Taking the First Bite

The following sermon was delivered at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan on Shabbat B'reishit.

I’ve lived in New York for over a year now, and I have a pretty good sense of direction, but there are still times that I find myself gettin lost. Maybe it’s when I come up above ground from the subway and I’m not sure which direction I’m facing. Or maybe it’s when I’m down in the West Village and the streets start to run diagonally. Sometimes I feel lost when I start something new—the first day of a new job and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to wear; the first time going to that bodega and I’m not sure where the Cheerios are. 

Whether we recognize it or not, each of us is getting lost all of the time. It happens to us when there’s some information that you don’t have, when there’s something that you need to know in order to make sense of it all.

This week, in the very first parshah of our Torah cycle, we find the story of a character who was tired of getting lost—Eve. Eve spent the first part of her life in the Garden of Eden walking around without a clue about the world around her. There were some nice plants, some friendly animals, this nice guy named Adam, but she didn’t have any real purpose. Every day, the same routine, day in and day out. And yet, despite the routine—or maybe because of it—Eve felt lost. There was nothing to do, nothing to know, nothing to get excited about.

So when Eve saw that piece of fruit hanging from the Tree of Knowledge, she realized “nechmad ha-eitz l’haskil / that the tree was worthy was a source of wisdom.” “Why should I continue to stumble around this Garden,” I can imagine Eve saying, “lost, without purpose, when a perfectly good source of wisdom is hanging right there?”

And so, Eve chose to no longer be lost. She chose to eat the fruit. Suddenly she saw the world as she had never seen it before. Suddenly, she realized that there were such things as good and bad. Can you even imagine how radically amazing it must have been for Eve to go from an amoral, partially-blinded, gray-scale view of the world suddenly to morally aware, 360-degree, Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat vision of reality? Suddenly, Eve had a moral compass. Suddenly, she had self-awareness. And of course, that self-awareness was sometimes inhibiting, but for a previously un-self-aware person, it was incredibly liberating. Eve ushered in a whole new era in the human history, in era in which a person could feel lost and still know where to get the information she needed in order to find her way home again. Eve gave us the power of knowledge.

The choice to eat that fruit and to gain her self-consciousness was, no doubt, a hard decision. I wonder if Eve recognized that in the majority of Western religious literature, she’d be remembered not as a radical free thinker but as a weak-willed sinner.

But even regardless of the reputation it would eventually earn her, Eve’s choice to eat that fruit and gain her self-consciousness would come with a price. Sometimes, self-consciousness can sometimes be a burden. Sometimes, we imagine that it would be easier not to know the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes, we imagine that we might be better off if we could just ignore those pesky parts of our personalities with which we’re uncomfortable. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Maybe your joking nature masks a deep insecurity. Or maybe there’s something in your past that you’re ashamed of, a long-ago trauma that you can neither let go of nor fully face. It hurts us to look at these things. It makes us feel lost. But to bury them back down deep inside of us will only cause us to continue to feel lost. We can’t find our way out of the woods if we’re constantly returning to bury our traumas. We have to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.

I wonder how many of us can say that we’re as brave as Eve, that we’re willing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge? How many of us are willing to give up saying things like “Ignorance is bliss,” and “What grandma doesn’t know can’t hurt her”? How many of us are willing to give up the safety of living in our personal Gardens of Eden for the sometimes-painful world of self-knowledge and wisdom?

I read this summer in the New York Times a personal essay by James Carlos Blake in which he describes the pain—and ultimately, the reward—of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Blake describes how at the age of three or four, he remembers his grandmother telling him that he had had a twin brother who died at just a couple of days old. His grandmother told him that it had been a very painful experience for his parents, and she swore him to secrecy. But of course, a few nights later, Blake asked his parents about what his grandma had told him. His mother burst into tears and left the room, while his father explained that “Grandma was getting very old and sick, and sometimes she mixed up stories in her mind. That’s the reason why mommy was crying.” His father asked Blake that he never mention it again. And so, he didn’t.

Meanwhile, Blake describes how in his teenage and young-adult years, he lived with what he calls “a chronic loneliness.” Blake was lost. “It wasn’t just clinical depression,” Blake writes. “It wasn’t the blues. It was a confusing sense that I was somehow incomplete.”

Many years later, as an adult—after Blake’s mother had passed away and as his father was nearing the end of his life—Blake remembered for the first time in years the incident with his grandmother. “Was it really a senile fantasy?” he asked his dad. His father grew silent, shocked that his son had remembered this incident from the age of three or four. He then told Blake that yes, he had indeed had a twin brother, that yes, he had died at only a couple of days old, that yes, it was a very painful experience, and that no, no one in the family had ever talked about it.

I don’t pretend that I could even imagine the pain that Blake’s mother and father must have felt to loose their infant child. I don’t pretend to know that I would have done anything differently. And God forbid that anyone should ever have to find out. And yet, I recognize that for years, Blake—and his mother and father—were all lost.

It’s true that eating from the Tree of Self-Knowledge will sometimes cause us pain, or shame, or even cause us to grieve—as was the case with Blake’s mom. But without knowledge, there can be no healing. Without knowledge, there can be no growth. Without knowledge, we’ll always be lost in the woods.

In her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, author and doctor Rachel Naomi Remen writes, “When Eve ate the fruit, she became an adult, and gained the freedom of an adult to go out into a world of complexity, adventure, responsibility, and change. To have her own life and to make her own choices.”

As Remen correctly identifies, eating from the Tree of Knowledge means embracing complexity. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge will require facing the parts of ourselves that we’d rather not know. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge will require the bravery to live face-to-face with a broken world, and if we’re lucky, to no longer feel lost, but find ourselves amidst the brokenness.

In our popular culture, we imagine that the forbidden fruit was an apple. But the Torah doesn’t specify what kind of fruit it was. And so, the ancient Rabbis set out to creatively determine what was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

One sage declared that it must have been a fig—for, after Adam and Eve discovered that they were naked, they sewed themselves clothing out of fig leaves. Another sage declared that, although they don’t even grow on trees, it must have been some sort of grape—for a grape may sometimes taste bitter, like the bitterness of leaving the garden.

But I tend to agree with the sage who suggested that it was an olive. An olive’s pit, the sage points out, is very close to its skin; its core is not too far from its edge. The olive is the symbol of a person who is, as much as possible, the same on the outside as she is on the inside. An olive is a person who is powerfully self-conscious. An olive is a person who gets lost in the woods just like the rest of the rest of us; but when she does get lost, she knows how to look within herself and find herself again.

This week, we begin again with the first parshah of the Torah. Year after year, we come back again to this very spot, where the story of our people begins with one tiny, radical moment. A woman eats an olive, and the entirety of Jewish history, of Jewish wisdom, of Jewish thought is catapulted out of this moment—this courageous, terrifying, transformative moment of awareness. Every year, we come back to this beginning. And we discover that the first step in finding ourselves is the knowledge that we’re lost.

And wish for all of us on this Shabbat, and in the coming week, and in the year ahead is: that when we meet again next year, back at this beginning, it will have been a year of self-knowledge, a year of wisdom, and a year filled with the courage to take the first bite.

Shabbat shalom.

You Shall Love Your Neighbor...

The following d'var torah was delivered on Yom Kippur afternoon at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan.

In a few moments, we’re going to read what is sometimes referred to as the ethical core of the Torah. In one climatic chapter, God lays out God’s expectations for ethical living, including such maxims as “leave the corners of your field for the poor,” “do not place a stumbling block before the blind,” and famously, The Golden Rule: “V’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha—You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In the days leading up the High Holidays, I found myself wondering: What is it that gets in the way of achieving the Torah’s ethical standards? A person asks for money on the train, and we avert our eyes. A person sleeps under the awning by our corner store, and we walk past him every morning as if he wasn’t there. We hold grudges. We lie. What is it that keeps us from loving our neighbors as ourselves?

One answer—and I think a sound, but ultimately unsatisfying answer—comes from our ancient sage Rabbi Hillel. The Talmud records that once a non-Jew approached Rabbi Hillel and asked to be converted to Judaism, so long as Hillel could explain the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Rabbi Hillel accepted the challenge, balanced himself on one leg and said, “Do not do unto others that which is hurtful to you. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.”

Rabbi Hillel takes The Golden Rule and frames it in the negative: “Do not do unto others that which is hurtful to you.” And yes, this alleviates us of unrealistic responsibilities to perfect strangers. Would loving your neighbor as yourself mean that you have to love your neighbor’s children as much as your own children? This kind of expectation is unrealistic, and Rabbi Hillel provides a more nuanced framework in which to understand our ethical responsibilities. “Do not do unto others that which is hurtful to you.”

But Rabbi Hillel’s formulation can’t possibly relieve us of our responsibilities towards that person who sleeps under the awning at the corner store. Maybe something that isn’t hurtful to me will, unwittingly, be hurtful to someone else in ways I couldn’t even imagine. It doesn’t hurt me to stand under the shower for 30 minutes every morning, but it likely does hurt someone who doesn’t have access to clean water at all. It doesn’t hurt me to spend all my money exactly as I’d like, but it does contradict the command to “leave the corners of your field for the poor.” So while Rabbi Hillel’s maxim does help explain why it’s sometimes hard to live up to the Torah’s ethical standard, it does so only to a partially. And nevertheless, the Torah still says, “V’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha—Love your neighbor as yourself.” And I find, time and again, that that’s really hard to do.

The 18^th century German-Jewish philosopher Rabbi Naftali Herz Weisel offers the following solution. Rabbi Weisel examines a grammatical peculiarity in the phrasing of “v’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha.” Perhaps you’ve heard that last word before, kamocha. It’s in one of our prayers—“Mi chamocha ba-eilim Adonai—Who, o God, is like you?” Who is “kamocha?” Who is “like you?” Using this insight, Rabbi Weisel retranslates “v’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha”—not “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but rather, “Love your neighbor, kamocha.” “Love your neighbor, like you.” “Love your neighbor, he is like you.” “Love your neighbor, because, like you, he is also a human being.”

The word kamocha, the word “like you,” doesn’t refer to how much we’re supposed to love our neighbor, but rather to the reason that we’re supposed to love our neighbor. “You should love your neighbor, because your neighbor is like you.” Because that person who asks for money on the subway is like you. Because that person who sleeps beneath the awning at the corner store is like you. You should let go of your grudges, because that person against whom you hold a grudge is like you. All 7 billion of us are just like you. That is to say, all 7 billion of us are human, like you. All 7 billion of us were created in the image of God, like you. All 7 billion of us have a spark of divinity inside of us, a light in our eyes, breath in our lungs, a mother, a father, a story of where we come from and a hope for where we going—just like you.

So I think I found an answer to my question. I think I know at least one thing that gets in the way of living up to the Torah’s ethical standards, and more importantly, of living up to my own. And it’s not what might you think. It’s not that I forgot that each one of us has a divine spark inside. It’s that I sometimes forget that I do.

My wish for all of us this Yom Kippur is that 5774 will be a year in which we keep our eye on the divine spark inside of us. Because if you can remember that you’re divine, that’s the first step in remembering that we’re all divine. That varied though we may be, each one of us is like you.

"This Thing Is Not in Heaven"

The following d'var torah was delivered on Yom Kippur morning at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan.

We often translate Yom Kippur as the Day of Atonement. When I was a kid, I didn’t know what the word “atonement” meant, and I was taught that it means “making up for your mistakes.” And so from an early age, I learned that Yom Kippur is a day about our mistakes, our shortcomings, our sins. Look at our High Holiday prayer book: We pound on our chests during the Ashamnu prayer, as we quite literally beat ourselves up over all that we’ve done wrong this year. We come to synagogue and we find ourselves neck-deep a litany of our own guilt—pages upon pages of “The sin we have committed against you,” and “Our alphabet of woes.” “Dear God,” we exclaim, “forgive us, for we stand guilty before you.”

I’d like to suggest that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the true message of Yom Kippur is not one of guilt, but rather one of hope. On Yom Kippur morning, we open the Torah and read what is for me the message of the High Holiday season: “Lo vashamayim hi—this thing is not in heaven.” This thing—this hard work of self-examination, this striving to be our best selves, this beautiful, challenging, ambiguous work of transforming ourselves and transforming our broken world—this thing is not in heaven. Lo vashamayim hi is the Torah’s way of saying “Yes we can.” “Yes, life is a challenge, and yes, we choose to accept it, and yes, it is going to be hard, and yes, we can do it.”

While the ancient Egyptians had their priests and the ancient Greeks had their oracles to communicate between the people and the gods, the ancient Israelites declared Lo vashamayim hi—this thing is not in heaven. When the age old feelings of doubt and guilt creep up and cloud our vision, when we feel immobilized by old habits and stuck in our ways, the words of our tradition burst forth and remind us Lo vashamayim hi—this thing is not in heaven. Your relationship with whatever you believe God to be, your sense of self-worth, your ability to be the best You that you can be—these things are not in heaven. “No,” the Torah declares, “they are right here—in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do them.”

Don’t get me wrong: saying "lo vashamayim hi," declaring that “this thing is not in heaven” does not imply that life is going to be easy. As I’m sure almost all of us have experienced, it’s a lot easier to promise that this year I’m going to be more patient or more attentive than it is to actually do so. We leave the walls of the synagogue on Yom Kippur afternoon and fall back into our old habits. Lo vashamayim hi asserts that we can face life’s challenges not by setting unrealistic, sky-high goals, but rather by taking everyday, concrete steps. In her book The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp gives the following example. Tharp writes:

“I begin each day of my life with a ritual. I wake up at 5:30 am, put on my workout clothes, walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym, where I work out for two hours.

“The ritual is not the stretching and the weight training each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go, I have completed the ritual.”

Tharp’s example shows that it’s not the workout that’s the hard part—it’s the getting out of bed. For most of us, myself included, working out two-hours-a-day is a goal that is way up in heaven. Similarly, to always be humble, or to never be angry—these goals are way up in heaven, unreachable even for the most emotionally aware people among us. We shouldn’t strive to never be angry. Rather, we should work, day by day, to cultivate the ability to recognize when our anger is arising in us, where it’s coming from, and to decide, moment by moment, if anger is the feeling we want to express right now. This kind of goal is not way up in heaven—lo vashamayim hi. “No, it is are right here, in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do them.”

Here’s what no one ever taught me as a child. The word “Kippur” doesn’t just mean “atonement.” It also means “forgiveness.” Yom Kippur—the Day of Forgiveness. Yom Kippur—not the day upon which we set unrealistic goals and then beat ourselves up when we don’t meet them, but rather the day upon which we forgive ourselves for being human. My hope for all of us, as we begin this new year of 5774, is that before the sun goes down tonight, as you’re asking others for forgiveness, that you’ll also make the space to forgive yourself. Because this thing—this beautiful, challenging, transformative work of forgiveness—this thing is not in heaven.

Carrying the World. Alone.

The following d'var torah was delivered on Rosh Hashanah morning at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you see a friend and you can just tell that something is not right? She looks worried or tired, as if she’s just been crying or she’s mad about something. So you walk up to your friend, and in as supportive a way as you know how, you say to her, “How you doing?” And then, shrinking inside of herself as if she’s been found out, your friend puts on the least convincing calm-face you’ve ever seen, looks you in the eye and says, “I’m OK.”

If you’re like me—and I would guess, if you’re like most people—you’ve been on both ends of that situation. All of us have an inclination to sometimes conceal the truth, in order—we imagine—to protect ourselves and those we love. It’s hard to admit it when we’re hurt. It’s hard to be so vulnerable. A coworker gets a promotion instead of us, and rather than acknowledge that we’re disappointed, we say, “It’s probably for the best.” A friend can’t make it to an important life event, and we wave it off as if it’s no big deal. We keep our disappointments inside. We put on a happy face. And while we quietly carry our bundle of worries, we imagine that we’ve got everybody fooled, most of all, ourselves.

On Rosh Hashanah morning, we read about a character who thought he had everyone fooled. For whatever troubled reason, our forefather Abraham heeds God’s call to sacrifice his son Isaac. He doesn’t tell Sarah where he’s going or even that he’s going. He, Isaac, and his servants set out early one morning, walking in uncomfortable silence for three days, the dread of the thing hanging over him. “The boy and I will go worship and we will come back,” Abraham says to his servants. He knows that if he tells the truth, his servants might try to stop him, or Isaac might run away. Or perhaps he imagines that so long as he doesn’t say it out loud, he doesn’t have to face the horrible truth of the deed. “It’s not real, as long as you don’t admit it.”

But then comes Isaac. He knows his father too well. Isaac senses that something is wrong. His dad is not usually this quiet. He doesn’t usually look so sad, so conflicted, so deeply torn. And then Isaac, who’s known in our tradition as a shy man of few words, utters perhaps the bravest words in the entire Torah—brave, not because he willingly goes along with his father’s plan like some sort of martyr, but brave because he risks breaking the silence in order to name what everybody else seems too scared to ask: “Dad, is everything OK? Ayeh haseh l’olah? Where is the sheep for the sacrifice?” But again, Abraham conceals the truth. “Everything’s OK, my son. Don’t worry about the sheep.”

Elie Wiesel, in his book Messengers of God, notes that although Abraham—as the first monotheist—is a visionary, he is also a complete loner, unable to form lasting relationships with anyone. “Abraham,” Wiesel writes, “the first angry young man. Abraham, the first to rebel against the establishment, a minority of one, alone against the world” (70-71).

Our trials may not be as severe or as obvious as Abraham’s, but like our forefather, we all too often act as if we too are alone against the world. We don’t want to burden others with our “stuff,” and so our burden grows. But we’re not Atlas; try as we might, we can’t carry the whole world on our shoulders.

Abraham is ultimately prevented from carrying out his horrific deed. Instead of his son Isaac, he sacrifices a ram that happens to be caught in a nearby thicket. Jewish tradition teaches that this ram was created at the end of the sixth day of Creation and lay in wait through the generations of Adam and Noah to be found at this exact moment—a safety net that God created from the beginning, in case Abraham should choose to actually go through with the sacrifice.

Abraham was lucky. God had pre-ordered a ram. But the rest of us can’t afford to silently carry our burden and hope for a divine intervention.

Rather than wait for some miraculous ram, on Rosh Hashanah we blow a ram’s horn and read the story of the binding of Isaac. My hope is that the story will remind us that we can’t carry our burdens alone. And the ram’s horn—the shofar—my hope is that the sound of the shofar this Rosh Hashanah will wake us up, jolt us into awareness, open our ears to the chorus of Isaacs all around us—who, even when we remain silent, are perceptive enough, and more importantly, caring enough, to ask if everything is OK.