Kol Nidre Sermon 5777: The Book of Life, Unbound Rabbi Eric Yanoff Shanah tovah. **PAGES FALL OUT OF PORTFOLIO Oh this? This is nothing. Not a big deal. It s okay. No this is no big deal, nothing at all. Because as I imagine it, somewhere, in some secluded corner of Heaven, other pages have gone flying scattered. Somewhere, alone, God must be standing still, overcome, paralyzed with fear and sadness amidst the scattered chaos of much more important pages: God stands, surrounded by the pages of the Book of Life. Picture that image: God, crying, unable to move, surrounded by the lost pages that once comprised the Sefer Ha-Chayyim, the Book of Life. This year it seems, more than any year I can remember this year it feels like the Book of Life has become unbound. As your Rabbi, I have been struggling with how to confront the feelings I ve heard from you this year, seen on your frustrated faces, shared with you. Feelings of uncertainty, of anger, of surrender and capitulation, of fear coming from so many challenges. We are uncertain for ourselves, for our country, for Israel, for the world, and this Yom Kippur, for our souls, who we are at our core. And the image that keeps coming back is God, lost, right alongside us because this year may be the year that the Book of Life has become unbound. The Book of Life has become unbound, has lost its binding, its coherence, its reliable order. This year, the default assumption that we re IN the Book is unsure, unsteady. In the past, when we reflected in this season, Who will live, who will die what we really meant was the assumption: Most will live, and a very few will die. A very few few enough so that in our minds, loss and despair remain exceptional, out of the ordinary. The INfrequency is what has, in the past made the exceptional outcome tragic, what forces us to be upset, surprised even, shocked. Otherwise, if we re NOT shocked, then death or hatred or anger or fear become normative, normal, expected. And that s what I mean when I say that the book of Life has lost its binding. I worry, that this year the pages are NOT mostly IN the Book of Life because in too many moments to count, we have abdicated our insistence on the basic sanctity of human life. And we run a serious risk of becoming, like God in that corner of Heaven, paralyzed numb to the number of challenges to that sanctity of life. Just imagine: From that corner of Heaven, God looks down among the scattered pages and [PICK UP A PAGE] God sees the victims of terrorism and violence both here in the United States and abroad. God sees the hatred that took a nation hostage when the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando fell victim in June to the deadliest attack ever by a single gunman on US soil, the worst casualty numbers since September 11, 2001. God sees the fear of the LGBTQ community and the subset thereof, in the Latino community as that page falls from the Book of Life. [PICK UP PAGES] God sees San Bernadino, Chelsea, New York City, Northern Jersey. Shootings, bombings, knifings. [PICK UP PAGES] MORE PAGES FALL from the Book of Life. [PICK UP PAGES] Belgium, France, Germany God sees us afraid and just as God is paralyzed from acting, so are we. Fear is powerful. That s why, horrifically, terrorism works. Our fear is what keeps us from opening our arms to the victims of one of the worst humanitarian crises since the Holocaust, as Syria kills its own people and sends them fleeing. God sees Aylan Kurdi, the boy whose lifeless body washed up on shore and forced the world to confront a crisis that had Kol Nidre Sermon 5777: The Book of Life, Unbound Rabbi Eric Yanoff 1 of 5
been going on for years, without our indignation. For years, with eleven million people killed or displaced and vulnerable. Where was God, and where were WE, all this time? Unaware? Aware, but inactive? Because terrorism is brutally effective, we are scared into INaction and in some cases, justifiably so. I don t know the answer to this. I am not an expert on vetting refugees, or the percentages of extremists who may be among those refugees. But I know that, coming from a nation of refugees, of wandering Arameans, as we say on Passover, of a People who for two millennia prayed for little else besides a safe homeland I know that this crisis should tug at us, should make us WANT to help, despite and with our fears. We know what it is like to have the world turn its back. And also, I know that the fear is real, that there are those who have been taught from the youngest of ages to hate Israel, to hate Jews, to hate the West, to hate America. And so, the pages fall out of the Book of Life. [PICK UP A PAGE] God sees, as we saw this year, the spike in individual actors of terror the knifings and rammings in Israel that set a nation on edge a nation that is used to forging ahead with life, despite terror. Israel is pretty good at thwarting the terror organizations, but these were random individuals provoked by a Palestinian government spreading lies about Israel s security measures on the Temple Mount at the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. whose leaders fueled fears and manipulated a generation of young people with textbooks and rallies featuring gross, circa-1938, dehumanizations of the Israeli and the Jew Whose leaders celebrated as a hero called the murderer of thirteen-year-old American-Israeli Hallel Yaffa-Ariel this past summer as Israel mourned, with the Prime Minister saying, You don t murder a sleeping child for peace [or] to protest policy. Israel has faced governments whose athletes could not shake hands or share a bus or even compete against Israelis. One commentator wrote of the anti-semitism at the Olympics, For Israel, this is a pity. For the Arabs, it s a calamity. The hater always suffers more than the object of his hatred. Israel confronts a government whose rallies and town-square dedications feature murderers and terrorists as not only normative but heroic. It s a clear violation of one of my favorite rabbinic stories, of the Children of Israel at the Red Sea they cross, the Egyptians chariots get stuck in the mud, and the Israelites cheer. Seems justified, after all that persecution and pain and slavery, right? But God stops Israel, berating them, saying, NO! Those are My Children, too, drowning out there! How dare you sing and cheer for their demise! There is plenty of pain and persecution on all sides. Fifty years (this year) since the Six-Day War, I want to believe that the average Joe, the average Yosef, and the average Youssef all want peace and all shun murder. I also believe that God sees another page slip out of the Book of Life, when Palestinian leaders applaud every knifing and pay terrorists, when the United Nations acts indifferent to the fear of Israelis living with the broken promise of an arms-free Southern Lebanon under UN supervision and a demilitarized zone east of the Golan in Syria,, and then the UN wonders why Israelis do not trust the international community! But instead, Israel builds, advances, yes as imperfect a nation as any, but a striving and thriving nation, against formidable odds. When that sense of insecurity for Joe, for Yosef AND for Youssef becomes okay, even becomes a pawn of terrorist states and entities in that corner of heaven, God loses another page of the Book of Life. Because when we lose the base reverence for the sanctity of life and worse, when that becomes okay, or at least, expected that s why God is in Heaven, surrounded by these fallen pages. It sounds so easy in the Torah, right? Lo tirzach Don t murder. Value human life above all else. Punish those who violate this both to remove the murderers but also to say, THIS IS NOT OKAY, in our world. Preserve human dignity, for all. And, lest we get too satisfied with ourselves, here can we honestly say that WE have kept the human dignity pages in the Book of Life? That WE have cherished a humankind that, in all its diversity, is created in the image of God? Because, while nothing devalues human life worse than murder, the pages of the Book of Life fall Kol Nidre Sermon 5777: The Book of Life, Unbound Rabbi Eric Yanoff 2 of 5
out of the binding also because we mourn a culture of anger and futility that has fueled not only loss of life, but loss of human dignity. [PICK UP A PAGE] This year, God sees the way that we as a nation have, in this electoral season, vilified one another. How anger and disillusionment have fueled a debate that is not about disagreement with another person who may see the world differently, who may confront our problems with different types of solutions. No we now see that person not as someone with a different approach, but as an enemy, someone to tear down and destroy. You know (despite my strong personal, INexpert feelings) I m not going to be partisan here so here s what I know: In November, someone is going to win. If the polls are right, it s not going to be a landslide so poo-pooing, dismissing as insane or irresponsible or pie-in-the-sky idealists or ideologues or anything that means you are vilifying almost half, or slightly more than half, of America. But what s different this year is that, in past years, in November someone won, and in December the losing side licked their wounds, and in January, we inaugurated a new President, as a united country. Remember when taking the W s off the West Wing keyboards on the way out the door was condemned as a prank violating our tradition of a smooth and universally-accepted transition of power? This year, such pranks will not be our concern. This year, I have no confidence that we will be one nation again, come January. Because of a deep and ABIDING enmity that has marked this election from its start, on all sides, in all extremes for many Americans, we see the other side (whoever that is) not just as wrong, or misguided but as EVIL. We devalue one another, we dismiss one another and in so doing [PICK UP A PAGE] we dehumanize one another. We spend a lot of time and energy, defining who the other is, and we HATE that other. We prey on the fears (even some of the justified fears) of whoever is IN our camp, and we fail to see that those who are NOT us are ALSO God s Children, crossing the Sea, in the Image of God. That s certainly what God sees from that corner of Heaven when it comes to racial inequities in our country. Because of my skin color, I cannot begin to understand the fear that someone with black or brown skin feels at this moment, because of the racism that is part of our society and law-enforcement systems. I observed it this year, when I drove past a friend on City Line Avenue, a black man who got pulled over for a busted taillight, while he was driving with a white woman, also a friend. Immediately, I thought, oh no this could be bad. And why was I worried? [PICK UP A PAGE] Because unarmed black men are seven times more likely to be killed by police than unarmed white men; because black teenagers are 21x more likely to be killed than white teenage males. And let me add that this racism in no way explains or justifies, for example, the police killings in Dallas this past summer. And let me also add how painful it was, as I cry out against racism, to have been spurned wholesale, called out because of my love of Israel this past summer, when the Movement for Black Lives Platform included a clause with false and hurtful and anti-semitic claims of genocide and apartheid against Israel. There is villainizing on all sides here such that we cannot even come together to fix it. We simply do not see one another in the image of God; we do not value one another this way and the senseless loss of life that comes from that reality, again, breaks the binding of God s Book of Life. Friends, I wish I could give you only happy sermons these High Holidays. But this year, come on, you had to know this one was coming. It would have been almost irresponsible of me as your Rabbi to leave this pain unchallenged. And that s where this sermon turns a corner: So yes, there is pain, there is insecurity and uncertainty and fear and the pages of the Book of Life are strewn all over so now we have to ask: WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? I know it all feels too big, too paralyzing. It brings to mind something I learned in high school, when I was preparing for the SATs. You remember the analogies, for vocabulary? Here s one I learned, about a word that often trips us up: [SIGN] Infinitesimal (teeny) is to small as enormity is to [not BIG ]. BAD. Enormity does not meana state of bigness it is a state of big, badness. Of overwhelming, paralyzing, what do I do now, what do I do first, what can I do at all. Kol Nidre Sermon 5777: The Book of Life, Unbound Rabbi Eric Yanoff 3 of 5
What can we do, in the face of the enormity of this world that s come unhinged, this world whose Book of Life has become unbound. WHAT CAN WE DO? Many of you have heard me tell the starfish story of the old man down the Shore, sitting at dusk at the top of the beach watching a boy from afar. It was low tide, and the ocean had left stranded thousands of starfish that were going to dry out and die. The old man watched as the child walked a bit, bent down, picked up a starfish, and tossed it into the sea, walked a bit, past hundreds of drying, dying starfish, tossed in another. As the boy came to the beach directly in front of the man, he approached the child, and he said, Kid! What s the use? All these thousands of starfish are going to die, and you can t possibly save them all! What difference can you make? - To which the kid calmly bent down, picked up a starfish from among the thousands, tossed it in the sea, and said, Made all the difference in the world to that one. THAT s the meaning of the Jewish teaching that a person who saves even a single soul, it is as if she or he saves the world entire. The less-famous part of that teaching, though, is also true: A person who destroys a single soul has destroyed the entire world. It means that our actions which we judge on this Yom Kippur our actions, however, small, are impactful. We CAN save the world. We can also destroy the world even further but we can save the world. [PICK UP A PAGE] We can pick up the pieces. We ve dealt with brokenness before. We have held brokenness before, and insisted on wholeness. When Moses confronted the People of Israel dancing around the Golden Calf, when he dropped the first Tablets of the Covenant and shattered them but he did not just leave that brokenness by the side of the road NO! He insisted on a new, whole, set, climbed the mountain again and then sadly, carefully, picked up the pieces. And put them in the Ark of the Covenant, right next to the whole tablets. And we carried that brokenness with us always. We do not have to walk on our way, turning aside from all this brokenness, all these pages. We can pick up the pieces, the pages. We cannot control everything but how we act, how we respond it DOES make a difference. When we are about to post that comment online in response to another person s words ask, Will my comment help pick up a page or will it add to the enmity of the world? Will it add to the terror, the otherizing, the dehumanizing, the xenophobia, the homophobia the violence, the racism, the indignity? Now, I imagine that everyone here tonight is squirming a little bit, at least a little uncomfortable with at least one of the pages here, as I ve described them. Depending on your personal politics, on your beliefs, on how we prioritize ourselves and our causes You may disagree with me on some of it. HOW we disagree though, without villainizing one another, is an important step forward in itself. But regardless of whether we agree or disagree, NO ONE here should be at ease. This sermon is equal-opportunity when it comes to making us all uncomfortable maybe it even makes us uncomfortable enough to force us to act, to make a difference on one of these challenges. Because even with the challenges we ve raised tonight we can make a difference, we can make strides. Take the page of God s Book we mentioned about racism: There was a recent study that, in professional sports, umpires and referees were significantly more likely to call fouls or call strikes against black players. But a follow-up study demonstrated that our minds are not set in stone, but rather, our brains have great plasticity: Once the refs and umpires were SHOWN this statistic of racial bias, once they watched the tapes and were made AWARE, the inequity eased remarkably in future games, almost across the board because they were NOT OKAY with that inequity, and so they worked to change it! [PICK UP A PAGE] We can pick up the pieces, we can pick up the pages. In Syria, in Israel, in Europe, here in the United States. Kol Nidre Sermon 5777: The Book of Life, Unbound Rabbi Eric Yanoff 4 of 5
We must expect more of ourselves. We need to say, Enough! We are DONE! We are putting a stop to all these broken pieces, these scattered fragments! We are not ignoring them, not passing them by they are here, to remind us of what happens when we allow our worst selves to overcome our better selves. This world, right now, is NOT OKAY! And these pieces, these pages bear witness to our ability to destroy each other so that we can strive for our ability to love and support each other. [TAP CHEST] For the sins of enmity of vilifying of terrorism But also, for the sins that allow that enmity to go unchecked the sin of indifference because IF this image of the scattered pages teaches us one thing, it s that we cannot afford to stay indifferent in the face of such challenges. For the sins, then, of allowing fear to be okay or expected, of numbing ourselves to the suffering out there, of justifying, of shrugging and saying What can I do?. All of these sins dance around the worst sin, the Golden Calf (if you will) of ACCEPTING the troubles in our midst, of normalizing it all as part of what is okay or expected in our world. If we are serious about helping God pick up the pages, then we can no longer dance around it or ignore it. As another Rabbi Rosen Rabbi Jim Rosen, our Rabbi Rosen s father is teaching in this season, to heal, to truly confront pain, we cannot be like the prophet Jonah, and run from it. We have to walk, together, THROUGH the pain, not around it. We cannot rest, staying neutral or indifferent. As Elie Wiesel, that moral giant whom we lost this year, once said, We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must at that moment become the center of the universe. It is true: We have a lot of work to do, to get to where we want to be, to help God pick up the pages and put back together the Book of Life. [PICK UP A PAGE] But friends, this year, THAT is our charge: To expect more of ourselves. In the face of a world afflicted, we must refuse to shrug our shoulders, as if we re helpless or indifferent. We are not. We can care more, we can speak out more against injustice, terror, violence, anti- Semitism, other hatreds. We can speak out, seek actions, however incremental picking up even just one page, lighting just one candle in the face of darkness. The pages that dropped here are nothing compared to the pages that are scattered at the feet of God, in that far-off corner of Heaven. But every gathered page of that unbound Book, every piece of the brokenness when reunited with another is a step in the right direction. As we say in the Kol Nidre prayer, mi-yom Kippurim zeh, ad Yom Kippurim ha-ba from this Yom Kippur to the next We must partner with God, to pick up the pages. We must affirm life, in all its sanctity human dignity, in all its beauty. We must work hard, to earn not just our place in that Book of Life but to earn the Book of Life itself to bind ourselves together, as we pick up pages, and once more, firm up the binding of the Book of Life. Keyn yehi ratzon So may it be God s will and so may it be OUR will, together with God. And let us say: AMEN. Kol Nidre Sermon 5777: The Book of Life, Unbound Rabbi Eric Yanoff 5 of 5