Rosh HaShanah: An Entire World
Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2016/5777
This is a year of celebration of our community. We expanded our Temple on a yuuuuuuuuuuge level! You came through our ginourmous lobby of 1.6 million square feet; our sanctuary now seats 65,000 people; we are partnered with over 20 different food and beverage companies; there are 125 suites overlooking the field; we have 1200 HD flat screen televisions, and the largest glass pivoting doors in the world! At our coffee bar you can get a beer for $11.50 a glass and… Wait, oh, how embarrassing. I’m being told I apparently have the incorrect building status report.
But those numbers are impressive, no? And ours are too! 6000 congregants, 2200 family units. I have to admit, I throw around big numbers all the time. Lots of folks do! There are over 7 billion people in the world. Did you know that the Powerball Jackpot is currently $47.5 million? Someone told me at Torah study this last Shabbat that there are something like 8 trillion stars in our universe!
When we use words like 6 million Jews, or read that 450,000 Syrians have been killed in that civil war which still rages on, we are dismayed, but on some level we cannot wrap our minds around big numbers of people. Their identities are drowned out by the brash statistic. When, after all, in our day to day lives, do we deal with 6 million or 450,000 of anything??
No matter how big we get, and no matter how colossal the numbers are in the daily news from distant lands, we are hardwired to deal with one person at a time. Our Talmud teaches us whosoever saves a single life it is as though he has saved an entire world.
Many years ago a documentary film was made about a classroom in Whitwell, Tennessee, a small community of 1600 people. They were studying the Holocaust and the consequences of extreme prejudice. The kids in Whitwell knew about hatred. The KKK had been founded about a hundred miles from their town. The challenge for the teachers was when the kids asked: What is Six Million?
Their solution was to have the kids try and collect 6 million paper clips in order to wrap their young minds around the enormous number of victims. They succeeded in doing so. Now they knew what the number 6 million meant.
Last week our scholar-in-residence was Yehudit Shendar from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. So we were steadying ourselves to hear from her about the millions of Jews who lost their lives during the Shoah, the real impact of her presentation, and this is definitely how she “rolls,” was when she began to tell us individual stories.
She told us, in loving detail, about Petr Ginz, one 14 year old Czechoslovakian boy, a gifted artist and author who wrote novels and created drawings while imprisoned in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, and who continued to write and draw even in Auschwitz where he was murdered. How Petr dreamed, in 1943, of flying in a rocket into space. And how 60 years later his drawing of an imagined moon landscape actually accompanied the first Israeli Astronaut Ilan Ramon on the ill-fated Columbia Mission.
A chill went up our collective spine when Dr. Shendar told us that the morning on which the Columbia disintegrated upon reentry into the earth’s atmosphere on February 1st, 2003 in the skies over Texas… happened to be the very day Peter Ginz would have turned 75 years old! Now the dark history became real. There, in the tragedy, hope and glory of one 14 year old boy, and the world’s first Israeli astronaut, lay the human drama.
Remember a single life, and you save an entire world.
Experts tell us that compassion fatigue sets in not when the number of victims reaches the hundreds or thousands, but when we hear about the fate of even two people! It seems we are hard-wired to relate to each other one at a time.
Lots of numbers flew at us last year, but what were the images that penetrated our consciences - the little boy washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean; the Syrian child who survives the bombing of his city and sits, shell-shocked, staring at us from the back of the ambulance.
Witness a single life, and you see an entire world.
Yes, we rejoice in being a large Temple community. But in reality we are built around individual joy, individual achievement, individual pain. Our shiva houses are mobbed because one family has lost one beloved person. Caring Bridge communications online when a single friend has a life threatening illness. Our community gets energized when we coalesce around one loss, when we trot out one young thirteen year old for her Bat Mitzvah, when we name one baby.
Just about a month ago the fate of Jacob Wetterling became known to us. Here is one young life, a boy whose whereabouts were unknown for 27 years, a tragic mystery that somehow galvanized a community. We cried, we waited, we searched and we hurt right alongside the Wetterling family for 27 years. We marveled at Patty Wetterling’s tenacity of spirit as she ran for public office, like she was our own mother, or sister. People in our congregation talked about how they were 11 years old when Jacob was 11 years old and feel as though they “grew up with him.” And when we finally learned what had befallen Jacob, we felt that strange combination of horror and relief, again, along with the Wetterling family.
Remember one young life, and you have remembered an entire world.
You have to ask yourself, how can it be, that such a thing happens to a family you don’t even know and may never even meet, and still you agonize alongside them and find relief, with them, in knowing, finally, an answer? This is what is truly meant by community. And we as Jews should celebrate it!
A friend of mine was a student rabbi years ago in the northeast. He used to marvel that many members of his tiny congregation, some of them over 80 years old, would somehow make it to services even in the midst of a big snowstorm. When he asked, one woman responded, “well, I wouldn’t want Ethel to be disappointed by my not showing up.” Another said: “well, Fred won’t know what to do without me here.”
The humorist Harry Golden tells the story of his father, a notorious atheist who nevertheless went to synagogue every single Saturday morning. When Harry asked his father about it, he replied, "Look, everyone goes to shul for a different reason. Garfinkel goes to synagogue to talk to God. I go to synagogue to talk to Garfinkel."
It is no coincidence that when any U.S. President gives the State of the Union address the high point of the talk is often when he points up to the gallery and identifies one soldier, one national hero, one individual story of heartbreak, one person’s act of courage. Even when you are speaking to millions of people through the media, you can’t portray the whole country as simply a mass of humanity – you have to look at the people – one by one.
Before construction began on Temple’s new addition, we invited members of the Kenwood neighborhood to a forum to talk about the new building. We asked if any individual had an issue with what we were proposing. Not a soul objected. Maybe it’s because we are good neighbors. Maybe it is because the people who come in and out of this building care about the individuals they meet up with on the street. Or maybe it is because we cared what each of them thought.
You know, there have been many stunning moments in this campaign season, and I’ll bet we’re in for a lot more, but one of my personal favorites was when, in addressing the plight of Syrian refugees and immigration quotas someone asked the question: If I had a big bowlful of Skittles and told you that just three of them would kill you, would you take a handful?
Called upon for comment, a spokesperson for the Mars Candy Company, maker of Skittles, had the wisdom to point out, quote: Skittles are candy, refugees are people. We don’t feel this is an appropriate analogy.
Personally, I imagined a group of Jews ferrying out to the Statue of Liberty to scrub the obscene graffiti off the Emma Lazarus poem and to re-hoist the lamp beside the golden door that the Statue of Liberty dropped when she heard the Skittles comment!
But here’s the more Jewish response: If you knew that in that teeming mass of people there were three who would bring joy and wisdom, brilliance, initiative and innovation to our society, could you refrain from bringing them to safety? If you knew that in that bowl of humanity was young Petr Ginz, who dreamed of flying to the moon, and would have delighted us endlessly with art, stories, visions and achievements, who may have discovered a cure for disease or devised new sources for clean and renewable energy, could we refrain from opening our golden door to him?
Save a single life, and you have saved an entire world.
We can talk big numbers, statistics, we can talk millions, hundreds of thousands, or dozens crowded on life rafts floating in the Mediterranean. But better each of us should think of a single person, or her descendent, someone whom we know personally, even we ourselves, who would not be alive today had more Americans angrily protested the immigration of Jewish refugees to this country during World War II.
The Jewish people knows what it means to be counted as numbers. We’ve had them tattooed on our arms. We are commanded, in our tradition, never to count people. The Prophet Hosea said: And the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which shall never be counted. The great sage Maimonides warned that to count people like so many cattle is a sin against God and humanity.
The paper-clip-collecting children of Whitwell Tennessee didn’t learn the lesson when millions of paper clips arrived in their classrooms. They got it when they saw the clips that held the name of a single person, or the faded yellow Jewish star, or the identification papers… the single photograph.
We are a people who love people. We find our treasures in the individuals we know. We celebrate milestones, one Jew at a time. We share the pain of those who have lost that special person they love. This is what is meant by community.
As big numbers come your way in the coming weeks, don’t think so big. Forget the 65,000 seats. Think of the individual fan. Never mind the 8 trillion stars – think of the fragile planet Earth. Don’t ruminate on 6 million Jews. Think of Petr Ginz. Don’t let the number 450,000 lull you into the stupor of indifference. Think of the one child in the ambulance staring past the camera.
And thus our Talmud teaches: To save one life is to have saved an entire world!
When Jacob Wetterling’s murderer led the authorities to his grave last month, tens of thousands of people uttered a communal gasp.
Why, on one of the holiest days on the Jewish calendar would a synagogue community, and a rabbi giving a sermon, want to remember Jacob Wetterling, an 11 year old boy who went missing 27 years ago? What does it have to do with us? What does the story of just one boy have to do with you and me?
Everything. For he was an entire world.