From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

When Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks passed away earlier this month, he was arguably the most impactful English-speaking rabbi in the modern world: prolific, profound, patient, persuasive, powerful.  His words of Torah touched and transformed countless lives. If anyone was born to be a rabbi, it was Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks – though to hear him tell it, becoming a rabbi, let alone the spiritual guide of a generation, was not his plan. In an interview this past summer with Tim Ferriss, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks tells a story about himself as a young 20-something.  Young Jonathan thought he would grow up to be an accountant or a lawyer.  The year, he says, was “1968, when Simon & Garfunkel were counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike and they’ve all come to look for America. In 1968,” he shared, “the end of my second year at university, at 20 years old, I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know much about Judaism, about religion, but I do know there are lots of distinguished, distinguished rabbis.’ And so I decided…to take a plane to the States and buy a Greyhound bus ticket — a hundred dollars, unlimited travel…I went around looking for America and counting the rabbis. Not the cars. And I met lots and lots of terrific rabbis.”

The great preacher in Atlanta, Andy Stanley, has recently given a series of sermons about a topic that is always relevant, especially now.  What happens, he asks, when it is what it is, and what is isn’t great.  You don’t love it, but you are stuck with it. Your marriage is what it is. Your health is what it is.  Your kids are what they are.  Your financial situation is what it is.  Your job is what it is.  There can be so many areas in our life where it’s not great.  We are not loving it.  But there is no clear way to change it.  No easy way to get out of it.  What do you do? That universal problem has a particular application in month nine of the pandemic, when the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all soaring— and all of us are suffering from Covid fatigue,  social isolation and numbing routine.  Our Thanksgiving this year is what it is: small, different, disconnected, not like any other Thanksgiving. When life is what it is, when Covid is what it is, how do we think about it, what do we do about it?

Today, I want to share the story of a woman who stood in the shadows of history, but whose vision, whose courage, whose convictions have paved the way for generations.  We always talk about Ruby Bridges. We never talk about her mother. Lucille Commadore Bridges, who passed away this week at the age of 86, grew up in Tylertown, Mississippi.  She was the daughter of sharecroppers and dreamed of a world where she could learn and grow and become everything she was meant to be.  But that world was not her world, and though her parents dreamed of a better life for her, reality limited her opportunity.  After the eighth grade, she was forced to leave school so that she could help her parents in the field. She grew up, hemmed in by Jim Crow and blatant racism.  She became a housekeeper, married a mechanic, and saved away her dreams for her children.

Paradoxically, it turns out that we are the United States of America after all. United in our insomnia.  Both Republicans and Democrats report not being able to get a decent night’s sleep. United in our fear.  Both parties fear that if the other candidate wins, the very future of our nation is endangered. United in our alienation from national unity. However you voted, the reality is that about half the country voted for the other candidate.  United in not getting that fifty percent. United in living with a pit in our stomach. United in handling all this stress not well.  We eat too much. We drink too much. We perseverate too much. The United States of America. United in our dividedness. United in our 50-50 split. In the face of this division, I want to raise a single question.  For each person listening, here is the question: what can I do, what can I personally do right now, to make this grim situation a little better?

In her classic study of presidential leadership entitled Leadership in Turbulent Times, Doris Kearns Goodwin observes that Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson all shared something in common: each fell into a deep depression years before they became president, and each was able to recover to the point that they could become and function as president.

Join us on Temple Emanuel’s Mission to learn Torah at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

In our fast and furious news cycle with so many historic moments of upheaval and anxiety covered every day, in the middle of this past week came a report that was different from all the rest.  Instead of division and despair, it noted that the current Pope had said supportive words about the LGBTQ community.  “They are children of God and have a right to a family,” Pope Francis said.  “Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable because of it.”  He continued, “What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered." This was instantly met with backlash both from conservatives who railed at what they saw as a betrayal of Church doctrine, like Father Gerald Murray of New York, who said, “Pope Francis has overstepped his bounds,” and from liberals – too little too late.

Our Torah reading today is loaded with characters who get lots of press: God creating the heaven and the earth; Adam and Eve and the serpent in the garden of Eden; Cain and Abel.  All these stories are well known.  But the character who speaks most powerfully to us now, in our time—in month eight of the pandemic,  in the last month before an epochally divisive election—the person who has the most to say to us now is the one person most of us have  never heard of.  His name is Seth. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel.  But Cain killed Abel.  If we pause here, and take this epoch narrative seriously, imagine what it would be like to be Adam and Eve, the parents of this murderously dysfunctional sibling pair.  One child is dead, murdered by your other child.  The other child has blood on his hands and is sent away by God nah v’nad b’aretz, to wander the world.

Growing up, Ann Patchett dreamed of becoming one thing, and one thing only, a writer.   “I wrote and read and read and wrote, ” she observes in the current edition of The New Yorker.  She didn’t like sports. She didn’t like clubs. She didn’t like socializing. She liked books, reading them and learning how to write them.   She fulfilled her dream.  Her  many books, like Bel Canto and The Dutch House, have become both critical and commercial successes. Yet for all her acclaim as a writer, her father Frank never believed in her as a writer, and told her so, explicitly, painfully, and repeatedly.

On Tuesday, Solomon and I spent hours lugging wood and trellises up three flights of stairs to assemble the frame of our sukkah on the roof. At the end of the day, I asked Solomon to take a picture of me, in between the walls of our sukkah, in a power pose.  I sent the picture to our family with the caption “we did it!” דִּבְרֵי֙ קֹהֶ֣לֶת בֶּן־דָּוִ֔ד מֶ֖לֶךְ בִּירוּשָׁלִָֽם׃ On Sukkot, we read Kohelet and Kohelet has a lot to say here. On Wednesday, I woke with a start. An ominous crash sounded on our roof. I catapulted out of bed, imagining that our sukkah had collapsed or was about to blow off the roof to cause who knows what damage.  I ran up to the roof in my pajamas, dodging the plants that had toppled in the wind.  Our sukkah was still standing, but barely.

A while back I was searching my bookshelf for Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a philosophical masterpiece from the Holocaust era that has shot up Amazon’s bestseller list, a balm for our pandemic world. Frankl’s most profound point? That the answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” is, “To make meaning." I love the book. I needed the book. I know I have the book; my copy is dog-eared from repeated reading. But I couldn’t find the book. As I searched high and low, an entirely different book jumped out at me. Its spine read, “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” If ever there were a phrase that captured where we are right now, that would be it! I would wager there are not many of us who can say, “Yes, this is exactly where I thought I would be come Sukkot.”

When I first heard the story of Thom Brennaman, I knew that I had to talk about it on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of our year.  Thom Brennaman has something to teach everyone of us. Thom Brennaman was a sportscaster who called Major League Baseball games for 33 years.  There are a 162 games in a Major League Baseball season, and at least nine innings per game.  Thom Brennaman therefore called at least 48,114 innings of baseball over 30 years, not counting the many games that went into extra innings.  He had a special relationship with the Cincinnati Reds, whose games he started calling 14 years ago.  His connection with the Reds was generational.  His father Marty Brennaman had also called games for the Reds, and the son took over the mantle when his father retired, m’dor l’dor. Follow this link to view the sermon and watch the live streaming version on our website https://www.templeemanuel.com/rabbi/rabbi-wes-gardenswartz/your-final-chapter-not-your-finest-chapter/

It was right after Erev Rosh Hashanah services that I heard the news. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. Erev Rosh Hashanah. Happy. New. Year. I wanted to cry and scream and panic all at once. My throat constricted. My breathing hitched. Tears threatened to burst from my eyes. I was heartbroken. And I was furious. Follow this link to view the sermon and watch the live streaming version on our website https://www.templeemanuel.com/rabbi/rabbi-aliza-berger/for-the-sin-of-being-an-arrogant-sheep/

December 30, 1983 was a freezing cold day in New York City.  On that day a New York firefighter named Eugene Pugliese was fixing a broken pipe in SoHo.  Just then a man comes running up the street shouting that there was a fire.  Pugliese follows him, running towards the fire as fast as he possibly can.  The firefighter can see that an apartment building is on fire.  Smoke is billowing out from the sixth floor.  He runs inside the building.   Is anyone here? Is anyone here?  He can see that an artist’s studio is engulfed in flames.  Pugliese sees a woman crying hysterically.  My baby! My baby! My baby is in the fire. Follow this link to view the sermon and watch the live streaming version on our website https://www.templeemanuel.com/rabbi/rabbi-wes-gardenswartz/infinite-good/

If you had to pick the single most essential personal quality to be working on right now, what would it be?  Let me place this question in a context by sharing three recent conversations. One was from a beloved long-time member who really misses coming to services on Shabbat morning.  She misses it so much that she has counted exactly how many Shabbatot it has been since she was last in shul.  At the time we spoke, she had not been in shul for 25 Shabbatot. A second was from a wonderful couple that told me how much they used to love the energy of coming back to services on Rosh Hashanah.  They have had the same seats, in the same pews, near the same friends, for years. It just won’t be the same this year, they observed. A third was with a high school parent who shared their teen-age daughter, upon hearing that the Newton high schools will be all virtual this year, lamented that her high school experience has been, in her words, “ruined.”  She points to all the things that she used to do, has not done since March and will now not be able to do again for a full year, including not seeing her friends every day. Hence her dark verdict, ruined, and her father is at a loss for how best to love her through it. Follow this link to view the sermon and watch the live streaming version on our website https://www.templeemanuel.com/rabbi/rabbi-wes-gardenswartz/stamina-when-you-are-in-the-shadows/