Rosh Hashanah Day 1 - 5769/2008
The last time I took a science class was in college, and only because I had to. It was one of those “physics for poets” classes that took poor pitiful souls like me, much more comfortable in the world of the humanities, and tried to help us understand the laws and ways of nature.
For reasons that escape me, given how easily I forget things these days, I actually remember one or two things from that class. I don’t know why, but I doubt I’ll ever forget that acceleration due to gravity is 32 ft/sec squared. As best as I can tell, this little factoid helps me not a whit in my daily life as a rabbi or parent, but I use it to impress people when I need to, so that they shouldn’t think that I’m a complete humanities geek.
I also remember one other thing from that lesson- the concept of some law or principle being operative “under laboratory conditions.” That is to say, in a vacuum, under perfect test conditions, acceleration due to gravity is 32 ft/sec squared. But in the real world, which does not operate under laboratory conditions, things like friction, wind velocity and direction and the like can and will conspire to change the equation in unknown and often unknowable ways. Outside of the lab, the laws of nature, while unchanging in their fundamentals, are subject to variation in how they will apply.
On this very special morning of Rosh Hashanah, I want to spend a few moments talking with you about life, and its relationship to what I learned in my very modest physics for poets class. What I’ve come to understand is that life itself is not lived under laboratory conditions. The choices and decisions that we are called upon to make in every sphere of our lives are likely governed as much by what we call the “law of unintended consequences” as they are by the laws of nature. We rarely know, nor can we predict with any certainty, the ramifications of our actions or those of the people around us.
Moreover, in addition to unintended consequences, the choices with which we are presented are rarely neat and clean, and easily identifiable as either right or wrong. Black and white are, as often as not, swallowed up in an ocean of murky gray.
When push comes to shove, there are, if we dare to admit it, more than a few times that, when confronting significant forks in the road, we simply have to close our eyes, hold our noses, and hope for the best, even on the most important decisions. That’s how life in the real world is lived, outside of the laboratory.
So my question is: given that truth, what does it mean when we talk about right and wrong, sin and piety, making good and intelligent choices as opposed to bad ones, and, of course, penitence? How good can we be expected to be when we live outside the laboratory, with all kinds of variables playing on our decision-making processes, and most of the time with no clear right and wrong readily apparent?
My first step in trying to answer such globally significant questions is to go to the sources that my tradition affords me, and the chapters of Genesis that we read from on these days of Rosh Hashanah are certainly fertile food for thought.
As many times as I’ve read through these Torah readings, I still come away with the same reactions. How badly do I crave being able to creep into the psyches of the characters so as to know what they were really thinking- not what the rabbis tell us they were thinking, but rather what they were really thinking. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of Abraham and Sarah’s tent after Sarah forced Abraham to expel Hagar and Yishmael:
Garesh et ha’amah hazot v’et b’nah
Ki lo yirash ben ha’amah hazot im b’ni im Yitzchak
Chase away this handmaiden and her son,
For this handmaiden’s son will not inherit with my son, with Isaac…
What must Abraham have been thinking and feeling that day? Surely he must have had tender feelings for Hagar, with whom he had made tender love and fathered a first-born son, all at the behest of Sarah! Sending them off into the desert for what he assumed would be certain death must have cut his heart like a knife. And yet he loved Sarah too, and God told him to follow Sarah’s wishes. Did the fact that God told him what to do make his misgivings go away? Was God’s choice the clear right choice because it was God’s?
In tomorrow’s reading God will also tell Abraham what to do, to go to Mount Moriah and sacrifice Isaac- his only remaining son, whom he loved. Our tradition paints Abraham as the exemplar of faith for not challenging God. But I ask you- is he the exemplar of faith, or simply too dumbfounded to talk?
I suggest to you that the rabbis of our tradition painted Abraham as the exemplar of faith because they were too terrified to contemplate the implications of any other explanation. Whether or not that is the case I can’t say with any certainty, but this I can. Whether it was with the expulsion of Hagar and Yishmael, or the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham was living life way outside of the laboratory that we spoke of earlier. Nothing was clear, nothing was easy, and certainly, nothing was obvious. Pure good and bad were nowhere to be found. He was doing the best he could, the stakes could not have been higher, and he was surely unhappy.
To place this in a more contemporary setting, fast forward a few thousand years into the cabinet room of Israel’s government this past summer.
For too long, the names of Eldad Regev, Ehud Goldwasser, Gilad Shalit, not to mention Ron Arad and others, have been a part of our prayers for pidyon sh’vuyim- the redemption of captives. The kidnapping of Regev, Goldwasser and Shalit by Hizbollah and Hamas was the fuse that lit the second Lebanon war in the summer of 2006. Just two months ago, in July, Hizbollah announced that it was willing to “release” Regev and Goldwasser in exchange for Israel’s release of a large number of prisoners, including Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese Arab who, in one of the most egregiously offensive terrorist actions against Israel, murdered a father in the presence of his young daughter, and then bashed the young girl’s head against a wall and killed her too. “Freedom” for Regev and Goldwasser, but at a terrible price.
Sadly, of course, the exchange was made even more painful because Regev and Goldwasser were dead. Israel received their bodies in exchange for live murderers. We could spend all morning and much of the afternoon debating the wisdom or lack thereof of what Israel did. But again- outside of the laboratory, there were no good or clear choices.
A pillar of the Israel Defense Forces strategic playbook is the concept of lo mafkirim chayyal bashetach – under no circumstances does the IDF abandon a soldier in the field. Dead or wounded, at large or captive, the safe return of each and every Israeli soldier to Israel is a priority of the Israeli government, and soldiers and reservists go into combat knowing that their government will not abandon them. Even knowing that their husbands and sons were dead, the families of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser demanded the return of their loved ones’ remains as a critical example of lo mafkirim chayyal bashetach – Bring the boys home.
And yet, and yet…. At the cost of freeing Samir Kuntar? How grotesque a price to have to pay. There was certainly an argument to be made against his release, even given the imperative of bringing the boys home.
What was Israel to do? Well, as you know, they decided to make the exchange- and most of the country was proud of the government, and the values it had chosen to uphold. We can be sure, however, that the decision did not sit well or easily even with those who supported it. No clear choices, no good ones, either.
There are many who, in today’s Jewish world, interpret our tradition and sacred texts as monolithic and unbending on the subject of sin and adherence to God’s will. I, for one, most certainly do not differ with them- even with the most stringent of them- in the belief that a life of Torah and mitzvot is our best and most gratifying chance for a meaningful and fulfilling life. A life rooted in mitzvot is the life that God wants us to live, commands us, if you will, to live. The day that I cannot say that is the day that I cannot be your rabbi, or anybody’s.
But that said, I differ with them most profoundly in my understanding of life, of choice, and most particularly of sin. We are all sinners, every one of us. That doesn’t make us evil, or even bad necessarily- it makes us imperfect, and in need of spiritual repair. We are not Abrahams, you and I. We do not hold the destiny of our people in our hands, and few among us are called upon to make the kinds of choices that he was, and that he struggled with.
But each and every one of us lives our lives outside the laboratory of absolute moral clarity. We face choices, and we make mistakes sometimes. We try to raise our children as best as we can, and we make mistakes- sometimes. We try to provide for our families as best as we can, and in our efforts we make mistakes- sometimes. We try to be faithful, we try to be trustworthy, we try to be worthy of the love and respect of the people we love and care for the most, and of God- and sometimes we fall short of the mark.
But God loves us anyway. Yes, our God loves sinners too. That’s the good news of these Yamim Nora’im. We have a chance to start over with a clean slate, if only we resolve to work that much harder on making better choices and decisions in the new year just beginning. We have a chance to feel cleansed, forgiven, even saved… we’re used to hearing that language from the church, but if you’ll pardon me a moment of parochialism, we had it first. Our God loves sinners too. Our God forgives, and our God understands that in the harsh realities of the world outside the laboratory, it’s hard to know what the right thing is to do, much less to do it. Our God forgives!
I wish my Physics for Poets professor were here today; for all I know, he could be. I think he’d be happy to know that I was listening that day…
