"DEAR MARY AND SUZANNE . . . . ON WINNING AND LOSING"

January 3, 2003

Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn

Temple Sinai

New Orleans, Louisiana

My dear Mary and Suzanne,

We ordinary citizens are enormously relieved that the campaign's over. Certainly no one misses those every three minute television attack ads-especially yours, Suzanne. Who in the world convinced you to run those? Was it the White House's Carl Rove or was it your own dark side that they reflected? Of course we understand how it is in the fury of the campaign when the entire nation looks on in interest.

When we are frantically trying to do everything to win, sometimes we allow ourselves and our advisors to take on a cutthroat persona, going so far as to even question one's opponent's loyalty to their faith.

I suppose, sometimes when desperate to win, people do create euphemisms like "Louisiana values" and then boast that only they defined have a monopoly upon them.

Suzanne, had you wound up with the most votes or not, had you gone on to Washington as our United States Senator or, as the case proved to be, simply been left to stay here in Louisiana to fantasize about becoming the next governor, no matter-for me you would have become the loser, because of your questionable tactics.

Louisiana values are not monolithic-they are pluralistic and every Louisiana family and citizen has a private take on them. I have my own Louisiana values, just as you have yours. And my values are just as authoritative and genuine as yours, whether considering what takes place in the privacy of one's bedroom or how much to spend per square yard on the wallpaper covering one's dining room.

Anyway, Mary and Suzanne, I really have a bigger picture to address on this issue of winning and losing, and I really hope you'll both stick around and listen to the rest. Like chicken soup, it couldn't hurt!

I want us all to think about this. Was there a greater loser in the Hebrew Bible than Moses? He was well-ensconced in the Royal Palace of Pharaoh. Here was a fellow who drove a Lexus chariot, who was a graduate of the Cairo Harvard. He held post-grad degrees in the law and business administration and enjoyed the perfect portfolio for big things in the palace of the future. And yet he gave it all up in that moment of passion when he rescued that Hebrew slave and killed the Egyptian taskmaster. He couldn't hide from his true identity nor from his God Who had called him from a burning thorn bush to become the liberator of the Hebrew people.

Nothing but humiliation follows that point. He was embarrassed before Pharaoh. God hardened Pharaoh's heart as each succeeding plague only made their cause of freedom less certain. But then it happens; the death of the first born, even Pharaoh's, and the Hebrews were urged to leave and that's when Moses' real trouble began. He had to lead this contentious and sour people, trying to teach them what it meant to be loyal to God's covenant and to open their eyes to the possibility of freedom, but they were slow learners. Remember the nasty business of the golden calf?

From one catastrophe to the next, from one temper tantrum to the other, these former slaves never stopped their doubting and their kvetching about what they needed to eat and drink. Now let's cut to the end of the Torah: one could wonder--is Moses a winner or a loser? After all he's done, after all the sacrifices he has made, and the abuse he has withstood, he is denied the privilege to enter the Promised Land and completing his assigned task!

It seems to me that to lose is fundamentally not to be in control of what is vitally important to you. It is to run into walls that will not move. To lose is to experience limitation, and transience, and frustration. Like it or not, I still believe that life makes losers of us all. No one wins every battle, so friends, the number one question then becomes, what kind of losers are we going to be?

I.

It seems to me (are you still listening, Suzanne and Mary?) that, believe it or not, two things then need to be said. And the first is this: in the final analysis, there is a freedom to be learned from losing.

Moses sensed it, when he finally accepted his fate. He began a long series of farewell letters to his people, in a much more relaxed, accepting and forgiving tone. Moses reviewed where they had been and how far they had come. And he seemed to enjoy giving advice to those who would lead the people beyond the Jordan, those who would replace him, Joshua in particular.

Remember, too, the story of Zorba the Greek? There was a man who invested his entire resources in an untried invention to bring timber down a mountainside. The whole village turned out to watch, but anticipation turned into gloom as the logs collapsed and the expensive plan came to nothing.

Oh, so dejected man, this man whose money has been lost, pondered leaving the village in utter shame. But Zorba's words to him have calculating impact:

Boss man, I've never loved a man as I love you, but there's one thing you lack-the little madness to be free.

And Zorba winds up teaching the man to dance, right there on the site of his greatest failure. Zorba underscores how life is not measured by what happens to us, but by how we react to that which happens. Defeat does not destroy the vitality and promise of life; resignation does that.

Well, for each of us there comes a failure and to transcend it, we need that "little madness to be free." We need to forsake resignation. Says Kipling, we reach adulthood only when we can

meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.

II.

There is a second observation that perhaps we ought to make on winning and losing and it is this. If there is freedom, there is also strength to be harnessed out of our losing. Read the Torah and notice that Moses' most effective and powerful ministry transpires after his fate has been sealed and his leadership was clearly lame duck. Suddenly, as the elder statesman he is listened to and respected. It even (I'm ashamed to mention the name with Moses, but it even worked with Nixon!) Says Ernest Hemingway in a famous observation:

The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places.

I've always loved this verse of Robert Browning Hamilton because I think it offers, no-I know it offers tremendous insight into the difference which winning and losing can make on our lives over the long haul.

I walked a mile with pleasure,
She chattered all the way,
But left me none the wiser for
All she had to say.

I walked a mile with sorrow,
And ne'er a word said she,
But oh the things I learned from her
When sorrow walked with me.

So you see, there really is strength, there really is lasting power and faith to be harnessed out of our loss.

I was more than a little surprised a couple of days ago when, over at the Poydras Home where my mother now lives, the residents there were asked to indicate their favorites---their favorite food and book and movie and sport. Finally, they were asked who their favorite historical figure was.  Abraham Lincoln.  Clearly, with their canes, wheelchairs, and walkers, these fifty mostly Southern matrons most closely women related to a Yankee who knew all about the losses of life.

Bankruptcy, a broken engagement, an unhappy marriage, the death of two children, two unsuccessful campaigns for the House of Representatives and two for the Senate. He delivered a brilliant speech to an indifferent audience, he was a man despised by at least half his country. And finally, he was murdered by a white supremacist hate-filled entertainment celebrity, only four days after his finest hour, Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse:  Abe Lincoln.

Lincoln's life opens our eyes to understand that failure can always be a teacher and one of life's greatest assets. Few of our heroes and truly greats are other than intimate experts with the subject of losing. But you don't have to be a Lincoln! God makes precious few with such grandeur of character.

Now I'm certain that some of you who are here tonight could step up here and testify as to what you have learned from the experience of loss or from the threat of it.

• There are those whose marriages have been beset with problems and whose partners have learned from their failure and the two of you have gone on to become all the stronger. A husband recently assured his wife: "I've taken you safely through all the rough spots of life, haven't I?" To which his wife replied: "Yes indeed. I don't believe you've missed a one of them!"

• And there are businesses which are threatening to fail but which only need to be tweaked with a new idea and a steady nerve. There are those, too, whose businesses have failed and they have still held their heads tall and proud and have begun all over again and have managed to become hugely successful.

• Interpersonal conflicts between children and parents or between sibling and sibling have often turned families into armed camps. What a waste and tragedy! Here, too, new starts are possible. Calls can be made to end arguments and create truces. Egos can be tempered, counselors may be consulted and at last, resorting good sense, bad history can be buried once and for all.

Yes, life makes losers of us all. It really does. There are experts here on loss who have heroically persevered! I saw a cartoon of a cemetery monument featuring the statue of a little round-shouldered, forsaken man standing at its top in futility with his hands in his pockets and underneath the statue these words were carved:

Wayne Wallinggast
Had it-Lost it.

Well, even if we're at the top of our "game," so to speak, the passing of the years will inevitably diminish our ability and, having had it-we'll lose it, whatever "it" happens to be: preaching, teaching, healing, lawyering, selling, singing, driving, performing on stage, golfing, making a dinner, or making love.

Listen, Suzanne and Mary, and all of the rest of us. Here's the final point:

Perhaps the only real winners in life are those of whom it can be said: "They were faithful to the highest they knew."

So what shall we do then, we who are destined to become losers at some future point? Well, I think as Moses watched while the Children of Israel made their preparations to proceed across the Jordan to the Promised Land, old Moses' might have urged them-and I believe as he would urge us today-to embrace one another all the more, men and women, generation beside generation, young and old, stranger and kin-bravely affirming in the poet's words:

Let us gather what strength we have,
What confidence and valor,
That our small victories may end in triumph,
And the world awaited, be a world attained.

Amen.