Menachem had to buy a mule, so he went to Mules R Us, and explained to Shlomo, the owner, that he needed a very tame, very compliant mule. Shlomo answered that he had just the mule, a very sweet, very domesticated animal who would do whatever Menachem wanted, guaranteed.
Menachem bought the mule and he started home without incident, but when he came to a stream, the mule simply wouldn’t budge. Menachem shook the reins, he yelled at it, he pushed the mule, he even gave it a slap or two, but the mule wouldn’t move. So he turned around, and went back to Mules R Us, demanding a refund.
Shlomo listened to Menachem’s story, and said that he couldn’t imagine how it would have happened; he never had trouble with the mule before, and suggested that they walk back to the stream to see what could have been wrong, what could have spooked the mule.
Menachem and Shlomo walked to the stream, and when they got to the stream, sure enough, the mule wouldn’t budge. Shlomo thought for a second, and then looked around, when he found a very large, very heavy 2x4, and just like Manny Ramirez jumping on a hanging curve ball, hit the mule as hard as he could across the head. At that, the mule shook its head and walked across the stream.
Menachem was very puzzled – he said, Shlomo, I thought that the mule would do anything I asked? And Shlomo answered, it will – you just have to get its attention.
Life is all about paying attention. From the day we are young, we are told to pay attention in school, pay attention to our parents, to our children, to our spouses, to traffic signals. And all of this is for a good reason – when we don’t pay attention, we wind up on academic probation, we are rebellious children, poor parents, inadequate spouses, and in traffic school. All around us, we see reminders of how we need to observe and react; ringing telephones, buzzing blackberry’s, electronic billboards – the world fairly shouts for a piece of our minds.
No less, our religious lives, our observance, is centered on paying attention. What we focus on, for much of the time, is hevdel, is what is different. All of the holidays, from Pesach to Sukkot to Hannukah are intentionally designed to create differences from other days, through matzot, or arba minim, or the channukiah, or whatever it is that we do on Shavuot. Shabbat is more than a day of rest; each erev Shabbat, and each motzei Shabbat we intentionally recognize the difference between Shabbat and the other days of the week, between the holy and the ordinary.
Elul and the Ten Days and Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, are specially designed to catch our attention. It is not just that there are so many piyyutim or Avinu Malkeinu or the extended mussaf, or even the Shofar; these days, and Yom Kippur most of all, are days filled with differences, subtle and broad, that force us to pay attention to where we are and what we are doing, the way we might not on Shabbat or Yom Tov. We walk into this room and immediately feel, viscerally, the difference from any other day; the very fabric of time and space is altered when we walked from our homes to this chapel this evening.
We can walk into shul and, within seconds, recognize the nusach for the yamim noraim, and that instantaneously conjurs up memories from prior years, in this room and others, for many of us from our childhood, for others more recent memories, but all very separate, very distinct from Shabbat or Yom Tov. This is not an accident; it is part of a plan. The Maharal writes that there is a special melody for reading the Torah on the yamim noraim to remind us of the awesome character of the day, that we might lend our ears to the reading and make amends for our faults in reading from the Torah during the rest of the year. There is, seemingly, nothing this day does not transform.
And so everything is designed to make us realize that things are different and to remind us to pay attention. While other days we might take the nusach and the liturgy for granted, today we read the Mahzor carefully, and in our care, we are allowed to get out of our rut, to recognize who we are, what we have done. It allows us to recount and be accountable for our actions. We can, perhaps, ignore these things the rest of the year, but today, as we feel the gates closing, we have to bind ourselves, once again, to reality and recognize that we are flawed, we have sinned, and we must repent.
You should recognize that I am faced here with a choice. I could now quote Hilchot Tshuva rather trenchantly, identify the elements of repentence, and end this drasha here with a discussion of some of the common and perhaps subtle themes of repentance, and if I did, I would probably be the most popular darshan in the history of the Library Minyan high holiday services.
But if we stop here, we will end with focusing on ourselves and we shall have sold ourselves short; we shall not even have come close to paying attention, and recognizing what we are to do today, we will not understand, let alone achieve, our goal.
If we just look at what is placed before us and is obvious, if we focus on the liturgy and the shofar and the nusach and the other obvious signposts of the day, we can and we will miss the point. We all know the rubric that repentance and fasting on Yom Kippur expiates those sins we have committed before Hashem, but for those sins we have committed against our friends, family and acquaintances, we must seek actual forgiveness. We need to repent between each other, and we need to forgive and be forgiven.
So we look around us, I in Alpha quadrant and you in Gamma, and we turn to our neighbors and friends and ask forgiveness. We think over our deeds and misdeeds – in my case, Sandra prepares a three-ring binder at the beginning of Elul, with a table of contents and an index – and seek out our friends and relatives, and ask and receive for their forgiveness. And with that we feel satisfied.
But is that really enough? Aren’t we still looking at ourselves? Haven’t we failed to do more than restate the obvious? Aren’t we still focused not on our neighbors, but internally. It is true that we have acted badly toward each other at times, even to those whom we care for, and we know about that, and we will ask and receive forgiveness for those sins. But if we leave it to that, we have missed much more. What are those things we have not noticed? To what, or whom, have we failed to pay attention?
Who is here, and more importantly, who is not? Who sits alone? Who is in pain, afraid, suffering? Who has joy that they have not shared? Who is welcomed into this community, and who is separated from it? We have hurt others as often, more often, by ignorance as by intention.
The question is not what we notice; it is what we don’t notice. Paying attention is doing more than recognizing what is obvious; it is the subtle absence we are likely, that we are happy to ignore. And this is the sin for which we will not be forgiven. I was reminded, very forcibly, a few weeks ago that this Minyan has a reputation of elitism, of being cold and unfriendly. We don’t get this reputation by insulting people. We have this reputation because we are prone to ignoring them.
We rely, today, too much on the absolute power of forgiveness and asking forgiveness. There is a story that the Chofetz Chayim, the great teacher of Shmirat Lashon, was on a train to a village where he would act as a scholar in residence, and in his carriage was a wealthy and arrogant man, who boasted to the Chofetz Chayyim, not knowing who he was, that he was going to meet the Chofetz Chayyim and receive his blessing. The Chofetz Chayyim commented that he, too, was going to the village, to which the businessman – it’s always a businessman – laughed, saying that it was unlikely that the Chofetz Chayim would recognize such an insignificant man. So it was a great surprise to the wealthy man when he was introduced to the Chofetz Chayyim and realized that this was the very man he had abused. But since it was the Chofetz Chayim, the man asked his forgiveness, confident that it would be granted. So he was particularly surprised when the Chofetz Chayyim said no, he could not forgive him, and the man, astounded, asked why. And the Chofetz Chayim answered, I cannot forgive you, only the poor, anonymous man you insulted can forgive you.
There are sins which cannot be forgiven, and one is that we cannot be forgiven for what we do not recognize as a sin. We cannot ask those around us for forgiveness if we do not even recognize them.
The failure not just to pay attention, but to recognize at all, the absence of others, the trials and pains of others, is not just a personal failure, but a communal failure. I don’t know how often we comprehend that recognizing another, their triumphs and failures, commiserating with their losses and sharing their joys, is what makes us a community. Every time that we choose not to do so, every time that we elect not to reach out, we weaken our community and we weaken ourselves.
I am guilty of this; I am probably more guilty of intentional ignorance as anyone else. It’s easy – I sit in my regular seat and focus on my siddur, I recognize a select few, and look the other way (something I’ve learned from the better waiters I’ve met over the years). I even claim moral superiority – I don’t ask, because I don’t want to intrude, I don’t want to gossip, wear indifference like a badge of honor.
I don’t want to suggest that we are unfeeling; that’s not the case. We are a community and we share our simchas and losses; but we share the public simchas and losses, we don’t share the more private, daily intrusions of life. And just as we do not seek out people, we shut ourselves in – we are often complicit.
These are particularly difficult times. There are people here who have lost their jobs or will lose them, or will lose their income, investments and security. This is incredibly difficult to share, harder than death or sickness or other losses. Now, more than ever, we must make the effort to pay attention and recognize not just our own challenges, and not just the challenges that, like the Mahzor, are obvious; we need to dig further, to expand our world view. Sometime over the next year, God willing, we will choose a new senior Rabbi for our Synagogue and community – will we, as I am sorely tempted to do, say that it doesn’t matter, because we in the Library Minyan have plenty of Rabbis, and the rest of the community can make do with what they get? Think of what we face in if a few weeks. We will head to the voting booth or fill out our absentee ballots to vote for a President – will we focus on what this particular person might do for us, individually, or will we consider how all of us, our community, our country, our world, might be impacted? Will we ignore how these choices affect those in the seat next to us, across the aisle, upstairs or elsewhere?
We do not have that liberty. We are part of a community; if we don’t pay attention to what is happening around us, we won’t have a synagogue, or a minyan, or our community.
It is not consistent with the challenges we face to ignore the world around us, to ignore the public schools because send our children to Pressman, to ignore hunger, even if we are not, to ignore the homeless, even if we are housed. The point of the yamim noraim is to challenge ourselves not to focus on our personal, parochial shortcomings, but to recognize our broader failures, our failure as a minyan, as a synagogue, as a community and as a people and nation, and by recognizing them, complete our tshuva and change our ways. We must do more than notice; we must seek out what we hide from.
It may be too much to decide, today, to take upon our shoulders the burdens of the world, especially since I am painfully aware that, as with most things, we are sorely divided. But surely it is not too much to ask that we take on the burden of our community, of our Minyan and of our friends and neighbors. We may not, individually, be able to complete tikkun olam, but we can take responsibility for something a bit smaller. We are not, as chazal reminds us, obligated to finish the task, but neither are we permitted to ignore it.
Let us recognize that our omissions have consequences just as do our acts. May this be the year that we open our eyes, that we recognize not just those things that scream for attention, but those that hide from it.
Gamar Chatimah Tovah.