Confessing Together—Always Room for One More (Yom Kippur Am 5777)

A Jewish girl goes to synagogue with her father for the first time on Yom Kippur.  She’s eight or nine years old, and takes it all in with great curiosity.  Much of it moves her.  She’s enthralled by the white vestments, the large, elegantly-dressed crowd, the haunting music.  And mostly she loves being there with her father, sitting by his side, his soft tallit draped over her shoulder. 

Then the congregation crises for vidui, the communal confession of their past year’s failings.  They rap on their chests and chant the litany: Ashamnu.  Bagadnu.  Dibarnu dofi. . . . Al cheyt, al cheyt, al cheyt. . . We are arrogant, bigoted, cynical.  We’re robbed, lied, cheated, and stolen. . . on and on and on.

The girl is shocked.  With a deeply worried look, she turns to her father and cries, “Daddy, we’d better get out of here.  Everyone around us has done a lot of really bad stuff!”

The father smiles and reassures her: “My love, they’re not all guilty of everything they’re admitting.  This is just something we do together on Yom Kippur.”

“But why?” she persists, as only an eight year old can.  “Why do we beat ourselves up over mean things we didn’t even do?”

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It’s a good question, and not just for children.  Conservative Rabbi Mark Greenspan composed a meditation on the subject that opens:

            I have a problem with the Vidui,

            the confessional prayer that we recite

            several times during Yom Kippur.

            It seems to me that for a confession to be honest

            It has to be sincere, heartfelt, and personal.

            I can’t sincerely confess someone else’s sins

            Nor can I simply read a generic list of sins.

            Yet this is what we seem to do in the Yom Kippur liturgy.

            My transgressions may or may not appear on that list

            And there is something disingenuous about confessing

            Sins that I did not commit, just because

            They are “on the list” and written in the plural. . .

Why do we read this list of confessions?

Why, indeed?  Why do we still recite that litany of transgressions, from aleph to tav,

from “A” to “Z”, repeatedly over the course of this long and solemn day?

This morning I’d like to offer three answers, three approaches I have learned from diverse and unexpected sources: a non-Jewish journalist from Connecticut, a local Christian clergy colleague, and a deceased longtime CABI member who I find myself missing a great deal this season.

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I’ll start with the Colin McEnroe, columnist for the Hartford Courant and  host of a daily public radio show.  I heard him on one of my favorite Jewish podcasts, “Unorthodox”, where he appeared as the tongue-in-cheek “Gentile of the Week.”   After schmoozing about a variety of topics, the moderator, Mark Oppenheimer, asked Mr. McEnroe for his take on Donald Trump’s rise to political stardom.  McEnroe replied:

His persona was sculpted in the world of reality television—and reality TV is completely based on the idea of getting rid of somebody.  At the end, whether it’s “American Idol” or “Survivor” or “The Apprentice”—what happens at the end is you get rid of somebody.  And that’s a kind of tempting view, because in life, you can almost never get rid of anybody, right?  The people in your life—they’re not going anywhere.  The folks in your workplace, the people you like the least—they’re just not going anywhere.  They will be there tomorrow when you come to work.  The folks who most get on your nerves—they’re here to stay. So that’s why these shows are incredibly popular, because there’s this incredible fantasy—you can actually get rid of someone who’s a pain in the butt.  That’s the world that Trump comes out of, this fantasy world, in which he’s the guy who can make this happen

This illusion perpetuated by reality television is, of course, the antithesis of Jewish tradition.  We are inextricably bound in covenantal community with friends and foes and everything in between.  As Yom Kippur begins, before we chant Kol Nidre, we ask God for permission to pray with the Avaryanim—the sinners—which is to say, all of us.  If you can’t tolerate being in the presence of those who irritate you, you won’t thrive in the Jewish world.  As one of Boise’s former student rabbis, Mordecai Finley wrote in an insightful article:

One must start any conflict resolution with the commitment to the community, to emphasize the many benefits one receives and not focus on winning the conflict.  Conflicts and tensions are inevitable and even productive aspects of communities.  Conflicts mean that the participants are active, dedicated and have a stake; and the willingness to be reasonably unhappy means that one takes a more expansive view of these things.

If you’re Jewish—or really, as Colin McEnroe notes, if you’re human—you don’t always get your way, because in our communal lives, we’re not getting rid of anyone.  When we confess publicly, we remind ourselves of our obligation to learn to live together.

My favorite teaching on this topic comes from Rabbi Harold Kushner’s marvelous book, When All You’ve Wanted Isn’t Enough.  Kushner recounts how, just before Yom Kippur, he runs into an unaffiliated Jew who insists on sharing why he won’t be coming to services: “I tried to get involved in your synagogue but I found it to be full of hypocrites.”

To which Rabbi Kushner is tempted to respond: “True.  But there’s always room for one more.”

Instead, he notes: “A synagogue that only admitted saints would be like a hospital that admitted only healthy people. It would be a lot easier to run, and a more pleasant place to be, but I’m not sure we’d be doing job we’re here to do.”

Jointly confessing our transgressions reminds us that there’s always room for one more—that, like it or not, we’re not getting rid of anyone, that we’re in it for the long haul, together.

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It also encourages us to open our hearts to one another.  My colleague, Rev. Andrew Kukla, senior pastor at Boise’s First Presbyterian Church, shared this in a post to my Facebook page.  He wrote:

I think the current state of political and social discourse affirms why public and communal confession is so important.  It’s owning that none of us has “arrived”; that we are all struggling to find the “better angels of our nature”.  Such communal ownership has the power to make the discourse less about

finger-pointing at them and more about looking at ourselves.

A unified prayer of confession is our mutual task of accountability and responsibility, and yes—of mercy and forgiveness.  Because somehow and some way, we have to make it okay for people to be less than perfect, so we can stop investing so much energy in armor.

How might we take the energy we waste on emotional armor, pitting ourselves against the world, and, instead, invest it in our common humanity? Rev. Kukla suggests we start by acknowledging our shared vulnerability.  Communally confessing our shortcomings is a step in that direction—even if, at first, we’re merely following a formulaic script without much real feeling.  As our Sages noted centuries ago, Lo lishma ba lishma—If we practice doing the right thing, even if our initial motivation is insincere, eventually we will do it with proper intention.   Even a rote public confession can help us start to stretch our atrophied “forgiveness muscles.”  The Yom Kippur vidui may, over time, inspire us to examine our own choices, take responsibility for our failings, and make amends to those we’ve hurt.

It can also nurture gratitude.  I’ve already quoted Rabbi Mark Greenspan’s challenge to the notion of communal confession but he ultimately affirms the practice as a path to gratefulness.  He reminds us:  

We do not shrink from taking advantage of rewards for the efforts of others. The same person who sits in a building he did not build, cooled by air conditioning he neither created nor paid for, reading words he did not write, will protest indignantly at discomforts visited upon him by someone else's mistake. We see our blessings as birthrights and our troubles as undeserved.

Perhaps we confess in the plural to bring home to us that interconnectedness is true in all ways: in sin, in punishment--and in virtue and reward. We seek to be good not only for our own soul, but to help those around us. You may beat your own chest, but the vibrations echo through the breast of everyone whom you know, and many whom you will never meet. Swift and sure are the currents that tie us to one another.

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Swift and sure are the currents that tie us to one another.

This affirmation of our interconnectedness is at the heart of my third and final argument in defense of our Yom Kippur vidui.  It involves a scientific breakthrough I learned about in detail this past summer in the podcast Radiolab—but which I first encountered in its infancy through my dear friend Bob Parenti.

Many of you were lucky enough to know Bob, may his memory be for a blessing.  He was a stalwart CABI member, a past president, and original chairperson of the rabbinic search committee that hired me.  He was also an eminent botanist who did trailblazing work in the field of plant communication.  To walk in the woods with Bob—to see the world through his eyes—was to enter into a beloved secret kingdom.  He patiently taught me, in layman’s language, what he’d learned through rigorous scientific research: that plants communicate with one another.  Bob showed me that what we see is, as it were, the tip of the iceberg—a tiny fraction of an intricate, interconnected ecosystem.  When he began his academic career, this hypothesis was mostly met with scorn.  Plants talking? Nonsense.  But by the time he retired, the scientific community had begun to come around.

Bob would have reveled in the findings documented in the Radiolab episode.  It features the work of Professors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan at the University of British Columbia.  They have mapped out the mechanics of what Bob intuited, a forest beneath the forest, in which plants converse in the language of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and water.  Simard and Ryan discovered the medium for this communication: a web of tiny white tubes, barely visible to the eye, called mycorrhizal networks—essentially, mini-mushrooms.

When they plug their roots into these networks, trees become capable of amazing range of behaviors that stun even the most cynical biologists.  When life is good, and trees have extra sugar, they store it in these fungal cells.  When times are hard, the mycelium release this sugar to the trees so they have food amidst the famine.  If rising temperatures are stressing certain trees, they will send a warning signal through this web.  Dying trees dump their carbon into fungi in order to redistribute it to their healthier neighbors.   The nutrients don’t just get reapportioned, as one might expect, to the offspring of the dying tree, or even to other members of the same species.  Instead, they go to the forest’s strongest young trees of all varieties, which have a better chance of surviving global warming. 

Rabbi Adam Lavitt views this new botanical model through the lens of Jewish tradition.  He writes:

Torah teaches: “The human being is a tree of the field.”  As we learn more about them, the trees of the field invite us to cultivate aware participation in the web of interconnectedness in which we are naturally embedded.  All of our actions have consequences.  We, too, can plug into the micro-universe, the web of intricate connections, both out in the world and within our own lives.

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And so we gather here, bound by the brit, by covenantal community, on this sacred Day of At-one-ment.  We confess our failings together, because it is our holy obligation to learn to live with one another in all our imperfection, to stop investing so much energy in armor, to recognize that our interconnection echoes the sometimes hidden oneness underlying all of God’s creation. 

We recite the vidui, the lengthy list of shortcomings, large and small, because our choice to acknowledge our mutual responsibility determines the difference between heaven and hell.

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The story is told of an old woman who wished, more than anything, to see for herself the difference between heaven and hell. All her life she prayed for this, until God finally agreed and sent a messenger to grant her request. The angel put a blindfold around her eyes, and said, "First you shall see hell."

When the blindfold was removed, the old woman was standing at the entrance to a great dining hall. The room was full of round tables, each piled high with the most delicious foods — main dishes, vegetables, fruits, breads, and desserts of all kinds! The smells that reached her nose were wonderful.

The old woman noticed that, in hell, there were people seated around those round tables. She saw that their bodies were thin, and their gaunt faces creased with frustration. Each person had an enormous, three foot-long spoon strapped to his or her arm. As a result, the people in hell could reach the food on those platters, but they could not get it into their mouths. As the old woman watched, she heard their  desperate, hungry moaning. "I've seen enough," she cried. "Please let me see heaven."

And so the angel reapplied the blindfold and declared, "Now you shall see heaven." When the blindfold was removed, the old woman was confused. For there she stood again, at the entrance to a great dining hall, with countless round tables piled high with the same lavish feast. And again, she saw that the people sitting just out of arm's reach of the food with those three-foot long spoons.

But as the old woman looked closer, she noticed that the people in heaven were beautifully healthy, with smiling, happy faces. As she watched, a joyous sound of laughter filled the air.

And soon the old woman was laughing too, for now she understood the difference between heaven and hell: the people in heaven were using those long spoons to feed one another.

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The choice is ours.  Confess together—live with one another, as the frail, flawed, and deeply vulnerable creatures that we are—or wither away, spiritually-dead, isolated and alone. 

This morning God tells us: I set before you this day life and death, the blessing and the curse. 

Let us choose community, which despite—and even because of—our endless imperfections, is the only path toward life. 

Heaven awaits.

Our Strength, Our Song (Kol Nidre 5777/2016)

The older I get, the more I follow the old rule of thumb for backpacking: Go light.  Lay out only the things you think you’ll really need—then put away half.  Thirty years ago, while trekking the southern half of the Appalachian Trail, I learned to lessen my load by cutting off the handle of my toothbrush and removing the tabs from my tea bags—because when you’re carrying all of your possessions on your back, for weeks on end, you realize, with every bone of your body, that every little bit counts.  This is one of the reasons we go to the wilderness: to get back to basics, to pare away everything non-essential.

Imagine, then, our Israelite ancestors, leaving Egypt under duress, in the middle of the night.  Setting out for who knows where, for God knows how long—what do they choose to take along, when limited to what they can carry?  The bare essentials: unleavened dough, water bladders, goatskin tents, a few pieces of clothing.  And, at least in the case of the women:  musical instruments!

We know this because as they pass through the Sea of Reeds, just a few days after their departure, Miriam and the women dance, sing and celebrate to the beat of. . . tambourines!  How extraordinary: we flee Egypt in such haste we don’t even have time to let our bread rise, yet the women have the strength and wherewithal to pack the percussion section!  Thus Torah instructs us: music is not a luxury; it is, instead, a staple—as indispensable, for many of us, to the life of the spirit as food, water, and shelter are to the body.  Today, many evolutionary neurobiologists argue that music preceded speech in human development and continues to play a central role in shaping who we are.  Although I’m no scientist, I believe that music is as essential to our humanity as language—and that we Jews are not only a People of the Book but also a People of the Song.

Consider the convoluted history of Kol Nidre, the Hebrew/Aramaic prayer that opens—and gives its name to—this Yom Kippur evening service.  No one can trace the origins of this quasi-legalistic formula for annulling vows—but we do know that, from its first appearance, in 8^th century Babylonia, most of the leading Sages opposed its inclusion in our liturgy.  In 879 CE, the editor of the very first siddur, Rav Amram Gaon, called it minhag shtus, a foolish custom.  Since then, many venerated rabbinic authorities have argued against Kol Nidre, dismissing it as a misguided practice that makes light of pledges and promises. 

And yet, despite centuries of vehement opposition from leading scholars, Kol Nidre endured—because the primal power of its melody trumped the rabbis’ reasoned resistance to its words.  The music is the message.  It opens with a fall, a descending minor tone, which continues for two full phrases—and then breaks way to a determined rise.  It acknowledges our pain and heartbreak, then lifts us with a heroic—even defiant—endurance, crescendoing into a hard-earned triumph.  As Rabbi Reuven Hammer teaches, “the emotional experience of Kol Nidre overwhelms any individual attempt to understand what is being said.”

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What is the nature of the melody’s uncanny power? How did music inspire our foremothers to pack the percussion on their wilderness journey—and enable Kol Nidre to survive centuries of rabbinic effort to edit it away?

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For starters, music is omnipresent.  While spoken language is limited to human beings, and perhaps a few of the higher mammals like chimps, whales and dolphins, music fills the natural world.  Creation’s song is an endless chorus of chirping insects, singing birds, rustling leaves, raging rivers, and so much more.  The great Hasidic Rebbe Nachman of Breslov would pray: “Master of the Universe, may it be my custom to go outdoors each day, where every tree and blade of grass chants to its Creator.”  And the Psalmist proclaimed in wonder: “The heavens sing of God’s glory.” While we humans fumble to give language to the world, the world offers up its gorgeous song with utmost and unceasing grace. So it has been, says Torah, since God chanted everything into existence, commencing with  “Va-yomer Elohim y’hi or, va-y’hi or—And God said, ‘Let there be light’—and there was light.”   From the beginning, forever and always, it’s wind and water, the rushing spirit of the Divine, singing us into being, humming through the vastness of the universe into our waiting heads and hearts.

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Given music’s ubiquity, we should not be surprised at its special capacity to bring us together. 

Language often divides us, as Torah teaches with the Tower of Babel.   In a world awash with dialects and tongues, most of humanity cannot converse with one another.  And even for those lucky enough to share a common language, words may create barriers as much as bridges.   Speech descends into the realm of judgment, unconstructive criticism, and rigid dogma.  We lapse into dichotomies of right and wrong, self and other, us and them.  Doctrinal debates splinter religious communities,  and politics sunder families—and nations.  Even the Jewish people, with our proud Talmudic history of respectful argument are not immune to such discord.  Listen to the acrimonious dispute over the state of Israel currently raging in our Jewish press, institutions, and households—the language isn’t pretty.  Rancorous discourse and petty accusations make it ever harder for us to talk—and pray—together.  For us, and for all humanity, words too often harden into walls that set us apart.

Music can help us overcome such obstacles.  It transcends the failings of language; people who cannot speak to one another can sing and play and dance in beautiful harmony.  As the great 20^th century folk troubadour Pete Seeger noted, “Music leaps over barriers of language, religion, and politics.”  Seeger spoke from deep experience.  He and his band, the Weavers, were blacklisted during the McCarthy era.  In 1957, he was indicted for contempt of Congress, and his music was banned from mainstream TV and radio for nearly a decade.  But this did not silence his song.  Pete Seeger continued to sing out for peace, justice, and environmental responsibility well into the next millennium.  When he died in 2014, at the age of 94, President Obama memorialized him, lauding his steadfast belief in the music’s power to promote community and social change.  Speaking for so many of us, Obama concluded: “He always invited us to sing along.”

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Daniel ben Yehuda Dayyan also invited us to sing along, over six hundred years ago. He wrote the hymn that concludes this evening’s service.  Like Kol Nidre, which opens it, Daniel ben Yehuda’s work illustrates music’s ability to take us where words cannot.

For centuries, the Rabbis tried to persuade the Jewish people to subscribe to a standard creed.  They imagined a universal profession of faith might unify us.  Their best candidate for that challenging task was Moses Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith.  Maimonides, also known as the Rambam, was the greatest Jewish scholar who ever lived—yet time after time, our Sages’ best efforts to canonize his words failed miserably.  The Jews in the pews simply refused to recite these principles; then, as now, we were just too strong-willed and opinionated to accept any fixed creed—even one penned by our most revered teacher.  Then, in 1404, the poet Daniel ben Yehudah had the brilliant idea to recast the Rambam’s principles in rhymed metric verse.  Soon thereafter, composers set it to music as Yigdal.   That hymn quickly secured the beloved place in the siddur that it had repeatedly failed to gain as prose.  The lesson is clear, and true to this day:  if you want people to profess words, even if they don’t necessarily believe them, arrange them to a catchy tune.  As both Daniel ben Yehuda and Pete Seeger taught: Creeds divide us, music invites us to sing along.

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But music doesn’t just connect us with one another; it also helps integrate different aspects of ourselves.  Dr. Daniel Levitan is a former rock musician and producer with a PhD in neuroscience; he shares his research in his terrific book, This is Your Brain on Music.  Working with functional MRI technology, he and his colleagues have demonstrated that while sight, smell, speech and other human sensory operations occur in specific areas of our brains, musical activities light up everything from the cerebral cortex to the amygdala. Scientifically speaking,  music defies compartmentalization.  Philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore summarizes these findings:

The aquamarine light of music floods through the brain, pooling in all the places where we feel, understand, remember, prefer, perceive, analyze, hope, and fear.  The part of the brain that reads music helps us read pain in a person’s face.  The place for perfect pitch is the same area the brain uses to understand language.  We remember a melody in the place we remember our children’s names.  The splashing edges of this great blue sea of music are the places where understanding can grow.

Many of us love music precisely because of its unique capacity to cross, confuse, and ultimately confound boundaries. I believe this is a large part of its eternal appeal for all kinds of religious communities.  For just as music blurs the regional borders that so often define our brains, so, too, does it transcend the artificial barriers  we draw between sacred and secular.  That’s why you can be deeply religious and still love secular show tunes, or avidly atheistic yet thrill to the passionate energy of a gospel choir.  Consider: when Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics for “Our Love is Here to Stay” just one month after the death of its composer, his beloved brother George—what kind of love, exactly, did he have in mind?  Is the song a pledge offered by a romantic young man to his lover?  Does it represent Ira’s loving lament for George?  Or is it something else entirely?  The chorus declares: “In time the Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, they’re only made of clay.  But our love is here to stay.”  Recently, a colleague reminded me that these words are remarkably similar to a passage from the book of Isaiah: “For the mountains may move, and the hills be shaken, but My love shall never depart from you.”  Was Ira Gershwin nodding to Scripture?  Did he unconsciously compose a sacred song?  Or is “Our Love is Here to Stay” all of the above, and more: romantic and fraternal, mournful and joyous, human and divine, all at the same time?

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Music’s miraculous, mysterious ability to transcend boundaries—to integrate us—infuses it with transformative holiness.  It can rescue us, body and soul.  During one of the darkest periods of my life, I found solace playing my harmonica at a Sunday night blues jam.  I took comfort in the Psalms, that holy poetry perhaps composed upon King David’s harp—and in the wisdom of my teacher and therapist, Bruce Springsteen.  When I was at my lowest, I would crank up The Boss singing “Lonesome Day”, with its elegiac verses echoing my own sadness, then overcome in the end by the irresistibly triumphant chorus: “It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.”  That music saved me from despair.

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 And I am not alone.  For some of us, salvation comes through John Coltrane’s haunting wails of “A Love Supreme.”  For others, it arrives via Bach or Beethoven.  The vessel can be the muezzin’s call, a Buddhist chant or Hindu raga, Ave Maria or “Amazing Grace.”  It is the coal miner’s daughter, Loretta Lynn, and Luciano Pavarotti, the gospel chorus and the Motown band, rock and rap and R&B, Don Giovanni and “Tangled Up in Blue.”  It is sacred or secular—no, it is sacred and secular—and it is a priceless gift to us all.

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The founder of Hasidism, Israel Baal Shem Tov, knew this.  He taught that music shatters the barricades of heaven.  He composed devekus niggunim, songs that transcend syllables and sound, and he shared them with his disciples, to help them lift their prayers into communion with the Holy One.  Nearly fifteen years ago, I experienced a taste of those songs and their transformative power, thanks to the writer, witness and teacher, Elie Wiesel, z”l, who died this past summer.  Mr. Wiesel grew up in the cradle of Hasidism, in a small town nestled in Romania’s Carpathian mountains.  His mother, Sarah, was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a prominent Vizhnitzer Hasid, sage, and storyteller.  

In his book, A Jew Today, Elie Wiesel paints an extraordinary portrait of his grandfather.  He describes the day, as a young boy, when he missed his zayde so much that he walked the seven kilometer journey to his farm, without his parents’ knowledge or permission, just to visit him.   Reb Dodye sent back a message with the next coachman to reassure the worried parents, then regaled Elie with tales of his great-grandfather, who took up the violin at the age of 70, and  entertained his family with klezmer and gypsy tunes.  And then they sang, Dodye Feig and Elie Wiesel, grandfather and grandson, together.

Fast forward almost seventy years.  Nobel-laureate Elie Wiesel comes to Boise to speak to a packed house at the Morrison Center shortly after 9/11.  His talk was exactly what one would expect.  He said what needed to be said, eloquently—as he had undoubtedly done on countless other occasions around the globe.  I don’t recall any of the specifics because the words, while instructive, simply weren’t that memorable. 

But during his short stay in our city, despite his jam-packed schedule, Mr. Wiesel somehow found the time to visit us here at CABI, to share an intimate half hour with the Jewish community.  Quite unlike the highly-polished speech he gave at Boise State, this talk was totally informal— just a wise old Jewish man lovingly shmoozing with his extended Jewish family.

Then time ran short and he prepared to head out for his next event.  But first he paused and asked us: “May I conclude with a niggun, a melody from my youth?” He took a deep breath, then shared a brief, beautiful story about a lullaby his mother sang to him when he was a boy. Then he sang, so softly at first, barely above a whisper. Who knew?—Elie Wiesel had the sweetest, most poignant singing voice!  You could hear the angels humming with him, and when he finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the shul. It was one of the most moving Jewish moments of my life, and I remain forever thankful for it.

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From Kol Nidre to Yigdal, from the Baal Shem Tov to Elie Wiesel, music unites and integrates, because it speaks straight to the heart.

We know this here at CABI.  It’s why we applied for—and received—a prestigious grant from the Covenant Foundation to hire Nemmie Stieha as our music educator.  We’ve used Covenant money to bring in some of today’s most outstanding young Jewish musicians. Michelle Citron headlined at the Basque Center, and Nefesh Mountain joined us for last spring’s congregational retreat in McCall.  Josh Niehaus and Chava Mirel played at Feast of Torah and anchored our Idaho Jewish Festival.  And thanks to Nemmie’s leadership, this spring we will host a Purim visit from Pizmon, the fabulous co-ed, a cappella group from Columbia University, Barnard College and the Jewish Theological Seminary.  Meanwhile, week in and week out, we will do all we can to better infuse our Shabbat and holy day services—and other gatherings for study, socializing, and social justice—with vibrant Jewish music.  Because I believe that our spiritual growth and inspiration depend less on how much Hebrew—or which siddur—we use—and more on how enthusiastically and often we sing together. 

I want to encourage all of us here tonight—and those who are not here, too—to join with me and Nemmie and Elana Salzman and Oliver Thompson and Brad Wolf and the Moody Jews and all the rest of our CABI music lovers and music makers in the holy work of transforming and renewing our congregation with the amazing power of song.

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During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, African-American demonstrators risked their lives in the deep south, facing down brutal white supremacists with remarkable courage.  When asked about the source of such bravery, Bernice Johnson Reagon, daughter of a Baptist minister and founder of the ensemble “Sweet Honey in the Rock”, points to the music.  She maintains that by singing hymns from the black church, the protestors conjured up an extraordinary collective strength.  The music created a kind of protective barrier between the demonstrators and the police, allowing the marchers to move beyond their fear.  As Ms. Reagon describes it: “Those songs do something to the material that you’re made of.  The singing connects you with a force in the universe that makes you different.  You become part of a community.  And then they can’t get to you.”

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On Rosh Hashanah eve, I challenged us to go forth, into the wilderness together, to embrace a Jewish future articulated by diverse new voices that may strike us as strange and unfamiliar.  I acknowledged that this call is challenging—that it will take great faith to work through our fear, to embrace the unknown, and hold fast to our vision of a revitalized Jewish future. 

Tonight I reassure you that we can, indeed, muster that faith and courage—that we can find it, in no small part, through the gift of music.

Kathleen Dean Moore describes the unparalleled potential of that gift in her essay, “Another World Could Start Right Here”.  She writes:

A physicist will tell you what you already know.  That harmony has the power to shake the world.  Sing one clear note, and the same tone will hum in the window glass, in the electric wires, in the neighbor’s piano, in the pine needles—and the air will be changed forever.

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 Let us go, then, into that wilderness, singing, as Miriam and the women sang at the Sea of Reeds.  Why did they pack their tambourines?  Because, in their wisdom, our mothers knew the journey ahead would demand the kind of bravery best-mustered through the power of song.

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Imagine the scene on the shore of that distant sea: As the Egyptian army bore down upon them, our ancestors must have been seized by doubt and fear—until Miriam took up her timbrel, to dance and sing.  Then the rest of the women joined her, fortified by the courage of her song, and the music rose in a mighty crescendo, parting the waters and paving freedom’s way—even as it does, still, today.

And so, on this Yom Kippur eve, this sacred day of atonement—at-one-ment—let us, too, sing together:

Ozi v’zimrat Yah, va-y’hi li l’yeshua—                                                                                      

God, my strength, and my song, shall be my liberation.

Amen.

Tribes (Rosh Hashanah Morning 5777)

I have always disliked John Lennon’s utopian anthem “Imagine”; Sebastian Junger’s new book, Tribe, reminded me why. 

In case you’ve somehow forgotten the lyrics of this ubiquitous tune, Lennon sings:

                        Imagine there’s no countries

                        It isn’t hard to do

                        Nothing to kill or die for

                        And no religion, too. . .

                        You may say I’m a dreamer

                        But I’m not the only one        

                        I hope some day you’ll join us

                        And the world will live as one.

It’s the classic dream of the 60s, a world liberated from national boundaries, archaic creeds, and petty tribal loyalties.  So why am I so resistant?

Perhaps there’s an element of self-interest—when I imagine a world with no religion, I’m unemployed.  Yet I disliked this song long before I entered rabbinical school.   Junger’s book clarifies why. 

Tribe describes what often happens after soldiers return from battle and survivors of natural and manmade disasters resume ordinary life.   Why, Junger asks, do so many find that despite its horrors, war may feel strangely better than peace, and calamity creates community?  He argues that for all of its unprecedented material comforts, contemporary Western life can be terribly lonely.  Conflict and catastrophe, by contrast, remind us what it is like to be a member of a tribe, a tight clan pledged to care and sacrifice for one another. 

This culture, with its fierce devotion to kith and kin—is at odds with modern society’s drive toward economic—and moral—globalization.  As columnist David Brooks notes, there is a sharp divide between those for whom loyalty to blood and historic ties takes precedence and those who emphasize generic obligations to all of humankind. If the universalists’ hymn is “Imagine,” the tribal ethos is embodied by the chorus of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem, “We Take Care of Our Own.”

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I learned where my sympathies lay early in my rabbinate, at a series of interfaith gatherings, where I always found myself lumped in with the Catholics and Protestants.  As a rabbi, I was inevitably seated with priests and ministers, as part of that family of faiths labeled “Judeo-Christian.”  They were good people, and I did not take their company for granted; I was well aware that generations of American Jews had labored mightily to gain a place at that table, which meant acceptance into the social and religious mainstream.  And yet. . . it wasn’t where I wanted to be. 

Then—and even more so now, thirty years later—I identified with the outliers: the Buddhists and Muslims and Hindus, with the Native American shamans, the Wiccans and animists and pagans.  I connected best with those on the periphery—not the proper mainline clergy in their grey business suits and collars but the women and men in bright, bold colors, flowing robes, funky hats and headdresses, the folks whose celebrations included pungent smelling foods, drums and dance, and chants offered up in ancient, guttural languages—just like my own. 

I cast my lot with the tribes.

As a rabbi, to this day, I hear my calling to represent my tribe, the Jewish people.  I honor our storied history.  I revere the sacred tradition that fills my life with purpose, and insists, contra John Lennon, that there are, indeed, people and principles worth dying for.  If this seems dangerously naïve, let me offer an important caveat: I am well aware that taken to extremes, tribalism devolves into racism and bigotry.  This is a critical concern, and I will return to it soon enough.  But here, at the outset, I refuse to let tribalism’s potential dangers eclipse its many-fold blessings. 

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Rabbi Brad Hirschfield describes those blessings in his article, “Confessions of an Unrepentant Tribalist.”  He writes:

It all comes down to two words: unconditional love, or at the very least, unconditional belonging.  A tribe offers the experience of being loved and cared for not because of what you do, but simply because you are who you are.  Once you are in the tribe. . . you are in, no matter what.  It is that sense that no matter how wrong we may be, there is always a place for us..  Think of it as un-divorceable family on steroids, if you like.   We all need that, and the only question is where and how we are going to get it.

I’ll add: Not only do we all need this kind of unconditional love—right now, we need it more than ever, because modern American life so often leaves us isolated and alone.  Even when we are surrounded by people of good will, the emotional armor that we wear, both knowingly and unwittingly, insulates us from them.  Our culture instructs us not to intrude or ask too much, to shy away from strangers, to keep out of others’ business.  Living behind our closed doors and ubiquitous screens, we are frequently hyper-connected yet ultimately on our own.  Our vaunted networks of Facebook friends are pale imitations of true tribal bonds.  They have a real role to play, enabling us to share information across vast distances in time and space.  But they can’t make your shivah minyan or dance with you at your wedding or bring you soup when you are sick.  They won’t help you care for your new baby or your dying father and they definitely will not love you even when you are being a total jerk.  Only the real, flesh and blood tribe has the power to lift us when we fall and stay with us, through thick and thin, as we struggle to get back up.

This is the immeasurable benefit that tribes confer upon their members: they love you and care for you even when it’s inconvenient—because you will do the same for them.  That’s the nature of the brit—the sacred covenant—that binds you.  And this is where John Lennon’s “brotherhood of man” inevitably falls short, for it simply isn’t possible—or even desirable—to love the entire 7.5 billion member human family with that kind of unconditional passion.

Most of us who have been parents—or, for that matter, children—know this in our gut.  The mother or father who loves their own child neither more nor less than any other child of the universe is not a parent that you’d choose to raise you.  You want someone to love you fiercely, vehemently, uniquely.  And that’s the point.  It’s ok—in fact, it is essential—to disproportionately love and nurture those closest to us.  It’s no sin to take special care of our own family and own tribe.  Indeed, Jewish tradition considers this a central obligation.  From our roots in Abraham and Sarah’s ancestral clan to today’s diverse tribe—spanning the globe from Be’er Sheva to Brooklyn to Boise—our calling has always begun with Kol Yisrael areivin zeh ba-zeh—All of Israel, all the Jewish people, are responsible for one another. 

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Here at CABI, caring community is the soul of our mission: celebrating our simchahs, comforting our mourners, tending to our sick and lonely.  We must always strive, however imperfectly, to learn and laugh together, to love one another in sickness and in health, and to maintain a special place in our hearts for our extended family, the land and people of Israel. As Hillel put it over two thousand years ago: “Im ayn ani li, mi li—If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

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But here’s the catch—the critical caveat to which I promised to return and which any responsible tribalist must address: we cannot not stop there.  For we know, all too well, what tribalism looks like when it runs amuck, when tribal pride degenerates into chauvinistic supremacy.  History and today’s world stage are rife with wars pitting clan against clan, sect against sect.  Countless conflicts rage, as arrogant bands spill endless blood over misbegotten power, privilege and honor.  If we wish to make the case for tribalism, we have a strong obligation to guard against these potentially lethal pitfalls.  Such precautions might begin with two guiding principles.

The first is easy in theory but surprisingly difficult in practice: Do not raise your side up by putting others down.  Root passionately for your tribe.  Sacrifice, serve, and advocate for them with all of your heart, soul, and might.  But do not let your zeal for your community lead you down the rat hole of thinking that it is superior to everyone else’s.  As Rabbi Brad Hirschfield writes: “When one is clearer about what’s wrong with the other tribes than they are about what is right with their own, they are almost certainly walking down the racist path.”

Arrogance is a mask we wear to hide our weakness; real power is humble.  Invidious comparisons are a sign of underlying insecurities.  Tribes that are truly strong and secure can afford to be magnanimous in measuring others.  This is an important lesson for us as twenty-first century Jews, for an honest appraisal of our sacred tradition acknowledges that a significant strain of Jewish thought declares our superiority over our non-Jewish neighbors. 

That’s the understandable legacy of centuries of oppression. When others put us down—often with horrific brutality—we maintained the self-respect we needed to survive by acclaiming ourselves God’s elect.  But the time and place for such boasting is now past.  The American Jewish community is surely secure enough to stand tall, to realize we no longer need to assert our unique sense of destiny at others’ expense.   In the words of two CABI members, who responded to a Facebook post I offered on this subject:

I have a hard time reading “chosen people” as “better people”. . .

It is not that others are better or worse, but that one is where they are and they cannot pretend to be otherwise. . . Like flowers, we all bloom at different times.  Can a sunflower that has kissed the sun pretend that it hasn’t?  Can a bud pry open its petals without being destroyed?  Both are beautiful, unique, and part of something perfect, miraculous and essential.

This is the balance that we, the Jewish community, walk in this new year 5777.  Let us learn to celebrate our chosenness, even as we recognize that others are also chosen, for their own unique missions.  May the pride we take in our community’s accomplishments help us better hail those of our neighbors.

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Which brings me to the second governing principle for successful tribes: Self-preservation is not enough.   Strong communities extend their vision outward, using their hard-earned wisdom to bring healing to the world at large.  After we take care of our own, we must also take care of the other.  I’ve mentioned Hillel’s defense of tribalism: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”  But of course that’s just half of the equation, as he famously adds: “U-ch’sh’ani l’atzmi, mah ani—If I am only for myself, what am I?”

In my childhood years, the Jewish community paid too little heed to this principle.  Our modus operandi was survival for its own sake.  The goad my parents’ and grandparents’ generation trusted most to keep us in the fold was good old-fashioned guilt: since Hitler tried to wipe us out, we were obligated to keep the faith, whether we liked it or not.

This didn’t work very well back then—and it certainly won’t play today—for it begs the Darwinian question: Why does our tribe deserve to survive?  If we want our children and grandchildren to be Jewish, we have to do better, to offer them inspiring answers to that query.  For unlike previous generations, they have a vast array of options—countless tribes that will eagerly and adeptly welcome them if we don’t.  They can find a new clan almost effortlessly, through soccer or politics or Meet Up or Crossfit or a thousand other possibilities.  They certainly won’t join a synagogue out of guilt or obligation.  Our young people—and lots of our older people, too—will vote with their feet unless we model a community that cares for them deeply and empowers them to work together with other tribes to repair our broken world.  As it turns out, taking care of our own includes infusing them with a powerful sense of purpose they can carry into the wider world.  Isaiah said it best, almost three thousand years ago:

It is too small a task for you to be My servant merely to preserve the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations, that my liberation may reach to the ends of the earth.

Now there’s a vision I can imagine—and, God willing, pass along.  It’s our mission here at CABI: to care for our own—visiting the sick, comforting the mourners, celebrating weddings and births and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs—while also working in the wider community, feeding the hungry, gardening with, tutoring, and advocating for refugees, and lobbying our legislature for justice.

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That far-reaching vision lies at the heart of this sacred day, which deftly balances unconditional tribal love with universal aspiration.  On Rosh Hashanah we revel in our uniqueness, with majestic melodies, sweet foods, and the shofar’s haunting call to community.  We focus on teshuvah, on turning—or returning—to the values that have sustained the Jewish people throughout our history.  But we don’t stop there, for Rosh Hashanah also celebrates Yom Harat Olam, the birthday of the world.  Today we remember that our little tribe is part of something so much bigger.  We stand in awe before the Holy One and the vast mystery of Her works.  And we add our uniquely Jewish voice—our small yet significant tribal song—to the magnificent, multi-vocal chorus of creation.

At the high point of this morning’s liturgy, the service for sounding the shofar, we sing: Aleynu l’shabayach l’adon ha-kol—Let us praise the Maker of all. . .

This is our tradition’s alternative to both “Imagine” and “We Take Care of Our Own”, living, like the Jewish people itself, in the creative tension between the two.  It is, simultaneously, unabashedly tribal and ambitiously universal.

As Aleynu opens, we declare our special destiny, our unique Jewish mission to serve the Creator, whose covenantal relationship commands our worship.   Then, in the second paragraph, the perspective turns, and we envision an age when all the nations of the earth will dwell in harmony, making real the vision of God’s—and humanity’s—oneness. 

It’s complicated and paradoxical and a little unresolved—which is to say, it’s very Jewish—and very human.

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And so, my friends, we journey together into another new year.  May 5777 bring blessing to us, to the people of Israel, and to all of humankind.  Let us embrace our little community—our tribe—with unconditional love—and may that love ripple out into a world that so dearly needs it.

If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? 

If we are only for ourselves, what are we?

And if not now—when?