Rabbi Neal Scheindlin

Rosh Hashanah 5767

[Note:  You must have "DavidD" font to read the Hebrew portions]

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray updates the Faust legend through the tale of a young man with an angelic face. Under the influence of the cynical Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray embarks on a life of dissipation. In time, Dorian’s descent into evil culminates in what the jacket of my copy of the book calls "acts of debauchery, degradation and finally murder." Wilde does not depict an actual deal with the devil, but Dorian Gray’s actual face continues to appear young and innocent, no matter how low he sinks. But his portrait, painted in his youth, mirrors Dorian Gray’s true character, growing increasingly horrific to behold.

Oscar Wilde portrays a kind of Victorian morality, predicated on the idea that a human face reflects character. But the tale’s premise about the relationship between the inner self and the outer deeds lies not too far away from an important insight of Jewish tradition, one that speaks to our efforts to engage in apbv iucaj, self-examination and reflection on our lives, at this time of the renewal of the year.

It’s a truism that Judaism concentrates on what we do rather than what we believe. While rather simplistic, this idea still captures something important about the Jewish approach to life. Anyone who wonders how to conduct their life need look no further than any code of vfkv. I’m not even considering matters that people conventionally think of as "religious" -- that is, ritual or spiritual practices.

The author of the lurg ijka happily tells the reader, right at the beginning of his work, what to do the instant one awakens. He instructs us which shoe to put on first. (I’m not going to tell you; you’ll have to look it up.) And so it goes through the day. Depending how we react to this kind of halachic codification, we can either despise this degree of detail as oppressive and dictatorial; or we can admire it as allowing us to serve God with every action of every day.

It seems to me that the endless details of the halachic system risk turning Judaism into a kind of mania, where we obsess at every moment about whether we are doing exactly the right thing in precisely the right order. We risk worrying only about what we do, losing sight of why we do it. I disagree with those, perhaps most famously Yeshaia Leibovitz, who suggest that ,uumn need no underlying rationale: it is enough just to make sure we do what we understand God to have commanded us to do.

To me, this outlook threatens to turn the performance of ,uumn into precisely that: a performance. And a rote performance, at that. Few among us can bring our full attention to bear on every action we undertake. Certainly this morning I have had moments of absorption in the prayers; but those moments have been balanced (to say the least) with moments when my mouth sang the words, but my mind focused on lunch - or even something I wouldn’t want to mention from this vnhc.

You laugh, but it’s an uncomfortable laugh, because you’ve been in the same position. Probably most of us have had the experience of finishing a meal and reciting iuznv ,frc without actually noticing a single one of the familiar words we chanted. Granted, we have fulfilled the instructions of the lurg ijka, or whichever code you prefer; but the unthinking recitation of a set of stock phrases hardly accomplishes the task of letting us feel our reliance on God’s goodness for our food.

We need to keep in sight the underlying purpose of all these prescribed actions. A arsn I think about frequently makes the point trenchantly. Speaking about the laws of vyhja, kosher slaughtering, the author of the arsn asks, "What difference does it make to God whether we cut the animal’s neck at the front or at the back?" It cannot affect divinity either way. Rather, the midrash suggests, we need to understand that ,uhrcv ,t ivc ;rmk tkt ub,hb tk ,uumn- the commandments’ only purpose is to refine human beings. We do ,uumn not as ends in themselves, but to make ourselves into better people.

Here is the crux: It’s actions that shape our character. It’s not that good people do good things; rather, we learn to be good people by doing the right and the good. Frequent repetition of good action transforms us into good people.

The author of the lubhjv rpx, a medieval work of ,uumnv hngy - giving the reasons "behind" the commandments - expresses the idea very well. Explaining a vumn that appears to make little rational sense, he writes:

hrjt hf / / /okugk rcsc ubhapb gceb 'oaug ubjbta iuhnsvu vagnv lu,nu/,ucckv ohfanb ,ukugpv

"From the doing, and the impression we make [on ourselves], we establish the idea in our souls permanently. . . for the heart is drawn after deeds."

The author of the lubhjv rpx helps us to understand an important theme forthese Days of Awe. We expend a lot of energy, both in services and privately, examining our lives and deciding where and how we need to change. Actual change, as we know from experience, does not come easily. What we learn from the lubhjv rpx is that we change ourselves by changing our actions. We cannotchange who we are unless we change what we do.

I want to stress this point, because I think it runs counter to what many of usimagine. The usual assumption is that people do good things because they are good people. But the lubhjv rpx teaches us to look at life the other way around.

We do not necessarily do good because we are good; but we can make ourselves into good people by doing good things. After all, only God can see inside a human heart. We can judge each other only by what we see each other do. Similarly, we cannot change our interiors without paying attention to our exteriors. If we accept the idea that what we do determines who we are, then we realize that the thing to change is our behavior. If we live in a good way, we will transform ourselves into the people we are capable of being -- the people we always wanted to be, as well. We know this truth from our experiences raising children, or just being children. The average pre-schooler does not notice, or care about, the effects of her actions on others. She cares only about satisfying her own desires. That is developmentally appropriate; but we begin training kids to say "please" and "thank you" before they can transcend childish self-centeredness. Why bother? Because the endless repetition of the conventional phrases of polite society creates polite young people. True, we can err in teaching rote phrases, as in the story of the boy whose doctor gave him a lollipop after his exam. When the mother asked, "What do you say?" he responded, "Put it on my bill."

If anyone doubts the effectiveness of this kind of technique with adults, I would offer the story in the Sunday L.A. Times last week about a woman named Mimi Silbert. Thirty-five years ago, she started a restaurant named Delancey Street in San Francisco. The unique feature of the restaurant is that all its staff -- both in the kitchen and in the dining room -- is ex-convicts. They live together in a controlled setting, and work long days at the restaurant. Through that structure, most of the staff learn for the first time to find purpose in their lives and to conduct themselves as law-abiding citizens. Silbert constantly orders them to "act nice," explaining that eventually the "act" will become real. The reporter comments, "A trained therapist, Silbert believes minor surface adjustments can generate major inner reform."

This strikes me as a good summary of the point made by the lubhjv rpx, and an important message for us on this occasion. Rosh Hashanah challenges us to make "surface adjustments" in our conduct to "generate major inner reform": to change our hearts. Maimonides captures this purpose of the day wonderfully in a famous passage from the vcua, ,ufkv 'vru, vban. Rambam describes the purpose of listening to the shofar (other than on a ,ca like today, of course) in this way:

urzju ofhagnc uapju of,nsr,n umhev ohnsrbu of,ban ohbhah urug kcvc o,ba kf ohduau inzv hkcvc ,ntv ,t ohjfuav ukt 'oftruc urfzu vcua,c kf cuzghu ofhkkgnu ofhfrs uchyvu ofh,uapbk uyhcv khmh tku khguh tk rat ehru [s"v d"p] /vcuy tk rat u,cajnu vgrv ufrs ofn sjt

"Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep, and dozers from your doze. Examine your behaviors and repent. Remember your creator, you who forget the truth in the pointless day-to-day, and who turn to things that do no good in the long run. Every one - abandon your evil way, and your thoughts that are no good."

When we stop to think about it, we often discover that we have unwittingly fallen into a kind of spiritual slumber, as o"cnr might describe it. We realize that we are reciting iuznv ,frc, or perhaps the gna, in such a routinized way that we "could do it in our sleep" - because we are sleeping, in a sense; we are not awake to what the prayers actually mean. Or we notice that we are not doing at all the kinds of things both our tradition and our better nature call on us to do. We catch ourselves sleepwalking through life without hearing the voice of the oppressed, without taking the hand that is stretched out to us for help.

It is at this moment of realization that we need to take to heart the words of the anonymous author of lubhjv rpx. If we feel uncomfortable with the kind of people we have become - people who are complacent, people who are not growing, people who are not making the most of our characters - then it may be time to change the things we do. Only those change can produce the internal changes that will make us who we want to be.

Perhaps we understand better why the Jewish concept of repentance, vcua,, reflects in its etymology the action of turning. We can turn ourselves into the people we want to be. There is no need to decide that we are not as learned as the Rambam, not as spiritually adept as the Dalai Lama, not as socially conscious as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. We need only turn around and do something -- do the right thing -- and thereby become the "right" person. It only takes small steps. May we find the courage to act as we should, so that we can become who we want to be.

uc,fh, vcuy vbak