Yom Kippur 5778: How We Speak, and How We Listen

At Mussaf on Yom Kippur, just before the cantor leads the powerful repetition of the standing Amidah prayer, she does something remarkable. She recites the Hineini prayer, saying these words:

“Here I am, impoverished of deeds, trembling and frightened from the dread of the One Who is enthroned upon the praises of Israel. I have come to stand and supplicate before You for Your people Israel, even though I am not worthy or qualified to do so.”

This is all a prayer before the prayer service actually begins. The cantor here is, in effect, saying a prayer about speaking before speaking the particular words she is about to speak.

Jewish prayer is all about words. Yom Kippur is, in a sense, all about words. But it’s not “all talk, no action.” The words on Yom Kippur are the action.

In our world of nonstop words, nonstop language, Yom Kippur reminds us that we must weigh our words. Even if we’re not someone on whose words might rest the fate of the world (and who might tweet those words at 6 am), the fate of our relationships, the fate of our reputations, even the fate of how we understand ourselves – all depend a great deal on how we speak and what we say – and what we don’t say. And, connected with all of this, how we listen.

As I say these things to you – even as I stand before you – I feel like I should be reciting that Hineini prayer. Not only because I feel unqualified to speak before the One Who is enthroned upon the praises of Israel.

I feel unworthy to speak in front of you.

I know. I’m “the man who seems to be in charge at Hillel”. I’m supposed to convey a message that is meaningful, and you’re supposed to listen. More and more, though, and especially in recent days, I catch myself as I speak, and even before I speak. What is important for me to say? And is it important even to say it?

I sense the power of speech, and I also recognize my own shortcomings related to speech. And all of this, for me at least, and at this moment at least, is wrapped up in how I deal with anger.

I’ll illustrate with a (very) recent story:  Last Thursday, I stood on the bridge by the Lakefill with many of you at our Tashlich service. It was beautiful – a warm afternoon, more than 50 people, even a shofar blowing. Rabbi Brandon spoke a few words of wisdom, and then I walked to the railing with a few clumps of bread, and with my little guys Jacob and Ethan in tow.

Ethan is 3, and he had a lot of fun just throwing the bread. His tashlich experience amounted to “More bread, Daddy. PLEASE! More bread!”

Jacob is in first grade. At Solomon Schechter Day School. So he gets it. Kinda. I asked him, “What are you going to try to do better in the coming year?” “Make better choices?” he said (or sort of asked). I led the witness: “You mean, like, doing better listening, and not arguing back at me when I tell you ‘no’.” “Yeah, Daddy.” I followed up: “Well, one of the things I’m going to work on is not getting so angry or frustrated with you when you don’t make a good choice.”

Then I threw my chunks of bread into the water. Some years, I’m throwing away a whole list of things, but last week, it kept coming back to one thing. Anger. Impatience? Anger. Frustration? Anger. Damaged relationships? Anger. Stress and a sense of impotence in the face of political issues that are tremendously upsetting. Yep, anger.

So I tossed my anger away, symbolically and metaphorically. Then I headed home with Jacob and Ethan, and we took the scenic route along the lake. It was a beautiful ending to this story.

But.

Of course there’s a but.

Not more than an hour later, Jacob was yelling at Ethan, Ethan was pulling away a toy, Jacob was half-crying/half-whining, and, yes, there was my anger again. And my voice was rising.

Here. We. Go. Again.

Why is anger so wired into us, so ever-present – yet so problematic? And what to do about it?

Maimoinides – the Rambam, the 12^th century Jewish philosopher and physician, famously echoed Aristotle’s belief that in life, and particularly in our emotional lives, we should strike a balance between too much and too little, find the golden mean. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks illustrates this idea, “Too much fear makes me a coward, too little makes me rash and foolhardy, taking unnecessary risks. The middle way is courage.

But anger is different. Even a little anger is not OK – there isn’t a middle way. Rambam explains, “Anger (is) an extremely evil tendency and it is proper for man to remove himself from it to the other extreme. One should teach himself not to get angry, even over a matter which befits anger.”

For Rabbi Sacks, “What is dangerous about anger is that it causes us to lose control….The result is that in a moment of irascibility we can do or say things we may regret for the rest of our lives.

Sacks suggests: The best way of defeating anger “is to pause, stop, reflect, refrain, count to ten, and breathe deeply. If necessary, leave the room, go for a walk, meditate, or vent your toxic feelings alone.”

Or we could try another approach, which I saw on this somewhat crudely illustrated flyer that same evening after Tashlich.

It was sent home from Schechter with five suggested steps managing your anger…if you’re about 6 years old:

(Hold it up and read from it)

What to do when you are angry:

Step #1: How do I feel?

Step #2: Take three deep breaths.

Step #3: Count slowly to five.

Step #4: Say “calm down” to yourself.

Step #5: Talk to a grownup about it.

Talk to a grownup about it.

And here we are…the grownups.

Words have the power to heal, to convey love, to build relationships. But also to destroy and tear apart. On this day, Yom Kippur, we repeat, over and over again, the “Al Cheit” prayer. Al cheit she-chatanu lefanecha. (Upon the transgressions that we have transgressed in front of You.) Over and over, throughout these 25 hours. So many words about our transgressions before God. And so many of those transgressions are about words. 11 of the 43 sins enumerated are sins committed through speech. Al cheit that we have sinned before you through gossip mongering, through oath taking, with the idle chatter of our lips, through foolish speech, through denial and false promises, through evil talk.

Why this repetition?

What are we being called to do, over and over again? Ultimately, I think, it comes down to two things:

(1) Speak more carefully.

And

(2) Listen.

In traditional Jewish practice, we say a blessing for just about everything important and quite a few things that might not seem so important. We say a blessing before we eat food because we are grateful for that food. We say morning prayers that show appreciation that we are here, alive another day, a recognition that we are living on borrowed time. We say a prayer before we head out on a journey, before we light candles to begin a holiday, and, as we saw earlier, before we pray to God.

What if we said a prayer before we spoke to another human being? What if we saw the very act of speaking as holy? If what you’re saying is holy, doesn’t that require a prayer?

I know, practically, this sounds tremendously difficult, especially in our nanosecond-response-time world of Snapchat, Facebook, and snappy one-liner responses, not to mention the 140 (or possibly 280)-character universe of Twitter. How could I possibly pause to pray each time I communicate?

But conceptually – before you go to speak with someone, before you respond to an email, send a text, or post….what if you said a prayer?

Maybe it would sound like this (with appreciation to Roy Lessin, a poet of Christian devotional prayers; I’ve adapted his language a bit):

Omnipresent One, guide my thoughts before they become my words. Place a guard over my mouth and a watchman over the door of my lips.

When I open my mouth, I ask You to fill it with right words, good words, true words, loving words.

Use my words this day to heal and not harm, to restore and not separate, to extend mercy and not judgment, to build up and not pull down, to comfort and not injure, to bring sunlight and not shadows, to encourage and not quench, to mend and not wound.

May my words herald good news, be seasoned with salt, and bring grace to the hearer.

If I am to speak correction, may it be with compassion; if I am to exhort, may it be with humility; If I am to instruct, may it be with brokenness; if I am to guide, may it be with wisdom; if I am to inform, may it be with clarity;

Guard my tongue from murmuring and my voice from complaint. In all things, may my mouth be filled with words of gratitude, expressions of praise, and proclamations of faithfulness.

Maybe that prayer would work for you. Maybe other words would work. Or maybe just taking a couple of seconds to pause.

Speaking is one part of the puzzle. But sometimes it’s better to Talk less, smile more.

Or to paraphrase that line from Hamilton:

Talk less. Listen more. And listen resiliently.

Judaism has a central guide to this kind of listening: Shema

Shema yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.

Listen, Israel. Adonai is our God. God is One.

The program Encounter, which has enabled me and other North American Jewish leaders to visit the West Bank and East Jerusalem to meet and learn from and with Palestinians, operates under seven core values connected with Jewish tradition. (You should Google Encounter’s Core Values – it’s worth a look). But I want to mention just one:

Shema / Listening / שמע
Encounter cultivates resilient listening and curiosity, for Jews toward Palestinians as well as between Jews and other Jews with divergent worldviews.

Here at Northwestern, you may or may not engage with Palestinians and the issues connected with Israel and Palestine, so permit me to broaden this statement:

Let’s cultivate resilient listening and curiosity for Jews toward all non-Jews as well as between Jews and other Jews with divergent views.

Let’s broaden it further – let’s model resilient listening and curiosity for everyone. Let’s be willing to engage in the most challenging issues that we find politically unsettling, highly problematic – and let’s do so in a way that demonstrates respect. That demonstrates that we’re willing to listen resiliently – we do not have to give up that which we hold dear, our strongest values, but we’re open to the possibility that learning from another might actually enhance our self-understanding, might actually broaden our perspective – might actually impact our own values.

When I traveled on Encounter, it was about being willing to listen even when what I was hearing made me uncomfortable, frustrated, angry. Angry enough to feel I needed to take deep breaths, and maybe even talk to a grownup.

When Maimonides discusses anger he also points to this kind of listening:

“The conduct of the just,” Rambam writes, “is to take insults but not give insults, hear themselves flouted but make no reply, do their duty as a work of love, and bear affliction cheerfully.”

Resilient listening reminds you that it’s not about you. Or, at least, it’s not only about you.

As Brenda Ueland puts it in The Art of Listening

“When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand….Listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role….So try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends, to those who love you and those who don’t, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.”

And miracles do not happen on their own.

Can we listen resiliently…

            To a parent

            To a colleague

            To a friend

            To a roommate

            To a partner

To a stranger

            To an Other?

At the end of Yom Kippur – we stop saying Al Cheit.

We stop saying nearly all words. We end with all of us, together, saying:

Shema yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad

Listen, Israel, Adonai is our God; God is One.

We end with this statement of unity – all transgressions wiped away, a clean slate, clear language, and one action step:

Shema.

Listen, resiliently.

And that’s exactly what we do at the very last moment of Yom Kippur – the shofar is sounded.

We stand in a place of no words, where we listen to whatever cosmic message comes through.

Throw away the anger. For real.

Say a prayer before you speak. Sometimes, really say a prayer.

And listen. Resiliently.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

On behalf of my wife Claire and our sons Jacob and Ethan, and on behalf of Northwestern Hillel, I wish each and every one of you a Shana Tova and g’mar chatima tova ~ may you be sealed for goodness in the Book of Life.

Rosh Hashanah 5778: Home and Welcoming

“You are walking through the world half asleep. It isn’t just that you don’t know who you are and that you don’t know how or why you got here. It’s worse than that; these questions never even arise. It is as if you are in a dream.

Then the walls of the great house that surrounds you crumble and fall. You tumble out onto a strange street, suddenly conscious of your estrangement and your homelessness.

A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten.”

These are the opening lines of Rabbi Alan Lew’s extraordinary book, This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared: “The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation”

In Lew’s book, the metaphor of home – both the destruction of the home that we know and, eventually, the journey to a home that is not a home, a sukkah – plays a central role.

This time of year at Northwestern, it’s not just the Jewish holidays that bring home to mind.

Last week, we welcomed hundreds of first-year students to Northwestern, many of them away from home on their own for the first time. Away from the home they have known, and about to make a new home here.

At the same time, second-year students and others returned with different perspectives. They walk around Evanston and see all of those purple ’21 shirts and wonder, “Who are all of these people invading my home?” The more self-reflective might wonder, “Was that me a year ago? How could I have been walking around with hardly a clue?”

Yet the transformation, the sense of being ‘home’, can be nearly immediate. My wife Claire mentioned to me that she saw a student she is advising the day after move-in and that student seemed completely disoriented and, in fact, shell-shocked. But within two days the same student looked quite OK, and much more at home, at ease in her new surroundings.

What makes a place a home? And does a home have to even be a place?

Is home the place where we are born? The place where we grew up? The place where we are married? The place our children are born? Where our parents are buried? Where we’ll be buried?

Or is home simply the place where we love and are loved at any given moment in our lives?

Claire and I met in Jerusalem, were engaged and married in Boston, yet neither of those places is really our home. Evanston is now home, and – though I’ve lived 40 of my 47 years in other places – it’s more a home for me than any other. Perhaps this is because Jacob and Ethan were born in Evanston Hospital. Perhaps it’s because Claire is from here, and her parents still live just a few miles up Sheridan Road in her childhood home in Glencoe.

Or perhaps it’s because I’m helping to create a “home away from home” on this campus for Jewish students and non-Jewish students alike – at our Hillel. Though I sometimes bristle at the cliché of “home away from home”, I’m proud that students feel at home at Hillel, and I and my wonderful staff and student leaders spend countless hours trying to make it a more welcoming home to all. We’ve put in the nice TV, the keurigs upstairs (and downstairs), and the free food texting service, but we also have the friendly supportive adults who ask “How are you?” and actually care about the answer.

We care because we understand that, wherever we are, we want to feel at home.

Whenever I take off in an airplane, I say the Traveler’s Prayer (Tefillat ha-Derekh) and ask for a safe journey and a safe return, but I also add a very personal plea. “God, let me return home to Claire and Jacob and Ethan. Let me be OK. Let them be OK. Let me make it home.”

And when I say that I don’t mean Hillel. Or Evanston, or Chicago. I mean the people I love the most.

Or, as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros sing:

“Home, let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you
Home is wherever I'm with you”

Don’t get me wrong -- physical h

omes do matter.

During the past few weeks. It has been heartbreaking and overwhelming to watch images of the ruined homes of thousands of people in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey in Texas and Irma and now Maria in the Caribbean and in Florida, and the massive earthquakes In Mexico.

(And, no, this is not a segue into how these are possible signs of the apocalypse. Perhaps for another   time).

I’ve spent hours listening to and reading heartbreaking stories. Stories of people who fled Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and moved to Houston, only to have their homes in Houston destroyed by Harvey. The story of a guy who put irreplaceable family photos on the highest places in the house when they evacuated, now wishing that he had taken those pictures with him.

We see our homes as places of safety, of security, where we can go to be warm, dry, and taken care of. And these hurricanes and storms remind us how flimsy and tenuous these physical structures are in the face of nature’s raw power.

I haven’t just been obsessing about physical houses, but also the homes of our identity – communal homes, and national homes.

This extraordinary political year has left many of us wondering what is the nature of this country that we call “home”. Is this really our home? Whatever your political leanings, the results of last November 9 were a seismic shock wave to our sense of national identity. (Again, just a reminder -- this is not a talk about signs of the apocalypse)

Last fall, many of us felt the fragility of what it means to consider our nation our home. After the election of Donald Trump to become President of the United States, many were stunned. But for some, especially immigrants and Muslims who have been the targets of unwelcoming rhetoric and worse, it has meant a very real sense that the nation they considered home might not really be a safe harbor, after all.

But how do we make a fragile home into a safe harbor, anyway? First, we recognize that all homes are fragile.

Rabbi Alan Lew instructs us on how the process of teshuvah actually brings us to a deep recognition of this fragility. He says,

Our journey starts at Tisha B'Av, the day we remember the destruction of the Temple.

Months later, at the end of the journey, we're sitting in another broken house, the sukkah.

It’s stunning to me that the end of the journey, rather than bringing us to a home that is complete, instead places us in a home that is not really a home. As Lew notes,

“So it is that the sukkah, with its broken lines, its open roof, its walls that don’t quite surround us,

exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed in this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it…..

This is raw. It’s challenging. But Lew concludes…

…In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need. The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life.

But how to square this tension ? We recognize that a home is an illusion of protection, but we need that illusion. Even if it is a tentative security, we need that security.

It is not only the structure itself that makes a “home”. Home is also how safe and comfortable we feel, how much we feel that we belong there. We don’t want to ever feel too safe, because we know permanent safety is not realistic. But we want to feel a modicum of comfort, a modicum of safety, and a modicum of belonging.

We want to feel welcome. And in order to feel welcome, be welcome, we ourselves have to be welcoming. We have to be welcomers.

The first Jew, Abraham, understood this. We’re told in a midrash in Avot D'Rabbi Natan 7:17a

Let your house be open; let the poor be members of your household. Let a person’s house be open to the north and to the south and to the east and to the west, even as Abraham’s house was, for Abraham made four doors to his house, that the poor might not be troubled to go round the house, but that each would find they faced a door as they approached . . .

This is beautiful. And Abraham’s tent is a model of welcoming.

But on Rosh Hashanah, we see a glimpse of just how complicated being welcoming can be, even for Abraham.

We read in Genesis 21:

Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing.

She said to Abraham, “Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

11

וַיֵּ֧רַע הַדָּבָ֛ר מְאֹ֖ד בְּעֵינֵ֣י אַבְרָהָ֑ם עַ֖ל אוֹדֹ֥ת בְּנֽוֹ׃

The matter was very evil in the eyes of Abraham, for it concerned a son of his.

The matter was very evil in the eyes of Abraham, for it concerned a son of his, Ishmael. And it also concerned the mother of that son, Hagar. It concerned two human beings who were in Abraham’s care, who he was about to cast out into the desert, driving them from the only home they have known.

Even Abraham, famous for his tent open in all four directions to the traveler who might journey his way, so aware of the needs of the nomad perhaps because he was a wanderer, fails here to provide the safety and security of home to those in his care.

Having a home that is a haven, a place of welcoming guests, the Talmud tells us, is not just a nice thing to do. It is a core human value. In Shabbat 127b, Rabbi Yehuda said in the name of Rav, "Welcoming guests is greater than receiving the face of the Shechina (the Divine presence)

The Maharal, Rabbi Yehuda Loew of Prague, tells us, ““Understand this the following way: One welcomes guests because one honors the human who was created in the image of God, and this is considered to be a great thing”

The guest is a human being created in the image of God. And often the guest is really a stranger who you do not yet know but who you welcome into your home.

In order to feel welcome, we have to be welcoming. In order to feel at home, we must help others to feel at home. We must remember the stranger, for we were strangers. And at any given moment we could be strangers again.

As we think about our homes, our communities, our nation, and our world on the cusp of this new year, let us ponder what kind of home we want to create for ourselves, for our classmates and friends, for our families, and for and with our fellow travelers on this planet.

And perhaps we’ll ponder these questions as we sit in the sukkah – perhaps the (shameless plug) Hillel sukkah – and rebuild our broken hearts with the hope that comes in the New year.

As we begin 5778 and this new year at Northwestern, Claire and I (and Jacob and Ethan) look forward to welcoming many of you students into our home just a few minutes from here on Church Street.

Hillel looks forward to welcoming you and to you helping us to welcome all into our vibrant and diverse community.

And I hope we will all strive toward creating communities  that feel like a home, and a nation that is welcoming, compassionate, and full of love.

I’ll leave the last word to those brilliant modern Talmudic scholars, Rav Simon and Rav Garfunkel, who so aptly put it:

Homeward bound

I wish I was

Homeward bound

Home where my thought’s escaping

Home where my music’s playing

Home where my love lies waiting

Silently for me.

Silently for me.

Shana tova u’metuka. May you have a sweet, happy, and welcoming New Year.

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