Rosh Hashanah 5774

RH I – 5774

“Lest We Forget” September 4, 2013

What a pleasure it is in early September to still be talking about baseball! The crowds are back at PNC and we are talking about Andrew McCutcheon’s bat, Ben’s knees.  And now, it’s official!  No losing season this year!

Last time this happened was a different time, the early 90s. Nirvana captured the youth with “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” John Grisham burst on the literary scene with The Firm. And in 1991 my old team, the Minnesota Twins, defeated the Atlanta Braves to win their second ever World Series.

The American League rookie of the year was the Twins’ Chuck Knoblauch. The next year he would be an all-star. He would win a total of four world championships, one with the Twins and three with the Yankees.

He was an excellent hitter with .289 career average. He stole 40 or more bases three times.  He won a gold glove.  He seemed destined for the Hall of Fame.

But in 1999, at the height of his powers, something strange happened. He forgot how to throw the ball to first base. He tried to aim his throws and would miss by a mile. He tried to remember his old instincts but he still threw wildly. He worked with a sports psychologist who was no help at all. In one forgettable game, he made three errors in six innings, took himself out of the game, got dressed and just left the stadium.

Chuck Knoblauch never recovered. He hung on for a while as a designated hitter, was traded and finally retired. Others before him went through fielding funks, but no other player had his career end because he forgot the baseball equivalent of breathing – throwing the ball to someone waiting to catch it.

It’s hard to identify with Chuck Knoblauch. I mean, forgetting what we have always known?  Couldn’t happen to us.  Or could it?

On Rosh Hashana, we speak often of teshuva, of return, making our way back to our best selves. But what if we have forgotten how? What if, like Chuckie Knoblauch, we have forgotten how to make that spiritual throw to first?

This Rosh Hashana, we ask: what have we lost that was once second nature to us?

Six things come to my mind this year.

Some have forgotten the joy and need of service. Not just going to Shabbat services, although I am a big fan. No, just offering ourselves in service to others or to a cause or to a synagogue whose values we believe in.  I truly believe we are born and bred to serve someone or something larger than ourselves. We are fed when we give ourselves over to someone or something beyond our own needs or wants.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday when I come to Temple, I park and have the opportunity to observe older men and women who have come to pick up meals from our kitchen and drive them to those who are homebound. They are almost always smiling, sharing the latest joke or family doings.

I asked one man why he seemed so happy. He had to get up early, schlep to Temple, and deliver meals before he even thought about anything for himself. He smiled and said, “I get so much out of this. I deliver physical nourishment to those who would have a hard time getting it for themselves.  But I receive an inner nourishment that I don’t seem to get from any other place in my life. And everyone I give a meal to makes me feel more important than the President!”

He went on to say, “I also hope that by making Meals on Wheels thrive it will be around when I reach the age that I need meals delivered. But I’ll tell you a secret, Rabbi. I not only feel great after each delivery. At the end of my route I feel I can accomplish anything! I mean, I just connected with 14 of God’s precious souls through food. Each one of them has told me that I am a gift to them.  What can’t I get done after that?”

That’s what it means to serve. To lift and be uplifted ourselves. Service fills our deep need to be needed. The Sages teach, “More than the calf needs to suck, the cow needs to suckle.” Giving of ourselves is as natural as a mother giving her milk. And some of us have simply forgotten how, despite the many offerings to serve that are available through our B’racha Center and countless other agencies in town.

I fear many of us have forgotten about God. Like the 18th century mathematician, Pierre-Simon La Place [supposedly]* told Napoleon, “Sir, I [had]* no need of that particular hypothesis.” Yet, for so many of us as children, God and trust in God’s presence once seemed as natural as breathing.

I know it was for me. When I was five, my mother sang the Sh’ma with each of her five children every night. And I knew in my little heart of hearts that God was real. For God was the answer to so many of my questions back then.

Why did bees sting? That’s the way God made them, so they could protect themselves against kids like me who wanted to smash them with fly swatters or trap them in glass jars just to watch them thrash about.

Why did I bleed when I sliced my toe riding my bicycle barefoot? Because God made our bodies with an escape hatch in an emergency such as toe-slicing.

*corrections based on research after this sermon was delivered (jag)

Why did my grandfather Herb Kestenbaum die at 59 when I loved him so much? My beloved grandfather, whose bed I climbed into every morning of every visit to feel his arms embrace me. Why did he have to die when I was only 5 years old? Because God made us imperfect, fragile and so that much more precious.

Why was God invisible? To protect God from all of us who would pull God in a million directions if we could see where God was.

Why did my Dad spank me and at the same time say, “Jamie, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”  An outright lie, it seemed at the time.  Why did he tell it?

Because God made Daddies imperfect. Lovable, but imperfect. I prayed for God to give my Dad more wisdom.  I prayed for that a lot.

So many of us went from a knowing and trusting relationship with God to an outright denial as we became teenagers. At age 12 I was sent to the rabbi’s office for having an epiphany in religious school: God didn’t create human beings. We created God to explain what we could not understand.

The teacher was upset and didn’t know how to respond, especially after so many other kids in class burst out in agreement with me. But sitting in Rabbi Shapiro’s waiting area, I was worried about what he would say and then tell my parents.

Rabbi Max Shapiro was the warm and caring spiritual leader of Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where we moved in 1966. He was a spiritual leader who found God right in front of him, in the people he taught, cared for and inspired every day.

Rabbi Shapiro opened the door to his study and smiled.  He asked me to come in.

He sat behind his huge desk and leaned so far back I thought he was going to fall over. Looking over his glasses, he gave me his most concerned look and said, “Now, Jamie, what seems to be the problem?” And I told him what had happened in class and about my insight into how we humans had created God.   He pursed his lips and said, “I see…”

Then, he burst into a smile and said “Jamie, all I know is that without some kind of God, there wouldn’t be anyone like you in the world, much less here at Temple Israel! Go tell your teacher that everything is fine and we’ll talk about it later. I will tell her that we have a thinker in our 7th grade and we should encourage our young thinkers instead of punishing them!”

When I shared this with another 7th grade rebel back in class, he got angry. He said, “Being all spiritual isn’t going to make the world better, is it? We should focus on what we must do, not how we relate to God!”

It seems a hard choice, spirit versus action. But the Jewish response to this dilemma is to say yes to both. Our spiritual sense, rooted in Torah values, calls on us to rage against the Syrian use of chemical weapons and call for the most direct and effective response we can muster. Because we believe that we are irreplaceable gifts of God, I feel compelled to organize for smarter, more comprehensive gun control to protect all of us.

Our spirituality calls for us to visit Israel (this coming March!) to not only touch our history, but to take up hard issues. These include supporting the Women of the Wall and ARZA and encouraging the chances, no matter how small they seem, for a durable, equitable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Our God-connection does not cut us off from these concerns, it moves us toward them. At least that is what it is meant to do. It is what Rabbi Shapiro taught me well into adulthood. Tikkun Olam, our repair of the world, is at its core, a witness of God’s presence among us.

Some of us have forgotten that being Jewish is a gift and not a burden. Along with Rabbi Symons, I teach at the Reform movement’s camp in the Poconos, Camp Harlam. Every day, children experience being Jewish in their eating, playing, living and learning.

This year, I tried a new approach. Instead of just trying to convey Jewish information, we had a session called “Physical Challenge – Spiritual Questions.” These 13- to 14-year-olds would compete doing things like building human pyramids, untangling knots made of their hands and arms, lifting themselves from the floor sitting back to back, five at a time.

After each task, they would reach into my hat and pick out a spiritual question to ask. By the second challenge, the kids were competing hard just so they could ask the next question.  Finally they asked if they could just talk about the questions.

They asked:

Are the prayers in the prayerbook literally true?

When I pray for something and I don’t get it, is God unhappy with me?

Why should we observe the holidays in the Torah? Don’t we live in a modern age? Why should I believe in God?

Will God forgive me if I’ve done something I know is wrong? Why is saying the Sh’ma important?

Does God care what I eat or about keeping kosher? If not, why should I? What if I believe something in Judaism is wrong?  Do I just have to accept it?

And finally, they asked…

…do we have to go to lunch?

A gift, not a burden! Worthy of skipping lunch (I didn’t let them). A gift to struggle with the meaning of our lives; a gift to keep our traditions alive; a gift to know that we are neither the first nor the last in our Jewish journey, that we are a link in a living chain of our people and our faith. A gift that some of us have sadly forgotten.

Some have forgotten that we can change, that we are not just condemned to do what we’ve always done. Some believe that our minds are permanently set, our hearts closed forever.

A recent book that challenges this notion is The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg. He shows that the power of habit is so strong that there is only one way to break it.  That is to acquire another habit and substitute it for the one that is harmful.

He tells the story of a venerable old company based in Pittsburgh, called the Aluminum Company of America. You guessed it. ALCOA! In 1977 this industrial powerhouse had forgotten something important: how to make a profit. Critics called it too big and slow and unable to produce a quality product.

Then Paul O’Neill was recruited to become the CEO. Duhigg writes, “The previous CEO had tried to mandate improvements and 15,000 employees had gone on strike… One person from the period [said]: ‘ALCOA was not a happy family…more like the Manson family but with the addition of molten metal.”

He entered his position with tremendous expectations that he would turn the company around. But he realized that if he promised to raise profits and stock prices he’d be doomed from the start. People with personal or departmental agendas would invariably look out for themselves at the expense of the entire company.

So he started from a completely different direction. Instead of profitability or quality control he promised that he would concentrate all of his efforts on worker safety, cutting down injuries and the lost days and crushed morale associated with them. The institutional investors scoffed. The managers wondered what good that would do. The unions agreed but couldn’t imagine it would make the company better.

He put worker safety on the agenda of every meeting at every level of the company, asking for daily updates of incidents and what caused them. If an accident happened on a shift and the manager didn’t report it, he was fired. If a worker did something dangerous, even if it kept the assembly line running, he or she would be reprimanded and sent for more training.

Speed of production or quantity of [aluminum]* were put second to worker safety. Paul O’Neill said that the minimum expectation of any worker was that when s/he came to work in the morning s/he could expect to go home that night in one piece.

* [misspoken in oral presentation]

And you know what? More quickly than any thought possible, worker safety improved. As it did, other areas of the company improved.  Workers and management

communicated more. Department heads shared information about how to avoid costly accidents. Vice Presidents competed with each other for the fewest accidents in their units.

And all the time the quality of the product went up. As it did, financial rewards poured in:  The stock price zoomed and raises were given to all.

Duhigg writes, “O’Neill never promised that his focus on worker safety would increase ALCOA’s profits. However, as his new routines moved through the organization, costs came down, quality went up and productivity skyrocketed.”

The solution for forgetting how to make a profit is attending to what is even more basic than making money. What could that be? Taking care of people. Why? Because without them there is no product, there are no profits. Without taking care of people, we are back to throwing workers into the fiery furnace of our former steel mills like so many replaceable cogs, seeing each person as a thing and not a gift of God.

Despite mistakes we have made this year as a sacred community, I am, we are, deeply, fiercely committed to each and every one of you here.  The single most important, essential fact that I know is that every one of you matters. More than you will ever know. Not in 33 million years of human life on earth has there ever been anyone around like you. You are more than unique. You are irreplaceable, because of our wonderful, profound, irrational belief that there is a spark of the Divine in you.

Yes, we have defects. Yes, we make mistakes – horrible ones. We are routinely selfish and self-centered, hyper-sensitive and often hyper-critical. We use others for our own ends, even when motivated by love and concern. We fall short of our intentions, in work, in our families, in our cherished relationships.

Yet, I believe, from the bottom of my heart, that every one of you sitting here tonight is a unique gift of the Creator of the Universe, even if we have forgotten how to throw to first. We are bound to struggle and fail, again and again. The struggle strengthens and ennobles us. For in falling down we learn to rise again. This is the way back, the path that so many have forgotten.  This is what repentance is all about.

According to news reports, Chuck Knoblauch is a fairly happy, well-adjusted 45- year-old now, living in Houston, Texas. After even more drama, he is finally in a good place in his life. It came at a price, though: In his home there are no displays or trophies from his baseball career.

He has substituted a stable home life for faded glories. Only by forgetting how to throw did he, in the end, remember how to live. This Rosh Hashana, we might just do the same: