Last Monday was the
10th anniversary, by the Jewish calendar, of the death of my father,
Joseph Karol. I try every day to
remember and pay tribute to what he taught me about life – striving for
excellence and integrity, showing compassion, and demonstrating an unwavering
commitment to a community. My dad
also taught me about writing, which was a major aspect of his job at the Army
Corps of Engineers. That fact, combined
with his many years of teaching religious school and volunteering for Temple,
may help explain why both children in our family became rabbis. My Dad’s
talents live on in my brother and in me, and you see or hear them every time I
write a newsletter article or deliver a d’var Torah.
One of my dad’s hobbies was
photography. Before the days
when video-recording technology was affordable or available in our homes, we
only had tape recorders to record television audio and a camera set on a tripod
in front to the TV screen to capture an image. On July 20, 1969, my dad and I did our best to
preserve on tape and Kodak slide film the first steps of Neil Armstrong on the
moon. Armstrong and fellow
astronaut Buzz Aldrin seemed larger than life that night. The same could be
said of Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space on June 18,
1983. Our nation and the
world now mourn both of these pioneers of space exploration who died this
summer. Even with their fame, each
of these astronaut’s families shared memorial messages with the public that
were thoughtful and very unassuming. Neil Armstrong’s family offered this statement: “Neil
was our loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend. Neil Armstrong was also a reluctant
American hero who always believed he was just doing his job. He served his
Nation proudly, as a navy fighter pilot, test pilot, and astronaut. He also
found success back home in his native Ohio in business and academia, and became
a community leader in Cincinnati….While we mourn the loss of a very good man,
we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to
young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to
be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause
greater than themselves. For those
who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his
example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk
outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil
Armstrong and give him a wink."
Sally Ride’s sister, Bear,
said this of the first American woman in space: “Our parents, Joyce and Dale
Ride, encouraged us to study hard, to do our best and to be anything we wanted
to be.…They encouraged us to be curious, to keep our minds and hearts open and
to respect all persons as children of God. Our parents taught us to explore,
and we did. Sally studied science and I went to seminary. She became an
astronaut and I was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Sally lived her life
to the fullest with boundless energy, curiosity, intelligence, passion, joy,
and love. Her integrity was absolute; her spirit was immeasurable; her approach
to life was fearless. Sally died the same way she lived: without fear. Sally’s
signature statement was ‘Reach for the Stars.’ Surely she did this, and she
blazed a trail for all…of us.”
Both families
of these world-renowned space explorers found a way to put into words the
aspirations and character of their loved ones. It wasn’t greatness that permeated their tribute, but the
down-to-earth nature of their lives.
Their successes were large, but both families were essentially teaching
us that any one of us can achieve our own level of greatness and then share our
story so that others can live by our example. And that can be our goal in life: to thrive, the make a difference with
our lives, and to symbolically write a new passage every day in the book of our
lives about the peaks and the valleys, and everything in between, that we
encounter. The Un’taneh Tokef prayer that we recited earlier this
morning declares about God: “You write and You seal, You record and
recount.” God isn’t the only
writer noted in that prayer, because it also proclaims: “You open the book of
our days, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the
signature of every human being.”
This prayer likely imagines that our actions automatically inscribe
themselves into an imaginary text, a process that singer Dan Fogelberg once
called “burning lines in the book of our lives.” Yet, our additions to that book are not simply a list of
what we have done. Our full
writing assignment demands that we put our deeds into perspective – that we
determine how our words and actions can reflect what we want to be inscribed
and remembered. The prayer states,
“On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.” Right now, on Rosh Hashanah, what
lies before us is a rough draft, our initial summary of our lives until now. By Yom Kippur, when the
manuscript of our life’s current chapter is due, we can make whatever revisions
we consider necessary and adopt new ways of thinking about how we have lived
and how we want to live in the months and years that lie ahead.
We do take many
opportunities to live our rough drafts, with the possibility of turning them
into the finished product. We
might find our own “rough drafts” in an email or letter that we write to
release anger or disappointment
towards someone and then DON’T SEND IT. It could be a conversation that doesn’t go well the first
time but that we are able to conduct later with a better result. It could also be a failure or failures
that precede success. In an
installment for Craig Taubman’s annual Jewels of Elul series, writer and film
director Marshall Herskovitz explained,
“Robert Bly once wrote that failure is a
necessary part of life….I’ve come to see that he was right. Failure is freeing,
failure is bracing. Failure makes you alive. I now understand, in fact, that my
life and career have followed a distinct pattern: Success. Complacency. Failure. Struggle. Breakthrough.
Success. It started in film
school, when I landed my first TV writing job -- and wrote the script in a haze
of self-congratulation -- only to find that the producers hated it. Failure
number one. I then spent several years in despair, hustling for jobs on bad
television shows, realizing finally that I was failing because I wasn’t writing
in my own voice. That was the first time I felt that sense of unexpected
exhilaration when your back is against the wall – and you discover you have
courage after all. With nothing to lose, I renounced my career as a TV writer
and wrote a screenplay. In my own voice. And everything changed. People loved
the script, studios offered deals. I was made. Until I failed again, and had to
find the courage – again – to write from my authentic self. And the result this
time was [the television show] “thirtysomething”, from whose success I assumed
– finally! – I must be immune to failure. Until my first film as a director
bombed – and the process had to begin again. And so it has continued, for thirty years. I welcome
the rhythm now, the struggle, the renewal, the euphoria, and yes, even the
despair – because I understand that this is the rhythm of art, of life. Failure
is not the opposite of success – they’re part of the same thing. The opposite
of failure…is death.”
Failure,
success, learning from mistakes, trying again, succeeding, and failing again,
with the hope of another triumph down the road – this is what it means to live. During the 2012 Olympics, there were
too many times when commentators characterized a silver or bronze medal as a
loss rather than a win. American
gymnast McKayla Maroney’s well-publicized facial expression on receiving a
silver medal in the Olympic vault competition offered a sharp contrast to Aly
Raisman’s joy at being award the bronze medal in the balance beam event. There was the personal story of
American Olympic diver Brittany Viola, who gave up gymnastics so that she could
compete in a sport that would allow her to stay home in Minnesota with her
parents. Oscar Pistorius of South
Africa became the first double-leg amputee to participate in the Olympics.
Sometimes, the TV commentators at the summer Olympics did declare that
competing in the Olympics at all was an achievement that shouldn’t be
minimized. In real life, small triumphs or a one-time amazing performance may
offer competitors and, perhaps, any one of us, the deepest satisfaction and a
sense that greatness and goodness are within our grasp.
In the terms of the Un’taneh Tokef prayer, we are all
still in the game. Each of
us has the chance to give our best to the various roles we fulfill in our
families, schools, workplaces or community. Whatever we do, including, as Marshall Herskovitz noted,
our failures as well as our successes, shows that we very much alive, recording
in the Book of Life even our smallest achievements and our personal attempts to
bring goodness into the world. But what about those who aren’t trying to bring
goodness into the world, people who have veered off the path towards reaching
their highest potential for decency and integrity? The Un’taneh Tokef prayer, in Gates of
Repentance, states: “This is Your glory: You are slow to anger, ready to
forgive. It is not the death of sinners You seek, but that they should turn
from their ways and live.” We
might expect that the Hebrew word for “sinners” in that passage would built
upon a root word for sin, like
“CHEIT,” so that the word would be “CHATA-IM.” That isn’t what the Hebrew says. The word for sinners in the Hebrew version of the
prayer is “MEIT” – literally – “You don’t desire the death of the dead.” That may sound redundant or almost
meaningless. When that
phrase occurs in the Bible, the word meaning “those who are dead” refers to
people whose moral misjudgments have taken them down a path devoid of goodness,
well beyond the point of no return….or is that really the case? This prayer says that they can come back
at any time. They can retrace
their steps and rediscover their true moral and spiritual selves if they do so
honestly and wholeheartedly.
To add to Marshall Herskovitz’s statement about failure being the
opposite of death – taking responsibility for our actions, whether we succeed
or fail, clearly demonstrates that we are not morally or spiritually dead. The fact that we care about doing
what’s right and making amends when necessary shows that we are very much alive
and that striving for goodness is still a reachable goal.
In the book WHO
BY FIRE, WHO BY WATER, Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman compiled a wide variety of
interpretations of the Un’taneh Tokef prayer. In one chapter, Rabbi Gordon Tucker explained a
reference in the prayer about the nature of human beings, where it says that
“Each of us is a shattered urn.”
How are we like shattered pottery, and how does that image help us at
this time of year if we are trying to make ourselves whole, to overcome feeling
“broken” or “shattered”?
Tucker described a rabbinic interpretation of a bible passage about what
needs to be done with an earthenware pot that has become impure in some
way. The procedure was to break
the pot, bury it, and then unearth the pot and put it back together. Only then could it be considered fit to
be used again. The High Holy Days
take us through a similar process on a spiritual level. We begin Rosh Hashanah, very much
alive and rejoicing in the beginning of a new year. We spend the next 10 days morally dissecting ourselves,
trying to determine what we have done well and how we can improve ourselves in
the coming year. On Yom
Kippur, we don’t eat, we don’t drink – we deprive ourselves of many of the
signs that show we are alive. We
recite prayers of confession, an end-of-life ritual in which we engage so that
we can emerge from the High Holy Days to live and thrive once again, with a
fresh perspective on how we can strive for spiritual and moral success on our
own terms, with our heritage and our faith as our beacon along the way.
The journey of Abraham and
Isaac to Mount Moriah, which will be retold in the Torah reading this morning,
took them far away from where we would have expected them to be. Some commentators explain that this
trek was meant to teach Abraham, called by many “the first ethical monotheist,”
not to do what his neighbors were doing – namely, practicing the sacrifice of
human children in order to please the gods in whom they believed. If we are like shattered pots
that are disassembled and then renewed during the High Holy Days, we could see
Abraham’s and Isaac’s near tragedy as an experience that was meant to remind
them that life could take them to the brink, to a point of being “shattered” or
“broken,” but that there would always be a sign available to them that could
bring them back to where they needed to be morally and spiritually. In the Torah reading, the sign was the
call of the Angel, “Abraham!
Abraham!” For us, it might
be the voice of a friend or family member, pleading with us to step back from
the precipice so that we can remember who we are and what we can do to make our
lives worthwhile and meaningful.
The Un’taneh Tokef prayer tells us that we can make our lives worthwhile
by practicing t’shuvah, t’filah
and tzedakah” – repentance, prayer, and righteous giving, which can make the
harshness of life’s stark challenges seems less overwhelming. Reaching within
to make ourselves complete, reaching beyond to connect to all of creation, and
reaching towards others can enable us to weather the storms of life, whatever
they may be. In the words of
Rabbi Brent Spodek and Ruth Messinger of American Jewish World service, when we
practice “repentance, prayer and charity” with an open heart, our road may
still be bumpy, but we’ll have better shock absorbers.
As I wrote this
sermon, I watched weather reports about tropical storm Isaac and noted posts of
my facebook friends who live in Louisiana about power outages that would
continue for several days. I
heard about the deaths of several American solders in a helicopter crash in
Afghanistan. I read about opinions
across the entire political spectrum regarding which presidential candidate or
political party can best take our nation into the future. In the coming year, we will brace
ourselves for the winds of unexpected challenges, the storms of sudden
disappointments, and a sense of restlessness that makes us feel that our souls
are wandering aimlessly without direction. At the same time, we can focus on what we can control
- creating a positive attitude within ourselves, preserving a feeling of
gratitude for the blessings that we enjoy, and demonstrating our concern for
the world and the human community.
To live, to love, to learn, to extend a helping hand, to overcome obstacles,
to take ourselves apart and then put ourselves back together so that we are
even more complete than before –we can achieve these goals both on our own and
with the support of our sacred community.
May all that we write in the book of our lives – separately and together
– bring us hope, strength and peace in this New Year. So may it be –and let us say Amen.
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