Temple Shalom Sermons: Rabbi Daniel Swartz--Rosh Hashanah 5759

August 17^th, 1998. After the President’s brief comments came the armies of analysts and spinmeisters. And amidst the static of self-important punditry, I heard one very wise comment. Someone, I forget who, said, "it seems a person’s reaction to the President’s speech shows us more about that person than anything else." I know that was true for me. My reaction was to think about the true meaning of faithfulness. And I know that I was obsessed with this question long before I had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky. I had reflected on it before my own parents’ divorce sixteen years ago. I think it even predates a conversation my first grade teacher had with our class after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Despite growing rumors about his marital problems, she called him the most faithful man she had ever known. As far as I can tell, I was born bugged by this question.

So I come at it with no pretense of impartial disinterest. Nor do I claim to have any special insights about the psychology behind presidential peccadilloes. Instead, as we enter into the reflective spirit of the High Holy Days, I thought it would be more appropriate not to concentrate on the scandal du jour but rather to ask the question with a slightly different focus. How does the Jewish tradition understand faithfulness to family? What guidance can that tradition give us for our own behavior--can it help us understand what is expected of us? And how can we become more faithful?

Now before I go any further, I want to make sure that we understand that questions about faithfulness are about us, not some unidentified and lesser other. Faithfulness in all its richness is an ideal we can strive for--but not one that humans ever completely reach. And all too often, we don’t even come close. But now, at the turn of the New Year, we have a new chance for healing, for turning, for admitting humanity while reaching for something a little better. Now, no matter our past failings, we can forge a future of faithfulness to family.

I also want to make clear that all of us are family members. As modern Reform Jews, our understanding of family includes singles and empty-nesters, those who have never been parents and single parents and blended families, close extended families and relatives who don’t speak to each other, healthy and dysfunctional families and the rest of us in-betweeners, kids born into families and kids that come into families through other routes, committed relationships that might not yet have entered the covenant of marriage, and same sex committed relationships. What all these complex sets of relationships have in common is a need for faithfulness, commitment, loyalty, for them to work. And something more, at least according to Jewish traditions. Faithfulness to family, our sages teach, requires a holiness of three dimensions, parallel to the three calls of the shofar---tekiah, shevarim, teruah. For to be truly faithful to our family as Jews, we need to be faithful first to God and our ideals, second to the sacred possibilities of family, and third, to the pursuit of tikkun olam, the healing of the world.

Faithfulness to God and ideals, the soul-stirring wake-up call of tekiah. But to paraphrase Tina Turner, what’s God got to do with it? I mean, if Clinton can claim that this whole ordeal isn’t Congress’s business, doesn’t that go doubly for God? And even if God is somehow relevant, how can we be faithful to God, when so often we’re not even half-full of faith in God?

I’ll try to answer each of these questions in turn. Today, we might not see the connection between God and faithfulness to family, but to Biblical authors, adultery and idolatry were obviously and inextricably linked. They spoke of each using metaphors of the other--whoring after other Gods, worshipping the women or men one found seductive. And they assumed that whoever strayed in one of these directions would be likely to do so in the other.

As we try to understand their reasoning today, we can see two foundations to this connection. The first and more obvious is that, as Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb teaches, each time we harm others, we spite God by failing to respect the image of God inherent in each person. And we also spite God by showing we care more about getting caught than about what we have actually done. We fear consequences more than sin, embarrassment more than an all-seeing eye that knows the recesses of our soul.

The more fundamental connection, however, is that our faithfulness to family, or lack thereof, explicates more clearly than words what we actually do worship--the gratification of the moment, or the altar of the eternal. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote,

Judaism is concerned with the happiness of the individual. It claims, however, that happiness is contingent upon faithfulness to God. Socrates wrote that an unexamined life is not worth living. The Bible, however, taught us that life without commitment is not truly life, that thinking without roots will bear flowers but no fruits. And our first and eternal commitment is to God.

It comes to this: in an age whose motto is "just do it," are our commitments, our vows, merely so much self-serving spin? Or do we bind them upon our hearts, let them serve as frontlets between our eyes?

This perspective helps us to understand how to be faithful even when we have problems with faith in God. For in this context, faith means living up to what we believe in, means imbuing the universe with at least the possibility of meaning. The question is not whether or not we believe, but what do our actions, our daily investments of time and energy, show that we believe in? Have we raised up idols of self and self-gratification? Do we make sacrifices on the altars of glory, fame, power, sex? Do we worship our appetites without restraint, feeding them more and more no matter the hurt we may cause? Or, through mature discipline do we seek the wholeness of presence, the integrity of being we have come to call God?

But actually doing so is harder than eliciting a sweet sound from the shofar. There just aren’t easy paths to faith, any G-chips to make us take our faith lives seriously. Nor is government-mandated school prayer likely to do more for religion that school cafeterias have done for haute cuisine. But we can each commit ourselves to taking a few steps forward. By, for example, slowing down, taking five, ten minutes a day to sit quietly, perhaps to meditate, perhaps to pray, perhaps just to listen. Or through the ancient wrestle/embrace of Torah study. Try out Temple Shalom’s ongoing series of Shabbat morning torah studies, and together, we can bring faithfulness to God into both our highest ideals and our everyday life.

Which brings us to faithfulness to family relationships, to the call of shevarim, alternating high and low notes that call us to pay attention to the big and little, to the great dramas and everyday happenings of family life. And family life, as the word shevar, broken, reminds us, can be fragile. How do we negotiate its often-stormy waters, keep steady through troughs and crests? We often casually bandy about the term "commitment," but we rarely realize how radical it is. As Rabbi Heschel taught, "the moment in which such a commitment is made is quickly gone: gone from our calendars, gone from our clocks. And yet we must be willing to regard it as if it were immortal, as if those events were happening now." For relationships can endure only if we remain loyal to that moment of promise. But how can we?

First of all, faithfulness to families cannot grow except in an atmosphere of truthfulness. Midrash Pinchas, a Hasidic torah commentary, teaches that the messianic age will come only when the world realizes that an untruth is a mix of adultery and idolatry, of unfaithfulness and self-worship. And truthfulness, in our tradition, is broader than some minimum legal requirement, broader even than not lying at all. Truthfulness means being not only forthright, but also forthcoming. Truth, we are taught, is God’s seal.

That’s a clear and high standard. It’s also a standard that’s impossible to meet fully and constantly, which our tradition also recognizes, thank God, or we’d be in a heap of trouble. As the Kossover rebbe taught, pure truthfulness does not exist in this world. We may be created in God’s image, but we can only make sorry counterfeits of God’s seal. So how do we balance this high ideal with our mortal failings? The Talmud develops the principle of Shalom Bayit--that sometimes untruths are not only acceptable, but even preferable, when they are told for the sake of peace in the household. Say, for example, your spouse asks, "what do think of my new hairdo?" The best answer might not be the most truthful.

But Shalom Bayit is far from a blank check. For if you are the cause of the potentially hurtful situation, say by violating the covenant of marriage, it does not give you justification to say "Oh, the truth will only add to the hurt even more--let’s hide what I’ve done." No--you mess up, you own up.

And owning up only becomes real when we make our family relationships our first priority, a priority that we stand by not only on the grand occasions, but throughout the daily life that Shevarim’s call reminds us of. And just as our actions show what we truly believe in, so too do they demonstrate whether or not we make this priority sacred. This New Year, let’s ask ourselves, are our best energies, our first fruits, given to our families? If not, should we change? A useful guiding metaphor, the Ropshitzer rebbe taught, is to imagine that any time we don’t make our families our priority, we incur a debt to them. We can only repay it through proper attention, appreciation, love, time, and devotion--a devotion that begins with family, but also reaches out to the world as a whole.

Which leads us to the third dimension of Jewish faithfulness--faithfulness to the pursuit of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. The gut-wrenching call of teruah, nine broken notes that, if brought together, would equal a whole tekiah, reminds us of how much is broken in the world. And it reminds us how this New Year is a new opportunity to engage in world-healing.

Sounds great and noble--but what’s the connection to faithfulness to family? Our tradition posits both a positive and negative connection. Positively, think of a chuppah for a moment. A thin cloth that, as I well know from some windy weddings, can tear in an instant. And yet, at the same time, what near miraculous shelter it provides--love beauty, creation, and the wings of the divine presence. So those who receive the gifts of this fragile fortress of family faithfulness consequently have an obligation--to share that gift with the world, to bring those in need into that shelter. Roya and I give each other comfort and strength--and teruah reminds us to use that strength to repair the brokenness of the world.

But what happens when that source of strength becomes a source of pain, when the faithful becomes the faithless? Does a leader’s lack of faithfulness to family compromise his or her ability to faithfully pursue tikkun olam, to, in current terminology, faithfully execute the law? Was Shimon bar Yochai correct when he said that a part of liars’ punishment is that they are not believed when they tell the truth, not followed even when they lead in the right direction?

The prophet Hosea certainly thought so. Listen to his words: "The Lord has a case against the inhabitants of this land, because there is no honesty and no goodness and no obedience to God in the land. False swearing, dishonesty, and murder, theft and adultery are rife; crime follows upon crime! For that, the earth is withered; everything that dwells on it languishes--beasts of the field and birds of the sky--even the fish of the sea perish."

Now Hosea is not preaching a magical disaster religion here--he isn’t speaking about God the cosmic prosecutor zapping the bad guys. Rather, if you read his overall context, he is talking about the break down of a society and the consequences thereof. The leaders of the land have lost their faithfulness to God, have stopped striving for their ideals. And so they do not keep their word--and thus lose their moral authority to uphold the law. Then on down the slippery slope they slide, lawlessness spreading like cancer. As raw power and self-gratification become the law of the land, the weak, human or otherwise, are exploited, destroyed, the land itself withers.

Could that really happen today? At some level, it already is. I don’t mean that corruption is rife, that all authority has been compromised. But we are facing some tough, moral dilemmas--and too many leaders are too compromised to be up to the challenge. And if we truly can’t address the tough problems, then indeed private faithlessness has led to public betrayal.

For example, last December, just before a certain intern became famous, Clinton took one of the most courageous stands of his Presidency and helped devise a strong international accord to reduce global warming. But the next steps may take more faithfulness than we can manage. We will have to be willing to pursue actions that will only benefit generations yet to be born--are we that faithful to the children of the future? We will need to faithfully keep promises not just for one election cycle or two, but for half a century or more. Can we? We will need to stand up to monied interests, including at times our own, who would live in denial until Da Nile floods.

Will we lose faith under that pressure? We will need to reassure those workers and businesses that may suffer during transitions to healthier energy--but will our word be trustworthy? We will need to see the whole world, especially poorer countries that will both be more severely impacted by climate change and have fewer resources to mitigate such impacts, as our family--but will we be faithful to this family of humankind? If we fail this test of faithfulness, the fault, dear Brutus, will not be in the Starr report, but in ourselves. Indeed, we will have been faithless to billions of present and future families, and the earth may indeed be withered.

But that is not the end of the story--not for Hosea and not for us. Hosea speaks of the people returning, so that God declares to them: I will espouse you forever; I will espouse you with righteousness and justice, with goodness and mercy. And I will espouse you with faithfulness. In that day, I will respond to the sky, and it shall respond to the earth, and the earth shall respond with new grain and wine and oil. I will sow her in the land as My own, and I will say, You are My people…Generously I will take them back in love."

That return is available to all of us. Yes, we have a high standard of faithfulness, a three dimensional commitment to God, family, and the world. Each tekiah, each shevarim, each teruah calls us to do more. But each of us will, at one time or another, fail at least part of the test of faithfulness. Indeed, these high Holy Days are predicated on such regular mortal failings--otherwise we would not need them each and every year. So what are we supposed to do when we have been unfaithful? How can we return so that we, like Hosea’s people, may be taken back in love?

The process is both simple and difficult. It is summed up in just three words from the Torah portion we read on Yom Kippur: b’feechah u’lvavcha la-ahsoto. In your mouth and in your heart, to do it. We start with the confession of the mouth--but that is only the start, and it is least important ingredient of the three. The key is not how many times we utter the word "sorry," whether or not we sound properly contrite, how often we apologize or to whom--but rather that, despite public abuse or ridicule, our words move us to a true change of heart.

This second stage of return can bring joy, comfort, and soul-transformation. As Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav taught, in one instant, as our heart truly sighs over what we have done, as we commit ourselves to change, we become newly born creatures. But even this is not enough--and the last stage of return, the actual doing, is the most difficult of all. Doing has two elements --removing ourselves from the wrong we have done so thoroughly that if we ever find ourselves in a similar situation again, this time we will remain faithful. And equally important, we need to take positive actions that demonstrate our faithfulness to God, family, and the world. The Gerer rebbe taught,

Do not dwell overlong on an evil deed you have done. It is like stirring filth--stir it, the more it covers you. Rather than waste your time weighing and measuring filth, begin stringing pearls for the joy of heaven. You have been faithless? Then balance it by acting faithfully.

Such faithful actions, of course, are not the task of a moment or even a month--but of a lifetime, for it is the nature of the harm that unfaithfulness causes that what occurred in an instant can echo for the ages. But we can begin to undo that harm by showing our true love, our faithfulness right now. That is our task for the New Year, for the whole year, for every year. Are we up to it? Listen tomorrow to the shofar’s call, and you may hear the answer. For we will hear tekiah, a call to faithfulness to God, to live up to our ideals. Then shevarim, calling us to find the sacred in both the high and low of family life. Then teruah, calling us to our eternal task of healing the world. But the shofar calls do not stop there. At the end is the greatest of them all--tekiah gedolah. It calls, Now! Bestir yourselves now! For at this very moment, you can be true; this year, you can become more faithful. Listen and this can become, for all of us, a truly sweet New Year.

Daniel Swartz is the Executive Director of the Childrens' Enviromental Health Network (CEHN). He lives with his wife Roya and their daughter in Takoma Park, MD.