| Rosh
Hashanah II - 2006
Rabbi Brian Glusman relates that "I have a little
program on my computer called Google Web Accelerator. Anyone know what it is? It accelerates your computer's internet performance. This free little program enables your
computer to achieve higher speed while surfing the internet. I installed it a couple of months
ago. Google Web Accelerator has an
interesting feature. It measures
your computer's performance and tells you how much actual time you saved.
Yesterday, I checked to see how much time I saved
– 5.6 hours. Can you believe
it? I saved almost 6 hours by
using the Web Accelerator. At
first, I was thrilled … 6 extra hours.
What a mechaya? What a find?
When there never seems to be enough time, I found extra time. The problem is that I just don't know
what I did with that extra time.
What did I do with that gift – my extra six hours? Did I spend more time with my wife? Did I do something special with my
children? Did I spend a little
extra time on the phone with my parents, with my brother or my sister? Did I do something important? Did I do a mitzvah? Did I reach out and help someone who
was in need? Did I make myself
present for my friends and community?
Did I use that time in a meaningful way or did I waste it?
….Especially at this time of the year, on the Yamim
Noraim, the High Holidays, we need
to recognize how holy our time is.
We don't need Google's web accelerator because each day we are given
more time, a most precious and sacred gift…."
Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of a new year. Our tank of hours is full. What do we intend to do with them? What will we do with them?
In his book, To Heal A Fractured World, (pg. 6) a book to
which we shall return on Yom Kippur, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the
United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth since 1991,
writes the following.
"When I first became a rabbi, the most difficult duty
I had to perform was a funeral service.
New to the position and the people, I often hardly knew the deceased,
while to everyone else present he or she had been a member of the family, or an
old and close friend. There was
nothing to do but to get help from others. I would ask them what the person who had died meant to
them. It did not take long before
I recognized a pattern to their replies.
Usually they would say that the deceased had been a
supportive husband or wife, a loving parent, a loyal friend. They spoke about the good they had done
to others, often quietly, discreetly, without ostentation. When you needed them, they were
there. They shouldered their
responsibilities to the community.
They gave to charitable causes, and if they could not give money, they
gave time. Those most mourned and
missed were not the most successful, rich or famous. They were the people who enhanced the lives of others. These were the people who were loved.
This reinforced for me the crucial difference between
the urgent and the important. No one
ever spoke, in praise of someone who had died, about the car they drove, the
house they owned, the clothes they wore, the exotic holidays they took. No one's last thought was ever, 'I wish
I had spent more time in the office.'
The things we spend most of our time pursuing turn out to be curiously
irrelevant when it comes to seeing the value of a life as a whole. They are urgent, but not important, and
in the crush and press of daily life, the urgent tends to win out over the
important."
So as we look ahead, have we really considered at all
whether in the new year we plan to work on the important or only the urgent? I am
confident all of us have a plan for our cars. We will either trade them in regularly or keep them for a
decade or longer until they are worthless. I am confident that we have a plan for our homes. We decide whether we will cut the
lawn and shovel the snow ourselves or hire someone to do so. We decide whether even hiring someone
for the lawn and snow is a nuisance and so we opt for a fifty-five plus community
or even a life care community. I
am confident that we have a plan for our clothes. We either choose designer items and don't care about the
cost or look for bargains at Marshall's and T.J. Maxx. We either shop eagerly and regularly
or, like me, view shopping as an accepted form of torture and go once or twice
a year. I am sure that we even
plan our vacations very carefully.
Is it the mountains or the shore?
Do we stay in the continental United States or go overseas, maybe even
someplace exotic? Is it about
resting or touring? But do
we plan as much and think as much about what we might do for others?
Rabbi Sacks points out, (Pg. 5) "Judaism is a complex and
subtle faith, yet it has rarely lost touch with its simple and ethical
imperatives. We are here to make a
difference, to mend the fractures of the world, a day at a time, an act at a
time, for as long as it takes to make it a place of justice and compassion
where the lonely are not alone, the poor not without help; where the cry of the
vulnerable is heeded and those who are wronged are heard. 'Someone else's
physical needs are my spiritual obligations,' a Jewish mystic taught. The truths of religion are exalted, but
its duties are close at hand. We
know God less by contemplation than by emulation. The choice is not between 'faith' and 'deeds,' for it is by
our deeds that we express our faith and make it real in the life of others and
the world."
How do we emulate God? What deeds express our faith?
Once a month, on the fourth Tuesday of the month, from
9:30 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., members of Brith Sholom help prepare and serve meals to
the homeless at New Bethany Ministries in south Bethlehem. We are most fortunate to have a small
group of dedicated volunteers who have participated in this mitzvah. But we need more. Soon the snow birds will be flying
south for the late fall, winter and early spring. Who of you will plan to transform his or her life in the
coming year by giving a few hours a month, at least some months, to help cook
for and feed the poor and homeless?
If you are willing, please call Debrosha McCants, our coordinator, to
let her know of your availability.
Four times a year, the Leisure Group, our senior adult
group, under the leadership of our senior adult staff person, Bernice Harris,
arranges for and prepares holiday meals and a cook-out for Jewish residents at
the Allentown State Hospital. Over
thirty years, I have seen enormous changes at both the State Hospital and the
Leisure Group. Neither has as many
people as it did in the 1970s and 80s.
But there are still a handful of Jewish residents at Allentown State and
they very much appreciate these quarterly meals and the schmoozing which comes
along with them. A few of the
patients even seem to enjoy Leo Pozefsky's harmonica playing. Only a couple of loyal Leisure Group
members help with the meal preparation.
Yes, I am talking about more cooking. But for people who are institutionalized for decades, and
really marginalized by most of society their whole lives, this is not just
another meal preparation. Who of
you is willing to transform his or her life in the coming year by helping to
prepare and serve meals to Jewish residents at Allentown State hospital? If we had enough volunteers, we could
go more than four times a year. If
you are willing, please let me know.
In the ninth chapter of Genesis, the Torah emphasizes
the importance of blood. Even from
kosher animals, we are not allowed to consume it (v. 4) "Only flesh with the life
thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall you not eat." As we know, in many instances, human
blood also is connected to life.
Throughout the year, there are human beings who need life saving blood
transfusions. I am certain that
some of you sitting here today may have benefited during surgery or some other
emergency from a blood transfusion.
As a member of Brith Sholom, if you sign up with our group, and if we have enough donors, you will receive blood from the Miller-Keystone
Memorial Blood Bank. We are
fortunate to have a few outstanding blood donors, but the total number is only
about a dozen. Who of you is
willing in the coming year potentially to save a life, whether of a total
stranger whom you'll never know, or of another Brith Sholom congregant whom you
like very much, by donating blood once or even twice? If you need more information, please contact our Blood Group
chair, Florence Hausman.
For some years, we had an active group of people we
called the Bikkur Chaverim, "the
visitors of friends." We did not
want to call it a Bikkur Holim, a visiting the sick, committee, because we included more than
those in hospitals and nursing homes and because not too many people want to
serve on committees and there really were no meetings as such. In addition, we did not want to focus on
sickness, but on the fact that some people who were once active in the
community no longer are, because of age as much as sickness, and because of
emotional or psychological problems as much as because of any physical
ailment. Because of deaths and
some people moving, the Bikkur Chaverim has not been active for a couple of years and it would be good if we
could reorganize it.
I want to draw special attention to a problem that may
too easily be overlooked, but is a reality in our congregation and that is the
issue of depression. I am not
discussing just feeling "down" or "blue" for a day or two. The Webster's Collegiate Dictionary definition of depression is: "a psychoneurotic or psychotic disorder marked
especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty in thinking and concentration, a
significant increase or decrease in appetite and time spent sleeping, feelings
of dejection and hopelessness, and sometimes suicidal tendencies." For obvious reasons, I am not going to
mention any names, but we have had and do have members of Brith Sholom, males
and females, who were or are depressed.
One of them asked me to read the book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of
Madness by William Styron. A
Pulitzer Prize winning writer, you may know him as the author of The
Confessions of Nat Turner or Sophie's Choice. But the back cover of Darkness
Visible gives this brief summary of this autobiographical essay. "In 1985 William Styron fell victim to
a crippling and almost suicidal depression, the same illness that took the
lives of Randall Jarrell and Primo Levy, Vincent Van Gogh and Virginia
Wolf. That Styron survived his
descent into madness is something of a miracle…."
Writing about depression in general, Mr. Styron notes,
(Pg. 7) "Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive
in the way it becomes known to the self – to the mediating intellect
– as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible
to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although gloom, 'the
blues' which people go through occasionally and associate with the general
hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many
individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form."
Later in the book (Pg.
46-47) Styron attacks any casual notion of being depressed. "Our perhaps understandable modern need
to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led
us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity,
melancholia, lunatic, madness. But
never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness. It has been established with reasonable
certainty … that such madness is chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters
of the brain, probably as the result of systemic stress, … The madness of
depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of
murk. Soon evident are the
slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to
zero. Ultimately, the body is
affected and feels sapped, drained."
Most of us will not be able to help someone so
profoundly depressed, although there are times a depressed person may welcome a
visit from a friend or acquaintance who is understanding of the situation. But let us not ignore that many
depressed individuals have a spouse. We may well be able to offer relief to a husband or
wife who has the full or major responsibility for taking care of a seriously
ill mate.
Who of you is prepared and willing to transform his or
her life by really reaching out to others in the congregation? The physically sick and psychologically
ill, the lonely and the shut-ins are waiting to hear from us. We especially need someone to serve as a
coordinator of our efforts. If we
want to emulate God, we need to express our faith in deeds and we need to find
the hours to do so. Superman may
have come back to earth this past summer, but we can't wait for him to take
care of these problems.
While he stops bullets and leaps over tall buildings in a single bound,
we need to be super ourselves and help perfect our world one person at a
time. If you are ready to help do
so, please let me know.
There is nothing wrong with wasting some time, as long
as we do not waste our lives. May
the new year see us make the most of our time in reaching out to those with the
most need of us.
AMEN
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