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Choose Life

Occasion: Yom Kippur 2004



This sermon discusses the meaning of the phrase "choose life." It tells people to choose a good way to live life.
I set before you this day life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life if you and your offspring would live.
This is the nature of the world. We live in a world filled with life and with death, with many blessings and many curses. Blessings include family, friends, and lovers. Great books or music. Incredible vistas. Simple pleasures. A favorite food. A warm bath. A soft touch.
Then there are the curses--family, friends and lovers and the inevitable difficulty of relationships, leading to hurts and broken hearts. There are disappointments and frustrations--big and small. Aches and pains--small and big. Loss especially the death of loved ones. The balance of blessings and curses are different for each of us, partly based on our efforts but mostly based on luck.
Yet, except in the most extreme circumstances life itself is a blessing. Another day of pleasures big and small. Another day without aches and pains. Another day of doing the work you want or being with the people you care about. Another sunrise. Another glass of cold water. Another breath and then another.
As I said on Rosh ha-Shanah, everything changes except one thing, that every story has the same ending in death. Yet even with that inevitable ending or maybe because of it, we cherish life and strive to remember that life contains everything, both blessing and curse and even birth and death.
What then does it mean to say 'choose life'? Who would choose death? And since when is it in our hands to choose life over death. Death is inevitable?!! What choice do we really have?
I think the phrase 'choose life' really means choose to be alive. It is the act of choosing that makes us alive. When we are confronted with roads that diverge in the woods, it is the conscious act of choosing that makes us alive. Whether we are choosing what movie to see or which job to take, at the moment that we consciously choose we are truly alive to the present. We have shown up for that vote, that election. We reflect and we act.
Choice is a key element in making us human. We don't react only by instinct as do animals. When an animal is hungry it will eat. We human animals can decide not to eat despite the hunger. We can deny our instinct on behalf of some value created by our human reason or emotion. Only humans can fast on Yom Kippur. Only humans can fast in solidarity with a people suffering an injustice. Humans do not live by instinct alone.
The challenge is to make sure we choose. Too often we take the easy road and we let choices be made. Not really alive, we are like sleep walkers moving through life on automatic pilot. We hand over the choice to someone or something else. Often it is to our past--this is the way we have done it before or this is our routine. We don’t stop to reflect whether this situation is in fact different from those previous experiences. Though times have changed and we have changed, too often we act like Moses. Told by God once again to draw water from a rock, he hits the rock, repeating his action from a previous incident. Yet, to this second rock he was supposed to speak. In punishment, God tells Moses he can’t go into the Promised Land. Why such an extreme punishment for such a small sin? Because when Moses hit the rock he showed that he had stopped paying attention and thus had stopped being a leader. In a crisis, when the people cried out for water, he went back to an old solution. Times had changed but he hadn’t. God then knew it was time for new leadership. The essential quality of leadership is being able and willing to pay attention and respond to the present situation, and not just rely on past experiences.
When it is not past experiences, it is our fear and anxiety that get in the way of our making choices. We become passive. We hope someone else will choose. O please let me not get that job offer because then I will have to make the difficult decision whether to take it or not. Or the theological version: Give me a sign whether I should take the job or not, if two people say hello to me in the office this morning before I get to the water cooler then that is a sign, etc.
As much as we might think that given a choice between life and death, nobody would choose death, the truth is we are often choosing a form of death, a passivity, a sleepiness. Too often we go through life like the prophet Jonah whose story we read today. He is aboard a ship that is floundering at sea. All those on the ship are frantically throwing overboard anything non-essential to lighten the ship. Everyone is praying to their God for help as the storm gets worse. Jonah, he is sleeping through the whole thing. What dedication to sleeping. He is, as the expression goes about a deep sleeper, dead to the world.
I set before you this day life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, if you and your offspring shall live. What does that last phrase mean 'if you and your offspring shall live?' It seems completely redundant. If you choose life of course you live?! Perhaps it is just emphasizing that it is the act of choosing that makes you alive. Choose life and then you will be really alive. Yet what does your offspring have to do with it?
We know that we are human and therefore mortal. Deep down we know that everything passes away and changes. Yet, we seek to gain immortality, to leave some ongoing presence behind. We don't want to feel like a snowflake--unique but gone in sixty seconds. It is our deeds that are our progeny. This is the impact. This is the offspring, that we have in our time and that reverberate in the cosmos even after we are long gone. Have we added to the misfortune and misery of the world or to its healing? In the untaneh tokef prayer it says that judgment will be based on what we have written by our own hand in the book of our lives.
This is the challenge of Judaism. To live a life of holiness and compassion. As I have said to you before and as I tried to set out in my recent book, A Book of Life, I think we have been less than successful in conveying the essence of Judaism. It is not about a nostalgic connection to a religious or ethnic past. Judaism is not about preserving the past but rather about improving the present. What Judaism tries to help us to do is to choose, in fact to choose life. Even some of the basic aspects of the tradition, which seem to have nothing at all to do with choice are in fact designed to help us make good choices.
Judaism has both ethical and ritual practices. The challenge is to experience the ritual practices as aids to being ethical. More often we look at the ritual practices and wonder about their importance or meaning. While few would question ethical precepts against lying or cheating and would see the relevance of making the right choices to tell the truth and not cheat, many of us wonder what difference it really makes if we write on Shabbat or eat matzah on Passover.
Let us examine two of the most prominent rituals of Judaism--Shabbat and prayer. Some might argue that Shabbat is an environmentally friendly day and helps to raise our consciousness about taking care of the earth. Others might suggest that it is useful to have a day of rest and point out how so much of the world has adopted this practice. Others might suggest it is an important time to be together with family or friends in our fast paced world. All these and more are valid reasons to observe Shabbat. Let me suggest one more.
By stepping away from the too business of our lives, Shabbat is a day for self reflection, for study, and for discussion. We can reflect on how well we are living up to our vision of ourselves. We can study texts or engage in discussions of the Torah portion to find new teachings or insights that might help us on our way. For most of us the opportunity for ongoing study is difficult given the pace of our lives. Yet, we know that we didn't learn everything in kindergarten. There are skills beyond memorizing multiplication tables that need to be learned, even skills that can never be fully mastered, such as learning to be a caring person. The question is no longer what happened in the year 1492, but what happened yesterday and how I can do a better job tomorrow. Shabbat has no other agenda than to give us time to reflect upon the spiritual dimensions of our lives, our inner space that gets short shrift between the demands of work, family, errands that need to be run, bills to be paid etc.
This is also true of prayer. Prayer too is a time for self reflection. To ponder the values expressed in the liturgy. Like Shabbat it is time cut out of the business of life to look inward and see where you are and how that relates to where you want to be. Both the day of Shabbat and prayer call us to wake up to life and to the passing of time, and ask whether we are ready to choose rather than sleep walk through another day, another week or month, another year.
Shabbat and prayer are "timeouts" from the ordinary daily activities to give us time to be with ourselves and with our ideals. So I would like you to think about Shabbat and prayer whether you come weekly to The SAJ on Shabbat morning or you have no plans to come to this space again before next High Holidays. I want to talk to you about what we are doing new this year at The SAJ on Shabbat. I want to tell you about this not to sell you on something. Nor because it is my job as rabbi to make you more Jewish. I deeply believe in choice. Each of you will choose your path in life and in relation to Judaism. I am not here to persuade you, entice you, or make you feel guilty. My only job is to open a doorway and give you a peak at what is inside. My whole life has been dedicated to make Judaism more accessible to people. But in the end the choice is yours and the choices are as numerous as the stars in the sky. There is no one way to be Jewish.
The SAJ has been chosen to be the first synagogue in Manhattan to receive a grant from the STAR Foundation to create a program known as Synaplex Shabbat. Like the movie theater cineplexes, SYNaplex is based on the notion that multiple offerings on Shabbat are better than few. In our context, it means that we recognize there are many different ways to celebrate Shabbat as well as new ones waiting to be discovered. For some, Shabbat will be a time of intellectual study and discussion, for others it will be a time to celebrate the wonders of creation, for others it will be a time to create community with other Jews, for others it will be a time to enjoy a fun/pleasurable activity, for others it will involve Jewish music or film, and for still others it will involve a project of social concern. On a Synaplex Shabbat all those modes of activity will be offered. It will be a time of choice. No one will be expected to attend everything. Nor is the idea to get people in the shul door for one activity so that in the end they will come to Shabbat services. If many people come to The SAJ on these Shabbatot and never open a prayer book--dayenu--it would be more than enough. We will be offering a Synaplex Shabbat once a month.
Some have looked at the preliminary program and have said--seems like the same old same old. Others have looked at it and have asked what is Jewish about bird watching or bike riding. When we hear those contradictory comments, we know we must be doing something right. Offering early morning activities that focus on the body and the outdoors does not seem like the same old same old except when we look at the first part of the morning liturgy and realize it is all about the physical act of waking up to the morning. We are offering bike riding, fast walking, a nature walk, and tai chi because we think there is something holy about going out into the natural world to see the wonders of God's creation, or to be thankful that our bodies can walk and ride and stretch. But fundamentally, we believe that if Jews gather on Shabbat to do pleasurable non-commercial activities together that too is a celebration of Shabbat.
We need to open wide the doors that define what happens on Shabbat, what happens in a shul in order to celebrate the diversity in our community and welcome as many people as possible to share in the creative energy of this congregation. One of the reasons that the STAR foundation was interested in The SAJ for the Synaplex program is because it seems like such a natural fit with Mordecai Kaplan's notion of Judaism as a religious civilization. For Kaplan, civilization meant the full range of creative expression--art, music, dance, literature, and film. Synaplex will feature the noted artist Tobi Kahn, Joel Sachs, a noted professor of music at Julliard, lectures on the challenges of new science to religion, a screening of an Israeli film with its director, and this spring the return of the cutting edge Israeli dance group Vertigo. Kaplan also posited that we live in two civilizations and he urged us to explore the impact one had on the other. Thus there will be talks on politics and intellectual issues not from a "Jewish" point of view but because these are of interest to us, Jews who live in America. There will be fun activities like wine tasting or haroset recipes (dips) for Passover.
Shabbat is also about community. We want adults with children to be able to attend. Thus there will be special and fun programs for kids such as comedy improvisation or yoga. There will also be supervised activities for kids either on our outdoor roof or inside.
And for those who would like to spend their Shabbat making the world a more caring place, we have arranged with Dorot to match individuals or families with elderly Jews for a monthly visit.
And more ideas are still to come from you.
We are asking you. I am asking you to consider putting on your calendar the once a month Synaplex Shabbat.
Don't come in order to save the Jewish people. Don't come because you want your child to marry a Jew.
Choose to come because being part of the Jewish people has significance to you.
Choose to come because you want to give yourself the time and context to reflect upon your inner life.
Choose to come because living your values is the only real way to teach your children what is important.
Choose to come because community can serve as a home in an alienating urban landscape.
Choose because choosing is life. It is up to us to choose how we want to live our lives. For whom shall this be a component of their existence, and for whom life shall be a leaf driven by the wind. For whom will life be purposeful and fulfilled and for whom will it be a passing dream, who shall create and build, and who shall drift and slumber, who shall have a context for the inevitable earthquakes and who will have neither community nor beliefs to serve as sails through the tempestuous storms, who shall have hope and courage and who shall fear what tomorrow shall bring.
It is only with teshuvah--self-reflection, and tefillah--engaging with that which is larger than ourselves, the good, the values that we call God, and tzedakah--coming together with others like ourselves and different from ourselves that we can avert the severity of the decree--not the decree of death but the decree that says this is all for naught, no purpose, no memory.
Judaism is about choosing life, choosing how to live, not by merely following Jewish rituals, but rather using them to guide us to a life of caring and compassion, of openheartedness, a life dedicated to becoming an ever better person to others and to yourself. At the end of your day, will you be able to look back and echo God's words at the end of each day of the first week of creation--va-yehi tov and it was good.
Who shall choose death and who shall choose life?
God says: I have set it all before you.
Choose life.
Copyright © 2004, The Society for the Advancement of Judaism

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