Better, Not Best: A Sermon for Kol Nidrei 5780
Oct. 8, 2019
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
I’ve always loved books and reading. Even as a child growing up in Israel, I loved walking over to a nearby bookstore and browsing up and down the aisles. Luckily, the town’s library also had a large selection that made me a repeat customer, sometimes several times a week. But some of the best books of all I found much closer—in the bookcase at my own childhood home. There I found a beautiful edition of the Bible that I treasured for many years, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Jewish folk tales told by I.L. Peretz, the complete writings of Sholom Aleichem, and many other classics. Among my favorites, however, a book that I kept returning to time after time, was a collection of Bible illustrations by the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré.
Doré’s woodcut prints, vivid and powerful, caught my imagination, and I would delve for long periods of time into both the mood and detail of each picture.
One of my favorite illustrations was of the Tower of Babel.
In the Bible, the story of the Tower of Babel, though cleverly told, is short and deceptively simple. In it, as you might remember, the people of ancient Babylon intend to build a tower so tall and enormous that its top would reach the heavens. Yet, for some unexplained reason, God is not pleased with this endeavor. God therefore confounds the builders’ speech so that they can’t understand one another. Consequently they abandon their tasks, and the work of building the tower is left unfinished.
This outwardly simple story, however, raises a question that has troubled readers ever since. What exactly did these ancient builders do that was so wrong? As the Torah tells it, they planned to build a tower so high that its rosh, its head or top, would be in the heavens. With this tall structure they wanted to create “a name” for themselves. And what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t the Bible itself say that “a good name is better than good oil?”
But was “a good name” the true intention of these ancient builders? Or, as most commentators see it, was their intent actually to stage a rebellion against God? According to these early commentaries, the Babylonians’ proposed not only to make a name for themselves, but actually to remove God’s name, a name written all over Creation, and replace it with their own.
Two morals were drawn from this story. One was that human beings must submit themselves completely to God’s will and never doubt or question it.
Such complete obedience, however, is beyond me, and I’m not sure that even Abraham, our earliest Patriarch, would approve of such an unquestioning and unforgiving faith.
In the Midrash, however, a story is told that leads us to a somewhat different understanding of the sin of the builders of the Tower of Babel.
In those days there were no huge cranes such as the ones used today to build skyscrapers. All the work then was done by hand, by slaves who were often hurt and maimed by the exhausting and hard labor they were forced to perform. As the Tower of Babel grew taller and taller, hauling stones up to the top became an ever-greater challenge. Once, the Midrash tells, a stone fell and killed a worker on the ground, causing an outburst of grief and mourning. The crying, however, wasn’t over the tragic loss of life. Rather, it was because now the stone would have to be hoisted all the way up again. The taskmasters were brutal, continues the midrash, sparing no one, not the sick and weak, not even women in labor. It was this, their hard-heartedness and cruelty, that angered God.
I like this Midrash, because, as seen through the Rabbis’ eyes, the story of the Tower of Babel becomes more than just a cautionary tale in which God demands complete submission. At the very heart of this Midrash one can find Judaism’s vision of a just and moral universe, one in which each of us has a role to play, where every one of us matters, where each of our actions bears fruit and consequences.
It is this midrash, and the lesson that it teaches us, which makes Yom Kippur—a day of forgiveness, atonement and redemption—possible.
The sin of the ancient Babylonians was the sin of supreme arrogance. They wished to be so powerful that they could live free from fear from punishment and consequence. They dreamed of—and began to build for themselves— a life unencumbered by moral judgment, a life whose guiding principle was unbound desire and indulgence, a life where pride and arrogance, not justice and compassion, reign supreme.
Yom Kippur, on the other hand, is all about consequences. Yom Kippur is a day of reckoning, a day when our actions and behavior are judged in the heavenly court and consequences are meted out. As the powerful prayer Unetane Tokef reminds us—“who shall live and who shall die”—each according to his or her own deeds.
But Yom Kippur isn’t only about punishment. It’s also about forgiveness and Redemption, the opportunity to cleanse our record and begin again, only now with more humility, with more experience, with greater wisdom.
Redemption doesn’t happen automatically. It’s a process, a gradual series of steps that must be followed. The prayerbook speaks of Tefillah (prayer), Teshuva (repentance) and Tzedakkah (acts of righteousness) as the three steps leading to forgiveness. Another way of looking at the process would have us suppose that there are three “R’s” in Redemption, each “R” representing a rung in the ladder of Redemption that we must climb.
The first “R” is for Recognition.
While often enough we know when we’ve hurt someone, it isn’t always obvious or clear. We may be too hurried, or too proud, to notice. Sometimes the other person might harbor his or her hurt deep inside, so that we don’t know what we might have said or done to offend. And yet it’s important to own the moment, to recognize that, knowingly or not, we indeed offended, caused hurt or injury. Sometimes we realize this ourselves; at other times, we need to be alerted or reminded by someone else. In fact, the Torah makes this a commandment: “Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt” (Lev. 19:17). We need to let one another know when we have wronged someone. We need to know when we’ve caused pain.
Once we have Recognized and become aware of the wrong we had done, the next step is to do something about it, to respond. The next “R” then is for Response. Say something of comfort to the person you’ve hurt.
I love it when politicians, caught in a lie or a smear, claim that their words were taken “out of context.” I love it when, instead of apologizing, they claim to have been misunderstood. Or, better yet, when they shift the blame to someone else. If Recognition, the first “R” in Redemption, is difficult, apparently the second “R,” Response, the act of simply saying “I’m sorry,” is twice as hard. Apologizing is humbling and embarrassing. It’s admitting that we can be wrong. For the arrogant among us, it’s like taking the air out of our tires. For a bully, it’s even more difficult, because saying I’m sorry means undoing his or her whole psychological makeup. You aren’t born a bully; you grow into one; and undoing that often takes years of therapy and hard work.
Yet if we are looking for Redemption, for a chance to rehabilitate ourselves, to re-create ourselves as honest and valuable members of society, Response, simply saying these three words, “I am sorry,” is essential. Apologize for the pain you may have caused, intentionally or not. Never underestimate the power of a word spoken, or a word not spoken, to cause hurt. Never dismiss a wrong or put it out of mind. Pain can linger, sometimes even for years. Respond to it. Say “I’m sorry.” The words go a long way towards healing the hurt.
One of the most naïve lines that ever circulated in pop culture comes from the book and later the movie, Love Story: “Love means never having to say you are sorry.” Actually, no; love means exactly the opposite. Love doesn’t mean you never hurt one another. In fact, sometimes we hurt the very people we love the most—not always because we mean to, but because they are there; not because they deserve it, but because they are available and vulnerable. Because we’re afraid or unable to express our anger to our boss or whoever else we are really mad at. And so we hurt the one we love. At such moments, love very much means having to say, “I am sorry.” This is how you reach the next rung, the 2nd “R” in Redemption, Response. Make it count: Take responsibility and Respond with kindness, respond with love, respond with humility.
The third “R” is for Repair. And this may yet be the hardest step of all. Sometimes there’s a penalty to pay, but that’s not all there is to it. Repair is hard work, the kind that’s done not for any selfish reason but rather to benefit someone else. It may take a short time, or an entire lifetime to complete. Sometimes the work is never finished, yet we are not excused from trying and doing our best.
Some wrongs can never be mended—and oh! how sad it is when a person we’ve hurt is gone, and with them, also the opportunity to make things better and whole again. You want to say “I’m sorry” a hundred times, but there’s no one there to hear it. There are moments in my life that I still cannot recall without cringing in shame. Times when I slighted someone, called them by a name or a slur that I regret uttering. There were times when I ignored someone because acknowledging them would mean owning up to my own fear and insecurity. Fortunately, the principle of tikkun olam, repair of the universe, teaches us that we can fix some things by paying forward, by making life better for others; and not least, by mending what’s broken inside ourselves so that we never revert, and never repeat our past behavior.
Sometimes that’s the best we can do.
And that’s where Yom Kippur comes into our lives. As the Day of Atonement directs us to ask pardon from others, so it teaches us to forgive ourselves. In the end, Redemption means to recognize our role in the larger world, to accept the fact that no one is above reproach; that all our actions have consequences. Yom Kippur teaches us that repair is possible. We can pick up the broken pieces and make the world whole again, starting with ourselves.
Yom Kippur is the opposite of the Tower of Babel. It’s all about morality and responsibility, not arrogance and superiority. It’s about the quest to be better, not best. Through the process of Prayer, Repentance and Acts of Lovingkindness, and along with our own 3 “R’s”—Recognition, Response, and Repair—Yom Kippur offers us a second chance, a golden opportunity to start off with a clean slate, to fix things, to right our wrongs and do things better this time around.
May our prayers and pleas on this Yom Kippur reach the Heavens—not by way of pride and arrogance, but rather carried aloft on the wings of our humble prayers and our remorseful spirit. May our acts of repentance and redemption be acceptable in God’s eyes; and may we all be inscribed in the Book of Life for a year of health, happiness and love. L’shana tova tikateivu v’teichatemu.
Kein y’hi ratzon, may this be God’s will.
© 2016 by Boaz D. Heilman
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