| Yom
Kippur 2006 Kol Nidre
"Here is a story that comes from the dark days of what we used to call
the Cold War. At a press conference in New York City in 1969, then Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev received a written question: 'What were you doing during
all those crimes of Stalin that you have exposed and denounced?' Livid
with rage, Khrushchev shouted, 'Who asked that question? Everyone remained
silent. 'Let him stand up!' Khrushchev demanded. No one stood up.
Then Khrushchev said in a lowered voice. "That's what I was doing.'"
Could
Khrushchev have stopped Stalin? I don't know. But I do
know that too many of us have followed his example and in the
face of actual atrocities
and potential catastrophes, we are silent. This is the antithesis of Torah
and our tradition.
I
return now to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United
Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth since
1991 and his book,
To Heal A Fractured
World, which is subtitled, "The Ethics of Responsibility." Rabbi
Sacks proclaims (Pg. 134) "The Bible is God's call to human responsibility." Rabbi
Sacks interprets four stories at the beginning of the Bible, the first four in
the Torah, in an insightful, and I think brilliant way, to prove his point about
human responsibility. I hope my summary (pg. 135-146) will do justice to Rabbi
Sacks' meaningful and extensive analysis.
Adam
and Eve are in paradise and are forbidden to eat from only one
tree and, of course, they soon eat its fruit. When God confronts
them, the man said,
(Gen. 3:12) "The woman you put here with me – she gave me some of the fruit
from the tree, and I ate it." Rabbi Sacks comments. "The first human
instinct is denial. The man blames the woman. By implication he blames God as
well. It was, after all, [God] who made her, [God] who decided that 'It
is not good for man to be alone.' We hear for the first time a proposition
that has undergone many transformations but always with the same conclusion: 'I
am not responsible. I am not to blame.' The fault may lie in our stars,
our socioeconomic class, early childhood traumas, the configuration of our genes
or the several other varieties of determinism, each of which denies the freedom
of human action." Adam and Eve are free to act because they are created
in the image of God who is beyond nature. Nature does not determine what we do,
we decide to eat of the fruit or not; and whether to accept responsibility or
not. (Pg. 137) Rabbi Sacks writes: "This is what Adam and Eve simultaneously
experience and deny. The first beings to discover freedom, they are also the
first to feel what Erich Fromm called 'the fear of freedom.' Freedom
is fearful, precisely because it involves responsibility. It is comforting and
comfortable to live under someone else's tutelage and power; to be able
to say, 'It wasn't my fault'; to look elsewhere for deliverance.
The knowledge that there are laws you can break, and for whose breach you bear
guilt, is the exile from Eden, the loss of childhood and innocence; and that
is never without pain. Hence the depth and originality of the story is not that
Adam and Eve sinned … but its insight into the psychodynamics of self-deception.
Their first instinct is to deny that they were acting freely at all. They deny
personal responsibility."
In
the second story, Cain murders his brother, Abel. When God asks
Cain where his brother is, Cain utters the famous line, (Gen.
4: 9) "Am I my brother's
keeper?" (Pg. 138) Cain does not deny personal responsibility. He does
not say, 'I could not help it. The blame lies elsewhere.' [Cain]
denies something different, namely moral responsibility. [Cain] acted, and acted
freely, but he sees no reason why he should be held accountable for what he did.
[Cain] is not his brother's keeper.
Adam
claimed that his will was powerless before the world as it acted
on him in the form of his wife. Cain believes the opposite, that
the world
is powerless
before his will. We are entitled to do what we choose to do, and conscience
does not impose constraints. … (Pg. 139-140) Cain denies neither his deed nor
the freedom with which it was performed. What he denies is accountability: 'Am
I my brother's keeper?' For [Cain], there is no 'I ought' to
countermand – 'I want' or 'I will' – no voice
beyond choice, no authority beyond emotion and desire. . . . Cain denies, not
personal, but moral responsibility."
The
third Biblical story is about Noah and the ark. (Pg. 140) Rabbi
Sacks elaborates: "The
name Noah comes from the [Hebrew] word that means 'to rest.' Complex
resonances are being set up. Noah is the man who rested when he should have acted,
for when disaster threatens the world he saves himself and his family; no one
else. … (Pg. 141) Relative to his generation, [Noah] was righteous, but
in absolute terms he was not. What was Noah's failure according to the
classic commentators? Told that there would be a flood and that he should build
an ark, he busied himself in the labour. … Throughout the whole of the
narrative – the warning of the deluge, the building of the ark, the gathering
of the animals, the beginning of the rain – Noah says nothing. The silence,
in contrast with the dialogues Adam and Cain have with God, is unmistakable.
Noah's failure is that, righteous in himself, he has no impact on his contemporaries. … Noah,
the righteous man, fails to exercise collective responsibility."
The
fourth and final story is about the tower of Babel, a text of
merely nine verses. Rabbi Sacks explains it is a story of people
trying to
create a universe
where (Pg 143) "they, not God, rule. … The builders of the Tower
defy the principle stated in the book of Psalms: 'The heavens are the heavens
of the Lord, the earth He has given to the children of mankind.' … Babel
is a profound commentary on the human desire to take the (Pg. 144) place of God.
The word 'responsibility' comes from the word 'response.' It
implies the existence of an other, who has legitimate claims on my conduct, for,
or to, whom I am accountable. The Hebrew equivalent, ahrayut, derives from the
word acher, meaning 'an other.' Responsibility is intrinsically relational.
The ethical is never private. … Babel represents the failure of ontological
responsibility, the idea that we are accountable to something or someone beyond
ourselves. … Responsibility is response-ability: accountability to an authority
beyond us, in the here-and-now."
As
Rabbi Sacks concludes this chapter, he summarizes. (Pg. 145) "It is
now clear why the biblical story does not begin with Abraham. Responsibility
is not a given of the human situation. On the contrary, it is all too easy to
deny it. It wasn't my fault (Adam). I don't see why I shouldn't
do what I wish, not what I ought (Cain). I am responsible for myself, not others
(Noah). We are answerable to no one but ourselves (Babel). … (Pg 146) Responsibility
is the condition of our freedom, and we cannot abdicate it without losing much
else besides."
I
love Rabbi Sacks' approach to the Genesis stories and I
love his play on words: responsibility is response-ability; we
have the ability to respond
to all kinds of issues around us and we have the responsibility
to do so. The list of such issues is long and subjective, but
let me mention a few this evening.
In
the fall of 2001, on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, I delivered
a sermon on genocide and the term – Never Again! On that occasion I reviewed a number
of the genocides of the twentieth century: the Armenians, the Shoah, our own
Holocaust, Cambodia and Rwanda. I mentioned those to bring attention to the events
that were taking place in the former Yugoslavia. Never Again! had become Once
Again! and sadly we have moved almost seamlessly from Kosovo to Darfur. Is there
no end to human brutality? And is there no end to the lack of response as though
we had no ability to do so. But we do have response-ability and if we do not
respond, not only will the people in Darfur die, but clearly so will a part of
our so-called humanity. If we do not reach out to save others, others who are
very different from us, we will be like Noah, who was silent in the face of disaster
and then had to drown out his failure to act in wine and drunkenness. Or we will
be like the prophet Jonah, whose story we read tomorrow afternoon. Rather than
save the people of Nineveh, Jonah tried to flee. And when he couldn't run
away, he was miserable that his message saved the Ninevehites, the enemies of
his people, from destruction. But God Himself emphasizes to Jonah that all people
are precious and deserve a chance. If we collectively sit silently by the destruction
in Darfur, then we invite the next genocide in a place unknown tonight, to a
people unknown tonight – but surely it will come as so many others have
since we said Never Again!, but didn't take responsibility
for what we said.
Something
is going on with the earth's climate. That concern is not new.
But the direction of concern definitely is. If we are aware of what scientists
said thirty years ago, it might remind us of the Twilight Zone episode, "The
Midnight Sun," that was first broadcast in November (17) 1961. The summary
of that episode is: "One month ago, the Earth suddenly changed its elliptical
orbit and in doing so began to follow a path which gradually, moment by moment,
day by day, took it closer to the sun. … The place is New York City and
this is the eve of the end, because even at midnight it's high noon, the
hottest day in history, and you're about to spend it in the Twilight Zone." But
as always in the Twilight Zone, there is a twist at the end. As the thermometer
bursts, the heroine of the episode collapses. "When she revives, it is
cool, dark and snowing outside. It was all a feverish delusion; the Earth is
not heading toward the sun – it's heading away from it!" (The
Twilight Zone Companion, Marc S. Zicree, pages 255-256) Why
do I mention this? Because in the mid-1970s, both Time and
Newsweek magazines had stories about
global cooling.
The
June 24, 1974 edition of TIME, titled its science article no
less, "Another
Ice Age?" TIME reported: "As they review the bizarre and unpredictable
weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are
beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations
are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies
from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of
temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing
gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of
reversing…. Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could
be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease
in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface could tip the climatic
balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another
ice age within only a few hundred years." Nearly a year later, the April
28, 1975 edition of Newsweek carried an article entitled "The Cooling World." It
proclaimed: "The central fact is that after three quarters of a century
of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling
down." A month later, the New York Times, in its May 21, 1975 edition,
in an article entitled "Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing" by
Walter Sullivan, came closer to the current thinking. "The world's
climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction
and why are subjects of deepening debate." Interestingly, the article continues, "There
are specialists who say that a new ice age is on the way – the inevitable
consequence of a natural cyclic process, or as a result of man-made pollution
of the atmosphere. And there are those who say that such pollution may actually
head off an ice age."
Well,
like the Twilight Zone, scientists have certainly changed course
and if there ever was global cooling, our
pollution
has obviously
reversed the
trend.
Just this past week, the U.S. government's top climatologist in a new report
released on September 26th, warned "In about 45 years, temperatures on
Earth will be hotter than at anytime during the past one million years. … According
to the report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
the planet is just two degrees shy of an average temperature of 59 degrees Fahrenheit,
which is what they believe the temperature was about a million years ago." National
Academy of Sciences' James Hansen sees the global warming as the result
of greenhouse gasses and ominously remarks: "Humans are now in control
of the Earth's climate, for better or worse."
On
Rosh Hashanah we celebrate the birthday of the world. On Simhat
Torah we will read again about the creation
of the world.
Both
of these emphasize
that
God
is the Creator, not as a matter of history, but as
a matter of values. And as a matter of values, we have
a responsibility,
and the response-ability
to work
for the control of greenhouse gasses and anything else
that pollutes
God's
world, whether it is the air we breathe, the water we drink or the food we consume.
Former Vice-President, Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," highlights
what you and I have done and are doing to our world.
I intend to show the film here at Brith Sholom and
if you have not yet seen it, I hope you will feel a
responsibility to do so.
We
also need to be among those pushing hardest for confronting realistically
the energy crisis. Let's not be fooled by a short term
reduction in the price of gasoline at the pump. We need to show
response-ability, by promoting
conservation and by advocating for alternative energy
sources and that may include, at least in the immediate future,
nuclear energy. Oil is our enemy and we had
better learn that it has seeped into so many products
that our dependency is far greater than just cars and heating
fuel.
We
need to show response-ability for the poor. We need to show response-ability
for the homeless. We
need
to show response-ability
for those without
health coverage. We need to show response-ability
for the oldest
members of our
society. The list
is long, and you may have other important causes
to add, but as our tradition taught long ago, it
is not
up to
us to finish
the
task,
but we are not
free to ignore it. We are merely free to pursue
these issues with a sense of responsibility.
And if not now, then when?
AMEN
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