“A JEWISH MAKEOVER”
Selichot Sermonette 5764
September 11, 2004
Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana
From our earliest days we are beset with questions. It’s just a
part of life, and its how we grow and learn about the world and our
place in it. Do you remember some of those first questions you
and I were asked? With the utmost of happy expectation, years and
years later we then posed those same questions of our own little
ones. Let’s see if you’re still able to answer them:
What sound does the cow make?.... Moo
What does the dog say?.... Ruff
What does the sheep say?.... Baah
Well, clearly your parents did a fine job with each one of you!
Then, you know, what happens? Life brings us
to somewhat tougher questions: Do we know our colors? Have
we mastered the shapes- circles, squares, triangles and
rectangles? Then, of course, there’s always that alphabet song
and the ordeal of numbers.
What comes before seven and what comes after 10?
The big day finally arrives when we are actually
able to spell and write our names. Of course, today, because of
educational television and our hyper-anal parents who insist on
registering their embryonic future infants in competitive college prep
preschools, today’s students are way ahead of where you and I were at
such tender ages.
Now, it doesn’t take all that long before all of
these basic questions begin to be transformed in awesome
complexity. But, (and here’s the change), by this time it is the
child who is the interrogator and the befuddled parents who are left to
either Google it or fake it!
Why is the sky blue?
How old is Mars anyway?
What did kill the Dinosaurs and when did they die?
How big is space and where is God in it?
Children’s letters to God and their questions about
the universe are the subject of any number of cute volumes. While
we are amused by the things which our children ask about God, we still
feel somewhat haunted deep inside, by how little we “grownups” actually
understand and know with a certainty. Where God is concerned,
we’re all pretty much children.
But wait, I mustn’t forget the toughest setting for
these questions: it is during the televised news. Instant
and continuous cable reporting brings to our dinner table vivid photos
from around the world or across the street of the latest horrors of
aberrant human behavior or the devastation of natural calamity.
We can all but smell the death as it is so vividly documented on our
television screens. And our children are watching and they have
questions ready for us, don’t they? And we, we wonder how and
what to respond. QUESTIONS IN SEARCH OF AN ANSWER— that’s our
theme.
I have two quotes I’d like you to listen to
carefully. The first is by Rainer Maria Rilke. And hers is
the advice:
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love
the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written
in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which
could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live
them. And the point is to live everything. Live the
questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will
gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Now the second is a quotation from David Roberts’
book titled The Grandeur and Misery of Man, in which he recalls:
Once I heard a man say: ‘I spent twenty years trying to come to terms
with my doubts. Then one day it dawned on me that I had better
come to terms with my faith. Now I have passed from the agony of
the questions I cannot answer into the agony of answers I cannot
escape.’
On this Selichot eve it’s really amazing to me that
I was able to run across two such quotations both of which urge the
self same strategy toward living our lives: we must persevere to
live our way into the answers to life’s questions. Those who
insist upon a certain knowledge of the answers to life’s imponderables
will miss out on the truest adventure life has to offer: the
search and the pilgrimage.
The increasingly popular, and seemingly endless
permutations on the theme of “makeover shows” which assault the
television networks night and day, seem to follow just that
advice. Have you noticed how they take what is and manage to
dress it up or strip it down, but they make new whatever they are
given. Hair colors are changed. Hair is cut.
Furniture is rearranged, landscape is transformed, sofas are
reupholstered and chests of draws are fitted with new knobs. But
in the end, it is the old that is made new.
Each of these shows, the queer eye for the straight
folks, the straight eye for the queer folks, the merging of two
combatant and equally tasteless styles for a future husband and wife,
and on at and on seem to take this old formula, and of it make the same
thing: a merger, a compromise, an adjustment, a simplification,
but some basics of the original are always stubbornly preserved.
It seems to me, that that’s our job. It seems
to me, that for these High Holy Days to which we now enter in earnest
and reverent atonement, our task is to reshape and to retune our lives,
not by throwing away and discarding everything we’ve lived, taught,
said, or done, but examining and improving the final statement and
product. It is adjustment to life, to which we are called and not
its destruction.
During these coming High Holy days you and I will be
asking questions which call out for answers. There are surely
many answers possible for each of the questions we shall pose, and
we’ll all be searching for the answers which most closely fit our
individual mindset; our view of God’s world and our place within it.
I wonder to myself, does that mean that every answer will be equally
correct? I doubt it. Some of the answers chosen— the
violence and the terrorism, the judgmentalism and religious hypocrisy
which so mar the world in which we find ourselves, invalidates the
worth of those systems and individuals who adhere to them. Some
answers are unworthy of the questions which life presents.
In the end what criteria should we choose then for
determining just how appropriate or worthy our answers will be?
Perhaps the bottom line is how much peace and love and kindness will
these answers bring into this world of such harshness and uncertainty.
Let me close with this story.
The Babylonian Talmud relates that a Rabbi by the
name of Beroka of Khurzistan used to frequent the marketplace where,
the prophet Elijah often appeared to him. Once he asked Elijah,
Is there anyone in this marketplace who will have a portion in the world to come? Elijah replied, “No.”
Just then, two men walked by, and, on seeing them,
Elijah said to Rabbi Beroka, “Do you see those two? They will
have a place in the world to come” Rabbi Beroka went over to
immediately ask them, “What is your occupation?” And the men
answered, “We are jesters. When we see people depressed, we cheer
them up; and when we see two people quarreling, we work hard to
establish peace between them.”
Of all the people in the marketplace, only the
jesters, the two who brought joy into others’ lives, would surely gain
entry into the world to come. Whatever answers we reach for those
penetrating questions in life, during these High Holy Days and
throughout all the years to come, may they be ones which will pass that
very test: to bring hope where there is hopelessness, joy where there
is despair and peace where there is misery.
May you, dear ones be blessed in your searching and
in your every finding this year, and in all the years to come.
Amen