Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
October 13, 2005

“Style…ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end.”
So spoke the great Pulitzer Prize-winning Pittsburgh Playwright August Wilson who died just over a week ago. It is in our ability to see and to sustain a thought, from its origins into unseen future horizons, that is the measure of who we are. And, if indeed this is the criteria we set for ourselves, then our world, our society, falls short indeed. Our time is not one to focus on beginnings and endings, on following ideas, events or people from start to finish. We live in an age of diminishing cognitive staying power, an age of short, intense and fleeting bursts of information. We click on and click off to world events at a dizzying pace. Rabbis will always remember the year of 9/11, as we all should, for many reasons. That was the year that every Rabbi went into the Holidays with one sermon, and every Rabbi delivered a different one, hastily rewritten days before delivery. Now, just a few years later, it seems as if that year was a taste of things to come. Going into the summer, I was sure that I would be speaking on the genocide in Darfur. Then Darfur fell into the background and it became the disengagement from Gaza. Gaza became history the moment Katrina arrived, then Rita, and in the last few days, the earthquake in Pakistan and mudslides in Guatemala. It is a shocking realization to consider just how distant the tens of thousand of victims of the Tsunami seem to us – and that was this past year! What ever happened to the war in Iraq, the plight of Argentinian Jewry, Presbyterian divestment from Israel, social security reform, the revamping of the Federal Tax code, and all the other “front burner issues.” An issue emerges, it eclipses everything, we lose sight of anything else and then it is gone. It is not a matter of setting a hierarchy; every moment, every crisis is important. What has changed is the manner by which we receive, process, and dismiss the events of our world. We have become connoisseurs of instant information, instance response, snap judgments and fast dismissal. We have, as a culture, no “style,” to use Wilson’s term.

And of course, the problem is that it is not just broader society which unfolds at this frenetic pace but our personal relationships as well. We live in a “you had me at hello” world. A fast paced life of speed dating, J-Date and “Its just lunch.” My wife Debbie was recently out with a friend and Debbie mentioned that we like to tape a particular program. The conversation came to a halt, her friend turned to her and asked incredulously: “You mean you set a VCR, rewind a tape and everything?” Now maybe it is time for us to get TIVO, but the fact remains that we have opened our eyes to an “on demand” world where not our culture, and everything else, comes in quick bursts. Character assessments are made in the blink of an eye and character assassinations occur on the flimsiest of hearsay. Our age of immediacy has bequeathed unto us a world in which moral judgments are collapsed into a hairbreadth of space. Nobody has time to see beginnings and endings.

There is a book out right now on the bestseller lists called “Blink,” by Malcolm Gladwell. It is a great book and a quick read, which is a good thing, because it is all about rapid cognition. The book is about the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye-Gladwell calls it “thinslicing.” When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, Gladwell explains that your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, the powerful and instant conclusions that we reach, sometimes spot-on and sometimes off-base with horrific consequences. For example, Gladwell describes an experiment in which a psychologist gave college students three, ten-second soundless videotapes of a professor lecturing and were then asked to rate that professor. The students’ ratings matched the ratings from students who had taken the professor’s course for an entire semester. On the other hand, the powers of rapid cognition can have ghastly consequences. In a chapter called “7 Seconds in the Bronx,” Gladwell describes the horrendous series of snap judgments made by the New York City police officers who shot and killed Amadou Diallo. From love at first sight, to the evils of racial profiling, our minds are calibrated to the thinnest dimensions. Gladwell explains that, “we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that – sometimes – we’re better off that way” (Blink 52).

Gladwell may be right. I am no neuro-biologist, so I can hardly speak to the science of human cognition. It may indeed be human nature to be able to process a million bits of information in an instant. And it may be the case that the outward pace with which society moves is merely a reflection of our internal human abilities. But I have to believe that whether or not it is intrinsic to the nature of humanity, it is decidedly not the nature of being Jewish. It is not an indication of maturity, and it is certainly not the nature of our task on Yom Kippur. If there is one message of today, it is that as important as the present moment may be, it can only be understood couched between past and future. Yom Kippur insists that we not lose sight of the broader context. Put simply, Yom Kippur is the “Anti-Blink holiday.” It is a day that acknowledges that it may indeed be human to thin-slice, it may be who we are to work and react to impulse, but it is not who we should aspire to be.

Long before we had a twenty-four hour news cycle and modern theories of cognition, we had another little bestseller – the book of Jonah. We read Jonah on Yom Kippur because he serves as the anti-hero, the paradigm that we seek to avoid. He is the guy who never completely gets what today is all about; Jonah only lives in the isolated moment of present, dislocated from past and future. The final scene of the Book of Jonah has our protagonist seeking shelter under a tree, waking up to the beating sun, only to have discovered that the sheltering tree has died over night – and Jonah cries out begging for death, saying, “I would rather die than live.” At which point God rebukes him saying, “Are you really so grieved about the plant?” One thing, one mishap, and Jonah’s relationship with God, with life, was all over. Jonah’s entire outlook is shaped by a spasmodic sense of urgency. He lets his gut response dominate and is thus oblivious to the span of time. The disposition of Jonah is all too familiar to us, and it is what we seek to overcome today.

Last month, Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi-Hunter from Vienna, passed away. There is a story he tells of the days following the war when a neighbor approached him and asked “Could you lend me ten dollars until Monday? I’ve got a package coming tomorrow, and I’ll sell it on the black market; Monday, you’ll have your money back. I swear it.” Wiesenthal figured, “Why not help out a neighbor? I’ll lend him the money.” Monday arrived, the man came up to him and said, “I don’t know what happened. The package didn’t arrive. You know how messed up the mail is these days. But don’t worry; it’ll be here any day.” This went on for weeks. Twice a week, for six weeks, the man came up with one excuse or another.” Finally after six weeks, the man came up to Wiesenthal and said, “It came. I sold it. Here’s the ten dollars you lent me.” And Wiesenthal answered, “No, keep it. For ten dollars, it’s not worth changing my opinion of you.”
It is a great story, but as I am sure you understand, Wiesenthal was wrong. Wiesenthal owed his neighbor, and he owed himself the opportunity to rise above the particulars of that disappointment. Not for 10 ten dollars, not for any price, is it worth allowing a single moment of disenchantment to overshadow the breadth of an entire relationship.

More than any other people, as Jews we are taught that the intense “nowness” of our present is always linked both to our past and to our future. Paul Ricoeur, the great philosopher of the University of Chicago who passed away in May, observed that the Jewish conception of time has no sense of an “isolated punctual instant;” rather for Jews, the present is “always directed toward the past though memory and toward the future through expectation.” We never allow the isolated moment to dominate our identity because who we are is so rooted in our past and our future. The implicit or explicit rejoinder to every Jewish ethical imperative is right there in the words of the Shema: “Lem’an Tizkeru” – “in order that you remember,” and “Lem’an Yirbu Yemeichem”- In order to increase your days.”

“ Lema’an Tizkeru”-In order that you remember.” This is the calling card of our people. Think of the words of the Passover Seder: “To imagine that that you yourself left Egypt.” The pre-eminent ritual of the book of Deuteronomy, if not the entire Bible, is the first fruits ceremony, whereby the supplicant brings offerings to the temple, and, in doing so, must recite a declaration in the first person: “My father was a wandering Aramean, he went down to Egypt...and there became a populous nation..” Our very identity as Jews never exists solely in the present. We must always, as Heschel noted, “See the past in present tense.” We are the people of the prequel. Long before this past summers’ cultural offerings of “Batman Begins,” “The Star Wars” prequel, and the Broadway production of “Wicked,” which anticipated “The Wizard of Oz,” the Jewish people had figured out that there is great, if not greater, value to the narrative that takes place prior to the present moment. Thus, “Lem’an Tizkeru-In order that you remember.”

And just as there is no Jewish present without a past, so too there is no Jewish present that is not eyeing the future; thus, “Lema’an Yirbu Yemeichem-In order that your days are extended.” There is a necessary future-mindedness to being Jewish. To be Jewish is be involved in a lifetime capital campaign for the soul because we are always determining the direction for our future. You may recall the moment in Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice asks the Cheshire Cat: “Would you tell me, please, which way I should go from here?” “That depends,” the cat replies, “a good deal on where you want to go.” Alice replies, “I don’t care where.” Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” retorts the cat. As Jews, we demand of ourselves that we have a better answer than Alice. Just consider the refrain embedded in the blessing that we say over the Torah: “Hayei olam nata betochenu”-“Who has planted eternal life within us.” The Jewish people are a people who always have one foot in the future, in hatikvah, in “bshanah haba’ah beyerushalim”-“Next Year in Jerusalem,” in what Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch called the “Hoveh Tamid”-“the Eternal Present.” To be future-minded is not an abdication of concern for the present; rather, it is an indication of the value one places on our present actions. The person who is nonchalant or in denial about the future is nonchalant about the deepest problems of humanity. To be future-minded, therefore, is to insist that we consider the weightiness of our present actions.
Today is Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement. The essential premise of the day is as well-known as it is simple. Over the past year, we have wronged others and others have wronged us. There are sins and transgressions littering the landscape, and in many cases, those wrongs have eclipsed the relationships we hold dearest. Brothers, sisters, life-time bonds amongst siblings, all of these have been overwhelmed by a single incident. Parents and children have lost sight of a life-time relationship, for what? Colleagues, confidants and partners have allowed one bad deal, one moment of poor judgment, to cloud years of trust building. To the credit of schoolchildren, though they may be set off by the slightest offense, they are also able to reconstruct a relationship as fast as it was lost. What is it about being an adult that we allow a present offense to obscure the past and future of a loved one? R. Nahman of Bratzlav offers the analogy of a hand, which when placed in front of our eyes, can hide an entire mountain range – so too does sin function towards our efforts at reconciliation. The wrongs of the past year block our vision; they obscure the wider context of a relationship and prevent us from coming to terms with G-d, with each other and with ourselves. Today is the day to remove that which blocks our view, to see wrongs as blemishes reflecting our humanity not as roadblocks preventing us from reconciliation.

Today is a day when we commit ourselves for 25 hours to slowly and carefully examine our relationships. I am not asking you to ignore your hurt, I am not asking you to forget the wrong, but I am asking you to consider the wrong in its broad trajectory. Was that one offense worth writing that person off? Perhaps, but I am guessing for many of us, perhaps not. The success of today is not to be found in the blink. Rather it is in the degree to which we open our eyes and consider the totality of a relationship. And maybe in that stare, we may be prompted to shed tears in the quiet concession that we are all flawed human beings, that not one of us is so arrogant as to declare that he has not sinned, not one of us is so haughty as to imagine that he is incapable of stumbling.

And just as our relationships can only be salvaged by seeing the broader picture, so too our own lives only acquire meaning by seeing the wide arc of time. Today is a day when we dare ask: “Mah anu, u’mah hayenu”- “What are we and what are our lives?” We consider our origins, and we acknowledge the end that awaits us all. It is not a sad day; rather, the focus on our mortality only serves to sharpen the question of the meaning of our existence. We pull ourselves out of the normal grind, realizing that the sum total of our identity extends beyond whether we have a corner office, the right parking space and a vacation home in Vail. On Yom Kippur, the only time-share you should care about is this one, this world, shared by all of us. We humbly acknowledge that our time here on this earth is limited and so we take pause to consider the degree to which our own lives serve to embody our highest ideals. As Jews, there are two criteria by which we are judged – our past and our future. We will recite Yizkor to honor the memory of those past because we ourselves hope that our lives stand as a living testimony to the values of our loved ones no longer with us. But ask yourself: Does your life reflect the highest ideals of the past? If not, then today is the day to address that fact. And so too, the focus on our transient nature draws attention to the future, that our actions will be judged both by God and future generations. We pray that our deeds and ideas serve as models for the years to come.

I mentioned Wiesenthal before, so allow me to conclude with a reflection from his recent obituary. Wiesenthal was often asked to explain his motives for becoming a Nazi hunter. According to Clyde Farnsworth of the NYT (NYT Magazine 2/ 2/64), Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner, his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" "You're a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?', there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.’ Another will say, ‘I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.’ Another will say, 'I built houses.’ But I will say, 'I didn't forget you'."

The singular focus of Wiesenthal’s life was driven by the anticipated conversation at the end of his days. The foci of our lives are as varied as the number of souls present today. But like Wiesenthal, we only find purpose through the act of anticipating a future conversation and keeping a pledge to the past. “Lem’an tizkeru”-“In order that you remember,” “Lema’an yirbu yemeichem”-“In order that your days be extended.” Today, this year, let’s try not to blink, let’s hold the stare a little bit, and in doing so be blessed with compassion, kindness, forgiving dispositions, purpose and, yes, even a little bit of style. Gut Yontif.