Yom Kippur: Who I Want to Be

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2015/5776

My little brother Jack, well, maybe not so little, but ten years my junior, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Policy, just released a book on racial profiling – entitled Suspect Race—making me more than a little jealous because he beat me to the punch, publishing before I was able to release my forthcoming epic: When Bad Things Happen to Inappropriate Rabbis.

Obviously Jack’s book comes out at a relevant time, but my brother has been studying and teaching about discrimination for about 30 years. In his early days as a graduate student he designed an experiment to measure an individual’s racial bias, and he found an unlikely guinea pig, or maze rat, in his older brother who happened to be visiting.

Here’s how it worked. I was instructed to press a key on a computer keyboard indicating my immediate either positive or negative response to stimuli as it appeared on the screen. A series of random words flashed before me and I batted away at the keyboard, reacting negatively or positively as quickly as I could.

When I finished, Jack told me that the words I saw on the computer screen were not actually the ones I had been reacting to. Rather, I was responding to racially charged stereotypical words related to race, color, creed, nationality, like black, white, ghetto, rap, urban, gang, etc. that had flashed subliminally just before the word I actually saw.

“Oy” I thought. But I had to ask. “How did I do?” My brother replied: “You don’t want to know.”

Fast forward three decades to a couple of months ago when the Downtown Congregations to End Homelessness Steering Committee voted to do a self-assessment of our intercultural competence, both our individual and group orientations toward cultural differences and commonality. We felt that since our work in the field of homelessness so disproportionally affects folks of race and culture different from our own it might be good to know how facile we are in relating to this population.

Answering a 50 question Intercultural Development Inventory, we were then evaluated and placed on a continuum that ranged from denial, and polarization and defense – that is, an “us and them” place of avoidance, judgment and inability to recognize cultural differences; all the way up to adaptability and acceptance of the other; the ability to authentically shift one’s cultural perspective and appreciate others.

So a few weeks later we were given our group result, and where we were as individuals. Ten of us were scattered throughout the continuum, but two were way over there in denial-polarization-defense land.

I don’t know the identity of one of the two, but you are looking at the other one.

So somebody is going to ask you at the break-fast: What was the sermon about this morning? And you may be inclined to respond: “Well, basically Rabbi Glaser told the congregation he’s a racist”.

But before you do that, let me add something crucial to the conversation. There were actually two scores. One was the developmental score that I just mentioned – where you actually are, based on your life’s experiences and life-long development of attitudes. The other score was our self-perception – where I perceive myself to be on that continuum of multi-cultural sensitivity. Who I think I am.

And I am here to tell you that my own perception of my intercultural competence put me way up there at the cusp of acceptance and adaptation. Apparently I believe I am someone who recognizes, celebrates and appreciates cultural differences in my own and other people’s values, ways and behaviors.

My personal perception score – the look-who-thinks-he-is “multi-culturally aware” Sim Glaser, was immensely higher than my developmental. The profile interpretation workbook advised us that a difference of even seven points between the two scores indicates a significant overestimation of one’s intercultural competence.

My differential was 37 points.

Ok, I hear you thinking. Now I get it. Rabbi is a racist – he just doesn’t know it.

On the one hand, this could paint a picture of an individual who is clearly out of touch with his true nature. On the other hand, more positively, here is a person who aspires to be a much more culturally sensitive adaptable person than he actually is.

So I did some research and some soul searching, and I talked to a few folks.

First off I looked up “Racism” in the Webster’s where it says: “Racism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” And I thought, naaah, that’s not me.

I asked my wife. Barb, source of all real wisdom in our household, do you think you are married to a racist? Her response was: “No honey, I think it means you just need to get out more often.”

I consulted a local Lutheran Minister who was on that steering committee that took the test, and she said: Well, you are being judgmental. Look at the number you are doing on yourself! This is not a shame and blame device – the disparity between your scores is a wonderful challenge!

And I made an appointment to speak with the person who administered the instrument to us. Her interpretation of the generous gap in my score was that I might simply be leading a smaller internal life than what I am capable of, and desirous of! She also mentioned that skewing to the polarization side is often a cultural safeguard for people who have been oppressed or persecuted.

I was comforted to learn that I am far from alone in this challenge. The intercultural development orientation, she said, is not static, rather it is a moving walkway, like the kind at the airport. Because of the way our society works and how we tend to associate most readily with people who are just like us – same color skin, same neighborhoods, same socio-economic status - if we stay on this walkway, we continue to be carried along and become further polarized and indifferent to a world filled with a variety of people. Even if we stand still and do nothing, the walkway will continue to carry us in that direction, because that is the way our society is designed.

However, when we reverse course, or choose to get off the walkway, this is when we can begin to make personal progress. This is where we begin to close the gap between who we are developmentally and who we aspire to be!

And this brings us to Yom Kippur. This is the differential holiday. This is the holiday of heshbon ha nefesh – of moral stock-taking. Not only: Who have we become over the course of our lives? But now that we know it, what the heck are we going to do about it?? Ok. So we opened the book of life, we filled out the questionnaire and saw the results. This is the day we declare that we do not have to accept what is written in those pages as immutable.

Human beings are capable of change. But when a human being finds out he is 37 points different from what he aspires to be, what then?

Just maybe this difference between who we are and who we want to be is the Divine part of ourselves calling out to us to be recognized! To be nurtured and developed!

On Yom Kippur the barriers are supposed to come down so we might acknowledge that our behavior has not matched what our souls know is the right way to behave. Or as one of my favorite bumper stickers reads: Dear God, help me to be everything my dog thinks I am.

Our aggregate score as a committee showed us that this is not only an individual issue, but an institutional one, and maybe even a state and national issue. How surprising it must have been to so many of us last week when the figures revealed that the wealth gap between whites and blacks in the self-described progressive state of Minnesota state is second only to Mississippi. How different is the gap between who we perceive ourselves to be as a society and who we really are?

I was pleased to note that the results of this test did not leave us without goals or homework. It begins with being brave enough to face your flaws, then noting, without judgment where you are. Then to develop a sense of curiosity about this huge world we could be a part of if we could just get out more often.

In a way, this is a very Jewish prescription. We are a deed leads to creed religion, so it makes perfect sense that in order to change our most basic selves we have to perform acts, do deeds, give ourselves missions and challenges in real time, with real people that are not part of our mono-cultural circle. And most seriously, to ask ourselves, what does it mean to remain mono-cultural in an era of Charleston, and Ferguson, and Baltimore.

Curiously, the workbook actually quantified what it takes to move one notch up on the continuum toward a positive more multi-cultural direction. About 40 hours of work. 40 hours!? I thought. I’ve have 60 years of experiences hardwired into me! In the book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours to become something you are not yet! But not so with the work of sensitizing ourselves to others. Maybe there is a Divine source of energy that just wants us to succeed. The opposite of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. Softening the heart can be accomplished in 40 hours! What a concept! Yom Kippur is the Jewish antithesis of “original sin” which we do not teach. We are not stuck on that moving walkway. We can reverse course, and we can get off.

The workbook goes on to encourage taking opportunities to have personal interactions with members of other groups, to travel, but not in a bubble like where you visit a foreign city but wind up eating at Applebee’s, or instead of insisting that everyone there speak to you in your language you learn some of the local vernacular. Or that you keep an intercultural journal, or widen your artistic tastes to include theater, music and film that depicts cultures other than your own.

A few days ago television history was made when in the year 2015 the best actress award went to a woman of color. Viola Davis, in her Emmy acceptance speech, quoted Harriet Tubman, speaking over a hundred years ago –

“In my mind I see a line… and over that line I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can’t seem to get there no-how. I can’t seem to get over that line.” The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.”

Opportunity, it seems, is the only thing that separates any of us from one another. Our divine selves can see that line that divides us, even as our structured, hard wired, developed, entrenched selves seem locked in a pattern of sameness. Today is the day to see that line, to acknowledge the higher self within us that wants to cross it, and to pledge to do so.

At this time of year we make pilgrimages to places where we can witness the grand beauty of the changing foliage. The multi-colored leaves that speak to us of God’s grand creation. We say ooh. We say ahhh… How do we go from that sense of wonder at the bold variety of fall colors right back to a fear or distrust of different colored faces?

I am not especially proud of my developmental test score, but I am excited by the Divine message my aspirational score has brought home to me. Like everyone else, I have work to do.

May we all be inscribed for blessing this year in the ever changing, ever evolving, ever growing books of our lives.

L’shana tova.