Many centuries ago in the land of Israel, one of the early rabbis was returning home from a long day in the House of Study. It was later than usual, and as he walked home, the sun set. Lost deep in thought, he took the left fork – Instead of the right –when the path split. Instead of nearing home, he was walking toward a Roman outpost. “WHO GOES THERE” boomed a deep voice in the dark, shaking him from his thoughts. Shaken and confused, the rabbi tried to figure out who this was at his home. “WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” thundered back, as a massive centurion stepped into view. The rabbi quickly realized the mistake that he must have made. Instead of answering the centurion’s question, he replied, “How much are you paid to stand here every day?” ”Three drachma” replied the centurion. “I see,” said the rabbi. “I will pay you twice as much to stand in front of my door and ask me the same questions every single day.
Pesah is not the only holiday when we ask questions. But the questions we ask on Yom Kippur, like the queries of the centurion to the rabbi, are questions that aim deep into our existential dramas. This morning I want to explore three questions asked of three Biblical characters whom we shall meet over the course of this day.
The first Biblical figure is Elijah the prophet. We meet Elijah in piyutim, special poems we recite on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, and at the end of the day when at Havdalah we sing Eliyahu HaNavi, Elijah is the prophet who never died and will herald the coming of the Messiah and a new day. Elijah has a prominent role in numerous legends but he was first a prophet during the reign the wicked King Ahab and his Phoenician wife, Jezebel. This was a time of religious backsliding by the people and Elijah stood out as a zealous follower of the Lord.
His grand moment came when he engaged in a contest with the prophets of Ba’al, the prophets of the Canaanite deity. A terrible drought had plagued the land and there stood assembled on Mount Carmel, which now overlooks the harbor of Haifa, King Ahab and the 450 Baalite prophets on one side and Elijah on the other. The contest was simple: both the prophets of Ba’al and Elijah prepared sacrifices and laid them on altars and then it was a matter of invoking their respective deities to bring down heavenly fire to prove which god was more powerful. The text declares that the 450 prophets wearied themselves in petitions to Ba’al. It was all in vain. Then Elijah dramatically had four jugs of water poured over his offering, then a second time and a third time. And he called to God, yˆn´nSo h yˆn´nSo, Answer me, o God, answer so that the people will know that you are the true God. And a fire descended from heaven and consumed the sacrifice and dried up the water. And the people proclaimed : Hashem Hu HaElokim. Which is the dramatic phrase with which we conclude Yom Kippur later today.
That should have been Elijah’s great moment of triumph. But Jezebel, Ahab’s wife, threatened to kill Elijah and he fled. Elijah journeyed down to the Sinai Peninsula and hid in a cave. There God finds him and asks “What are you doing here Elijah?”
Elijah’s response is: “I am moved by zeal for the LORD, the God of Hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and put Your prophets to the sword. I alone am left.” God says to Elijah, Come here. I want to show you something - Wind howls, thunder strikes, fire shoots out and God is not to found. Only in the soft gentle sound—Kol D’mamah dakah, a phrase that will reappear in the Unetaneh Tokef prayer in Musaf – only there is God found. And again God asks Elijah “What are you doing here Elijah?” And again Elijah responds, “I am zealous for you, everyone else has abandoned you, all that is left is me”.
A midrash reports that God becomes frustrated with Elijah, sends him off on the next mission which includes appointing his replacement and then assigns Elijah to appear at every bris of Jewish boys into the future to show him that he is not alone among the Jews in remaining faithful to our tradition. That is why we establish a kisay Eliyahu, a chair for Elijah at every brit milah.
The question that Elijah stumbles over is one that each of us on these holy days must pose to ourselves: What are you doing here? Why do we come on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur in such numbers? There are so many attractions for us outside the synagogue. So many demands made upon us. Why come here? What draws us to this holy space at these and other moments? What are we doing here?
The spiritual can be found in nature, it can be found in solitude, so what are we doing here?
Harold Kushner speaks of the synagogue as the one place where an individual can be part of a group, and each individual in the group can have their own needs and agenda while the group fosters each individual’s goals without a sense of competition. We live in a society in which when one person’s succeeds it often means another person did not. We can join clubs, or teams, or ideological parties but our individuality may not be appreciated. Only here in this room can we come as individuals and yet be equals as part of the group. Only in the Wolf chapel can one receive an ovation for being the 10th person to minyan, just for walking through the door!
One can be spiritual without community, but one cannot be a spiritual Jew without community. I don’t know if one can be a Jew at all without Jewish community.
“What am I doing here?” is a question that looms large before us on this day. This question must be asked with utmost seriousness for 21st century Jews. And the response we give to ourselves should be followed with utmost decisiveness. For if we find value to being part of a spiritual Jewish community then we must act on it.
It may be that we learn Torah in our classes
Or that we volunteer to be part of a synagogue committee such as the program committee
Or teach in the FEAST and TAMID program
Or make a commitment to minyan or Shabbat and Holiday services.
Or contribute to make these programs possible.
Whatever it is, the question What Am I doing Here should not be allowed to become a rhetorical question.
Our second Biblical character whom we shall meet today is Jonah whose book we shall read at Minha. Jonah, you may recall is perhaps the most reluctant prophet of all times. He is given an assignment that is to take him outside of the country, to Nineveh. He was going to preach to the wicked people there. He refused, he did not care for the bleeding heart liberal God’s soft on crime campaign, and hops a ship going away from Nineveh. God sends a huge storm and the ship begins to founder. The crew struggles to stay afloat. Then they turn to prayer: they propose that everyone appeal to his own god. Nothing works so they try to figure out caused the storm by casting lots and it falls upon Jonah. So they ask him a series of questions concluding with “from what people are you?”
Jonah responds Ivri Anochi. I am a Hebrew.
What does it mean to say Ivri Anochi? What does it mean to be a Hebrew? An ancient rabbinic interpretation, linked to Abraham who is the first to be called an Ivri, interestingly enough also in the context of a story set amidst non-Jews, Ivri is defined as one who stands Me’ayver, on the other side. In a physical sense it could be a reference to the fact that Abraham, the first Hebrew began his journey from the other side of the Euphrates; but in the metaphysical sense it means he stood apart. To be a Hebrew, means occasionally to stand apart from society; to live according to a different calendar, to respond from a different value system.
Rabbi Jonathan Waxman writes, “to respond like Jonah to the question “from what people are you?” is to link oneself proudly with a rich culture that has transformed the world, one that stretches through time and space, and that is a blend of memory and of practice”.
Zev Maghen, a professor of Arabic Literature at Bar Ilan, in his book John Lennon and the Jews a sardonic look at the meaning of Jewish identity, tackles the attraction our western culture has toward universalism by unraveling John Lennon’s popular song “Imagine.” Remember the words? “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/no religion too”. Maghen argues that the homogenized humanity that the song, taken to its logical political consequences, leads to is closer to the vision of no barriers, no walls, and no special or distinct human cliques or clans promoted by such great humanists as Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
Rather he looks at the inspiring verse in the Torah, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Maghen argues that it cannot mean “Love your neighbor as much as you love yourself”. For Rabbi Akiva elsewhere decreed that if two people were in the desert and only one of them had enough water to survive, the one who has the water is to keep it for himself. Why? Because were they to share both would die and one’s life is not less precious than another’s. “So to Rabbi Akiva [it] means ‘Love your neighbor in the same fashion as you love yourself.’ Use the feelings you have toward yourself as a guide for how to feel about him. You will never love him as much as you love yourself…but you will learn to love him at all, in the first place, solely through your overwhelmingly powerful love of yourself and your own.”
To be able to love others we need to love ourselves, to be able to express concern for other families and clans we need to love our families, to be able to love different cultures and ethnic and religious groups we need to love our Jewish people. It is through the love of those closest to us by identity and shared history that we can appreciate the bonds other cultures share. Golda Meir said, “I am convinced that peace will come to Israel and its neighbors because the tens of millions of Arabs need peace just as much as we do. An Arab mother who loses a son in battle weeps as bitterly as any Israeli mother.”
“From what people are you?” This question is crucial for us today as well. Knowing what people you are from helps understand who you are and what your values are. A story in the Forward newspaper a few months back noted that a recent survey found that while many young Jews volunteer for social service projects few choose to volunteer at Jewish agencies or even connect their volunteerism to their Jewish identity. David Elcott, a New York University professor of public policy, warned, “If we can’t connect public service to Judaism, we run into the danger that for the majority of young Jews, their religion will not be reflective of their core values.” But the opposite danger exists as well that if Jews don’t know their Judaism, if we don’t know what people we belong to or what values we represent than our core values will not be reflective of our religion.
That is the impact of what the sailors ask Jonah. “From what people are you?” Aren’t you from a people who believes in teshuvah, change? Is your God not the God who is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness? The question transforms him and in the belly of the fish he prays “In my trouble I called to the LORD, And He answered me…I, with loud thanksgiving, Will make offerings to You; What I have vowed I will perform. Deliverance is the Lord’s!”
Only three times in the Torah does the Torah command us to love. We are to commanded to love God; We are commanded to love our fellow in the verse we cited above and here I believe it important to stress the tradition’s understanding that fellow here means fellow Jew. Because the third command to love is you shall love the stranger, the other. The Torah commands us to love the other, the stranger twice, and explains why: you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the LORD am your God.
The Torah is making it clear to us that our embrace of our people, our history, our values will guide us to be able to love those who are different from us.
Finally one last question from the prophet Isaiah in this morning’s Haftarah. The prophet of Isaiah 58 may be speaking to the community of Israel who have returned to Israel after Cyrus of Persia allows the Jews to go back. The people are frustrated they are fasting and afflicting themselves in their search for God, yet at the same time their actions are duplicitous, they oppress the poor and the weak. Isaiah rebukes them, “Is such the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a marsh plant and lying in sackcloth and ashes?”
This is the final question for us. On this day when we like our ancestors in ancient Judea also fasted we must ask ourselves – Do our behaviors match our convictions? Do our ritual acts correlate to a spiritual purpose?
Yom Kippur is a day that should be filled with questions, deep questions. The answers we reflect upon will carry us through the year.
Abraham Joshua Heschel used to tell this story: A young boy was excited to begin school for the first time. He made sure he would not forget anything by putting notes around his room to remind him to take all the items needed for school: “The notebook is on the desk,” “the pencils are in the pencil case,” my lunch is at the door,” “my jacket is on the hook,” and “I am in bed”. Next morning he jumped up and diligently went about following his notes, he got his notebooks, his pencils, his lunch and his jacket. But when he got to the last note he looked in the bed. The note says “I am in bed” but I am not there. Where am I?
Let us consider deeply these three questions: What are you doing here? From what people are you? Is such the fast I desire? By answering these three we will know who and where we are. May this coming year be one of confidence and courage, of steadfastness to our heritage, and compassion for all. Shanah Tovah.