Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service
Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2019/5780
Failure is not an option.
This famous phrase is associated with Gene Kranz, the renowned NASA flight director for the aborted Apollo 13 space mission. It also became the tagline for the eponymous Hollywood movie . . . and it is purely Hollywood. Krantz never actually said this phrase.
In my opinion, the line should have been failure is always an option. In fact, when we look back on the greatest inventions, failure – and more importantly, the courage to fail – is what led to success.
Which is why it is so confounding that we tend to focus on the “either/or” of success and failure, rather than the both/and. In fact, who we are, and how we respond to the events of our lives, makes a much greater impact than the events themselves. Our first example of this is in God’s actions. In Torah, God has many human attributes: God loses God’s temper and questions God’s own judgement. God changes God’s mind and decides to take a different direction based on experience. Even God is not so headstrong as to be unable to learn from mistakes. We see this very clearly in the story of Noah’s ark. We read in Genesis that God brought a flood to the earth because “God saw how much human evil there was on earth and felt that the only way to remedy this was to destroy humanity and begin again with Noah.” After the flood, there seems to be a change in God’s opinion. The Torah reads: “I will not again curse the land because of humans, since the human heart is immature.”
This idea of an immature human heart intrigues the rabbis. They determine that it refers to our yetzer harah – our inclination to act only in our own self-interest without thinking of the bigger picture (as opposed to our yetzer hatov – our good inclination – which comes later). In the story of the flood, it is the yetzer harah that made humanity act dreadfully and anger God to the point of destruction. It was only after seeing the effect of the flood on the world that God took a minute to unpack what caused humanity to act with such baseless instincts. God began to try to better understand people and reflect on that hasty judgment in order to treat people with more patience moving forward. God, our commentators write, determined that Noah’s contemporaries were ruled only by aggression, viciousness, greed, and moral indifference.Therefore, God decided to give humanity the Torah with lessons of humility and honesty.
As the sages unpacked this view of humanity, they began to realize this was only half of the story. We are not all bad! This is where the yetzer hatov – our good inclination – comes into play. The yetzer hatov enters us when we come of age, around the time of our bar or bat mitzvah. The sages continue by teaching that as we grow and mature from adolescence to adulthood, we develop our ability to balance these two sides of ourselves.
While an interesting idea and explanation, this simplifies the concept to a degree that makes these two drives polar opposite rather than on a spectrum. As Professor Jeffery Spitzer explains, our yetzer hara is not a demonic force that pushes us to do evil, but rather a drive towards pleasure or property or security. It is a worldview that is just about us. It is the material force inside of us.
On the other side, the yetzer hatov is a worldview that holds us responsible for the other people in our lives. It is what allows us to feel empathy for another person, to want to reach out and help.It is the spiritual force within us.
Both of these forces, if left unchecked, have negative consequences. With our yetzer hara we act only in our own self-interest.With our yetzer hatov we act only in the interest of other people.When the two come into balance we do things that benefit ourselves and the community – like get married and raise families, start businesses that employ others, work for safe and friendly neighborhoods. This allows us to live in harmony with our inner selves.
A popular comedy that just began its fourth and final season, The Good Place, picks up on this very Jewish idea that each of us has good and evil inside of us. Spoiler alert! The show begins with Michael, a demon, conducting a radical experiment on a new way to torture human beings. He picks four people with questionable ethics, who would never have gotten along in life, and puts them into close community. When they “arrive” in his neighborhood, he tells them they have come to “the good place” – heaven – and lets them loose. His theory is that humans are self-centered and mean enough that they will spend eternity torturing one another.
Then enters the protagonist, Eleanor, who wants to become a better person. When Eleanor enters The Good Place she is told it is because of all the humanitarian work she did in life. She is then introduced to her alleged soulmate Chidi, a professor of ethics. During the first season Eleanor admits to Chidi that there was a mistake and she was not a humanitarian in life. But, she wants to learn how to keep her yetzer hara in check. She wants to balance it with her yetzer hatov! Chidi agrees to teach her ethics. In return, and unknowingly, Eleanor helps Chidi to keep his yetzer hatov in balance: you see, in life, Chidi was so concerned with making the ethical decision that it paralyzed him making him unable to make any decision at all. Eleanor’s self-centered experiences are exactly what Chidi needs to live life – even if he is already dead!
Recently at Temple, we heard an extreme example of what happens when our yetzer hara (our “selfish” side) is out of balance. Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson-Roy told us their story of betrayal and forgiveness. On February 12, 1993, Mary’s 20-year-old son was shot and killed by then 16-year-old Oshea during a fight outside of a bar. Oshea was sentenced to 25 years in prison for second degree murder. Twelve years into Oshea’s sentence, Mary sent a request to visit him in prison. At first Oshea refused, but eventually he changed his mind. The two met and talked for over two hours. Oshea admitted to the murder and Mary forgave him, fully and completely. She could not believe she was able to do this, but she said that as she did, she felt like a weight physically lifted from her. For Oshea, Mary’s forgiveness brought both changes and challenges to his life. He said, "Sometimes I still don't know how to take it, because I haven't totally forgiven myself yet. It's something that I'm learning from Mary. I won't say that I have learned yet, because it's still a process that I'm going through."
For Oshea, part of forgiving himself is allowing himself to make big changes to his life, and surround himself with people who will help him do this. As he was speaking here at Temple, Oshea talked about adders, subtractors, multipliers, and dividers. Adders are people who add to our lives while subtractors take away from our experiences. Multipliers, on the other hand, lift us up to a higher plane then we could have imagined for ourselves while dividers pull us down into deep holes.Oshea talked not only about the need to surround ourselves with multipliers and adders, but that each one of us, at different times, are all of these things to ourselves and to others.
We all find ourselves in difficult situations, big and small. And we all make mistakes. But that should not, and cannot, keep us from asking: Who are we? What role are we playing in the success or failure of our own life or the lives of others? What can we do next to move forward? How can we help our compassion win over our fear? Our kindness over our greed? This is the lesson of t’shuvah, of repentance, of cheshbon hanefesh, of examining our souls.Our goal is not to be perfect, but it is to be open enough to learn from our actions when we are out of balance.Our goal is to never stop trying to be the adders and multipliers in the world. And those years when we are more to one side or the other then we would like to be? Those are the years we tend to beat ourselves up the most. But, in reality, those are the years when we have the most opportunity for growth.
Rosh HaShanah is known in Jewish texts by many names including Yom HaZikaron - "The Day of Remembering” and Yom Hadin - "The Day of Judgment." We understand the reason for Yom Hadin, but why, the rabbis wondered, is Rosh HaShanah referred to as a day of remembering? The answer comes from a midrashic description of God sitting upon a throne, while books containing the deeds of all humanity are opened for review, and each person passes in front of God for evaluation of their deeds. While I am not sure that my theology is such that I believe in a God who sits on a throne examining all of our actions over the past year, I do like the idea of spending time remembering – and assessing – our own past conduct and contemplating our path forward.
This image helped me recently as I thought about a comment a student made. She felt that she apologized for wrongdoings as they occurred and therefore did not need a dedicated day of repentance. As I thought about her comment, I realized that we give the wrong impression if we think that these days of awe replace apologizing in the moment. Rather, they give us time to look back and reflect on the past year. Unpack times in which our inner selves were unbalanced. Go back and finish conversations we only started.Maybe even apologize again, with more thought and meaning this time, to people we hurt.
As I think about my student’s statement, I cannot help but think about how defensive we all become when confronted with our wrongdoings. When asked what made Oshea finally agree to see Mary, he said, “For years I didn’t even acknowledge what I’d done and would lay the blame on everyone else. I didn’t want to hold myself responsible for taking someone’s life over something so trivial and stupid. You blame everyone else because you don’t want to deal with the pain. Eventually I realized that to grow up and be able to call myself a man I had to look this lady in the eye and tell her what I had done. I needed to try and make amends.Whether she forgave me or not was not the point.”
It is truly all about the framing. Oshea could have viewed apologizing for his crime and all of the pain he caused as a weakness, as something only cowards do. Instead, he realized that this took courage and maturity. It was not easy, but it has allowed him to use the senseless act of crime to help others avoid his mistakes. Acknowledging, admitting, even accepting and embracing our flaws and imperfections is what will enable us to become the best versions of ourselves. It is our drive to be perfect that can paralyze us from action.
I wonder what would happen if we understood and internalized that we are ALL at different points of the same path. That we have years when we take more steps forward and other years when we take more steps back. That God is not perfect, therefore we should not and cannot expect ourselves to be perfect.Would this allow us to open our hearts and our souls to one another? Would this enable us to look another person in the eye and say “I am sorry” with meaning and conviction? Would facing ourselves with this level of chesed, of kindness, allow us to see the other with the same empathy?
Our machzor teaches that, “For sins against God, the day of atonement atones, but for sins from one human being to another, the day of atonement does not atone until we have made amends with each other.” This very important text leaves out one integral part of the scenario.We cannot embark on the work or the lessons of t’shuva until we learn to treat ourselves with kindness and compassion. Until we are able to admit and forgive our own wrongdoings. Then, and only then, will we be able to look kindly on each other. This is our challenge in the coming year, this is our path to move forward.