From Nobody To Somebody
Sermon For Rosh Hashanah 5780
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
Congregation B’nai Torah Westminster, Colorado
Sept. 30, 2019
It is the evening of Kol Nidrei, the most awesome night of the year. The entire congregation is silent as everyone awaits the beginning of the service. The cantor clears his throat once and again, but his beautiful voice, for which he is deservedly famous, does not emerge. He seems agitated and anxious. The rabbi looks at him expectantly. “Nu? Shall we start?” Suddenly, overcome by emotion, the cantor runs to the Holy Ark, prostrates himself and cries out, “O Master of the Universe! I cannot do this! I am a total sinner, a nothing! I am unworthy of leading your congregation in prayer!”
Visibly shaken and overwhelmed, the rabbi likewise runs to the Holy Ark and prostrates himself next to the cantor. “O God! Forgive me, I too am a sinner, dust and ashes, unworthy to stand before you!”
Just then, the shammes, the caretaker of the synagogue, jumps up from his seat in the last row of the shul, runs up to the Ark and prostrates himself next to the rabbi and cantor. “O God,” the shames wails, “I am a nobody, unworthy, nothing before you!”
“Ach,” groans the rabbi as he nudges the cantor and quietly remarks to him, “Look who thinks he’s a nobody!”
This wonderful example of Jewish humor is actually filled with truth. We laugh because we recognize ourselves in it. In each one of us lies a similar paradox. Despite the typically brave and even over-confident front we present to the outside world, most of us view ourselves with nearly equal measures of both pride and humility. We are all sure enough of ourselves to stay the path we’ve chosen; but alongside our self-assurance, hidden from public view, we also find nagging doubts, and the troubling awareness of our utter insignificance in the larger scheme of things.
Usually, we manage to balance the two views, but every once in a while, we find ourselves overcome by one more than the other. For me, it’s usually at night that my bravado disappears, and is replaced instead by doubt and uncertainty.
I admit that, especially during the High Holy Days season, I sense my doubts much more than my certainty. The start of a new year always brings about worries and concerns. How much more so for me this year than at past seasons, as I begin a new decade in my life, start a new chapter in a new part of the country, and face a new congregation!
But it’s even more than that. Standing on the bimah, I am deeply aware of my own limitations. As rabbi, I am entrusted with a heavy responsibility: I need to pray not only for myself, nor even just for my family. An entire community is looking up to me, expecting assurance that everything will be OK this year; that our prayers will be heard; that strength and health will be there for us and our loved ones again this year. A rabbi is supposed to do more than just hear the pleas of the congregation. A rabbi is expected to be a conduit between the people and our God—not only to deliver God’s message (or at least my take on it), but also to lift our prayers and lay them, as it were, at the feet of the Creator of the Universe.
Deep in my heart, I feel woefully inadequate to fulfill this charge.
And how often does it happen that, in conversation with someone, a person will heave a deep sigh and sadly admit to me that he or she isn’t a good Jew. “I rarely go to synagogue,” they acknowledge. Or, “I can’t read Hebrew anymore, it’s been so long since my bar mitzvah.” Still another person might say, in a voice hushed by shame and guilt, “I’ve been through so much in my life, there’s so much evil in the world, rabbi, I can’t believe in God’s grace and goodness anymore.”
My first task then is to assure them that I don’t judge them. It isn’t up to me to decide who’s a good Jew and who isn’t. My next reaction is, “But you are here now; you came here to speak with me, to express your feelings; to see if you can be given another chance to rise to the potential you once felt you had. Isn’t that what prayer is?”
I know I speak for some of you here today: Those of you who rarely go to temple, yet are here today; those of you who can’t read Hebrew anymore—or never learned—yet, awkward as it may feel, hold your prayer books in your hands and try to sense the holiness that they contain.
Yes, you are here today. That’s the amazing thing. That despite the doubts and uncertainties, despite the endless arguments back and forth, year after year you return.
Whether you know it or not, your presence here today speaks volumes.
There is a word in Hebrew, Hineini, the formal response to hearing your name called. Hineini: “Behold, I am here!” In the Garden of Eden, after eating of the apple, Adam hears God’s voice calling out to him, but he is silent. He hides in fear and shame. He cannot respond. Abraham, on the other hand, is not afraid to reply Hineini, not when God is about to try him with the most painful test of all, commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac. Nor does Abraham falter later, as he climbs Mt. Moriah, a sharp knife in one hand and the hand of his sweet son Isaac in the other. “Avi! My Father,” Abraham hears the boy’s call. Fortifying himself against the pain he feels within his heart, the father responds, Hineini v’ni, “Here am I, my beloved son.” I am here with you, I am here for you. Do not be afraid, my son.
Centuries later, the prophet Isaiah, when he hears God’s call, despite being painfully aware of his all-too-human flaws and failings, agrees to be God’s messenger. “Hineini,” he declares, “Here am I! Send me!”
It is no casual response, “hineini.” It takes courage to step up. It takes heroism to overlooks the dangers that lie ahead and yet, despite it all, choose to do the right thing. For Abraham, it’s the sorrow and dread of losing his beloved son, Isaac. For Isaac, it’s the fear of facing the unknowable will of God. For the prophet Isaiah,
what he so profoundly understood, yet chose to disregard, was that being God’s messenger is inescapably linked with danger, suffering and persecution.
Maybe that’s why so many of us remain silent and hidden, keeping our Jewish identity under wraps. We are all-too-aware of the dangers. Our long history has taught us that there’s security in hiding. It’s easier, it’s safer, to blend in, to disappear into the crowd.
For some of us, even if as children we did go to religious school, our innocent faith, based on tales of miracles and wonders, has been shaken by too many actual, real-life events, by too many unanswered questions. The images we see almost daily, of undeserved suffering; of pain inflicted on the innocent; the misery of refugees—men, women and children fleeing violence and deprivation; the very injustice of life itself! These appear to be in direct contradiction to the image of a loving, all-powerful and gracious God that we grew up with.
As a young child growing up in Israel in the 1950’s, almost every grownup I knew was a Holocaust survivor. Not surprisingly, few of them ever went to synagogue, not even on the High Holy Days. I never asked them why. It’s as though I instinctively knew that the answer was far too complicated, too painful to explain. It was only much later that I began to understand why. To survive the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka and yet to praise the glory and mercy of God seemed hypocritical to them.
To step up and say “Hineini!” to a God whose existence they bitterly questioned was to be untrue to themselves. To sanctify a God whose compassion and might seemed more fairy tale than actual fact, was to deny the blunt reality of the personal hell that each of them lived through.
And yet, there were those who did persist in their faith. I remember one Rosh Hashanah—I must have been seven or eight years old. I wanted to hear the shofar blown, and I actually did find my way into a synagogue. The shul was crowded. Not a seat was to be found. Men were standing and swaying, their tallit fringes swaying from side to side, intoning prayers with eyes shut to the world around them, through lips that barely parted, so that rather than any distinct speech, what I heard was a hum that rose and fell like a wave in the ocean. Huddled against each other, there was little enough air or space for me to walk through. Though I left soon—I don’t think I stayed long enough to actually hear the shofar—I still remember that experience. I have recalled and thought about it often. I could almost understand what led me there—it was curiosity, and perhaps something more. But what was it that drove them there in such numbers, I wondered. What was the force that seemed to take hold of their bodies and souls and make them sway like that, cry like that, with such intensity and power?
Only much later did I begin to understand. Their presence, their prayers, their yearning to feel the holiness of the day, called out: Hineini. Here I am. Despite it all, I AM HERE!
Unexplainable, there’s a thread that runs through all of us. Aware of it or not, when it tugs, we respond.
Not all of us respond through prayer or formal services. In the 1960’s, at the height of the civil rights movement in America, fully half of those who came from all over the United States to Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi to help African Americans find their voice and register to vote, were Jews. No matter that there was great danger in what they did, they did so anyway as a matter of civic duty. Or so they thought. Years later, in retrospect, many of them came to understand that they were actually responding to the call for social justice inherent in Judaism; that they were following in the footsteps of the prophet Isaiah, whose dream was to bring justice to all humanity and to give the downtrodden faith and hope.
Like Isaiah, these modern-day prophets heard the call, and they responded. They went because they were Jewish and because freeing the captives is a great mitzvah that our people have always prized and practiced.
In recent years, I have also seen a huge surge in the number of people going to Israel. They go as immigrants—making Aliyah; or as tourists; on a mission with some Jewish organization; on Birthright trips; or as volunteers stepping up to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Like our Biblical patriarch Jacob, who had fled in fear of his brother Esau’s murderous and jealous rage, yet hearing and obeying God’s call to return home, they too are heeding God’s call to come home, to return to their roots, to take their place in the history of our people in the most direct and personal way possible. Stuffing scraps of paper inscribed with prayers into gaps between the ancient stones of the Western Wall, planting trees on barren mountains, climbing Masada, or learning to use an M-16, with their presence they proclaim, “Hineini, I am here. I have returned.”
Years ago, a great shofar was sounded, a call that reverberated around the world. We are here today because so many thousands of years later, we still hear the echo of that first shofar. Like the child who found his way into the synagogue so many years ago, we are here today, hoping to reconnect with that mysterious tug within our hearts; to ask questions and seek answers; perhaps to hear a familiar melody, or perhaps just to say a few Hebrew words that have not yet faded from our memory.
Today, each of us, in our own unique way, says hineini, “here I am!” Our response empowers us to overcome our doubts, to fill us with confidence. Hineini may only be a word, but it has the power to turn us from a nobody, into a somebody. Even as hineini humbles the most proud among us, so it empowers us, turning us from a speck of meaningless dust into a fully covenanted partner with God, engaged in the sacred and ongoing work of Creation.
May our presence here today strengthen us in our resolve to make a difference—if not in the universe, then at least in our own little corner of it. This year, we pray to be counted among our people: to be there for one another; to help maintain our synagogue and our community; and to be ready to respond with all our heart, mind and soul whenever we hear our name called out: Hineini! Here I am!
May this New Year bring us blessings of health, love and joy. May we find satisfaction and fulfillment at our workplace and in our homes. Adonai oz l’amo yitein, Adonai y’varech et amo ba-shalom; May God bless us all with strength and peace.
L’shana tova tikateivu—May we all be inscribed for a good New Year. Amen.
© 2019 by Boaz D. Heilman
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