“FIVE QUESTIONS IN SEARCH OF AN ANSWER”
PART THREE –
“How Can We Make It Better?”
Atonement Eve 5765
September 24, 2004



Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana


     Our local weather experts had been carefully watching it for days.  Many of us had a sense of foreboding about this hurricane.  It seemed to defy easy prediction.  And, it had to arrive on the Eve of Rosh HaShanah!  This murderous and destructive storm dramatically underscored our powerlessness, not only to anticipate its path, but to even survive in its wake.

And so, urged-on by those whose civic charge is to protect us, many of us evacuated our homes.  Into our cars went a few clothes, irreplaceable photos, important papers and the family pets.  With one last look back, what else could one do but lock the door, hope for the best and get out of harm’s way.  Or in my case, spend four hours on I-10 West with the option of taking refuge at Celebration Station or returning home.

We were lucky.  Those who live to our east were not.  It just underscores how helpless and unprotected we are.  If it is not Mother Nature, it’s the “mother of all terrorists.”  Or it’s unexpected sickness or a personal loss or just the worst rotten luck.

With our puny arms we rage against the inequity of outrageous fate.

So here’s my question for this sacred evening, a “QUESTION IN SEARCH OF AN ANSWER:” “HOW CAN WE MAKE IT BETTER?”  What can you and I do to improve our chances and to elevate our experience in this world of such frequent disappointment and torment?

Well, of all things, my answer derives from the world of Cyber space.

I want to thank my friend, Reverend Galen Guengerich of New York’s, All Soul’s Church, for alerting me to John Brockman’s web site, Edge.org.  It seems that at the beginning of each year Brockman poses a question to a varied roster of distinguished notables.  He asks them:

What’s your Law?  What bit of wisdom or pattern in nature, either grand or small, have you noticed that could be named after you?

For example, computer scientist, David Gelertner offered this as “Gelertner’s Law:”

                    Scientists know all the right answers, and none of the right questions.

Physicist, John Barrow offers “Barrow’s Law:”

                    Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.

    Perhaps the best was “Ernst Poppel’s Law,”—  “We take life three seconds at a time.”  He illustrates it by pointing out that a handshake takes 3 seconds.  So does the preparation for a golf swing, a short-term memory, a phrase in spontaneous speech, and the typical pause when channel surfing for a television show to watch.

    And so, on this Kol Nidre Eve, with the utmost of modesty, I offer “Cohn’s Law” and it goes like this: 

                    “Always first save the person you see in the mirror.” 

    Cohn’s law is not unlike the familiar airline instruction to first place the oxygen mask over your own mouth and nose and only then to do so for your child, in the unlikely event of an airborne emergency.  “First save the one you see looking at you in the mirror.”  “Cohn’s Law” insists that we de-emphasize the global, and radically narrow the scope of our ambition to rescue and save the “other guy”.  This is by no means as heartless as it may sound at first.

    Let me explain.  Sometime back, Shirley Tilghman, Princeton President and molecular biologist, delivered a widely published lecture on the human genome project.  She produced side-by-side slides of a white mouse and a human being, wondering how many genes there would be for each.  Dr. Tilghman guessed there would be about 78,000 more genes for the human than for the white mouse.

    The surprising answer:  white mouse and a human being— they both have about 30,000 genes of which 99% are broadly similar.  The difference factor?  Tiny adjustments can result in big changes.  And that reality was the birth of “Cohn’s Law.”

    Following a surprise second back operation and condemned (or graced) with seven enforced weeks to do nothing but read and ponder the current state of the world and our place in it, I foresee a planet sliding, at exponential speed toward greater coarseness and inhumanity: terrorism, brazen corporate fraud, dysfunctional families, crude public and private discourse, merciless crime on the streets, greed, and graft in public education, and I concluded, save first, the person in the mirror.

    And that would be me.

    Save the person you see in the mirror:  yourself.  From what?  From being a co-conspirator— a carrier of those pernicious viruses which threaten to obscure the grace and beauty and love and kindness which still manage to survive in our neighborhoods and beyond our doors.  Here’s a hint of what I’m getting at.  Did you take note of that prayer we offered just a few minutes ago?
Al Chet She-chatanu Lefanecha B’dee-bor peh
For the sin which we have sinned before You by word of mouth.

    “How can we make it better?”  Remember, that’s our question tonight and the answer is prescribed by Jewish tradition: Look in the mirror and get a handle on Lashon ha-ra-/Gossip.

    Says our tradition:

One who engages in the evil tongue is like one who denies God.

    Do you know, of the 44 sins enumerated in the traditional confession for Yom Kippur, ten are sins of the tongue— our speech.

    The great Maimonides cautions us to be keenly aware:

Gossip is hurtful and destructive because it destroys three people at once:  the person who relates it, the one who heard it, and the one about whom it concerns.

    What is it about that person we see in the mirror?  Is he convinced that by pulling someone else down, he will elevate his own reputation and status?

    Does she imagine that by blackening the reputation of another, she’ll be aggrandizing her own?  How does that old rhyme go? 

There’s so much good in most of us, and so much bad in the rest of us, that it ill-behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

    If we can only save the person in the mirror from committing Lashon ha-rah, the sin of gossip,  at least that much pain will be taken away, and the world made just a little fairer and cleaner.  You think it an overstatement do you?  Think of this—
My name is gossip; I have no respect for justice.  I maim without killing.  I break hearts and ruin lives.  The more I am quoted, the more I am believed.  My victims are helpless.  They cannot protect themselves against me because I have no name and face.  My name is gossip.

    Of course, we all gossip at times.  They say— “the gossip is someone who’s the knife of the party.”  Oscar Wilde used to insist:
If you can’t say something good about someone, come on over here and sit next to me.

    Lord knows we rabbis (and, dare I add, the Cantors) are not immune to gossip.  The Talmud, well aware of our proclivity to tattle on others, pronounces:
Better no ear at all than one that listens to evil.

    Our tradition actually goes so far as to teach that “gossip is compared with those who transgress the entire Torah.”  Lo-tay-laychra-cheel b’amecha.  “Do not go as a tale barrier,” we will read in our Torah tomorrow.

    Now, I’m no stranger to the New Orleans Jewish community, its agencies, its synagogues and institutions. I love it and proudly call it home.  I can tell you what you already know in your heart,  this is a community of wonderful folks who sometime thrive on gossip and enjoy nothing more than carrying tales of this one’s failure and that one’s dismissal, this one’s ascension to power, and that poor fellow’s fall from grace.  We Jews of the Crescent City are “INQUIRING PEOPLE”— we want to know who has the power and who doesn’t.  This one is Mr. Popular.  That one is Mr. “old news” and that’s not even counting what I hear said about one another’s sexual habits, spousal relations, and troubled children and the misbegotten grandchildren.  It often sickens me and you would be too; were you to know how much pain, how many half truths, how many blatant jealousies, long nurtured grudges and outright deceits are generated against good, decent hardworking and well meaning people— not saints— but good folks.

    Now, I don’t know where all of you who are visiting with us tonight live, but I’ll bet your town’s not so different from ours.  People are people—  we are as slow to forgive as we are to change.  Everybody’s a critic.  Everyone knows how to do it or say it better!  Let me tell you, I take my hat off to our community and Temple leaders today.  It demands such selflessness because they are by no means immune to criticism and second-guessing.  All of this, in addition to the usual complaints:  the Temple’s too cold, the services begin too early and they end too late!  The weather’s too good to come to Temple; the weather’s too bad to come to Temple.  Do something about it!

    Rabbi Joseph Telushkin cautions us:
The fact is that most of us, most of the time. . . choose our clothes more carefully than we choose our words.

This Kol Nidre Eve, let’s take a look back.  How have we behaved?  Who has not spoken out of frustration and anger, words hurtful and damaging to those tender, fragile ones we love?  Who hasn’t slandered another?  Who has not gossiped and tattled and caused damage and upset to innocent others of all ages?  Who has not spoken disrespectfully to our parents, children, spouses, dear ones, teachers, business associates, employees and even strangers— and in so doing, diminished their God given dignity?

How can we make it better?  Let this be a quiet call for more words of gentleness and love, of restraint and respect between our generations, between husbands and wives, parents and children.

    On this most sacred night of nights, as we realize the potential for Kol Nidre’s words to bridge the distance between God and us, maybe we should also raise our awareness that words can be used to distance ourselves from God and from our family and dearest ones— and from ourselves.

    How can we make it better?  “Cohn’s Law:  save first the person you see in the mirror.”
Al chet, She-chatanu Le-fanecha.
B’dee-bor peh.

For the sin we have sinned against You by word of mouth.

   
    On this Kol Nidre:  Dearest God, we see so clearly.  There in the mirror!  There we are!  Bear with us.  Pardon us.  Forgive us.
Amen.