Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
March 25, 2006

One Shabbat, three Yeshiva students hid themselves in a barn to catch a smoke. Sure enough, the Rebbe caught them and decided to punish the offenders. The first student cried out saying, “Rebbe, I don’t deserve to be punished – I forgot it was Shabbat.” The second student then cried out saying, “I don’t deserve to be punished; I forgot that smoking on Shabbat was forbidden.” The third student spoke up as well saying, “I don’t deserve to be punished!” The Rebbe asked: “And what did you forget?” The student replied, “I forgot to lock the barn door.”

It’s an old joke, but it is a good one, and it communicates a gentle truth. We laugh at the chutzpah of the third student, who is honest with himself and with his Rebbe in a way that we may even admire. We, like the Rebbe, live in a world in which we are never entirely sure of people’s motivations, of who is penitent and who is not, of what drives someone’s actions, of when we are hearing the truth and when we are being given the lie. And we, like the first two yeshiva students, dart and dodge throughout our lives, evading the demand for honesty from those around us and, most of all, from within ourselves.

This morning, I want to approach a rather big topic in a very short span of time. I want to explore with you a theology of interpersonal relationships, or, in simpler terms, “Rabbi Cosgrove’s “How to” guide for dealing with people.” For a host of reasons, this topic has been on my mind of late, and I want to draw your attention, and our tradition, to it because no matter who you are or what your station in life, regardless of your background, by dint of being human, we all, at some point, have struggled with the task of constructing an ethic for how to interface with our shared humanity.

Let me be more specific: When it comes to other people, each and every one of us is granted a limited view of what is going on in someone else’s life. Maybe, just maybe, we are blessed with having another person whom we know as well as, or better than, ourselves, but for the most part, 99.99 percent of the time, all we ever know is what someone chooses to share. Just think about the last time you heard of the sad news of a divorce in the community. How many times have you heard the refrain: “I never would have guessed?” All we ever know is what people choose to share. For that matter, we don’t always know what is ticking inside of us. As a rabbi, you know what I hear when someone comes to me with news of his or her divorce? Often a person will say: “It seems that I am the only one who is surprised.” The chambers of a human heart remain forever mysterious, often even to ourselves. And whatever it is, divorce, death, addiction, abuse, a family matter, or none or all of the above, all human beings learn to operate through a complex series of shells and protective measures. Just this past week, I read a good book, not a great book, but a good book, called Lincoln’s Melancholy, by Joshua Shenk. The title says it all. The man who brought us the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the one who kept the nation together in its most dire hour, suffered from melancholy, depression, a condition that, by today’s standard, would demand clinical care. Shenk makes the compelling point that, be it Lincoln, Da Vinci, Moses or your own brother, there is no reason to draw any correlation between outward well being and the internal and private functioning of a person’s soul.

And so, given that each of us may only have knowledge of a person according to the limited degree by which he or she consciously or unconsciously grants us access, how exactly are we to relate to each other? As human beings, we must respect the boundaries that others set while not falling prey to the charge of indifference. How many times in my few short years in the rabbinate have I found that I didn’t correctly gauge the needs of a congregant, giving attention when someone needed to be alone or not enough support when someone needed help. And it is not just a question for clergy, but for all of us. Over the past few months, the staff of Anshe Emet has been stomaching the blow that a former employee, Heidi Doyle, took her own life, much to the shock and surprise of everyone, including her immediate family. We all want to comfort, we seek to support, and yet we readily acknowledge that it is neither possible nor at all desirable to tend to everyone’s needs. The reasons for self concern are many, not the least of which being that if we constantly give ourselves to others, we will find that we have left ourselves so raw and overextended that our own spiritual reservoirs will be rendered dry. The questions are difficult and complex and the answers elusive even to the most sensitive soul.

I want to suggest that one answer, one possible answer, can be found in a model suggested by this week’s parasha. At the conclusion of our reading, at the very end of the book of Exodus, as the desert tabernacle is signaled to be complete, God’s presence descends on the tent of meeting and fills the tabernacle. By day, God’s presence was beheld in a thick cloud, by night as a pillar of fire. The text goes on: “Moses could not enter the Tent of meeting, because the cloud settled upon it and the presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle” (Ex: 40:35). It is a remarkable and somewhat counterintuitive, if not contradictory, verse. The narrative seems to be telling us that the holy presence of God actually precludes contact with Moses or any of the Israelites. Holiness, or Kedusha, within the tabernacle is predicated on the presence of a series of paradoxes - the opposing principles of attraction and repulsion, of intimacy and otherness. The cloud and the fire protect Israel but also keep them away. This tabernacle that, if you recall, was built under the motto: “Build me a sanctuary that I may dwell amongst them,” in actual fact results in a necessary distance between God and Israel.

It was the great philosopher of Religion, Rudolf Otto, who best captured the paradoxical nature of the tabernacle in his book: “The Idea of the Holy.” The sacred or holy, which he calls the Mysterium Tremendum, is defined as that which is utterly beyond our experience and also, ironically, a prerequisite for any religious experience. Otto writes that for something to be sacred, be it the tabernacle, Mount Sinai or anything, two seemingly contradictory impulses must be present: Intimacy and otherness, dependence and autonomy, love and fearful awe. It is precisely this theological calculus that animates Ezekiel’s vision of the Jerusalem Temple as described in this morning’s haftorah. It is also the power of the upcoming Passover story, when each Israelite family is asked to daub blood on the lintel, signaling both God’s attentiveness and distance. The list goes on, but the point remains: The tabernacle is the locus of God’s Holiness because it engenders a sense of both proximity and estrangement. And the task of the Israelites for the next forty years is to manage a life torn between the seemingly incongruous proposition that our relationship with God is one imbued with profound intimacy and distance. It is at the moment when God’s presence is nearest, when God is also most distant, that the greatest potential for holiness abounds.

And, what is true for the theology of the desert tabernacle is also true for our own interpersonal relationships. It was the renowned theologian of the twentieth century, Martin Buber, who knew that Biblical Israel’s relationship with God serves as the paradigm for our own interpersonal relationships. And just as the Israelites sought to bring near a God who was ever elusive, so too we do so in our own lives. Human beings necessarily seek and desire to be loved and drawn to each other while retaining boundaries. The metaphor of a human cell is especially appropriate, in that the ongoing life of a cell depends on selective permeability both to allow some things to penetrate into the cell and to refuse others. The vitality of a cell, or any life form, depends on its ability to know when to let in and when to block out. Our souls need to be nimble enough to both honor our personal boundaries, and be prepared to let people in. To ask for help is not a sign of weakness, but of strength. It lets someone know that you have enough self awareness to know your limitations, to know that you can’t do it alone.

And on the other side, we all must learn to cultivate the art of compassion and detachment. There is a difference between empathy and sympathy; it is the difference between the capacity to be aware of another’s feelings and the inclination to enter into those feelings. We, as individuals and as a community, need to carry ourselves with an air of receptivity, to let our loved ones know that we are there for them, even if to be there means to let go sometimes. Detachment and responsibility are not opposites; rather, they are complements, they are necessary and symbiotic components of a sacred relationship.

It was Abraham Joshua Heschel who reminded us that concern for the self is not evil. “The precept: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, “includes the care for one’s own self as a duty” (Man is Not Alone, 141). It does not take a great sage to know that the ability to extend compassion is absolutely central to our religious ethos. It also does not take much living to know that whether you are on a airplane or anywhere else, you take care of your own needs first lest you be rendered useless to those in need around you. Long before Heschel, the sages of the Mishnah understood the competing and complementary impulses of intimacy and distance, of dependence and autonomy, as expressed in Hillel’s famous maxim: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me, but if I am for myself what am I?”

We need to be able to say to our loved ones that there are some things that we simply do not want to talk about. And when a loved one speaks those words, each of us needs to learn how to hear them without interpreting them as a comment on the relationship. People are allowed to set boundaries, after all. We need to be able to release ourselves from the guilt of not knowing everything. There is no obligation that we need to know, or should know, everything going on in other people’s lives, even in respect to those with whom we are close. There are things and people in this world that we cannot control. We should strive to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that we can and the wisdom to know the difference. We, as individuals and as a community, need to cultivate this culture of receptivity, to let each other know that we are there for each other, to honor each other’s needs and to respect each other’s boundaries, including our own.

Each one of us travels through life with clouds and fire around us. They offer us the shadows of intimacy and distance, vulnerability and protection. To be human is to live with an awareness of our limitations and potential for compassion. To be human is to know that the measure of a relationship is never judged by how close or distant we are but rather in our ability to shuttle back and forth based on the needs of the moment. It is in the act of alternating between regard for ourselves and regard for others, in balancing the polarities of detachment and engagement, that determines who we are and the relationships that we seek to have and hold dear.