Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2012/5773

Happy New Year to all of you who have come here this past week. I’m sure for you, as I know for myself, that being together is essential and important as we watch the world feeling as if it seems to be spinning out of control.

Last year I talked about change as an individual transition and this year I’m going to talk about world change: change that is not incremental any longer but exponential. It happens every day and every minute, and I believe that religion is the battlefield in which this change is emerging.

You see last week, as many of us who know the US ambassador to Morocco from our very own town, Sam and Sylvia Kaplan faced the death of Chris Stevens, the Ambassador to Libya. This brought a heavy heart, and our prayers and our hearts go out to his family and to the three other foreign diplomats who gave their lives.

And then the riots in Egypt, seemingly a response to the movie that went viral, “Innocence of Muslims.” Rabbi Glaser and I watched it for just a short time. It is a horrible movie, horrible. (The Muslims shouldn’t be rioting: the Actors’ Guild should be.) This is a movie in its very content that I do not believe was the cause of the riots. I think that is simplistic, and actually is a place that many people go. I thank God every day I was born in this country, and that I have first amendment rights. I appreciate it, I bank on it.

But the fact that we have a cultural divide and a difference in our basic rights: that is not new to the world; we all know it. What’s new is that it went viral, what’s new is that people had access to it, that it is the world that is changing, that it is out there. There are mega-changes. We are in a major transition in our world and that is what the response is: it’s happening in Egypt, it’s happening in Tunisia, it’s happening in Libya. It’s a reaction to a world and a transformation that is bigger than any one of us, any country. It is a world change; we know it. We began long ago as a movement in the Enlightenment movement in what is called the Industrial Time, the industrialization. We are at the end of it, if not onto a whole other post-modern, post-industrial world. We don’t quite know what it is but I can tell you when these major transformations happen, let me show you and tell you two obvious ways of knowing.

The generation gap becomes wider. Now let’s just talk for a moment about the generation gap. We have the great Generation. Those of us who are Baby Boomers need to ask our ten year olds to help us with our electronics: that is a generation gap. It is truly the case that the lives of our children and our grandchildren are vastly different than our lives. They’ve grown up in a culture and a sea of the ability to be on time all the time, connected world-wide, whenever they choose.

The second barometer of the transition that is immense is that people become entrenched in their ideas. There’s a new book out: it’s called The Big Sort, and basically what it says is that we live and we pray and we eat with people just like us, and that that has been a move that has happened where neighborhoods are monolithic in their political beliefs, in their values and how they see the world. No longer is there a Democrat standing over the fence with their Republican neighbor – somebody moves out of the neighborhood because they’re not like everyone else.

They showed in this book that actually when people got together and spoke to people who disagreed with them politically they became more entrenched in their beliefs, rather than open to a different opinion.

Those are the barometers that show us that this change is not small but transformative. We know these transformational changes in Judaism, and what we’ve found is that religion has one of two responses. It either becomes a breaker wall that says, “No change, unacceptable, I’m going to fight it” and that’s what we’re seeing throughout the world. Or, what we have seen in history is that religious institutions and religion are at the forefront of saying, “Let’s go into the change, take the best of the change by keeping our basic values but by understanding that we are living in a world of change - we’ve done it many times before.”

To help people negotiate and navigate the change in the world, religious institutions have been at the forefront of that. We’ve taught people how to understand the change and keep values in other institutions in their life, whether it’s at work or at home, whether it’s with their friends or their acquaintances; that’s the best of what religion has done during these massive changes.

But there always have been those two responses. You can look at the rabbinic period of time and we’ll get a little history: (don’t get too fogged over here at nine o’clock). What’s amazing is that during this rabbinic period of time, no longer could Jews support the temple’s sacrifices. We were off the land; we weren’t farmers any longer; we weren’t shepherds any longer. We couldn’t bring sacrifices; we had to buy sacrifices. That wasn’t going to last long. So what happened was that those people who were born into power, the priests, the Sadducees, gave way to the rabbis, to the rabbinic period of time that said, “You know what? You can actually move out of the world you were born into. You can advance on your own through knowledge and you can become a rabbi and become a leader and become a teacher.”

These are vastly different ways of knowing. The priests put up the breaker wall. The rabbis leaned into the change. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any sacrifices here. They’re gone. The zealots? They’re gone. We are the inheritors of the rabbinic tradition. We have survived that transformational change.

We had it in the Enlightenment period, as well, when opportunities were open to Jews that had never been open before. And there was a need to understand how to negotiate modernity with tradition and that’s how the Reform movement was born. We are the fastest growing movement of today, but don’t get too excited: because actually, compared to other movements, we are the fastest growing, but the fastest growing “movement” is unaffiliated Jews – that’s fifty percent of our community.

The change is interesting because what you have to understand as we move through change is that there are eternal truths. The L’dor V’dor – from generation to generation - to teach Judaism to the children and grandchildren head to head - that is an everlasting value that will remain no matter what change comes its way. The idea of educating our children, of giving them the tools of Judaism: Hebrew, and Jewish history, and Jewish tradition – that will not change. The idea of tikkun olam – the idea of caring for this broken world – that is not going to change. But we need to figure out how to communicate and do those things differently if we’re going to be relevant in the twenty-first century.

There’s a great Hassidic tale. You know Hassidism? It actually began in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. And so did trains, and so did the telegraph, and so did the telephone – major technological changes at the time. So the disciples of a Rebbe wanted to know what to do with all these newfangled, amazing technological wonders. And so they said, “Please, Rebbe, tell us: what do we learn from the train?” The Rebbe thought a minute, turned to his disciples and said, “Sometimes, if you’re a second late, you miss everything.”

“Okay. What about the telegraph? What do we learn from the telegraph, Rebbe?” And the Rebbe said, “Every one of your words is counted and paid for.”

“And what do we learn from the telephone, Rebbe?” “Oh, that one’s the best. What you say here is heard over there.”

The Rebbe got it. He understood that transformational change is not something to ignore but it’s something to adapt to, to reinterpret and reinvigorate our tradition, to respond to the changing nature of the world outside. You see, there are questions to be had in the world we live in, the world that is no longer full of authority but goes to autonomy, the world that was once hierarchical and now is networked, the world where communication and knowledge were the basis and the ownership of only a few, and now are democratically accepted and understood. With a click of the mouse you can Google anything and you can become an expert on Moses Maimonides; you don’t have to go to rabbinical school to learn it.

Here we have a world that is so different, where people can get anything, anytime, anywhere, and really, from anyone. And in that world we can say, “Not allowed” or we can say, “Well, what does that mean?”

So here are what I think are some essential questions to be asked about this world. If we can say whatever we want, whenever we want, and it will become viral, when do we decide not to say it? When do we guard our language and our words and our tongue? In Judaism, Shmirat Halashon, to guard your speech. What happens in a world that is just turned on 24/7 – it is on all the time and we can plug in. I just had a parent say, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to talk to my teenager – she Skypes, she IMs, she has Face time, and oh, by the way, is watching television doing all of those things.”

When do we decide to turn it off? To save our souls: that’s Shabbat. And when we live in a world that values power and we can have it, when do we find our humility and give the dignity to every human being, even the person who answers the phone? That is Derech Eretz : it is making sure you’re civil to everyone, even if you have more power.

And what happens in a world when I can get whenever I want at any time: what do I decide is important and not something to just throw away? That’s Ba'al Tashchit: to not destroy.

And when, when do we decide that the person who disagrees with us is just not summarily wrong, and we become more entrenched? When do we open ourselves up to change? That’s Rosh HaShana, that’s T’shuvah, that is understanding that each of us are B'tzelem Elohim, created in the image of God. We have a lot to have a conversation about because the world out there will take us for a ride. Every day each of us gets 5,000 messages to buy, buy, and buy. Whether you turn on your computer and the advertisements are right there; whether you walk into a coffee shop and it is constantly telling you to make sure you have this logo and that logo; meeting somebody in the halls of school – whatever they wear is telling you to buy what they wear. So we can abdicate our responsibility to the world out there but that would be exactly what we’re doing, we’re abdicating our responsibility.  We have to talk about real life. That’s what religion in the twenty first century and any century is. It’s making sure we have conversations about real life things that affect you and bring the values of Judaism and the tradition of Judaism to compare it to, to talk about, to incorporate.

I promise you that at Temple Israel in the years to come we will mediate the world out there; we will make sure that there are many doors and one roof; that people can come in at different portals to experience Judaism and we’ll meet them where they are, and that we will get out of this building to meet them where they are. In coffee shops, in bars, in places where young people congregate, we will be there. And we will ask those important questions. We will mediate between this Jewish world and the non-Jewish world and bring our friendships and our religious understandings of diversity back into this sanctuary. We have done it throughout time. We will make sure that Judaism is accessible to all, whatever our special needs are. Those are the things that we have to work on and do in order to remain relevant in the twenty first century. Religion as a breaker wall does not work. A porous wall, open doors, a welcome mat: those are the images of tomorrow.

And so, in the tradition of that nineteenth century Hassidic rabbi, the Rebbe, I ask you, what do we learn from streaming our Rosh HaShanah service? We learn that even though we can’t see the people, we touch them, we move them, they’re connected to us, even when they can see us.

And what do we learn from Facetime? Maybe that we can imagine and examine the fact that we hold people in the palm of our hands.

And what about You Tube? Well, I think that’s clear: that every action and every word can come back, it can come back directly to you. It is known, and it will be judged. L’Shanah Tovah.