Rabbi Aaron Fine Temple Sinai Rosh Hashanah 5774 rabbifine.sinai@gmail.com Change From Within What would you like to change about your life? Here are a few answers I received recently to this question. A friend of mine answered that he is always rushing in life. He said he is an aggressive driver, and that he is always in a rush to get out the door. Whether on the road, or with his young child, moving quickly just isn t always possible. He wants to be more patient so that he can feel calm and enjoy life more. A man in his 60 s told me how the one thing he would like to change is to start dating again and hopefully remarry. When I asked what was preventing him he said that he worries about giving up the positive sense of self and independence he has developed since becoming single. He worries about his tendency to give up too much of his individuality in a relationship. A friend of mine from high school who recently had a baby after a long and challenging process with IVF, said that she wishes it would be easier when they try to have a second child. She had been very hard on herself when it was so difficult to get pregnant, and hoped she could be kinder to herself the next time, with the help of the gratitude she now feels having had her first child. What do you want to change about your life? We will each have a different answer to this question, usually quite personal. But there are also two important commonalities in our answers. First, if we dig down beneath the surface of our answers, most of us end up at a similar place. The fundamental change we desire is to be more happy and fulfilled. The specifics of what that looks like will be different for each of us, but we share this basic human yearning. Second, we find that if we look closely enough, the change we desire has to start within us. The traffic jams on my friend s commute aren t going anywhere anytime soon. The change he really desires is to develop patience, to develop a different way of relating to his day- to- day reality.
Similarly, the fundamental change needed by the person who desires to date again is not external. He needs to feel strong enough in his sense of self to maintain his individuality while also being vulnerable enough to be in a relationship. My friend with fertility challenges ultimately doesn t have a lot of control over whether the biological factors will be different when they try to have a second child. But the change she has begun to make is to be more compassionate towards herself as she faces such challenges. The question I want to consider today, is how do we make this change from within? The great Hasidic rebbe, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, was once asked by his disciples - What does it mean to be chosid a pious Jew? He answered, Arbeiten ahf Zikh to work on yourself. This commitment is a core piece of being Jewish. But how do we work on ourselves? As my colleague Rabbi Brian Besser wrote recently, during this season of introspection and moral reckoning, how frustrating it can feel when we notice the same personal challenges surfacing over and over! Here I go again! we say to ourselves, with a mixture of despair and amusement. I thought I already put that to rest. Brian made the apt observation that when it comes to working on ourselves, we often seem to be on an eternal treadmill. And yet, underpinning the entire high holidays is the assertion that it is possible to make change that will bring us more in line with our deepest ideals and aspirations, and make our lives more fulfilling. This is the radical idea of teshuva - of repentence or renewal. If we truly desire to make our lives more fulfilling, we need to consider how to develop the inner qualities that are the starting point for change in our lives. This past year I had the chance to begin studying one of Judaism s spiritual toolkits, called tikun hamidot. Tikun means to fix, and midot means qualities of character. Tikun hamidot is the practice of developing our character traits. I am very excited to announce today the start of a project called The Midot Initiative: Values in Action, for which Temple Sinai is partnering with Cohen Hillel Academy and the JCC this coming year. I have been working with Noah Hartman from Cohen Hillel and Marty Shneer from the JCC to develop this experiment together.
For this project, our three institutions will share a midah of the month a spiritual quality that we will seek to put into action in our communities each month. We have chosen ten midot that we will work on beginning this month, as described in your supplements. Over the course of this year we will have many opportunities to explore each of these midot in depth. Today I want to highlight two of these midot that I believe are particularly helpful to get us started in stepping off the treadmill, namely anava - humility, and rachamim compassion. The starting point for change on the high holidays is the quality of anavah humility. We can only change if we have the humility to first admit that we are not perfect. As we say to God in our prayers, "Ein Anachnu Azei Panim U'Kshei Oref Lomar L' fanecha Adonai Eloheinu V'elohei Avoteinu Tzadikim Anachnu V'Lo Chatanu We are not so arrogant and brazen as to say before you God and God of our ancestors that we are fully righteous and have not done wrong In the Torah, Moses is the ultimate example of a humble person. We read, v haish Moshe haya anav meod, mikol adam asher al pnei ha adama. This man Moses was extremely humble, more so than any person on earth. It is no coincidence that our greatest leader was incredibly humble. You don t become great without being open to learning, to growing, to adapting, to changing. Pride and arrogance are obstacles to this growth, because they prevent us from looking at the truth of who we are, and convince us that we don t need to change. Alan Morinis, a teacher of the spiritual practice of midot, gives an example from his own life. One time after he finished giving a lecture, an elderly woman approached him. She started speaking to him very slowly, You have a wonderful, wonderful She stretched her words out long enough to give him plenty of time to jump to fill in the end of her sentence in his head. You have a wonderful voice, he guessed first,. Then you have a wonderful way with words. And then he went even further, You have a wonderful wonderful presence. All this in a split second in the middle of her sentence. Which actually ended You have a wonderful, wonderful.wife. If we pay attention, most of us will find similar examples of our ego becoming inflated, which can prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly and making change. Maybe his presentation wasn t actually so great. He would never know that and be able to improve it if he remained entranced by the story his ego was telling him.
That being said, there is another obstacle to humility. We might have the wrong impression, thinking that the character trait of humility is about being quiet, meek and perhaps even seeing ourselves as lowly. But this is not what true anava is either. Alan Morinis says it this way: Being humble doesn t mean being a nobody, it just means being no more of a somebody than you ought to be. Reb Simcha Bunam famously taught that we should always have two pockets so that we can put a note in each one. In one pocket we should put the quote, I am nothing but dust and ashes. And in the other pocket we should put the quote, The world was created for my sake. That way, we can reach into pull out whichever note we need to read at any given moment. Anava is the quality of having a grounded balanced view of our place in the world. Yes, if we are full of pride and arrogance, we need to remind ourselves that we are mortal and that ultimately we are dust and ashes. On the other hand, it is also spiritually dangerous to have low self- esteem. Just as pride is an obstacle to change, so too low self- esteem, self- pity and self- deprecation keep us from stepping up to the challenges of life. When God first asked Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, he didn t think he could do it. He too had to gain the self- confidence to do what the moment required of him. If we feel badly about who we are, we need to remind ourselves that we actually have great worth. We are all susceptible to both types of ego imbalance. Ultimately pride and self- deprecation are just two sides of the same coin. Take Alan Morinis example. Wasn t he making up the pride- filled ending of the old woman s sentence because deeper down he was insecure? Anava is that healthy middle ground in which we are able to look honestly at who we are and simultaneously know we have worth and value. In the words of Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, Humility is associated with spiritual perfection. When humility effects depression it is defective; when it is genuine it inspires joy, courage, and inner dignity. As you begin to take an inner inventory this Rosh Hashanah, how do you feel about yourself? When you ask yourself what you want to change about yourself, pay close attention to the answers you get. Do you find yourself not taking the question seriously, feeling that you are fully satisfied with who you are and there is nothing really to change?
On the flipside, do you find yourself overwhelmed by how badly you feel about your life? Sometimes we even feel both at once. The awareness of pride or self- deprecation is the first step to bringing us back to center. When you notice either inclination, then you can reach into one spiritual pocket or the other to help rebalance your sense of self. This is the moment- to- moment spiritual practice of the quality of anava. As we seek change in our lives, it is an invaluable tool. This leads us to a second closely- related spiritual quality that can help us change our lives for the better - rachamim compassion. When we look at the liturgy of the high- holiday prayer book, we find that there is a great deal there about our chattot, our wrongdoings. Ashamnu, bagadnu, and so on. This has its place in helping us break out of our often- supersized sense of self. But it also has a danger of getting us stuck being harsh on ourselves instead of caring for ourselves. We are often our own toughest critics, whether directly or through the guise of an angry God. Thankfully we find another aspect of God as well in our liturgy. Rachamim is one of the 13 attributes of God that we call upon on the high holidays Adonai Adonai, El Rachum v Chanun. On the high holidays our metaphors for God are usually male, God as Father and King. But the word Rachamim comes from the Hebrew word rechem, which means womb. Rachamim is the nurturing force found in the caring of a mother for her child. The word rachamim also often shows up in teachings related to the pure love of a father for his child. When we think of what allows a child to grow into adulthood in a healthy way, rachamim is essential. But just as love and caring is needed by children from the womb through adolesence, so too we need rachamim to help us grow and change as adults. As adults we need compassion not only from others, but from ourselves as well. Yes, we need to take responsibility for our mistakes. But sometimes the best way to do that is to ask how we might better care for ourselves.
There is a parable that illustrates this shift. You may have heard, and if you did, you would have heard the truth, that there is a very, very old winemaker, whose wine is as old as she is. In fact, she is so old no one knows when she was born or if she was even born. She has simply always been here. The wine in her barrels is so special that no other wine is comparable. The good news is that the ancient winemaker desires nothing more than to share her wine, and she never asks for anything in return. She is kind and generous and wishes for all people to be her close friends. But there is one catch. Because her wine is so special, it also requires very, very special containers. Just as wine gets better with age, so too these vessels get better with age if taken care of properly. If the vessel is not taken care of the wine in it has been known to turn to vinegar. Whenever a person is born, the winemaker sends one of these special vessels to the baby, along with a note for the child to read when he grows up. This vessel I am giving you is one of a kind. I will visit you each New Year to fill it for you with wine, or grape juice of course until you are a bat mitzvah. Please care for it and fix it when needed, so that you can enjoy the wine for many many years to come. On Rosh Hashanah, the ancient winemaker likes to give the precious gift of her wine to all of her friends. But since she has given all of her vessels away and has only the barrels of wine, she goes to each of her friends and asks, can I borrow your beautiful vessel to fill with wine for you? Sometimes her friends are embarrassed, because over the year they neglected to clean their vessel, or it got a chip that they didn t fix properly. Sometimes instead of being embarrassed they get defensive and try to hide the imperfections. Most often her friends make a sincere effort to care for the vessel as instructed, but often they just don t know how to do so. Many years ago, parents taught children the special techniques for caring for the vessel, but in many cases, the wisdom was lost somewhere along the way. In our day these techniques are being rediscovered, which makes the winemaker very happy. Because all she wants, is to be able to share her precious wine with her friends. The ancient winemaker in this story is of course God. The wine is the precious gift of life that God wants to give to us at all times. We are the precious containers who are meant to receive and enjoy that gift.
The thing I love about this story, is that God doesn t come knocking on our door here on Rosh Hashanah in order to make us feel bad about our imperfections, God comes knocking because God wants us to taste the sweet gift of life, to enjoy it, to find fulfillment in it. In this story, the reason we should make change in our lives is not in order to become holy, but in order to become whole, so that we can receive the gift of life more fully. Not only do we desire to be happy and fulfilled, apparently God also wants this for us! If we think back on the past year, we have probably all had times when life has indeed felt like a precious gift, and other times when it hasn t felt like a gift at all. If you think about the range of experience that this roomful of people has collectively had in the past year, it is quite astounding. We have had life transitions of every type the birth of new loved ones, the loss of loved ones. We have lost or acquired jobs. We have moved to new homes or transitioned to assisted living. We became ill, we regained our health. We have married, we have divorced. Amidst all these external changes, we have felt every emotion under the sun. Joy, love, sorrow, fear, anger, desire, peace. Such is a year in the life of a community of human beings. Life is extraordinary, but it definitely isn t easy. No wonder we don t always experience it as the precious gift that it ultimately is. When we arrive here on Rosh Hashanah, our vessels are chipped, smudged, cracked and duck- taped together! In Hebrew school we are usually taught that God is omnipotent all- powerful. But, in the story of the winemaker we see that God actually needs our help. God needs us to care for ourselves so that we are capable of receiving Her gift. God needs us to apply the healing power of rachamim to our lives. When are you hard on yourself in a way that isn t helpful? How might caring for yourself help you achieve the changes you desire in your life? At first glance, Anavah and Rachamim and the other midot we will explore this year may seem like overly simple spiritual tools for effecting change in our lives. How about clairvoyance if I could teach you to see the future now that could be truly helpful! But humility, compassion, generosity, respect? As the rabbis say in the Talmud peshita! everyone already knows these are praiseworthy qualities in a person, what is new about that?! But we shouldn t be fooled by the simplicity of the midot.
In the early 1700 s the great Italian Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzatto wrote a book called Mesilat Yesharim the Path of the Upright, which goes chapter by chapter through the different midot and how to master them. He begins the introduction with these words: I have written this work not to teach men what they do not know, but to remind them of what they already know..they will find in most of my words only things concerning which they entertain no doubts. But to the extent that they are well known and their truths revealed to all, so is forgetfulness in relation to them extremely prevalent. The Ramchal realized that because certain positive human qualities are so easily agreed upon, most of us neglect to actually take seriously the important effort necessary to develop those qualities. But just because we can easily agree on the benefit of these qualities doesn t mean we all embody them. The power in the midot is discovered when we apply them. Just as effort and practice are needed to get good at anything else, so too they are necessary to develop qualities of character. We might agree it is a fine skill to be able to play violin like a virtuoso. But we would never assume that we could become a virtuoso without practice! Why would we assume that we will be full of compassion, or generosity, or any of the other midot without practice? This is why we call it spiritual practice. In one of his books, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that if you study the lives of people who have achieved mastery in any field, from NHL players to Steve Jobs, the thing that they have in common is that they had the opportunity for a huge amount of practice. 10,000 hours of practice is apparently the magic number for mastering a skill. Tikun hamidot is the practice of mastering the inner skills. It is how we become a Jewish Jedi master. This too won t happen overnight. But the good news is that we don t have to give up our day jobs to find 10,000 hours for this spiritual practice. Just the opposite in fact. We can work on developing these inner skills in every realm of our lives, from our family life to our work life to our social life to our communal life. Tomorrow I will discuss how we can apply two of the midot in the realm of friendship in particular.
Despite my Jedi master reference, I make no claim to being Yoda. I am on this journey of developing midot as well, and I look forward to exploring this path with you all in the year ahead, so that we can drink deeply together of the richest, most amazing wine ever created. Ketiva v chatima tova, May we all be written and sealed in book of life.