Sermons

Yom Kippur 5786

Some Jerry Seinfeld:

“According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway. Because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.”

Isn’t that lovely? Of course it's not true, it's a myth stemming from early 20th-century aerodynamic calculations that got some pretty important details about how their wings work wrong.

But it's not untrue, bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.

Other humans however, care quite a lot. 

One of the hallmarks of progressive Judaism is its rationalism, its embrace of the empirical and belief that our religious world and our scientific world can be reconciled. It’s this attachment to rationalism that allows me to happily call myself a religious person without feeling like I've confessed to an untethered belief in flying spaghetti monsters.
But being rational, logical, reason-filled people also comes with a challenge for us. Reasons can quickly mount up, and explanations of how things work can start to sound like fate: the systems are too big, the trends too strong, the history too heavy.  

We’d call it realism, an honest appraisal of where we stand, but over the past year I’ve started to wonder if it's not realism at all, maybe it's something else.

Take yourself on a little thought experiment - both based on conversations I regularly have with members- how do you make decisions about your own environmental footprint? Do you fly? I do. Do I know that stopping flying is one of the biggest things I can do to reduce my environmental footprint? Yes. Do I do that? No. Why? Do you drive? Use single use plastics? Does any of that even matter when the world's biggest polluters are producing environmental damage at a rate none of our personal choices can outpace?

What about the situation in the Middle East? Do any of us actually think that the government of the state of Israel cares what a progressive rabbi or her synagogue members in London think if the prime minister and his government pay no heed to hundreds of thousands of protestors on their own streets? Do many of us have strong feelings in all kinds of directions? Do any of us really feel like we have any power or agency we’d like to have to actually make any kind of difference? 

Rationally, logically, once you appraise all the facts? Realistically? 

Sorry, I realise this sounds a little more depressing than I promise you it will be. Because I want to ask this Yom Kippur, is this kind of thinking realism, or is it something else? Is it fatalism? 

Where can our attempts at looking at our world through clear and rational eyes lead us into the opposite places to the ones we might want to go to? 

In the face of frustratingly glaring realities, there is also often a stubborn, maybe even sometimes slightly embarrassing part of us that wants to keep moving anyway. Maybe you noticed it in yourself as I was talking. 

I don’t think it's because we think we can out-fly physics, but rather because we suspect life asks for more than capitulation to what seems most sensible or logical.

Yom Kippur is in many ways an anti-fatalist feature of our tradition, it comes along and it tells us to look reality as we know it right now in the face, and make a decision to change course. It tells us nothing is ever fixed, people can make teshuva right till the moment of their death.

This morning was the fourth time in my rabbinate and my fifth experience in the years that I've been leading services that I've had to make an announcement like the one I made this morning to a room full of children and their parents -all under the age of seven, some of them just weeks old.

Being in Jewish life today means knowing that some nightmares things are very real. It means knowing that the worst of human nature is really truly every bit as bad as we fear. And it means knowing that it's far easier to come by in our neighborhoods than any of us would like.

Being Jewish in this moment also means making a daily choice to do Davka, to act and to define ourselves otherwise.

We talked downstairs about Yom Kippur and its book of life and our invitation to see ourselves as authors and to not hand the pen to anyone who would choose to write our story for us.

Yes, it's on us to accept and understand reality, to understand what we're given and be open-eyed to what we are living with. But acceptance is not the same as surrender.

It's easy and understandable that we may confuse the two. Acceptance is part of our toolbox of emotionally healthy responses to the world’s difficulties: there are moments when we need to come to terms with the fact that some decrees stand, some losses are real and some forces are bigger than us. Surrender is what happens when we decide those realities are an end point, and a fixed part of the fabric of our world. 

Lest you think that this is an anti-intellectual tirade, it's worth reminding ourselves that this is also how scientific thinking works - truths are provisional, our best explanations stand only until they can be replaced by better ones.
All of this matters especially for those of us who wear our rationality and our attachment to facts like a badge of identity - perhaps especially as a response to our post-truth world. I’m not suggesting a leap into denial, but instead a decision to not give up on the things that feel important and worth fighting for even when it doesn’t quite make sense - when the values are clear but the way to bring them into being is not. Viktor Frankl would call it the last freedom: the stance we take in circumstances we cannot control. 

Things we can see and hold and describe are helpful for many people, they act as anchors that nobody can disagree with. You have the house, the job, the car, the family. It’s all good. 

Objective markers of security have their place, but you don’t need me to tell you they aren’t the guarantors of happiness, health, and some of the more ineffable markers of life actually being good, things actually being ok, that we think they are. 

Sometimes it takes a close to home example to expose the truth that certainties on larger scales are also not that sure- almost every dramatic innovation or upheaval in our world to date has involved the uprooting of something that was hitherto perceived to be solid, fixed and unchangeable. Mountains move, dictators fall, and entire new ways of understanding the universe emerge to change the whole shape of our earth. There is nothing that is fixed in our world.

My favourite book in our tradition is the book of ecclesiastes, kohelet, that we’ll read during sukkot. 
Kohelet is the most realistic - some would even say nihilistic- voice in our tradition. His book is a meandering pursuit of meaning where he chases all the things that he thinks will give him what he needs in his life - objective markers of a good life we might call them.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, who dedicated much time to exploring life and its meaning after the death of his son at just 14, wrote this of Kohelet's search:

Kohelt’s conclusion in the face of all he has learnt is:

“Don’t give up on life. Give up on logic. Listen to that voice inside you which prompted you to ask the question in the first place. If logic tells you that in the long run, nothing makes a difference because we all die and disappear, then don’t live in the long run. Instead of brooding over the fact that nothing lasts, accept that as one of the truths of life, and learn to find meaning and purpose in the transitory, in the joys that fade. Learn to savor the moment, even if it does not last forever. In fact, learn to savor it because it is only a moment and will not last. Moments of our lives can be eternal without being everlasting.”

Kohelet says “Go, eat your bread with joy,” - not because the world is stable or the markets are up, but because to bless the bread on your table with the people you love is to refuse to outsource the meaning of your days to the mood of the age. 

Leah Goldberg, one of the great modern Hebrew poets wrote only one novel And This Is the Light - the first ever novel by a woman in the modern Hebrew language. It’s set in a small Lithuanian town in the summer of 1931. Nora, its protagonist, is twenty years old, back from university in Berlin. 

She’s trying to decide what kind of life she will live, and grappling with the feeling that there are things that have already fixed her life in place- illness, shame, inherited pain. Like Harold Kushner, her family history is significant, and her fear of falling into the same spiral of mental illness as her father looms large.

Towards the end of the book she speaks these words that have this amazing hunger about them. She echoes the sentiment set before us in our torah reading this morning. ‘Choose life’.

“אֲנִי רוֹצָה לִחְיוֹת - I want to live.

I want to live all the many days before me, down to the last one, to the end! 

...The days to come, the long string of days called life, are mine. I’ll dig into them with my nails and I won’t let go of them…

וַאֲנַחְנוּ נִחְיֶה And we will live,

אֲנִי אֶחְיֶה,I will live,

אֲנִי אֶחְיֶה, אֶחְיֶה וְאוֹהֵבֶת אֶת הַחַיִּים הָאֵלֶּהI will live and love this life.

Love it with its ugliness, its disease, its dread – and I won’t go out of my mind. I want to live. I want to live the life of a person who can breathe,

לִחְיוֹת בָּאוֹר live in the light,

in the light of the days to come. And this is the light.

And this is the light that will go on shining. And this is the light.”

Nora stakes her claim on her future but because what she knows of the world’s limits and reality gives her this resolute determination to find a way to make things work. Her experience of life's darkness means she knows the shadows that make the light and its promise even clearer. She’s a realist, but she’s not a fatalist.

Reading her words makes me ask how we develop a repertoire of techniques that keep us from surrendering our humanity or our agency to the very real forces that would flatten it. How do we stay connected to reality without giving in to fatalism? 

Kohelet’s list is beautifully ordinary: eat with joy; dress with care; love well; do your work. It helps us to fall back in love with the life that we might want to fight for. Leah Goldberg’s is more visceral: dig your nails in and do not let go of what is yours, don’t let others write your story or take away sacred moments. Our liturgy adds three more: teshuva, tefilah, tzedakah, return, pray, give.

If I could leave you with anything as we enter a new year in a world changing faster than ever and in which we can feel extremely small and very powerless and where fundamental tenets of civilised life like democracy and the value of life feel in jeopardy,  it would be this:

The earth is still round, don't give up on physics. Realism is ok, but when it spills over into fatalistic thinking it hands over any agency we might have, agency that the world might need us to use. 

Fatalism always aids those who benefit from the status quo remaining unchanged. It's not just the wisdom in that old adage that ‘all it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing’, it's also embedded in the hope placed in us on this day of atonement.

I don’t have answers to many or really any of our world’s biggest challenges at my fingertips and I know that’s true for many of us, but I also know that we cannot surrender, we cannot crown the forces of destruction in our world. Because their success relies on our decision to give away whatever  power we do have, whatever role we could play. We need to be realistic, and then be strategic, be scientific!

‘Choose life’ says the Torah. I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, whatever reality you face, so that you and your children may live.