Sunday, September 27, 2009

Yom Kippur: Kol Nidre: Love your Neighbor as Yourself

To show you what a forward thinking,and hip kind of guy I am, I want you to know that I just starting using Facebook. I can hear my kids saying now "Abba, that’s been around for 6 years now; there are only 23 million people who have already figured this one out." Well ok, but its cutting edge for me. And by the way, I need more friends. If you are on Facebook, please be my friend. Rabbi Katzan back in New York has 1700 friends and I have about 50. So you Facebook people: you know what to do.

So what is Facebook about, anyway? It’s a computer program that enables you to keep in touch with friends whether they live in your neighborhood or across the country. Seeing a friendly face, even on a computer, who says hi, what’s going on, happy birthday. People like it; it’s kind of comforting; it’s affirming. And I think, most importantly, it serves as a temporary antidote to the stress we feel when we look at what else is going on in our world.

It takes an act of courage to open the morning paper. Reported in the New York Times two weeks ago: the Iranians now have enough fissile material to fast track a nuclear bomb. Hundreds of thousands could die in a single strike. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons and an unstable government. Egypt could explode at any time. The poverty and degradation there is astounding. It was reported that Egyptians were killing their pigs because they thought they carried swine flu. But then the garbage piled up on the streets because the pigs eat the garbage!

And then you have the real disaster states: Somalia, Sudan, Kenya; in which there is violence, drought, starvation with their corrupt governments doing nothing.

Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century said “The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And you know what, it is like that still, for millions of people around the world: poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, disease: and early death. That’s their daily experience, and that is despite the fact that we have the power and knowledge to prevent the worst of it. Why are people still suffering so?
My grandmother would have said, “it’s a shanda.”

These are big problems. None of us can solve them alone. Many must be solved by governments doing the right thing. But governments won’t do the right thing unless their people demand it of them. And for that to happen, the people have to believe the right things.

Perhaps Thomas Hobbes describes the world as it is. But Judaism tries to focus us on what the world ought to be and must become. And it starts, of course, with you and me.

Here is the Biblical corrective to a Hobbesian worldview: Leviticus 19:18 "V’ahavta L’re acha kamocha." Three simple Hebrew words that can change the world: "v’ahavta l’reecha kamocha, "and you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

This is arguably the best known phrase in the entire Bible. It sounds so reasonable and right and obvious, and yet I propose to you tonight that it is a mitzvah that is summarily ignored by almost all of us. I am not even sure most of us know what it means. Does it mean I should be nice to others? You should be, but it doesn’t mean that. Does it mean I should be a good person? You should be, but it doesn’t mean that either. Love your neighbor as yourself is a very big concept; it is a difficult concept and it places enormous demands on how we live our lives.

Rabbi Akiva in the Talmud says that this commandment is the fundamental principle in the Torah; everything else in Judaism follows from it. If you understand this mitzvah, you will understand how we must remake ourselves in order to remake the world.

Let’s take a closer look at it by breaking it down.

Love your neighbor as yourself. What do we mean by love?

This has been a topic of debate in Western Civilization for 4000 years. No one has determined what it is, definitively. It is an elusive concept which virtually every culture has tried to define for itself.

Well, there is one thing that most cultures, including Judaism agree love is not. Love is not feelings. I always think of that song when I am on this topic by the group “Gemini:” “Feelings, nothing more than feelings, trying to forget my feelings of love.” This is a great song: not love. Anyone who has been married more than a month knows that feelings for one’s spouse are not the bases of love because feelings change over time. In fact, feelings can change several times a day. One can feel angry or frustrated or charmed or passionate or feel nothing at all at any given time. But the love remains because love is a fundamental commitment to the other. It is a focus away from the self and onto someone else.

The Jewish psychologist Eric Fromm wrote a great little book called "The Art of Loving." I read it in high school and I still remember three of his fundamental characteristics necessary for genuine love: care, responsibility, and respect. Care means an active concern for the life and the growth of whom we love. It is a focus on the needs of the other. Marriage counselors often cite the typical change in attitude of lovers who date and then get married. When you are dating, it is all about the other person; every little need, every desire, you jump right on, you do whatever you can to satisfy the other. But then you get married and all of a sudden, it’s your own concerns that take precedence and everybody is surprised. Caring is a focus on what the other one needs.

Responsibility. For Fromm, responsibility means, responsiveness. You care about another’s needs and you stand ready to respond to them. Their growth, challenges, troubles, stresses, triumphs, dreams and pursuits: in love, those become your concerns as well. In this sense, the one who is loved is never alone. There is always a partner there to help carry his or her life’s burdens.

Respect. This means appreciating all that is good and noble in the other’s life. The character flaws and deficiencies of another person are always quite readily apparent. We must look beyond them. We read in Pirke Avot, "dan l’chaf zechut,"judge everyone favorably. Find and appreciate the decency and humanity and the good in all people; that is respect.

So what does it mean to “love” your neighbor? It means to see the best in them, to be aware of their needs and to stand ready to respond to them when they need you.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Your neighbor. It is hard to be concerned about one’s neighbor if you don’t know who they are. Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone,” writes that there has been a breakdown in civic society. There are less people on the PTA’s, Fraternal Organizations, neighborhood councils. When I was a kid, we used to have “block parties.” The police would close down the street and we would eat together, play games and have fun. I have often heard the stories of the old West Side of Denver on the High Holidays; hundreds of people out in the neighborhood. Kids playing ball, walking in and out of each other’s homes to find the best treats. These affairs gave us the opportunity to know our neighbors and understand their needs and help them where we could. Today, most of us don’t even know the names of our neighbor’s two doors down.

Our world has become impersonal. We tend to isolate ourselves perhaps to keep a rather frightening world at bay. And I think this isolation gives us an excuse not to care. We can’t love the neighbor who we don’t know. We can’t love the neighbor to whom we pay no attention.

The term for neighbor in Hebrew is “rae’eh, which we can understand in broad terms. It can mean one’s fellow who is close to you, who may be very much like you,or it can mean people who are not close and who may be quite different from you.

We read in the Midrash, “when a human being creates coins from the same mint, they all come out the same. But God makes every human being in the same image, His image, and yet each is different.” Difference is the human condition. There are thousands of cultures in the world, close to 8,000 living languages. However, the first phrase of the Midrash is the key, here. Even though every human being is different from the next, each is made in God’s image, each is equal, precious, of infinite value. And each, according to the Torah, is deserving of our love. Loving one’s neighbor really means loving all humanity by finding in them the Divinity that we all share.

Of course, it is hard enough to love the neighbor next door. How are we supposed to love all of humanity?

There was a great Peanuts cartoon. In it Linus says: “I love humanity, it’s people I can’t stand.”

We don’t start with humanity, we start by loving people; the people in our own lives. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, writes, “the universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is like to be a parent, loving our children, we come to understand what it is like for someone, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children. By coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbor, a friend [we understand the lives of others in our community and even around the world who are children, parents, neighbors and friends]. We learn to love humanity by loving [the] specific human beings [in our lives].” We come to understand and care for our neighbors, near and far, because we see ourselves in them.

You shall love your neighbor by showing concern and being responsive to the people in your own life and then to the people in your community and then to the people around the world.

Now if the commandment stopped there, “love you neighbor,” it would be hard enough to fulfill. But the commandment includes one more word: "kamocha." The commandment reads: "v’ahavta l’rea'acha kamocha," you shall love your neighbor, “as yourself.”

We have to get a little more personal at this point, and quite a bit more specific. What is it in our lives that we cannot do without? What needs do we have in our lives that we insist must be fulfilled? Loving your neighbor as yourself means that what you insist on for yourself and your family, you must seek to provide for others who cannot provide it for themselves.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow once did a chart on the hierarchy of basic human needs. These are needs that must be satisfied for any single human being to flourish in this world. Here they are.

Maslow’s first level consists of basic biological needs: food and water. Simple isn’t it? Would we not do everything humanly possible to secure basic sustenance for ourselves and every member of our family?

There have been times in history when Jews suffered from starvation, in the pale of settlement, in the ghetto, in the camps. But today, thank God, we live in a Jewish community that enjoys a level of prosperity our ancestors could never have imagined. Yet as we thrive today, there are a billion people in the world that don’t have enough to eat to stay healthy. Every six seconds, according to U.N. statistics, a child dies somewhere in the world from malnutrition. In the United States, the most advanced country in the world, it is estimated that over 36 million citizens including 12 million children, suffer from what they now call “food insecurity,” which means a family that can’t afford to get enough food on the table to satisfy a normal diet. Some 7 million Americans avail themselves of emergency food services each week. A Jewish organization called Mazon raises about 5 million dollars a year from the Jewish community and disburses it to soup kitchens, food pantries, food banks, and a host of other anti-hunger agencies throughout the United States. Our own Jewish Family Service runs a food pantry right over here at Tamarac which was created by our members Bobbie Carr and Jerry Carr,of blessed memory. Jerry just passed away this week. Jerry and Bobbie’s food pantry disburses hundreds of pounds of food each month. There are 2,000 of us here tonight. We are all fasting for the next 24 hours. If we were to donate the cost of the food we would have eaten today to one of these agencies, hundreds of people’s lives would be improved in the weeks to come. As we would insist on sufficient nutrition for ourselves and our families, we must insist on it for others as well. "kol dichpin yatev v’yechul. We say this Passover but it is a mitzvah all year round, “all who are hungry, let them come and eat.”

Maslow’s next level of human need. To flourish, says Maslow, a person needs safety and security. No person can live in chaos. Everyone needs a roof over his head and structure in his life. There are between 1 and 2 million people in this country without adequate housing, many are children. The HEA is partners with other churches and synagogues in Denver, together with Habitat for Humanity. We have built 7 houses so far here in Denver and we are working on our 8th. We raise money then we go out and work on the housing site. We can all participate in this. We insist on adequate housing for ourselves and our families. Must we not insist on doing what we can to provide it for others?

Maslow’s next level of need. Every human being has a need for love, affection and self respect. We all need a place to be where we are known, a place where we are cherished and paid attention to.

There are many in our community who are alone. They are mostly elderly with children who live far away. Many are shut-into their homes or into nursing facilities. Our staff and clergy try to visit them when we learn about them. We visit them as often as we can but it’s never enough. These people need our regular attention; they need affection and they need to know that they belong here, that they are valued and a part of our community. We have a chesed society here at the shul that pairs our members with those who need visitors. The Jewish Family Service has something similar called ‘para-chaplains.” It’s good satisfying work. Tell us if you know of someone who needs a friend. Let us set you up as a friend. We would not allow for our mother or father or child to be alone. We say tonight: "al tashlicheni l’et ziknah," do not cast me away, oh Lord,in my old age. We must not cast anyone away when we have the power to do something about it.

And Maslow’s final level of need, the need for self-actualization. Maslow explains this as being able to do what one was born to do, to make full use of one’s potential, to go as far in life as our skills can take us. This requires the opportunity for a decent education. It takes good parenting, mentoring, tutoring, support in the home, correct values. These are all things that we would never think to deny our children but are denied to children all over our community. We have in Denver a program called Jewish Coalition for Literacy, run by the Synagogue Council, which sends volunteers into some of the Denver Public Schools to read with kids and help them with their homework; perhaps instill in them a love of learning. No child will thrive in this society without a good education and the correct values to succeed. Our tradition says that if you save a single life, it is as if you have saved the entire world. Save one child and you have saved the whole world.

Here is what I recommend. Make a "chesed circle." Chesed means performing acts of kindness and concern for people in need. Find 5 or 6 other people that you can work with, friends or those with whom you would like to become friends. Meet a few times and decide as a group what the group might like to do to make a difference in our community. Support each other in selecting where to put your efforts and then help each other follow through. You might speak to some of the members of our synagogue community who are already heavily involved in this work, like the Toltz family at Dependable Cleaners who distribute thousands of winter coats each year to the poor. They call it “Coats for Colorado.” Or Kim Turnbow who together with her friends deliver homemade knitted blankets and other items to the poor on Native American reservations in South Dakota. She calls her organization“Warm Woolies.” Or Sara Kornfeld who works to provide money to and information about those suffering in Darfur. She calls her group; “It only takes Sense.” Or speak to us at the shul; we can help your "chesed circle" find meaningful work. Let your goals be modest ones. Make life easier for even one other human being in this world and you will have done a great mitzvah in the eyes of God. Emily Dickenson: “ If I can stop one heart from breaking; I shall not live in vain. If I can ease one life the aching or cool one pain or help one fainting robin unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.”

Loving your neighbor as yourself. Love: we love others when we are responsible for and responsive to the needs. Your neighbor: no matter how different they might be from us we recognize in others God’s image and our common humanity. As yourself: what we demand for ourselves in our own lives, we must seek to provide for others in need.

There is the story of a wise woman who was traveling in the mountains. She found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry and the wise woman opened his bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone in the wise woman's bag, admired it, and asked the wise woman to give it to him. The wise man did so without hesitation.

The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the jewel was worth enough to give him security for the rest of his life.

But a few days later, he came back, searching for the wise woman. When he found her, he returned the stone and said, “I have been thinking. I know how valuable this stone is, but I give it back to you in the hope that you will give me something much more precious in return. If you can, give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me this stone” (Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul).

We pray tonight that God should give us the wisdom and the desire to truly “love our neighbors as ourselves.” Then we shall be truly blessed.

Shana tova tikatevu v’techatemu. A good and healthy new year to all.

No comments:

Post a Comment