Kol Nidre Sermon 5773, September 25, 2012: Crowd-Sourcing Rabbi Eric Yanoff. Shanah tovah.

Transcription

1 Kol Nidre Sermon 5773, September 25, 2012: Crowd-Sourcing Rabbi Eric Yanoff Football, foam finger, List of jokes Set up scene Banner of my office desk, chains, banners, etc. Shanah tovah. Almost two months ago, I set up a scene, much like this one, in my office and sent you all an internet video, asking for your help. I was feeling the high-holiday crunch and you know, it s one thing to come up with one or two interesting ideas for sermons. But I need to come up with about a half-dozen of these ideas for talks, in short order. So I had tried to inspire myself by taking out all the props and trappings from past sermons the chains, and banners, and pictures And I was still stressed. And then I remembered a conversation I d had recently, with one of my old co-counselors from Camp Ramah, who now works for the internet video website YouTube. He spoke of a phenomenon in online marketing called Crowd-Sourcing a way of enlisting the help and wisdom of an entire community to raise interest and engage the talents and ideas of many people all of you. I imagine that many of you have been asked to take these surveys: A company is deciding on a logo, and asks online for people to vote on three choices. An ice-cream company asks you to imagine a new flavor. A crayon company asks you to name its new color. And here s what s interesting about Crowd-Sourcing: Online marketers at YouTube and elsewhere also observed that, when an idea is Crowd-Sourced, those who contribute and respond tend to become more interested in the outcomes even if their own ideas or votes are not the ones selected. (In the case of asking your help with the sermon, it seems to have worked: You re all here, right? Are you interested in what you all wrote?) The theory behind Crowd-Sourcing is that the best way to sell something is to have your potential market create it. That s the whole idea of YouTube: Anyone, any amateur, can produce and post a video, in the hope that it go VIRAL people forward it, post it to their Facebook pages, get their friends to click on the link. (I know for those not accustomed to this process, viral does not sound like something desirable but believe me, it s a good thing.) Those who post and participate tend to go back to the site again and again, to see how many hits their video has, and in the process, they check out other people s videos, and that s the way interest grows. So first, as of now, my online request for sermon help has over 1000 hits not exactly viral, but not bad for a first attempt. (I m a STAR!...) (One piece of advice I got was that if I really wanted to go viral, I should have entitled it not Rabbi Yanoff Needs your HELP! but rather [FOOTBALL] Rabbi gets hit by a football in the groin. Evidently, that s the stuff that sells ) But anyway, my YouTube video is still live so after Yom Kippur, you should definitely check it out this whole live scene here doesn t do it justice. On YouTube, I asked three questions: First, I asked for a memorable piece of advice that you had received in your life. Second, I asked for Jewish Jokes (PG-rated). And finally, I asked how and why people connect to this community, especially at this time of year. Over a hundred responses have come in videos, s, posts on our YouTube channel, on Facebook Most of the responses have come from within the Adath Israel community but a significant number came from other Jewish communities, and even some from non-jewish sources. I had challenged you to join me in writing the sermon you wanted to hear on the Holidays. But then, it became my job to compile all of your ideas, into a sermon. So: Here is the sermon that YOU Kol Nidre Sermon 5773 Crowd-Sourcing: Rabbi Eric Yanoff 1 (of 6)

2 WROTE. I hope you like it but if not, don t point fingers here [FOAM FINGER], don t blame me I ll start with one of the earliest pieces of advice that I received in my ask: The search for blame is always successful and never helpful. Here goes: As if starting over: Shanah tovah. [As if reading, stilted, from my outline:] Begin with Jewish Joke, taken from the suggestions I received. Here we are: let s find one here. Hmm [flipping through pages; look up] WOW: A disturbing number of you could not come up with a joke you were willing to share with your rabbi, especially not on Yom Kippur. Ah here s one NOPE that one came from a person who probably should have kept it to himself Ah: here we are: Moishe is really down on his luck and in dire straits. He needs money to pay bills. Almost bankrupt, he decides to pray to God to let him win the lottery. He prays all day and night, he keeps praying every day. This goes on for a few weeks. Moishe is relentless in his prayers. Finally, one day, as he is deep in prayer the voice of God speaks to Moshe: Moishe, give me a break - help me out a little, buy a ticket, I learned a lot in this process about asking for help, while writing this sermon. I loved getting your s and messages, how you stopped me at Starbucks or in the Religious School hall with your reactions. Some of you felt challenged. One fifteen-year old girl told me she usually loves my sermons (so sweet, right ) but then gently asked if this wasn t a cop-out (her term) to get other people to write for me like Tom Sawyer white-washing the fence. Well I can assure you that, as is often the case when engaging volunteers, this sermon was far more labor-intensive than writing my own but also, far more rewarding. I quickly confirmed my suspicion that this sermon wasn t going to write itself. I had pleaded, prayed for your input and then I was overwhelmed with your responses but like Moishe in the joke, it wasn t going to fall into my lap, until I put in a bit of effort. I asked for your help, and you rose to the occasion; it was such an uplifting experience to receive your words. Already in our service, you ve heard a few, and there will be more. Even if you don t hear your response, please know that I read it, and it helped me and many of your words echo in my reflection on the process that led to this sermon. In addition, I ve saved every one and I intend to use them going forward; your jokes and ideas may appear in a future sermon, coming to a synagogue near you I began to realize that, for this labor-intensive process, the MEDIUM of crowd-sourcing had become the MESSAGE itself: That there are a lot of people in this community and we are all very different. We bring varied, interesting perspectives and talents. Our different approaches can inform a very diverse view of how we do our Judaism here. And while I feel very privileged to be your rabbi, to teach you I feel most blessed because of what I learn from you. I get to be the one to see the big picture the composite sketch of all the collected wisdom that is in this room. And I see it as my job to integrate all the pieces, to help each different perspective see the value and wisdom in the others so that together, we build a tremendous, beautiful, communal mosaic. But I worry: I worry that many of you have talents and abilities and unique insights that for some reason, you have felt reluctant, not comfortable enough, to share with this community. For some sad reason, you leave some of your best qualities at the door when you enter this community even though I know that these things are part of our true, composite, communal soul here. Kol Nidre Sermon 5773 Crowd-Sourcing: Rabbi Eric Yanoff 2 (of 6)

3 As I look out on this room, I see professors and professionals I see homemakers and home-builders. I see inventors and investors. I see people who are such loving and attentive parents, and I see people who have lost their parents, I see parents who have lost children, and I see adult children who are struggling now as adults to care for their parents. I see teachers and students and colleagues and friends. I see people who are excellent speakers, and I see people who are even better listeners. I see people whose book-smarts are incredible, and I see people whose street-smarts and common-sense have gotten them through some challenging times. I see people who have experienced tremendous simcha and celebration, and people who have endured unimaginable hardship and loss. And these things have the capacity to make us so much more a part of the community but sometimes, they have the potential to make us feel so much more apart, FROM the community. This past year, Adath Israel has engaged a process known as the Inclusion Initiative. It was the result of a challenge grant that we received initially to review our facilities and programs, our language and our sensibilities, to determine who was on our margins, whose entry into the community we were not yet accommodating. Initially, this was a conversation about large-print siddurim and amplification and ramps and signage, as well as live-streaming our services to hospitals and nursing homes which we are doing for the first time these holidays. But it became also about much deeper issues: What do we do to embrace whole sub-communities who are not fully included: Those with learning and emotional differences? Those who are single? Those who are empty-nesters? Those who are part of interfaith families? Those who are gay or lesbian? Those who have come upon economic hardship? Those who are victims of abuse, or addiction? Those who cannot be here for reasons too personal or painful to even articulate right here, right now? And the reason we need this Inclusion Initiative not just at Adath Israel, but throughout the community, is because, historically, in Jewish communities, we have not been good at embracing diverse approaches and individuals. One reason that so many of you balked at sharing a Jewish joke was that the jokes often play on stereotypes and negativity not to mention they used some embarrassingly harsh Yiddish words that don t even have translations into English. Because of our history of persecution, we have been very wary of anyone on or just beyond the boundary of the Jewish community. And so when I went into the Jewish tradition, to try to find a good example of how we work to include diverse approaches, I mostly found heartbreaking examples of ostracism and marginalization. Like poor Esau, our patriarch Isaac s other son, the older twin brother of Jacob who is tricked out of his birthright blessing, and goes to his father, wailing, Do you have only one blessing? As if to say, Is there only one way to feel part of the legacy of this people, this religion, this Torah, this vision for a more perfect world? And when Isaac shrugs and offers no real consolation or love or inclusion, Esau leaves his family. The lesson here tonight is that we are not only poorer for it, when we push away someone who wants to be embraced we risk tragic results for that person, and for ourselves. Because tradition has it that Esau goes on to found the nation of one of our greatest persecutors the Romans, who destroyed the Second Temple. This is not at all to say that every persecution we have faced can be traced to our own doing but the rabbis of ancient times do say that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sin at chinam purposeless hatred and divisiveness. And it is not to say that we should be so relativistic and ill-defined to include EVERYONE who is on our margins. Some people and groups and ideologies are marginalized for a reason: They represent ideas that are beyond the pale, outside of our borders of what is okay and decent, and self-sustaining and life-affirming. I have, this past year, written publicly about those who would deny the Holocaust Kol Nidre Sermon 5773 Crowd-Sourcing: Rabbi Eric Yanoff 3 (of 6)

4 or undermine the security of a Jewish State of Israel as those who define themselves as outsiders. And yes, there are examples in the Jewish tradition of those people as well. People like Moses cousin, Korach, who on the surface seems not only innocuous but correct in his claim against Moses that all the people should be considered equally holy not just Moses and Aaron. But quickly, we uncover Korach s motives: He stealthily undermines the very goodness and cohesiveness that was so essential at that critical time in Jewish history A solidarity that is no less important nowadays. Let me be clear about this: A diversity of approaches, ideas, and talents are critical to our success but the risk that we run with this openness is that corrosive, damaging, and hurtful ideas can sneak into that inclusive big tent as well and so we must be on guard against those tendencies. This is the price of being an open, inclusive society. But then I found a line about being an open society which we said just at the beginning of our Kol Nidre service here tonight that gave me hope, that perhaps Jewish tradition has always intended to embrace a diversity of talents, of skill levels, of ideas and perspectives: We started by saying, In the highest courts, and here in the earthly courts, anu matirin l hitpalel im ha-abaryanim we permit ourselves to pray with those who are not perfect, who have transgressed. And the classic interpretation of this is that the abaryanim, the imperfect that is all of us. Especially given how many times we are going to tap our chests together this Yom Kippur, saying Al cheit shechata-nu - WE have sinned in such-and-such a way, WE have sinned in such-and-such a way. I hope that long list of sins is not a check list for one person, sitting out there, saying, Yep did that one that one too. It is a composite sketch of our collective imperfections. And if there is a composite of our imperfections, then we have to believe that there is a much more impressive composite sketch of our goodness what we ADD to our community, what we each have to offer. We have so many different types of people in our community. That is the point of the blue signs with pictures and testimonials that you ve seen as you come in, along the lawn, our Hineni Project. It s a cross-section of our congregation just samples, but from all walks of life, people who have chosen to bring their talents and their presence to Adath Israel. As your Rabbi, I don t want us to limit ourselves as an Adath Israel community by saying, We are THE community for THIS one type of person. The most dynamic communities out there are the ones whose members are very different, not cookie-cutter. We need to be able to look at another person in this room here tonight and say, Wow, I am nothing like that person. My group at Adath Israel is so different from that person. But that person is, nonetheless, precious. He or she brings something that I could never bring, to the whole and I am WE ARE richer for it. That s what I learned from our Crowd-Sourcing experiment. You know, the Jewish Exponent covered the experiment, on the front page. But they only came upon it when a reporter asked me if I was speaking about the upcoming election. Now, I do not preach politics from the bimah but I do have one comment on what will certainly be the most rancorous, publicly bitter election of recent memory: Perhaps it s pie-in-the-sky, but wouldn t we all be better, on both sides of the debate, if the debate were sufficiently civil, that we could look at one another and say, despite our deep disagreement: That other person, with his or her passionate beliefs and good intentions is, nonetheless, precious, created in God s image, seeking a more perfect world, a more perfect United States, within this world. In fact, if you think about it, we have, coming upon us in just a month and a half, the greatest crowdsourcing opportunity that we get as a nation. We get to VOTE. I will tell you I have a terrible personal track record in getting candidates elected by how I vote in fact, I m half-expecting Kol Nidre Sermon 5773 Crowd-Sourcing: Rabbi Eric Yanoff 4 (of 6)

5 automated calls from both campaigns inviting me to vote for their opponent but just as my asking for your insight engaged you more in what this sermon would be, so too will voicing our opinion by voting have the significant effect of making us more invested in this country, in our place on the world stage, our mandate to build a better world. And that is true - even if your candidate loses. You will, regardless, be more tuned-in, more part of the essential mission of our nation at this critical time in human history. That s what happens, when we see ourselves as an essential part of the community s collective wisdom. Back in the early seventies, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had a meeting with President Nixon, in which she reportedly claimed that her job was tougher than Nixon s. Nixon vehemently disagreed: What are you talking about, Ms. Prime Minister? I govern a nation of 300 million people one hundred times the size of your tiny nation! True, Mister President, remarked Golda, You run a nation of 300 million people but I run a nation of 3 million prime ministers! It may make my life as a Jewish professional more difficult, but as your rabbi, with over 2000 people through this building on these High Holidays, I will tell you: I would like nothing more than to have a membership that was engaged and participating in so many different ways that I could say, I have 2000 prime ministers, or 2000 rabbis or whatever is the equivalent. Moses says that of the Jewish People when a couple people begin to show signs of engaged leadership, even prophecy. Would that the entire People might be prophets like them! There is so much wisdom in this room. It is just waiting to be tapped, to have light shed on new insights and inspiration that we cannot even imagine. Please share it because by sharing your ideas and talents, you will become more engaged and you will enrich us all. So with that, I want to conclude with just a sampling of some of the advice, the wisdom I received over the past few months since my desperate YouTube request. These are your words, your thoughts; I learned from YOU: From Bill Linenberg of blessed memory, this community s beloved Torah teacher, whom we lost a month ago: Keep practicing and try and push beyond what you think you can do. When you get money, do three things: save some, spend some, give some. (From a CPA) It s very easy to be a good Jew, when everything goes your way. Always leave the house wearing clean underwear. If you make a mess, clean it up. (Those were two different pieces of advice.) Look both ways before you cross the street. (We got advice from people of all ages.) Someone wrote, My dad, who is 92, always tells me to Be happy and have fun but he did not tell me this when I was in my teens. Don t sweat the small stuff credited to the speaker s mother-in-law. Guilt is a wasted emotion. You should live each day without guilt. Credited to the speaker s [Jewish] mother. (???!) The secret of a successful marriage: Never start a statement with the word YOU. There were a series of people who wrote in about the value of silence, or when not to give advice. o One person told a story: After a meeting or negotiation where he may have been active in his father s view, too active his father tapped him on the shoulder and said, You missed an opportunity, kid. To which he responded, What opportunity was that, Pop? He then said: The opportunity to keep your mouth SHUT. Kol Nidre Sermon 5773 Crowd-Sourcing: Rabbi Eric Yanoff 5 (of 6)

6 o This one was on video (I have to thank the teens who did the video interviews for me; you guys were great): Person asked, Are you videotaping this? Yes, was the reply. Then came the advice: Never appear on camera unprepared. o Last one - actually from the first response I got: The person wrote, Don t always be the first to respond, give others a chance. So since these are YOUR words take a moment to turn to one another shake hands with the person next to you, and say Yishar koach Job well done. Nice sermon we wrote. We really got the rabbi off the hook on this one. Go ahead I hope you like the sermon that YOU helped to write but true to one of the pieces of advice I got to always Give credit, and take responsibility I also recognize my role as your rabbi, in helping us build the community where these voices, this wisdom, is heard. I want to thank you not only for your part in writing the sermon but for your part in building a multi-faceted, exciting, dynamic community here at Adath Israel. I pray that as we look around the room, we see the potential in each of us, to inspire one another l eila ul eila to greater and greater heights of insight, understanding, compassion, and energy. Keyn yehi ratzon So may it be God s will. And let us say, AMEN. Kol Nidre Sermon 5773 Crowd-Sourcing: Rabbi Eric Yanoff 6 (of 6)