Rabbi Marc E. Berkson — Rosh Hashanah Eve — 5766
THEY ARE US
Rosh Hashanah Evening — 5766
5766 years ago this day, God created this world—for ha-yom ha-rat olam, for this is the day of the world’s birth. We return to the beginning, when God began to create, bringing order out of chaos. And we are told that God created through separation, making an expanse, which God called sky, in the midst of the waters, separating the water which was below the expanse from the water which was above the expanse. Then God gathered the waters which were below the expanse into one area calling the gathering of the waters Seas. In the process, dry land appeared which God called Earth.
Next week, on Yom Kippur, our fates will be sealed. Standing in judgment before God, the haunting words of unetaneh tokef will be chanted as we prepare to make our confessions. “Who shall live and who shall die? .…who by fire and who by water?..who by earthquake and who by plague?”
Then, in two weeks, we begin our celebration of Sukkot, our fall festival of falling leaves, the festival during which we live in what we used to translate as booths. But translate sukkot not as booths but, in truth, as shacks. And we dwell in those temporary shacks, braving the cold and the wind and, here in America, the waters.
Over these next three weeks then, so much of this past year. Waters burst forth out of their expanses as the seas covered the dry land, as chaos descended out of order. And so many lives were sealed, sealed perhaps not by God but by socio-economic circumstances, so, so many by water. And today, this Rosh Hashanah, so many still live in shacks, in temporary shelters still wandering in the wilderness. The travels of these folk can sound like a Biblical rendition of our ancestors’ journeys through the wilderness of Sinai. Take the tale of Sheila Clifton, her son, and her granddaughter as described in the newspaper last week. Chased from New Orleans by Katrina, they encamped first at Texarkana, Texas. They then set out for Donaldsville, Louisiana, and encamped there before moving on to Shreveport. From Shreveport, they set out for Baton Rouge where they stayed before moving back to Texarkana. They then set out from Texarkana to encamp in Houston. From Houston, they set out for Queens where they now encamp at the Westway Hotel on Grand Central Parkway. Where—and when—the Cliftons will find any home, any promised land, is unknown. Thus, since this day is also known as Yom Ha-Zikaron, as the Day of Remembrance, allow me to take one of my memories growing up in my reform congregation in the 1960s to use as we prepare for our journey over the next three weeks.
Each and every year, the same family in our congregation in Michigan City, Indiana, would put up the sukkah. How I loved that sukkah. And how impressed I was at this family’s skill and hard work in putting it up. Now somewhere I think I had heard that a sukkah should be built outside, not necessarily inside the community hall of the temple. Yet that made no sense to me; building a sukkah outside seemed such a gamble. What if it rained and got all the beautiful pictures and decorations wet? Even worse, after all that work, what if a big wind came along and blew the sukkah in? And late September to late October, you never know what the weather will be like. It might be too cold.
Truth be told, I had never seen a sukkah outside. Outside, when we sit in the sukkah, we are confronted with nature and with the very fragility of our surroundings. The wind can blow it down. The rain can chase us out. The cold can limit our time. And all this is with a roof that already must have holes in it. In short, outside, the sukkah makes clear how precarious is our good fortune. Yet move that sukkah indoors, under human control, and we forget. We take that good fortune for granted, we forget the precariousness of it all. And then it takes a tsunami, a hurricane, a flood, a tornado for us to discover just how tenuous is our dwelling place, how unimportant is the large screen TV, how much chaos remains in our world, how fragile is our life.
And life, we discover, is filled with so many other storms, storms so many of us have encountered just this past year alone. Someone who was in full health a year ago now facing cancer. Another who celebrated with a loved one last year and now is alone. The death of a child, of a parent, of a spouse. A financial flood hits someone else, a spousal storm descends on another, a chronic medical disaster wipes out yet another. No one—not one of us—is immune from these storms.
Life, in short, is simply not fair. And, in a remarkable Talmudic passage (Avodah Zarah 54b), the rabbis taught how nature is amoral. “Suppose a person stole a measure of wheat and went and sowed it in the ground; it is right that it should not grow, but the world pursues its natural course.” In other words, a thief should not benefit from his ill-gotten gains—but the laws of nature make no distinction. The same rain that brings needed water may well bring down the roof of the outdoor sukkah.
So another confession from my 40-year old memory. You see, for many years, the only sukkah I ever saw was that one in the community hall. Little did I know that people could, or would, or, traditionally, should build their own sukkahs in which to eat and to live during the days of Sukkot. I just knew that magically, right after Yom Kippur, the Kohns would put up the sukkah in the community hall, that it remained in perfect shape until just after Sukkot, and then, just as magically, the Kohns would take it down. Only later did I learn, when a new family came to town, that one could build one’s own sukkah in one’s own backyard. I still remember my excitement when their son, who was my age, invited a bunch of us over to camp out in the sukkah. We had a ball until, in the middle of the night, guess what? It began to rain! And, no, this was not a light rain; this was a thunderstorm. Soaked, we spent the rest of the night inside—and the following morning rebuilding the sukkah.
Our response was appropriate. We were soaked–and angry. It wasn’t fair—the one night we got together was taken away from us. Over the years, as I have built a sukkah time and again (and I am all thumbs), the anger has come back. When, just hours before Sukkot is to begin, the sukkah is complete—and the wind comes along and blows a wall in. The decorations are set by the table with care—and another of God’s creatures will decide to dwell, within disturbing those decorations or eating the food. A very small lesson—for when the storms of life really hit, for when life is truly not fair. Think what we do at the news of a death. Enraged, we engage in an act of sanctioned anger, tearing our clothes as our hearts are torn. Writes Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, “Judaism is not a faith that leads us to accept the world as it is. It is a faith that challenges us to make the world as it ought to be. It is a sustained cry of protest against the injustices and random cruelties of the world.” In fact, because the world is often unfair and unjust, we know that we must bring that fairness and justice into the world. God does not want us to accept an imperfect world; God wants us to struggle to fix what is broken, to make right what is unjust, to correct what is unfair.
The words from Isaiah which we will read next week on Yom Kippur morning tell us what we must do. As God clothes the naked, so must we; as God feeds the hungry, so must we; as God shelters the homeless, so must we; as God visits the sick, so must we; as God buries the dead, so must we; as God comforts the mourner, so must we. That is how we, like God, work at bringing order out of chaos, work at bringing justice and fairness into the world.
Think of all the strangers who put their own lives at risk to help the victims of Katrina—those who went out in their own boats in the flooded streets of New Orleans to rescue thousands of lives; those who drove hundreds of miles in their SUVs to help those in need; those professional first responders from across the country who left their homes to save life and limb including Lt. John Cohn, son of Perry and Bobbie Cohn, who went down with three other members of the North Shore Fire Department . And more—think of all those who opened their homes and their offices and their synagogues and churches and mosques to people seeking shelter, those of us who gathered clothing and food supplies and toiletries; those of us who have already reached deep into our pockets and raised over $1 billion dollars for hurricane relief.
So many of you helped out through our congregation and its social action committee. A number of us volunteered out at the Tommy Thompson Youth Center at the State Fairgrounds through the auspices of the Salvation Army and the American Red Cross. With the other Milwaukee reform congregations, we just sent 63 boxes of supplies to our movement’s centers for hurricane relief—Greene Family Camp in Bruceville, Texas, and Jacobs Camp Institute in Utica, Mississippi. Through your donations, toiletries and health supplies and towels and linens were collected by Renee Kavalar for distribution through Easter Seals and book bags and backpacks filled with school supplies were sent by our Religious School to those school districts where children of evacuees would be in attendance. And your contributions to our movement’s Hurricane Disaster Relief Fund now help the total approach $3,000,000.
Doing God’s work—and so many of you, so many of us, helping so many others through the storms of life. You, they, we, are God’s hands and God’s feet. And when we are in need, there are people who will help carry us through our storms, through our hurricanes, through our floods. As they reach out for us, they will rescue us and care for us.
So one last confession from that 40-year-old memory. I don’t actually remember ever using that indoor sukkah in any way. It simply sat there—looking pretty. But as I have built my own sukkahs outside over the years, I have come to learn that my task is still not done. For as I reach out to others, I must bring them in to me. In other words, once the sukkah is up and built, only then does my true responsibility begin. Each and every night of Sukkot, I am supposed to participate in Ushpizin, an Aramaic word meaning honored or exalted guests. For each and every night of Sukkot, I am to invite into my sukkah honorary Biblical guests—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David; Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah; Miriam and Ruth and Deborah.. They, themselves, were wanderers, exiles much of their lives, without permanent homes. But these symbolic guests are invited in on one condition—that I also invite real flesh-and-blood guests into my sukkah, those who today are in need of shelter, of home, of protection.
It is an odd custom. Why not just bring in those who are in need without all the symbolic invitations to the patriarchs and matriarchs? And it was only with Katrina that I came to understand. For in spite of the horrific loss of life in the tsunami, and in spite of the human evils we see afflicted on others be it from the genocide in Darfur to the hunger in Niger to the tragedy in Iraq, the winds and floods of Katrina haunt. It was not just the revelation of the immense poverty which existed in New Orleans; most Americans, rich or poor, knew and know of such economic inequalities, inequalities which play out in education and job opportunities and public services. For that matter, all of us here tonight are aware that the poverty rate in Milwaukee is higher than it was in New Orleans.
So what was, what is, exceptional about Katrina. Michael Ignatieff understood it fully in three words from a woman trapped at the Ernest Morial Convention Center during those painful days after the flooding. “We are American,” the woman proclaimed on television as she and thousands of others awaited rescue. The woman, wrote Ignatieff, “spoke with scathing anger, but also with astonishment that she should be required to remind Americans of such a simple fact. She—not the governor, not the mayor, not the president—understood that the catastrophe was a test of the bonds of citizenship and that the government had failed the test….Americans are not supposed to be strangers to one another. Having been abandoned, the people…were reduced to reminding their fellow citizens that they were not refugees in a foreign country.” And if there is any article you should read about Katrina, it is this one in the New York Times of September 25th. Citizenship has its claims—and the protection and safety of citizens in their own land is surely primary. When we needed to bring that woman in with us, to bring in all those trapped at the Superdome and at the Convention Center, we did not.
The claim of citizenship is one of right, not of discretion. We are required to respond to it and not await and then rely upon the charitable generosity of the people. And, for the first time, Ushpizin made sense. For what else is Ushpizin then a claim of citizenship, if you will, a right to shelter not dependent upon any person’s generosity? The poor, you see, become symbolic of the Biblical ancestors. Standing in for Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, they become Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as they also become us.
Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur to Sukkot—with one more story to return us to this day. Found also in The New York Times, it is told by Dr. Abraham Verghese who had come to treat Katrina evacuees as the came into San Antonio after far too many days. Among the last patients he saw was a man in his 70s with grey hair and a beard. And now let Dr. Verghese take over the telling of the story:
He was out of medicine, and his blood sugar and blood pressure were high. He couldn’t pay for his medication, so his doctor always gave him samples: “whatever he have. Whatever he have.” He had kept his shoes on for five days, he said, removing the battered, pickled but elegant pair, a cross between bowling shoes and dancing shoes. His toes were carved ebony, the tendons on the back like cables, the joints gnarled but sturdy. All night I had seen many feet; in his bare feet, I read resilience.
He told me that for two nights after the floods, he had perched on a ledge so narrow that his legs dangled in the water. At one point, he said, he saw Air Force One fly over, and his hopes soared. “I waited, I waited,” he said, but no help came. Finally a boat got him to a packed bridge. There, again, he waited. He shook his head in disbelief, smiling through. “Doc, they treat refugees in other countries better than they treated us.”
‘I’m so sorry,” I said. “So sorry.”
He looked at me long and hard, cocking his head as if weighing my words, which sounded so weak, so inadequate. He rose, holding out his hand, his posture firm as he shouldered his garbage bag [containing all of his worldly belongings]. Thank you, Doc. I needed to hear that. All they got to say is sorry. All they got to say is sorry.”
The work of recovery will be immense. And the cost astronomical. At best, voluntary contributions may ultimately total two billion dollars. But the current guesstimate for rebuilding is one hundred times that. Such rebuilding can only be done by the federal government. And our responsibility will be to pay the taxes for the undertaking, without gutting other governmental programs, without putting the burden on our children, without going further into debt to foreign creditors.
But any rebuilding, any attempt to bring order back out of the chaos, begins for us, as Jews, here, this Rosh Hashanah day. It begins between people—people we should have reached out to and didn’t, people we should have brought into our sukkahs with us and didn’t, people whose pain we ignored, forgot, perhaps even caused. They may even be sitting next to you. And that is true of any hurricane, any storm, any flood, any loss. The seventy-year-old man understood that so well. We begin by saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”