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by Rabbi Yael B. Ridberg Last December I thought I heard the voice of God. Like most human-divine encounters it happened in a most unexpected way. I had the opportunity meet and listen to Dr. Tony Campolo, an evangelical minister from Eastern College outside Philadelphia. Tony is a firebrand of a preacher, a prolific author and sociologist he shatters the stereotype of evangelical Christians. I was riveted by his words and his manner because I could hear in him the message of Heschel to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Honestly, I will tell you that I felt at that moment both afflicted – in that I had just completed chemo when I heard him – and I was also comfortable – in that I was enjoying an opportunity to participate in a dialogue with leaders from all walks of life in an intimate setting. The combination made for my being particularly open to hearing a new voice. In one of his talks, Dr. Campolo shared the data from a study that asked mothers around the world about their greatest hopes for their children. Mothers in Japan almost always answered, “We want our children to be successful.” The result is that the people of Japan have raised up a generation of the most success-driven children in the world. When American mothers were asked the exact same question I bet you can imagine what their answer was. “We want our children to be happy.” Tony, a child of traditional Italian immigrants, said, “I don’t think my father really cared if I was happy. Oh, I suppose it was of concern to him, and I’m sure he also wanted me to be successful. But if you had asked my father, and especially my mother, “What do you want your son to be when he grows up?” both would have answered, “We want him to be good!” Campolo said, "Woe to the society whose singular goal for the future resides in happiness." And that's when I though I heard the voice of God. It wasn't so much what he said, mind you, that felt godly, and I will never know what really opened my ears to hear his message differently than I had heard similar words before. For this is not a new message for people of faith. Religion, the synagogue or church, community, none of them are here to "make us happy" these are the institutions that help us make meaning out of our complicated, challenged, and broken world. The fairy tale ending of living "happily ever after" we know is pure fantasy. Not that we don't strive for contentment and satisfaction in our lives, but there has to be something more in this dizzying beginning of the 21st century. All we have to do is look at our world today to see that happiness doesn’t solve any of the world problems, doesn't make us see past the nose on our face. We know there is enough money and resources in the world to eradicate poverty and the fact that we haven’t done so should shame all of us. Here are a few more stunning statistics: According to David Held in A Globalizing World? There are 1.3 billion people living below the poverty line – that amounts to 22% of the world’s population; 841 million people are malnourished; 880 million are without access to medical care. 1 billion lack adequate shelter; 1.3 billion have no access to safe drinking water; 2.6 billion go without sanitation. Among the children of the world, 113 million—2/3rds of them girls -- go without schooling; 150 million are malnourished and 30,000 children die each day from preventable diseases. And we are worried about being happy? "Being good" -- now that presents a sacred challenge to us all. On this night that we come together to acknowledge our frailty, our mistakes, indeed our mere humanity, this is the time to talk about finding goodness in ourselves and our world. This is the time to challenge our complacency and apathy. This is the time to heighten our awareness of inequality within and between countries. Our moral sense of responsibility is both activated and frustrated, for we feel something should be done, but we often fail to assess what exactly and by whom? Of course we shouldn’t wait until Yom Kippur to look at our societal ills and shake our head. But Yom Kippur affords us this opportunity, and this is the work I personally feel called to do this year. Tonight I simply have one question for all of us. It is the question we were reminded of by Mark Nazimova on Rosh Hashanah, and it is the very first question posed to humanity in the bible – but one that continues to rebound and return for me all the time. After Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and hide themselves, God asks Adam -- "Ayeka" -- where are you? It seems a silly question. Surely God knew exactly where Adam was, god could "see" him. So why did God have to ask the obvious question? Because the question is not one of physical location. God was asking Adam something different. God was saying, "You've done the one thing I instructed you not to do, and now you are hiding – Where is your soul? What are you thinking? Where are you now that you've done the one thing I asked you not to do, and you know that I know you did it?" I can see all of you here tonight, and I can see millions of Americans in my mind's eye, but I ask all of us as a Jewish community, and as a nation -- "Ayeka" where are you? Where are we in our quest for meaning and goodness in a world filled with insecurity, anger, and war? Where are we, in a world where the politics of insecurity has given rise to political and religious extremism? Where are we, with so many millions of Americans out of work? Where are we, now that nearly every citizen of the world faces the nexus of the threats of terrorism, civil strife, and weapons of mass destruction in one form or another? Where are we with an Israeli-Palestinian peace process all but dead? Where are we with millions dying each year of disease and starvation? Where are we if we don’t heed the call to see the past not as an indicator of the inevitability of our destruction, but as the catalyst to pursue reconciliation and communal re-engagement? Tonight I want us to dig deeply into the collective unconscious of humanity And try to understand those sins we have committed against godliness in our world. There should be an Al chet for the sin of neglecting goodness in the world. As Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer wrote – We sin Against God when we sin against ourselves; For our failures of truth, of love, and of seeking justice we ask for forgiveness for ourselves and all humanity. These failures of humanity should make us take notice, perhaps even return to the mythic creation of humanity to search for answers to our deep questions. In a famous midrash in Genesis Rabbah, when God was about to create Adam, the ministering angels split into contending groups. Some said, ‘let him be created.’ Others said, ‘let him not be created.’ That is why it is written: ‘mercy and truth collided, righteousness and peace clashed’ (Psalm 85:11). Mercy said, ‘let him be created because he will do merciful deeds.’ Truth said, ‘let him not be created, for he will be full of falsehood.’ Righteousness said, ‘let him be created for he will do righteous deeds.’ Peace said, ‘let him not be created for he will never cease quarrelling.’ What did the Holy One Blessed be God, do? God took truth and threw it on the ground. The angels said, ‘Sovereign of the Universe, why do you do this to your own seal, truth? Let truth arise from the ground.’ Thus it is written, ‘let truth spring up from the earth’ (Psalm 85:12) This is such a powerful tale of creation. It speaks to the complexity of the human enterprise, and reminds us of our imperfections and weaknesses. We human beings are capable of great acts of altruism and self sacrifice, but we are also constantly at war. We tell lies and are full of strife. Humans lie, hurt and kill because they believe they possess the truth while others are in error. According to the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, in his remarkable book: The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the clash of Civilizations, ‘In that case, says God, throwing truth to the ground, let human beings live by a different standard of truth, one that is human, and thus is conscious of its limitations. Truth on the ground is multiple, partial. Fragments of it lie everywhere. Each person, culture and language has part of it; none has it all.” As Reconstructionists we understand this idea well. When we abandon the idea of the Jews as the chosen people we open up the possibility that all people everywhere can be called to the service of God, called to pursue goodness and godliness out of their religious tradition, texts, and heritage. But it seems that nothing has proved harder in the history of civilization than to see God, or good, or human dignity in those whose language is not our own whose skin is a different color, whose faith is not our faith, and therefore, whose truth may not be our truth. To see people of other countries, faiths, and world views as created betzelem elohim – in the image of God – THAT is really the fundamental calling of our age. I have been reading Rabbi Sacks’ book over the last several months, and it has opened my eyes to see a new ethics of globalization in the face of a world that demands more and more, a new paradigm for co-existence. Rabbi Sacks point s to several underlying causes for our insecurity – so much rapid change in our world, political, technological, cultural, we can hardly catch up. Families, neighborhoods and communities have broken down in ways unimaginable two generations ago. On the other hand, we live in such a fortunate time – so much freedom, so many choices, so much comfort, and yet, so insecure and so little control.. How do we fight such despair in the name of hope? On this eve of Yom Kippur we must be prepared to open our eyes to the challenges of globalization. We must assert and reassert that our actions do matter, that there is accountability to be held, there is meaning beyond absurdity, and that we are not entirely powerless in the face of the unknown. We can easily see the sins we have committed as individuals, we can think of the mistakes we have made against our friends and loved ones. But we must also recognize our collective responsibility. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that "in a democratic society, not all are guilty, but indeed all are responsible." We all are responsible for the sins of our society. We are all involved either through omission or commission. We are 6 weeks from our national election, and for me this represents the most important election yet of my generation. I look at the reality of the world, and I wonder if and when I will be able to tell my daughter, “Everything will be alright.” But with the war in Iraq leaving thousands dead without a real plan for peace; with over 1000 US service men and women having given their lives and no end to the insurgency in sight; with the rhetoric of nuclear war once again rearing its ugly head; with greedy politics allowing more people to fall into poverty, live without healthcare, the approaching election might very well decide the fate of our nation’s, if not the world’s future. And I want to know – Ayekah? Where are you? Where is humanity? I feel the despair tugging at my soul, but I don’t dare remain there. It is a powerful thing to contemplate the fate of the entire world, and I recognize my own discomfort in that I don’t find myself in this place as often as I should. But I believe it is a sin against goodness and godliness to throw our hands up in despair and say there’s nothing we can do. Rabbi Kaplan wrote in The Meaning of God and Modern Jewish Religion: “If we are to go on living at all, and especially if we want life to be fruitful and creative, we must refuse to accept as final and irredeemable the man-created evil in the world. Such a refusal is possible providing we hear the call of religion.” (p. 134) Religion helps us not by changing the facts, but by teaching us new ways of looking at those facts. Religion doesn’t prevent the ills of the world, but in its finest moments it helps people cope with and make meaning out of those ills. Humanity has always sought answers to the bigger questions of meaning – who am I? What am I called to be? But “It makes an immense difference whether we see ourselves as isolated individuals at war with the rest of the world, or as links in a network of human beings working for each other’s survival as well as our own, and depending on other people to help us find what we cannot get for ourselves.” (Harold Kushner, Who needs God) The Dignity of Difference argues that the global future will call for something stronger than earlier doctrines of tolerance or pluralism. It will need a new derstanding that the unity of God is expressed in the diversity of creation. The human community has become so disparate, so isolated from each other that we are forgetting how to relate to one another. And yet, the irony is our global economy and globalization in general is all about the inter-connectedness of the world through new systems of communication. Globalization is the double edged sword of our day. It has the power to divide as much as it has to unite. I believe that our process of teshuvah must include, but not be limited to the inward search. The implications of teshuvah are far wider and greater than that of our own personal transformation. A complete teshuvah must also address the deep questions of our day and must challenge the assumptions that underlie the society in which we live. In other words, at the conclusion of Yom Kippur when Judaism teaches that our first act of the new year is to build a sukkah – a protective shelter for ourselves, we must also see that sukkah as a metaphor for the structures in our society that must honor and sustain our own freedom, integrity and creativity and that of every individual. This is unlike any other time in history, and it is moving at a pace so fast, so cavalier and so spurious that we don’t have enough time to make conscious and thoughtful decisions. If you are like me, right now your heart is probably racing. I know. This is heavy. We’re talking about the future of our civilization. I’m kept up at night thinking about what the world will be like in the 2020 when our daughter Margalit will be preparing to vote for the very first time. But maybe, you’re hearing and absorbing these words in a new, perhaps unexpected way. The quest for global change is overwhelming. I have been deeply affected by these ideas, and am searching, like all of you to make meaning out of it all. Esah einai el he’harim, me’ayim yavo ezri? I lift my eyes to the mountains, from where will my help come? Assistance, reverence, restraint, humility, a sense of limits, the ability to listen and respond to human distress – these are not the virtues of a market economy, or a capitalist system. But these are precisely the values we will need if our global civilization is to survive. These are the middot – the virtues of Judaism and indeed of the religious imagination in general. Rabbi Sacks’ vision is one that simply asserts that when the dignity and diversity of the humanity are acknowledged and celebrated instead of merely tolerated or feared the possibilities for a world transformed are enormous. We need to look at the world and ask how the economic, political, social, and environmental systems of the world impact on human dignity. This vision applies in America, Sudan, Iraq, Israel, Russia, Kosovo, Afganistan, and the West Bank and Gaza. If conditions in our world today are to change, then there must be commitment and covenant on the part of all the nations of the world to see their own benefit to such a global vision. Towards the conclusion of Dignity of Difference, Rabbi Sacks asserts the concept that what is needed in our society is a global covenant – that which is an attempt to create partnership without dominance or submission. Covenants are relational by definition, they don’t seek to create winners or losers. They are intergenerational – made with those of us here today and the generations yet to come. “Covenants are acts of moral engagement”. Sound naïve? Hardly. Sacks writes that one of the most important distinctions that he learned in the course of his study is the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the faith that, together, we can make things better. Optimism is passive, hope is active. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. It is no accident of course that the national anthem of Israel is named “hatikvah.” The hope. Lo avdah tikvateinu – we sing – we have not lost our hope. When I heard Dr. Campolo last year, what I heard in his voice was the voice of generations past, imploring us not to abandon global vision, instead, to go forth, leave what we know, what we are comfortable with, and pursue those values that support and uplift humanity. What I heard then continues to echo for me as the voice of god today. Success and happiness are fleeting, but pursuing goodness and godliness, that is how we can actively participate in the transformation of our world. that is how hope can generate global change. Let religion be that which lifts up the world, not what tears it down, let us treat each other with the dignity we deserve, let tolerance come from the presence of faith not it’s absence, and let us remember that difference does not diminish possibilities, it expands them. May we in our day seek to renew the covenant of human connection, the covenant of human dignity, the covenant of mutual respect, responsibility and dedication and let the covenant be renewed with us. G'mar hatima tova. May your journey to teshuvah be inspired.
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