, and somehow be able to begin telling a new story.
After the war, over 1,300 scrolls sat in a warehouse in Prague, forgotten, ignored, left to rot, and slowly disintegrating. But by sheer luck, they were rediscovered in the 1960s, and eventually brought to Westminster Synagogue in London. Then, in 1980, a dynamic, young rabbi from Wallingford, PA, wrote to the Memorial Scrolls Trust, based at that synagogue, asking if his congregation could be so honored as to care for one of the rescued scrolls. Soon enough, Rabbi Louis Kaplan was bringing a Torah to Ohev Shalom, where it found a new home, and began a new story.
When I came to Ohev in 2009, the scroll was being kept in a glass case in the lobby. One of my first executive decisions as Ohev’s rabbi, almost immediately when I arrived, was to take it out of that display, and put it back in the ark. The Nazis had a plan to turn our texts and our traditions into museum objects; I get a chill down my spine every time I see a Torah scroll kept permanently behind glass. (And no, that is not the situation with the scrolls you think you see in our hallway either…) A few years ago, we were able to add many, wonderful new chapters to the story of this Lostice Scroll, which I urge people NOT to call a Holocaust Torah. I wish I could share all of them with you here, but hopefully many of you have attended our annual Lostice Shabbat, in the spring, or heard me read from Megillat Lostice, a scroll (of sorts) that I wrote in four chapters, to tell the “official” story of the Torah. Or you’ve heard me tell of the incredible coincidences of Fanny Neuda, the wife of Lostice’s rabbi in the 1850s, who wrote a prayer book for women nearly 170 years ago. Copies of which, miraculously, have found their way into our congregation RIGHT NOW.
I can’t tell you all of that right now; I so, so wish I could. My main point to you today, however, is that the story of Lostice has been reborn after one of the most dramatic and terrifying crashes in human history. And in line with SVARA’s interpretation of how rabbinic tradition has worked for millenia, incorporating the crash and rebirth into OUR story has been a powerful force at Ohev Shalom in Delaware County, PA, in the 21st Century. This is our Jewish process; looking squarely at our crashes and figuring out how to weave them into new, and therefore more powerful, stories. Our lives are like the Lostice Scroll. We go through many phases in life, some filled with joy and celebration, others laden with tragedy, illness, scandal, and death. We COULD pretend they never happen… we could run as fast as we can in the opposite direction… or we could embrace the imperfect, flawed, torn, damaged parchment that constitutes who we are, and stitch it together into something new.
Indeed, many of you are already aware that our Lostice scroll is having a new chapter added to its story right now. It is literally being written for us! Thanks to an incredibly generous donation by Phyllis and Alan Schapire, the scroll is in Florida, as we speak, being fully restored for the first time since it was stolen from Lostice. I also want to highlight that the Schapires made this fabulous gift in memory of Phyllis’ parents, Sheila and Benjamin Garberman, who were both Holocaust survivors, and actually fought as Bielski partisans in the forests of Nazi-occupied Poland. In reminding myself of their incredible story, I found an article from a New Jersey Jewish newspaper online, from 2014, after the Garbermans had told their stories of survival to local religious school students. The article ended by stating: “The Garbermans explained that they never kept their difficult past from their children. They wanted them to know what happened so it would never be forgotten.”
The stories of death, persecution, chaos, pain, and suffering, are hard to hear. They are some of the most intense and difficult examples of crashes. The enduring power of our people, however, can perhaps be summed up in our ability to weave pain and suffering INTO the fabric of our continuing, undying narrative. To clean off the damaged parchment surface, wipe away - with tears in our eyes - the old, crumbling letters that have fallen off the parchment. But then we write new words in. We stitch the scroll back together, whether we’re talking about a literal scroll from a small town in Czechoslovakia, where an inspiring woman wrote prayers for women, and local artisans made a super-stinky, but famous cheese. Or about painful experiences in our own lives, or perhaps in the life of our community.
My main point to you all is, the crashes ARE inevitable. We are human, and thus flawed, imperfect, sometimes stupid, afraid, vulnerable, and we can injure one another. We are all those things AND we are Jewish, and one way that our ancestors have survived all the other “And’s” is to keep telling our story, and to keep incorporating joy AND pain, victories AND defeats into those stories. As we embark on this new Jewish year, let us not run from the challenges facing us as individuals, a community, a nation, or a planet. Let’s also stop pretending the problems don’t exist, or that they can somehow be ignored. They cannot. But let’s write new chapters and whole volumes, filled with “And’s” and bursting with life, honesty, and compassion. In this hour - in this moment in time in this holy place - let us begin yet another new story. It’s gonna be a great one, I guarantee it.
Shanah Tovah!
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