AYEKAH – WHERE ARE YOU?

It is all in the way we tell the story and, after all, it is our own story, and so we have a right to tell it our way. The first question in the whole world occurs in the opening paragraphs of our Torah. Well, you all know really the setting. On the sixth day God had created Adam, certainly an astonishing item in the created order, which soon indicated to God that he could not be alone and why God then tried to find a suitable mate for this new creature. By having him look at all the animals, God soon learned that none of them were adequate. And therefore God created a helpmate and you all know she’s called Eve. And Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, in paradise. They had the full run of the entire place and, could do whatever they wanted except they had been given one prohibition. As God soon learned, if He had not known it before, in the willfulness and self-consciousness and perversity of Adam and Eve, they broke the only command, the only prohibition that had been given them to observe. And when they had eaten from the forbidden fruit and discovered that they were genderized and embarrassed, a curious fact, they made themselves garments. Then they heard God coming into the Garden and they hid.

And here then comes the question. The Torah writes and tells us that God calls out to “Adam, Ayekah,” “where are you?” Now of course, immediately our Rabbis are uncomfortable by thinking that God did not know where Adam was physically even though that is what the text does say in the literal fashion. So they interpret this question Ayekah, where are you, by putting it in a kind of a spin to say not where are you?” but rather “what have you done? Where are you now?” And this question has been the question, hasn’t it, that God always needs to ask. And while it is no longer Adam, AyeKah”, one human, that question really goes out all the time, humans, where are you? Who are you really? Surely this is a kind of a question that fits into the general mood and conception of these days of repentance and particularly in this Yom Kippur when we are bidden to delve into the depths of our own selves. There, too, we’ll ask the question where are we?

Well, we can begin, perhaps, and take an account, a review of who we are as American Jews. This is particularly appropriate right now because we are celebrating and observing the 350^th anniversary of the establishment of the first Jewish community in then New Amsterdam, which soon was to become New York. And when you think of the fact that we started out 350 years ago, twenty-four bedraggled, poverty-stricken refugees from Brazil, having been cast onto a foggy shete by the pirates that had captured them and despoiled them, at least so one version of the story goes, and think of it that now we are somewhere between 5½ to 6 million, then when we ask the question where are we, we could easily be satisfied and think of ourselves as perhaps the single most successful journey that has ever lived in the long thousands of years’ journey of our people through time. It is a remarkable story, isn’t it really, where every conceivable aspect of our lives here in the United States, Jews have made extraordinary contributions and been successful. Just think of the fact that on the Supreme Court, which is currently, of course, in the news, two out of the nine judges are Jews; ten out of a hundred Senators are Jews; thirty thousands are members of Congress; dozens of the major universities have Jewish presidents with tens of thousands, if not more, members of faculties. In the field of commerce, we have done extraordinarily well, in the arts, in the sciences. There is not an aspect of life which is going on and being celebrated here in the United States, in which we, the Jewish community, have not done extraordinarily well.

But there are some clouds. A recent survey has shown that the replacement of the Jewish population, by natural growth with children, is falling way behind that of the rest of the American population. Only 1.86 of children per family is the current average among Jewish families, therefore being way below the 2.1 level that would guarantee replacement. And the picture is actually even more curious when you think of it that in the liberal wing of the American-Jewish community, the replacement figure is even below the 1.86. While, for instance, among the Orthodox it is 3.3, among the more right-wing Orthodox it is 6.6 and among the ultra Orthodox it is 7.9 children per family, allowing the possible projection that, within a generation, the majority of the American Jewish community will be made up of those who are traditionalists. Right now, reform Jews are the largest single religious Jewish community in the United States. Some 36% of Jews declare themselves to be reform Jews, a little more than those who call themselves with, conservative to this moment, the Orthodox are no more than about 25%. But if current trends continue, it is not too difficult to project that, within a relatively short period of time, the majority of Jews that affiliate with a religious organization or a synagogue will be Orthodox. Even now, at this very moment, half of all the Jewish children under ten come from Orthodox families! Half of all the children, Jewish children, under ten, come from Orthodox families. The reason for this disparity is not too difficult to figure out. Feminism has certainly celebrated its long delayed and justified victory among those Jews that think of themselves as being left of center. Our young women go to college, pursue academic pursuits, postpone marriage and sometimes childbearing. There is no question that this great achievement, the greatest revolution that has come over humanity, the discovery that we have forsaken and forgotten and not made use of half of the talents that are available to the human race, also comes at a certain cost. This is no free lunch. The unfolding of these women’s talents and their use quite often conflicts with what had been the traditional kinds of ways in which women made their places in life through marriage and childbearing and the like.

And there is perhaps, if we want to go now by numbers for a moment, another very curious fact publicized just recently in an essay by which a competent scholar claims that two thousand years ago there were about forty million Chinese and today there are about a billion, two hundred million (if this is true because I don’t think they can be counted), with a factor of about thirty in the increase. The same scholar claims that two thousand years ago there were about five million Jews and, if you were to apply that same increase, we should be a hundred and fifty million today. You and I know we are barely fourteen million in the world. Where are all those Jews which might have been and are not? True, we have had a very difficult history with persecution and violence are death – but the Chinese have not lived a very easy life either. No one really knows because our history alone cannot possibly account for this disparity. Dare we therefore perhaps whisper at many more than we have ever thought of or given any account of who have left the Jewish community and disappeared so that over these two thousand years we have remained a relatively numerically insignificant component of the human seed. Of course, we have always said, and rightly, that shear numbers are not in any way the measurement of what a people or a culture really is all about. In fact, you and I know that sometimes it can be a single person that can make the entire world sit up and change. Think of Abraham, to which three major religious communities now in the world look as their originator, their rock, their root. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, all think of Abraham as their originator. Or really think of Moses and the impact that the life of this one Jew has had on the rest of humanity. Need I remind you of another Rabbi by the name of Jesus or his greatest disciple Saul renamed Paul? But in our own time, look what the Jew by the name of Einstein has done to the whole world or Freud or Karl Marks who, while he did not want to be a Jew, nonetheless is formed as such. So numbers alone certainly are no measurement and do not permit us to either judge or project what a given community can do.

Yet, for instance, in the state of Israel, the question as to what a Jew really is, is alive and contemptuous. For that is really the question, Ayekah, who are we, who are we. And to this the answer is, of course, not at all easy. And especially as it works itself out in the state of Israel where there are many who would like to be Israelis just as the Danes are Danes or the Nigerians are Nigerians or the Vietnamese are Vietnamese. And no one asked them “why are you Dane” or “Nigerian” or “Vietnamese;” these people simply are. They have a territory, they have a language, they have a culture, a past, and aspirations of the future, but nobody asked them really “who are you?” And yet a day can hardly pass in asking yourself, “what does it mean to be a Jew?” Is a Jew simply someone who has a right to a land, there to live like others who have a land, who are a nation and a state? Is their existence their validation, or is it not also possible, may not only be possible but necessary to accept the fact that to be a Jew is a vocation. Somehow or other, we do not fit into the general pattern of humanity. From the very beginning we have felt called to embody certain values and to strive for their injection into the texture of life. And not only for ourselves – for the whole world. To be a Jew is not merely to be born, to live and to die, and even then call oneself a Jew. To be a Jew means to be committed to a certain set of priorities, of values, and not merely to accept them for oneself or to understand that the inner pride and meaning of all of this is a command. It has been told thee, oh human, what it is that God wants of you, so the prophet Micah, 2700 years ago, already stated. And he stated it because he was challenged and because it was necessary to tell his Jews what they were about and why they were here – to do justice, to love mercy, and to be sensitive to God’s call. So it isn’t that it is a puzzle, a secret what it means to be a Jew. To be part of this vocation, this more than mere biology, to love justice, to do justice, to love mercy and be sensitive to God’s call. That’s our vocation. That is our program. That is the answer to the question “what does it mean to be a Jew.” So, my friends, Adam, “Ayekah.” God asked the first human, “where are you”? And that question has never been stilled. It reverberates through our entire existence. It is the nerve of our own being. Where are we, right now, this day? Where is Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun right now, this day? Herman, where are you, where are you?