Who Am I Anyway: Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Eve 5777

Who Am I Anyway

Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Eve 5777

October 2, 2016

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

“Who am I anyway?  Am I my resume? …”

No one who has ever heard this line can ever forget it or the musical it comes from: “A Chorus Line.”  The scene is where the actors who’ve made the first cut in the audition stand side-by-side across the stage, holding their black-and-white headshots in front of their faces.  One by one, they lower the photographs.  And as they do, along with their real faces they also reveal multiple layers of their personalities—their fears and insecurities, their dreams and their hopes.  It’s a powerful moment.

Who am I anyway?  This simple line reverberates through time and space.  One reason for this is that it comes from such a smash Broadway hit.  In 1976, “A Chorus Line” won nine Tony Awards including Best Musical, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Drama and, probably more than any other musical, has awakened the theater bug in countless aspiring actors and actresses.  I first saw the play performed on stage by a touring company, then at the movies.  Then, last but not least, I saw it in an excellent high school production where our daughter, Hannah, played the part of Kristine, the girl who “could never really sing.”

But there’s another reason why “who am I” resonates within us.  It’s really a question that we often ask ourselves.  Though psychologists say that our identity is pretty much set by the age of three, as we grow and mature we add layers that help define both for ourselves and for others who we are. Only Popeye can get away with saying, “I yam what I yam” year in and year out.  With real people, our identity becomes an ever more complex set of parts and roles, which we switch in and out of several times a day.  At any point in our life, we are son, daughter, sibling; parent, caretaker and grandparent (and sometimes all at once).

Psychologists tell us that that’s a good thing.  The ability to adapt to any given situation, to play many roles and successfully manage life’s complex demands is called being well adjusted.  At times we may feel intimidated by the number of obligations placed on us, but on the whole we learn how to balance them and how to keep the show going without too many slip-ups or missteps.  We get good at what we do, and we maintain a solid hold on who we are as we do so.

We learn the art of juggling life’s many roles from early on.  As soon as we are able, we explore our surroundings and figure out the limits of who we are and what we may do. Then, little by little, from role-play in worlds of make believe and fantasy, we turn to playing real roles in the real world.  For some, this role is thrust upon them.  The expectation is there, and, willy-nilly, we learn to fill it. For most of us, however, our talents and passions guide us.  Random ventures and various experiences attract our attention and call out to us to become involved, first as observers and then, participants. For some time, we test our abilities, learning to know our strengths and our weaknesses.  And then, we focus on those roles that matter the most to us, roles that challenge us, that reward us, and we let them define us.  We become our character.  And that become the lens through which we see ourselves, and through which others see us.

Each stage in life calls on us to play different roles, and at each stage our success is measured differently.  As children, we learn by emulating our heroes.  We want to be like people we like and admire, and we assume our identity one step at a time. At this stage in the game, reaching a specific goal in itself isn’t as important as the gradual steps we take to get there. Each success is celebrated, and one by one, like stepping stones, our accomplishments lead us on a path towards a promising future, towards a future where everything is possible and anything is within reach.

Later on, not so young or naïve any more, we graduate to being judged not on our potential, nor by the steps we take to get there, but rather on our performance. Life comes with a bag full of responsibilities, and our assessment depends on how we fulfill these. We are measured by ratings, by statistics, by how well we perform.  At annual reviews, our strengths and shortcomings are pointed out to us in clear detail. We are judged—and we judge ourselves—by results: how many points did we score, how many sales have we made this year, how many patients or clients have we seen or added to The Firm.  At this point, we do in fact become our resumes.  We list our accomplishments and awards, and we post them on the various social media, along with the profile picture that we think says the most about us.

For the larger part of our life, who we are fades into what we are. 

It’s easy to confuse one with the other.  The system is unforgiving; pressures and deadlines keep us constantly short-of-time during the day, and wide-awake at night.  The problem is, we spend so much time on fulfilling expectations, that there’s precious little time or strength left in us to learn anything new about ourselves or about the world we live in.  And so, as days turn into weeks and months into years, it’s easy to lose sense of who we really are.  We become our jobs.  We focus on polishing our glowing façade, paying little attention to what lies behind it.

But life doesn’t stop, and neither does our personal evolution.  Nobody stays the same for long.  Life events have their affect on us, and we change with time.  Slowly a gap begins to appear between how we see ourselves and how others see us, a gap that grows and widens, and in time turns into an abyss.  At that point it doesn’t take much for us to lose our footing.  Losing or changing a job, even retirement from a position we held for many years, may be enough to plunge us into a severe identity crisis with many different implications, both physical and emotional.

Of course, there are other reasons behind identity issues.  There is dissonance when the image by which others see us clashes with the way we see ourselves. When we realize that we are different from others by dint of our skin color, or the shape of our eyes; when we find ourselves part of a persecuted and shamed minority; when our body fails to match our gender perception; or when we don’t quite measure up to society’s standards of beauty, size, shape or weight.

At such times, “Who am I, anyway” becomes a troubling question.  It makes us both sad and angry. We struggle and flail, knowing that on the inside, we are really no different from anyone else.  Sometimes we try to hide our differences, to alter our outward appearance.  We try whatever it takes to somehow acculturate and assimilate, to be more like everyone else around us.  We can try laughing at the difference we perceive—poking fun at ourselves or, worse—much worse—mocking others.  Sometimes self-hate emerges, and with it also hatred for anyone who reminds us of what we see as our own flaws and shortcomings.

Yet somehow, none of these seem to solve the problem.  Inside us, the gap remains.  Even if only in our imagination, we remain aware that we are different.  That the inside us is different from the outer shell, that how we see ourselves doesn’t quite measure up to how others see us.

If only were some reset point, one that would even everything out, one that would bridge between the inside and the outside perceptions!  Something that would tell both us and the world, who we truly are.

But there actually is one.  Only it doesn’t work quite the way we might expect at first.  There is no magic trick, no pill to make us taller, more handsome, thinner, or smarter.  But embedded within each of us is the ability to span the gulf, to fill the gap, to extend the inside us until it matches the image we would like others to have of us.   

It might take some training, but it isn’t difficult.  But it does require that we measure ourselves on a different scale, against different standards.  Yes, it’s OK to have a list of our accomplishments; it’s OK to be successful at what we do; and a good profile picture is still worth a thousand words. But what we must do in addition to all that is to measure the immeasurable within us.

Measure the immeasurable.  What would that be?

In the Morning Blessings, every Jew is instructed to review a Talmudic passage called ‘Eilu d’varim  (“These mitzvot”). This prayer comprises 10 obligations, which the Rabbis say are of immeasurable worth.  That is, whose value is so great that the interest, the payback for fulfilling them, is there for us to enjoy now, today, tomorrow, and for the rest of our lives, “in this world.” Yet “the principle remains in the world to come.” More than enough for every human being! For all eternity!  It is this fountain that we must tap, this point system that increases our value a thousand times or more.

These mitzvot include honoring our parents, acting with kindness, visiting the sick, accompanying the dead to burial, making peace between people—and, above them all, the study of Torah, since it is the source of all these lessons and commandments.

Notice, however, that all these obligations are in fact what we owe one another, not God. And all of them can be summed up in three words:  kindness, compassion, and dignity.

How do you measure these concepts?  Obviously you can’t.  The value of a kind word surpasses its weight in gold or silver.  A gesture of compassion, a word that uplifts the spirit—these are truly immeasurable, and their effect is just as vast.  One smile leads to another; one kind deed leads to another, and peace is the ultimate reward.

This is the bridge that helps us span the gap between our inner selves and how others see us. ‘Eilu d’varim—these things, these sacred mitzvot, convey us, who we are, more than anything else we do.  In the end, our inner qualities and values become the traits that define us and by which the world knows us.     

In “A Chorus Line,” the actors nervously hand their resumes and headshots over to the director, hoping for a job.  

But tonight, at the start of our High Holy Days--Yamim nora-‘im, the Days of Awe—we are reminded that there is yet another Director, another Judge, one who sits above and beyond all things physical, who leafs through our lifeline and reviews everything we have done in the past year. At this annual review, however, we are judged not so much by the gold we’ve amassed, nor by how many projects we finished at work, but rather by the immeasurable good that we have done. 

A famous Chassidic story tells of the great master Rabbi Zussya, who lay crying on his deathbed. In amazement, his students asked him, “Rabbi, why are you crying?  With all the mitzvahs and good deeds you have done, surely your reward in heaven is awaiting for you!  “I am crying,” replied the rabbi, “because I am afraid that when I get to heaven, God will not ask me why I wasn’t more like Moses, great leader and teacher that he was; or more like King David, whose piety is famous the world over.  I am afraid that God will ask me, ‘Zussya, why weren’t you more like Zussya?”

Over the next few days and nights, let us resolve to be more of the person we know we can be, the best we can be.  With kindness and compassion as our guidelines, let us treat one another with the dignity each of us deserves, regardless of the differences between us.  Because the answer to the question “Who Am I” is always, “I am a Child of God.” And when we recognize that in in one another, that’s how others will see us too.

Kein y’hi ratzon.  May this be God’s will.  Amen.

L’shana Tova tikatveu—may we all be inscribed for a sweet, healthy, successful and peaceful year.

© 2016 by Boaz D. Heilman