Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
September 22, 2006

This past year, my family had the opportunity to visit Israel.   It was a quiet trip, me, my wife, four kids, the in-laws from Milwaukee, Pittsburg and DC all visiting my sister-in-law, her husband and two kids and who live in a small city in the north called Tivon.  It was a wonderful and delightfully uneventful family trip.  On our last night, with a late night / early morning flight out of Ben Gurion, we all had the chance to stop  in Jerusalem for a few hours – after all how could we go all that way without stopping in Yerushalayim.  So everyone went out to dinner.  And I sat there, stewing.  I couldn’t imagine being so close to the Old City and not giving my child an enduring memory, of taking her to the Kotel. So I stood up and announced that my oldest daughter and I would return within the hour. The two of us arrived at the Old City, entered through the gate, wound our way through the streets, passed through security and there it was, the Kotel.  Standing just a few feet away with my daughter’s palm in mine, I kneeled down and whispered in her ear telling her to look at the wall, explaining this was once the Western Wall of the Beit Hamikdash, the holiest place for the Jews. Look at all the pieces of paper stuck in the crevices with people’s deepest yearnings. It was late at night, but there were a few people there, and I told her to look at them, all of whom were praying to the Kadosh Baruch Hu, and that not just today, but for thousands of years Jews have come to this very place to offer their most heartfelt prayers.  “Maybe, Lucy, you have a hope, a prayer that you want to ask God right now.” She looked at me…looked at the Kotel, and said, “Yeah, I hope that we get back to my cousins in time for dessert.”    

At the time, I was crestfallen, but in retrospect, I think the enduring lesson is embedded in my daughter’s response.  In my zest to impress upon her a religious experience; I removed her from her context, from her family. I was, strangely, doing something a bit un-Jewish.  Religion for Jews is, for the most part, an activity which takes place in the context of community; we don’t separate ourselves from the group to achieve holiness. Judaism doesn’t really have a developed theology of solitude.  Nearly every other faith, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, believes that seclusion is a premier tactic for achieving transcendence.  Classical Christian devotional strategies, the wilderness experience of Jesus, the life of St. Anthony and the hermits of the Egyptian desert. Just think of the opening scene of Pilgrim’s progress, when Christian takes flight from the city, ears covered against the appeals of his family.  Emerson, Thoreau, the greats of New England theology all wrote beautiful tracts on personal growth through social detachment – beautiful, but not Jewish.      

Sure we have our journeymen.  Abraham goes off at God’s word to Canaan, Jacob flees Esau into the wilderness.  But you know what, read what happens next: In Abraham’s case, “And Abram went forth as the Lord had commanded him, and Lot (his nephew) went with him.  Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son, and all their possessions and all the persons they had had acquired in Haran as they set out to Canaan.”  This wasn’t isolation; it was a road trip worthy of being a “reality show”.  And Jacob, well Jacobs’ journey leads him to two wives, a few concubines, twelve sons, a daughter, a heck of a father-in-law, not to mention a whole lot of speckled sheep.  On Yom Kippur afternoon, we will read about Jonah, the prophet who really tries to go to the end of the earth, the bulk at the bottom of the ship, thinking he can find quiet.  And, God and the whale say “not so fast,” literally spitting him up onto the shores of the community from which he fled.  The message of Jonah, the message of our tradition is that although it is human to be drawn towards solitude, our families, our community, our people, our meshugas, are an undertow which we can’t and perhaps should not resist.     

Just think about tonight, Rosh Hashanah, the day the world was created, the spiritual apex of the Jewish year, our opportunity to look at the horizon of possibility in the year ahead and to look within, reflecting on the year gone by.  Imagine you are a religious anthropologist describing the spiritual strategies of Chicago Jewry in 2006.  You join a synagogue, your tickets are sent home or are available at will call.  You arrive here having eaten quickly or anxious for the food to follow.  You battle for a parking spot, perhaps having to take a shuttle.  Security checks your tickets, you drop your kids off at another service. You eventually find a seat awkwardly realizing you are seated near that person whose parking space you just took. You forget to turn off your cell phone, your deepest prayer has now become “ribonno shel olam please don’t let my phone ring” and in the midst of it all, the Rabbi has the chutzpah to tell you that these are the most hallowed moments you will experience throughout the year.

And the irony of course is that the sociological chaos extends into our homes.  People travel back and forth, cousins, aunts and uncles, children and grandchildren, step siblings, in-laws, all to be together.  On holidays, Jews bring into their homes all the disorienting dysfunction which a therapist would tell us is the root cause for all our shortcomings.  We all know the story of Yankel Goldstein who opens his front door and there is his mother in law standing on the porch with her bags in hand ready to enter.  And he greets her saying, “So…for how long will you be visiting.” And she replies, “I’ll be here until you get fed up with me.” So he says, “Well, at least stay for a cup of coffee!”  It is not just that as Jews we heed the prohibition of not separating ourselves from the community, or the platitude that you need ten people for a minyan.  To be Jewish is to cast your spiritual destiny in with others.  As Jews, our religious vitality is contingent on being surrounded by the community, by family, warts and all.

Just consider the Torah and Haftorah readings which we will encounter over the next few days.  With the entire Bible to choose from, Micah’s call to do justice, the holiness code of Leviticus, the Ten Commandments, over the next few days we will read of our great spiritual heroes, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Hannah.  If you don’t know already, these narratives read like a like an ugly little soap opera about a dysfunctional family.  The plot lines of our first families include deception, abuse, infidelity and all the frailties and peccadilloes you would expect in the check out line of the supermarket.  They are families facing serious hurdles, infertility, impotency, favoritism, sibling rivalry and more. Sarah and Hagar (the other woman), children and half-siblings, Hagar and Ishmael being cast into the wilderness at the urging of Sarah.  Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac, which though we may read as a testament of Abraham’s faith in God, raises rather obvious concerns as to his suitability as a father.  The Haftorah reading for the first day, again the story of a barren woman Hannah, but really a tale of a woman whose anxiety stems from an inability of anyone to understand her plight.  And finally, on the second day, we will read of Rachel’s tears over her children as her voice calls out from Ramah.  It is not just that these stories may leave a bad taste in our mouth, they beg the question of why on earth do we read narratives of familial stress and discord on the holiest days of the year?!    

One, rather straightforward answer, is that we read these stories because they serve as triggers for introspection and moral development.  It is not just that they mirror our lives; rather these stories are our stories.  Education comes in multiple ways, but any seasoned educator will tell you that the moral growth never comes simply by offering a “bag of virtues,” a list of do’s and don’ts to follow or avoid.    Moral growth comes from developing our own reasoning structures, from the ability to see the choices others have made, learn from them, and know how to respond when faced with the same choices.  There is a rabbinic principle, “ma’aseh avot, siman lebanim,” roughly translating as the acts of our forefathers are signposts for children.  The choice to read these stories makes eminent sense if you allow that they help us see ourselves as brothers and sisters, as parents and children.  By re-telling the missteps and foibles of our predecessors, we ourselves are better equipped to identify and avoid the fault lines in our own lives. But I want to suggest to you that there is an even more basic reason, which ties back into how we began.  We read these stories, because the rabbis in their wisdom knew that what is true for the first families of our people, is true for us.  There is no spiritual journey without complexity.  There is no founding patriarch Abraham without the Abraham who broke from his father and had a ruptured relationship with his sons.  There is no Sarah our esteemed ancestress, without the Sarah constantly struggling to negotiate the mixed up messages of what it is to be a woman, a mother and a wife.  Hannah, our model for prayer, the mother of Samuel himself, is also the Hannah who woke up to find that not one person in her inner circle, her husband, her rabbi could relate to her angst.

Each one of us, I am sure, craves some spiritual elixir capable of bringing spiritual serenity.  Each one of us, carries the hope of finding an inner peace.  But you know what! There are bills and braces and angry bosses.  There are children who don’t listen and parents who need our care and we are not sure how to give it.  There are siblings we don’t talk to and there are rejected lovers who are nursing a world of anger.  There are dreams which aren’t going to be realized and there is hurt that just won’t fade away.  There are colleges we need to get into and there are dissertations which we really need to finish.  There are memories of loved ones we carry around and there are new horizons which constantly elude us.  Nobody walks into this room without a whole lot of baggage.  The two common elements we all share today, are that each one of us is desperately reaching towards new spiritual heights and we are all grounded by the mundane, complex, weighty and constant pressures of what it is to be human.

It would be nice to tell you that we come to shul on the High holidays to look inwards and shut out the noise.   But the message of the Torah readings, and for that matter, the spiritual regimen of these sacred days is that we look inward, but only insofar as we come to grips with those around us. To be introspective, to seek to change, without recognizing the powerful interdependence shared between each of us and our families and community is a myopic sort of self indulgence. Our identities are the product of a complex series of interlacing orientations and relationships to our families, community and beyond. The line between our internal condition and external relations is never easily identified and so we dare not consider one without the other.

And so we sit, and yes, we should breathe deeply and daven and listen.    I have often thought of the High Holidays as a moral tuning fork, that once a year we strike in order to identify our inner key.  But to really do teshuvah means that you stop to consider all the epithets we bear:  Father, son, mother, sister, husband, wife, colleague and so forth.  The central act of these days of awe, teshuva, of reconciliation, and by definition can not happen in isolation.  Jews have no confessional.  The only person who ever atoned in isolation was the High Priest Aaron, our days of atonement happen in the context our community.

Right now, I want everyone to think of one person you know that the health of that relationship was, is, or should be more important than the magnitude of the wrong committed.  Once you have thought of a person, raise your hand. Now, if you raised your hand, then I ask you: are you courageous enough, to call that person up, this week, and if you are able, to sit down with them and begin the conversation with words to the effect of “This relationship is important to me, my goal is to rebuild it, and while this conversation may get uncomfortable, know that it is my abiding respect for you which drives this discussion.”

We may not be able to change the world all at once, but the promise of the High Holidays is that if we set as our task to repair our relationships, entire systems, even chaotic ones can change.   Maimonidies explains that even the quiet act of one person can impact the entire world.   It is the moral application of what Edward Lorenz called the “butterfly effect”, the idea that the beating of a butterfly’s wing in Australia can cause a tornado in Kansas or a Monsoon in Indonesia.  Our lives may be the natural equivalent to the beating of a butterfly, but each of us has the potential to set consequential changes into motion. 

I began with a story of Jerusalem and it is there where I would like to end. This past week, after 65 years of living on separate sides of the world, Hilda Shlick and her brother Simon Glasberg were reunited. The two had not seen each other since 1941.  Hilda had fled Romania to Uzbekhistan, then Estonia to arrive in Israel just a few years ago.  She always believed the rest of her family had perished in the Shoah, when in fact two of the brothers Simon and Mark survived and continued to live in Canada.  Through the efforts of her internet savvy grandson and the resources of the Yad Vashem archives, these long separated siblings were recently informed of their siblings alive on the other side of the globe.  They cried in each other’s arms, again saw each other this week in Jerusalem.  It is nothing short of inspiring to consider that so many years later, after so much pain, the possibility of bringing family together remains.  It is never too late, not for the Glassberg’s and not for us today. We too can be in Yerushalayim, we can be shalem, whole and complete.

The stories of our predecessors, like our own family sagas occur on a human scale.  Some end in tragedy, some end well, many remain with gnawing questions left unanswered.  We remember them, for their wisdom, for their mistakes, for teaching us that that even we, in all our creatureliness, can reach out to scratch the surface of the heavens.  And it is never too late.  It is in our grasp to reach inwards and tip the balance of our lives, our families and our community.  This is the most exciting and empowering time of the year, we dare not miss the opportunity.