Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
Yom Kippur 5767

On Rosh Hashanah I informed the community that this year, I would be giving my Yom Kippur sermon on Rosh Hashanah and my Rosh Hashanah sermon on Yom Kippur.  The idea is that if we’ve done the work of the season, at the new year or during the aseret y’mai t’shuvah, the ten days of repentance, then Yom Kippur is cast in a different light.  And although we should certainly have the humility (and perhaps the guilt) to see that there is much that we can improve about ourselves, at some point we must get beyond our work of tikkun atzmi, repairing the self, and think about tikkun olam, repairing the world. So, I would like to take this opportunity to look outward, backward, upward and forward, to channel the energy of newness that is this High Holy Day season toward radical new ways of thinking about Judaism and our responsibility as Jews to the world as a whole.

I remember when I was in grammar school.  I used to design things, invent things.  I would think of a problem, then try to come up with a solution.  To this day, I still can’t figure out why stackable washer/dryers come with the dryer on top.  Wouldn’t it be better if, when the washer finished, the clothes simply fell into the dryer and began to tumble?  One year, a friend and I came up with an ingenious little invention called the Beep-0-matic 2000.  You simply attach little color-coded key chains to your keys, your remote control, anything that you typically lose around the house.  The key chains correspond to buttons on a device which you keep mounted on the wall.  If you ever lose an item, you simply push the appropriate button and the item’s keychain will start beeping.  Imagine how crushed I was when, just a few years ago, I saw an almost identical item in Skymall.  And to think, we could have made… hundreds. 

But, of all the things I invented as a child, I loved designing cities, utopian metropolises with bullet trains, underwater cities or cities on the moon.  Then, I read Brave New World and I stopped believing in utopian cities.  I, like many of us I think, had become cynical about cities and sometimes about technology.  The collateral damage for each new innovation should be enough to give us pause.  Cell phones are great, but are they leading to an increased risk of cancer?  And what about hands-free devices?  A law was enacted to improve driving safety, but is rarely enforced.  Television, too, was a milestone invention, but some argue that it has influenced the breakdown of community and of inter-personal communication.  And we haven’t even touched topics like genetic engineering.  For more on that, just dust off your old copy of Brave New World. 

But my cynicism, when it arises, is most often short-lived.  I’ve never been one to think that technology is inherently evil – it’s a tool that, like any other, can be exploited or used to do great things.  Plus, the latest toys are fun!  Recently, I discovered an exhibit currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  The exhibit is entitled “Massive Change” and its goal is nothing short of Utopia, including the audacious claim that designers can actually change the world for the better, that technology combined with forethought and compassion can have limitless potential.  The man behind the exhibit, and a book by the same name, is Bruce Mau of the Institute Without Boundaries.

And it seems to me that Mau is right, the world could use some work.  82% of the world’s income is still controlled by the richest 20% of its population.  Half the world’s population, nearly 3 billion people, lives on less than $2 per day.  As of just six year ago, nearly one billion people, school age children and older, were functionally illiterate, lacking the capacity even to sign their own names.  Traffic fatalities are predicted to increase 67% globally by 2020.  Arctic fisherman are falling through the ice in record numbers, and air conditioning units have been installed in the arctic town of Resolute Bay, Northern Canada, where residents have seen temperatures rise into the 80s in recent years – All this due to global warming.

And yet, these grim statistics do not faze the creator of “Massive Change.”  If anything, Mau sees the brokenness of the world as an opportunity and his exhibit glistens with an unbridled optimism.  He cites inspiring stories of designers, inventors, politicians and engineers who have and are revolutionizing the way the world functions from distribution of wealth to transportation to healthcare to manufacturing.  In Mau’s, almost Heschelian, words, “Massive Change is not about the world of design; it’s about the design of the world.” 

I remember several years ago, Miriam and I were visiting a friend from my Hillel days at the University Chicago.  We had lunch at Café Medici in Hyde Park.  While I was waiting in line to use the facilities, I noticed that on the wall just outside the bathroom, someone had graffitied the following question: “Do I dare change the universe?”  Change is hard and frightening.  It takes gumption, and daring and effective change takes a certain clarity of thought and mind. 

And yet our tradition has always encouraged thoughtful change, the shepherding rather than the domination of our planet.  The Torah tells us (Gen 2:15) that Adam’s first task with regard to the earth was to till it and tend it, “l’ovdah u’leshomra.”  Human beings were intended to be farmers, organizing the world in terms of growth and productivity.  The problem occurs when that productivity becomes a means and not an end.  Progress is only such if it takes us somewhere better than we were before.
 
Jewish leaders and thinkers throughout our history have encouraged change for the better.  Some of those changes came as a response to crisis.  Ezra the Scribe and King Josiah before him instituted centralized authority and worship as a response to increased idolatry and the fracturing of the Jewish community.  Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai established Yavneh, the first true yeshivah, in the first century when faced with the destruction of the Temple and the cessation of the sacrificial rite.  The revolutionary theology, then, of Beit Hillel in the years that followed Hurban haBayit, the razing of our most sacred place, depicted the Almighty as accessible no less through prayer and study as God had previously been through the actions of the Cohen Gadol.  Hassidism saw its advent in the eighteenth century as the Jewish world lay crushed by the failure of Sabatian Messianism and the conversion of Shabtai Zvi himself to Islaam.  Herzl created what we know as modern Zionism when faced with the reality of virulent anti-Semitism in France, birthplace of European Jewish emancipation.  Little more than one hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Herzl watched, in horror, the aftermath of the Dreyfus trial as a Parisian crowd chanted “death to the traitor, death to the Jews.”  Dreyfus had clearly been innocent and Herzl realized that the “Jewish question” could no longer find its solution in the lands of Western Europe. 

Yet, many changes in our history have not come as a response to crisis, but rather as a simple embrace of innovation and progress.  Rashi’s enduring and radical commentaries which view the Torah as an eternal question mark, begging to be answered and interpreted, likely grew out of a thirst for knowledge and a desire to embrace God’s continuously unfolding revelation.  The invention of the codex (precursor to the book as we know it) and, to an even greater extent, the creation of the first printing press led a radical shift in how Jews pray and study.  No longer would our forebears be forced to roll through an entire scroll to reach a given passage of Torah.  Previously oral traditions began to be codified as written texts.  Ideas and prayers became concretized and passed down through the generations….  Even the advent of Judaism itself was precipitated not by a larger systemic need for monotheism, but by the desire of one visionary man, Abraham, to live in a world with one God.  The good idea simply caught on, as good ideas tend to do, and changed the world forever.

This type of massive change is well summarized by Jewish architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, Jaime Lerner, who is featured in the MCA exhibit.  Lerner explains that “a city needs a strategy that works with potentiality, not just needs.”  In other words, change should occur, not simply as a response to crisis and certainly not as a mere means of ‘putting out fires.’ Designers should constantly be looking for new challenges to tackle.  When the solution anticipates the problem, change is more seamless and less disruptive to a given society.  

Lerner’s town of Curitiba is considered one of the best examples of urban planning on the planet.  Though the city’s residents have the second highest ownership of private cars in the country, 75% of its commuters take the bus and Curitibanos spend only 10% of their income on transportation costs.  This is because the citizens of this Brazilian town have an excellent and affordable public transportation system.  A rapid bus system, complete with dedicated bus lanes and elevated Plexiglas tubes where commuters can pay in advance transports more than two million passengers each day.  The rapid bus design mimics subway systems in other cities without the added cost of digging a network of tunnels.  Buses are color-coded for easy reading of the system.

Closer to home, Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transport based that groundbreaking machine on an earlier invention of his with similar technology: the iBOT 3000 Mobility System.  After witnessing a person try to get over a curb in his wheelchair, Kamen designed a chair which can raise the disabled to standing eye level, allowing them not only to better engage in “standing” conversations and to conquer curbs but even to climb stairs. 

These projects are exciting and groundbreaking, captivating the human imagination and our capacity for innovation and social change.  But Mau makes the point that massive change viewed retrospectively is most often not that sexy.  In fact he writes, “…the secret ambition of design is to become invisible, to be taken up into the culture, absorbed into the background.  The highest order of success in design is to achieve ubiquity, to become banal.  The automobile, the freeway, the airplane, the cell phone, the air conditioner, the high-rise… have achieved design nirvana.  They are no longer considered unnatural.  They are boring, even tedious.

Years ago, the international trade industry adopted a standardized shipping container.  You’ve seen them, on barges, trains and lifted by cranes at shipping yards.  It ain’t much to look at, but this container has allowed for the exchange of goods across the seas, while significantly minimizing transportation costs.  This means that someone living in Chicago can use a product from China or Norway without the burden of cost prohibitive transport.

When great designs work, they become ordinary.  But, perhaps we should not think of them in that way.  Recently, Miriam and I took Eliyah to visit the Shedd Aquarium for the first time.  We watched the dolphin show and with each leap or splash, Ellie would offer her newest word: “wow.”  Now, Ellie says “wow” when she sees bubbles or ceiling fans or her favorite stuffed monkey.  A friend of ours remarked that this is the beginning of a religious life.  To be able to say “wow,” to be able to see the miraculous in the ordinary is what it means to be a religious person.  Science-fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke once stated, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  Remember when we were kids and the whole world was magical?  Remember when we played with legos or rector sets or lincoln logs, attempting to master the magic that is the world of creation?  Dean Kamen says that “If a client doesn’t say, “Wow that’s amazing!” he assumes that he hasn’t succeeded yet. 

Our Jewish tradition has a mechanism through which we can harness that “wow” energy, by which we can sanctify the ordinary.  It’s called a beracha.  The beracha is a formulaic recognition of God’s imprint.  It reminds us not that we can make the ordinary special or profound, but that profundity is inherent even in those things which seem mundane: a piece of bread, a glass of wine, the smell of lilacs or roses.  When we say the blessing over the Torah, we are acknowledging the privilege of having access to an ancient and beautiful tradition.  When we say the blessing over a rainbow, we are bearing witness to the ancient promise that God would never again destroy the world by flood.  But some berachot reflect a greater partnership between God and human beings.  We say hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz, admitting that God doesn’t really bring forth bread from the earth.  At best, God may bring forth wheat, but we harvest it, thresh it, winnow, grind and sift the flour.  We, humans, create dough, kneading and baking it until it becomes bread.  To say Hamotzi, to acknowledge the blessing of God’s having brought forth bread from the earth, is to recognize the sanctity of human action, the holiness that undergirds not heavenly but terrestrial forces for change. 

Massive change occurs when we dare to harness the building blocks of God’s universe, when we embrace the earliest human mandate: l’ovdah u’leshomrah, to till and tend the earth on which we reside.  God gave us the capacity to do so.  Human beings are the only creatures with an opposable thumb, the only members of the animal kingdom with true bipedal locomotion and one of the few with binocular vision which allows us unparalleled depth perception.  Humans can use reason well beyond the capacity of other creatures, but it is not in reason but in imagination that we must put our faith.  Reason is dispassionate, an important tool to be sure, but it is imagination that leads to truly innovative design, to the next good idea.  And a good idea can change the world.

And yet, we should keep in mind that the same gifts that allow us to create also allow us to destroy.  Massive change can go in two directions.  Our task is to remember to change the world for the better.  This may be my Rosh Hashanah sermon, but that’s no accident, no simple gimmick to see if y’all are paying attention.  During the days of Repentance and on Yom Kippur, the appropriate greeting to offer someone is g’mar chatimah tova, may you be inscribed for good [in the book of life].  Yet, as soon as Yom Kippur has ended, we return to the greater context of the holiday season and say, once again, L’shana tova, may you have a good year.  If we alter the first word just slightly, L’shana becomes L’shanot, may you change for the better.  And this is the hope of the High Holidays, that we can improve both ourselves and, in turn, the entire world.  The expectations of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are nothing less audacious than changing the very universe in which we live.  Massive Jewish change.  When design is done with the goal of improving the world and with an eye toward minimizing the collateral damage, then I think we are on the right track.  We simply have to dare to believe that we can make a difference – and then do it.

Bruce Mau’s exhibit is saturated with ridiculous and wonderfully courageous mission statements: We will create urban shelter for the entire world population. We will eradicate poverty.  We will seamlessly integrate all supply and demand around the world.  We will eliminate the need for raw material and banish waste. And the list goes on.  Mau speaks with the kind of prophetic voice which calls out from the pages of our most sacred texts.  To be sure, our Jewish tradition embraces utopianism.  This is, after all, the messianic ideal.  Isaiah tells us (2:2-4) “In the days to come… they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up sword against nation; They shall never again know war.”  Indeed the haftarah that we read this Yom Kippur calls us to global change (Isaiah 58:6-7), “No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke.  It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; When you see the naked, to offer clothing, and not to ignore your own kin.”  On Yom Kippur, the day when ostensibly we are meant to focus on the self, our personal growth and repentance, we are commanded to look outward.  As we deny ourselves food or a shower we are compelled to see the destitute in our midst and to remember that they fast out of necessity, not out of design.

But do Isaiah’s words stir us as they once did?  Can you imagine what it would be like if Isaiah or Jeremiah or Amos sat down in the back row of services and listened the haftarah being chanted?  In some ways, the haftarah is a terrific example of massive change.  Once revolutionary in scope, it has become mundane, banal.  At best, so much white prophetic noise that little of it really sticks to our ribs.  At worst, the haftarah is simply the torah portion’s awkward younger sibling, or a good time for a bathroom break before the sermon.  But, we say a beracha before the haftarah, just like the Torah, just like bread or rainbows or hearing the shofar.  There is wisdom in the voice of our prophets, imagination and vision abound.  Isaiah isn’t interested in the economics of scale, he is simply interested in ending world hunger or freeing the oppressed.  Thoreau once said, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”  Dreaming big: that’s prophesy, creating the foundations to realize those dreams: that’s design.  Prophesy plus design: that’s massive change.

And this is the challenge I would like to offer us this Yom Kippur: to reclaim our prophetic voice, to make audacious statements without apology or rationalization, to build our castles in the air.  Now is the point in the talk where I could tell you about all the great things Anshe Emet is doing to make a difference in our city and our world.  I could tell you about organizations like the American Jewish World Service or Habitat for Humanity, but I’m not going to do that.  Rather, I want each of us to think for a moment about a goal, something bold.  It can be something which affects your local community, the Jewish community, the world community, but whatever it is, it should speak to you, to your heart.  Now, pretend you are in 5th grade.  Use your imagination.  What will you do make your dream a reality?  Do you dare change the universe? 

Today is a day on which to paint with broad strokes.  There are crises to which we must respond, but as we have learned, we cannot heed only the call of the latest crisis.  We must contribute proactively to the design of our world.  And, if I may be so bold, I sincerely believe that we, each of us, can do it.  David Ben Gurion once remarked that anyone who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.  To create massive change is not beyond the realm of human possibility, is not beyond any one of us.  We, each of us, are designers.  We, each of us, are prophets.   In the coming shana, the coming year, what will be our shinui, what will we change for the better?  What problems will we solve?  What problems will we anticipate and prevent?  Will we heed the Torah’s call, l’ovdah u’leshomra, to till and tend our world?  The possibilities are as limitless as the human imagination.  This Yom Kippur, build your castles in the air.  Then put the foundations under them.  Then… well, the next part is up to you.  In the meantime God is waiting.