Decisions Decisions
My grandfather Harry Reich was from a small village near Krakow. His story of immigration to New York around the turn of the 20th century wasn't terribly different from millions of others. His mother had blazed the trail and come to the Lower East Side ahead of the rest of the family. She worked in sweatshops, and the plan was that when she had accumulated enough money, she would send it back so that the six children could come over, each in turn. Her husband, my great-grandfather Asher after whom I'm named, refused to come to the New World, so he stayed in Poland and watched each of his children leave for America in turn. My grandfather, Harry, was one of the middle children and he was impatient. He had been working as a baker's apprentice in his shtetl, and he didn't like his boss. He didn't want to wait at home with his father for his turn; he wanted out. So at the age of 14, he left his father's home and made his way on his own to Hamburg, where he got a job on a boat headed to Halifax. There he jumped ship, but my family's true connection to Canada would have to wait a couple of generations for me - because my grandfather immediately left Halifax and made his way to New York to reunite with his family, and to start his own.
Like so many others, I sometimes reflect on the decision my forebears made to leave Europe. Millions like my grandfather did leave, but other millions stayed behind. My grandfather had a mean boss, so he left. What if he had had a nice boss? We all know what happened to those who stayed put. Let the Ukrainian town our shul is named after, Narayev, stand for all the other thousands of towns in this regard - we're here in a congregation founded by those who emigrated. As for the town they left behind, nothing is left of its once thriving Jewish community. Nothing. Not an abandoned shul building. Not a broken down cemetery. Certainly no actual Jews. All destroyed.
With the benefit of hindsight, those who decided to leave look very smart. My grandfather, the founders of Di Ershte Narayever Congregation, the millions of others who made their way out of Europe before the war to the Americas, to South Africa, to Palestine, to Australia - they all seem very perceptive. But I don't believe that those who left knew or foresaw what was coming in Europe. And nobody knew what they would encounter in their new land. Life was hard in the old country; there was a window of opportunity to get out, and they took the chance. But there were also valid reasons to stay, to try and make a go of it on more familiar terrain. Family responsibilities. Health considerations. A business. A sense that ancient traditions would be harder to observe in a new place. Rumours of political change in the offing. The dangers of traveling. The difficulties of obtaining a visa. All these were very valid grounds for staying, as so many millions like my great-grandfather Asher did.
How can we understand these individual decisions, made by millions of people, that we know with the benefit of hindsight turned out to be life and death decisions? If it wasn't superior wisdom that guided those who decided to leave, what was it? One possibility that must be weighed is that God played a role in these decisions, that it was divine intervention steering some people and not others on those voyages out of Europe. Were our ancestors on the receiving end of an Unetaneh Tokef judgment - mi yihye umi yamut mi va-esh, who shall live and who shall die? Our hearts shudder at the notion of such a divine selection process, whereby some were guided out by God or God's angels to safety, while others were left to burn in the fires of the Nazi hell. Surely enough of those who stayed had lived lives of teshuvah, tefila, and tzedakah to belie the notion that their fate was a divine punishment.
But if it wasn't superior smarts, and if it wasn't divine intervention, what's left? And of course this question doesn't end with those who got out before the war - of those who stayed, how did some survive while most did not? Here we must consider another possibility -- was it all just dumb luck?
This summer in Jerusalem I encountered a poem written by another resident of Krakow - one who I imagine would have very little in common with my grandfather other than the fact that they come from the same vicinity. The poet's name is Wislawa Szymborska, and she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. The poem is called "There but for the Grace" and here's an excerpt:
You survived because you were the first.
You survived because you were the last.
Because you were alone. Because of people.
Because you turned left. Because you turned right.
Because rain fell. Because a shadow fell.
Because sunny weather prevailed.Luckily, there was a wood.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily, there was a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A frame, a bend, a millimeter, a second.
Luckily, a straw was floating on the surface…So you're here?...
The net had one eyehole, and you got through it?
There's no end to my wonder, my silence…
In the world of this poem, such weighty matters as survival and destruction are determined by trifles - You happened to be first in line, you happened to be last. There were woods there. It was raining. It was sunny. Or…You have a mean boss. So you're here? the poet asks. And I feel like she's asking me personally. Yes, I reply, I'm here. Because of a variety of circumstances, my grandfather got out through the eyehole, so yes, I'm here. Others' nets had no eyehole and they stayed, and met their fate - not because they weren't as smart, and not because they were somehow less worthy in God's eyes - but seemingly just because of trifles and happenstances.
We are continually amazed by the small things, the coincidences, the trifles, that have such dramatic impact on our lives. At the very least, we think, dramatic effects should derive from dramatic causes. But that's not always how it works. Scenarios present themselves, and we determine our response based on what we think will be best, but so often these decisions are fatally flawed. I read that in the twin towers after the planes hit, some people went up, and some went down. Virtually all those who went down the stairs got out in time, before the towers collapsed. In hindsight, it was stupid to go up, but in the midst of the crisis presumably many thought they could get away from the fire by going up, and waiting it out on a higher floor. Or their colleague had decided to go up, so they went along. Or they knew someone on an upper floor, and thought they'd wait it out with them. Did they know their decision would determine their life or death? The situation was unprecedented. At the time, who was to know the towers were about to fall?
We can all think of such examples. It's scary when our fate seems so completely beyond our control, or dependent on skills or judgment we're not sure we possess. In desperation, many of us turn to alternative ways to control or at least influence our fate. A story is told of the great Yogi Berra, who once watched as his center fielder Jim Piersall got up to bat. Before stepping into the batter's box, Piersall scratched out a cross on the dirt near home plate. Yogi called out to him from the dugout and said, "Why don't you just let Him watch the game?!"
Today, Yom Kippur, She is watching the game, She is watching us. Watching to see who we really are, under the masks and the personas that we put on. Present in the room as we, challenged physically as well as mentally and spiritually as on no other day in the year, ask the most fundamental questions of all. Who am I? What are my values - not the ones I talk about, no that's too easy on us - what are the values I actually live by? What have been my failures? How can I cope with the burdens and the suffering and the pain with which my life has afflicted me? How do I deal with the consequences of the decisions I have made, all of which together add up to the life I now have? We make decisions all the time, we can't get around it. Stay or leave. Go up or go down. Take this job or that job. Go to this university or that one. Marry this person, or not. Wait another few minutes for the bus, or give up and catch a cab. We make these judgments every day - some of which we recognize at the time as being extraordinarily significant, others of which only emerge as having been important with the benefit of hindsight.
But we're not the only ones who make decisions. God too, in the language of the tradition, makes decisions and judgments about us. Our machzor uses the imagery of God as Judge to express the way in which God relates to us at this time of year. Especially on this day of Yom Kippur. The language is all about decision. L'shana tovah tikatevu ve-tehatemu "May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year" - this is the metaphor we have inherited. God, with those two books of life and death, recording what will befall us in the new year; making judgments about us and our fate. There is no need to take that image literally in order to take it seriously. Our faith maintains that there is a God who knows us (the real us - not the persona), who cares about us, who knows the things we've done that represent the best that we are capable of, and who knows the things that we've done which represent something less than the best we are capable of, who knows how committed we've been as Jews to our tradition and to our community, how faithful we've been as human beings to our responsibilities as citizens and neighbours and inhabitants of God's earth. This God judges at this time of year how to help us grow, how to help us become stronger, how to help us cope with the consequences of our decisions and the physical and spiritual and ethical challenges we face. God the Judge models for us how to render the hard decisions we are forced to make in life - with compassion, and with love and with forgiveness and with hope.
The Szymborska poem is true, but it is of course not the whole truth. "It was raining. It was clear" - yes such factors beyond our control can play an extraordinarily important role in our lives, but still we are not entirely at fate's mercy. We are not completely helpless in the face of it. And it's not a baseball player's talisman that helps us transcend fate or control our fortune. It's something much deeper.
On Rosh Hashanah, I critiqued the Stoic approach which counseled that we essentially give up on controlling anything outside of ourselves, and focus instead on adjusting our own internal reactions to maximize our acceptance of the unchanging conditions around us. I suggested that even if we can't change the world, or even our own lives altogether, we can and must retain the hope that we can make decisions which result in incremental improvements over time both in our own conduct and in our own circumstances. We know these decisions are inevitably flawed. They are based on incomplete information, influenced by ancillary considerations, corrupted by fear, ambition, greed, laziness, and other less than sterling qualities we all possess. But even with all these flaws and foibles, still at the end of the day, we make decisions. Judgment is ours. The power to choose is ours. Free will is ours. The attendant consequences of our decisions are ours. This is the whole premise of Yom Kippur.
I want to look at two different ways in which our power to choose is realized, two places in which we make decisions that have a significant impact on ourselves and others, moving us beyond fatalism. One example is societal, the other personal. Both, I think, reflect the spiritual challenge of decision making in our lives.
First, the big picture. Our free will gets played out on a grand scale in our politics, and the confluence of elections on both sides of the border, and the impending change of government in Israel, makes this year a particularly apt one to reflect on political change. When we cast our vote, we make a judgment call, we use our free will as citizens of a democratic society, and we make a choice, one which we usually recognize as not a perfect choice, but a choice which we determine is the best among imperfect alternatives. Our vote is a solemn responsibility, a decision not to be taken lightly or dismissed cynically, even when we know that our vote is just one among millions being cast. Just as we make decisions and judgment calls all the time, so do our politicians and leaders. And while we have the right and duty to judge them on their decisions at election time and cast our ballots accordingly, at the same time we must also remember that few of these decisions are easy, nearly all our leaders' judgment calls involve difficult tradeoffs, and many of our expectations of them are beyond reason.
In this regard, I can't help but think of one of the lesser known characters in the Bible to have a special day named after him. His name was Gedalyah ben Ahikam, and it is to commemorate his assassination that the fast of Gedalyah was instituted on the 3rd of Tishre, the day after Rosh Hashanah. Who was this obscure figure, and why do we have a fast day named after him, of all people? I think it's because at a very critical time, he made a decision which resonated in important ways for later generations.
In the year 587 BCE, the Babylonians conquered and burned Jerusalem, taking most of its surviving population into exile. To govern those who remained amidst the ruins, the Babylonians appointed Gedalyah, a man who came from a noble Judean family. But even in a decimated and subjugated Judea, there were still some diehards who were not prepared to accept the reality of the Babylonian victory. They favoured a political alliance with Egypt and its army, which they hoped might lead to the ultimate defeat of the Babylonians. This rebellious faction was opposed by Gedalyah, as well as by others like the prophet Jeremiah who realized that at that moment in history submission to Babylonia was the only way. In the midst of all this ferment among the survivors, Gedalyah was assassinated, by fellow Jews.
So Gedalyah died tragically. But so did lots of others in Jewish history, including many at the hands of their compatriots. So what was the tradition really asking us commemorate when it designated Tzom Gedalyah? Not the destruction of Jerusalem itself - Tisha B'Av surely covers that tragedy very well. No, I believe that what Gedalyah represents in the context of Jewish history is the judgment call that accommodation is a better choice for Jews than resistance. Those who assassinated Gedalyah could not tolerate his judgment that resistance was futile, and that what that crisis demanded was an acceptance of the fact that the Babylonian superpower was in charge, and that all the remaining Judeans could do in the midst of their decimated country was to try to save what they could by accommodating to Babylonian terms and demands.
Some in our own time would like to use this biblical assassination and the fast day it led to as an occasion to reflect on political decisions we face today[1]. They see the story of Gedalyah as setting a precedent for an accommodationist foreign policy in our time, particularly regarding our foes in the Middle East. Again, it's a judgment call. What will lead to more security, what will lead to peace - accommodating the demands of those who have been our historical enemies in the region, or determinedly resisting those demands?
In Gedalyah's time, the Jews had to decide how to respond to Babylonia. Israel in our time faces another grave threat from the east, a hostile and potentially nuclear Iran. No more weighty decision has confronted Israel's leaders since the founding of the state: what to do about Iran? We all know that the consequences of a misstep on Israel's part one way or the other would be catastrophic. Attack preemptively, and possibly trigger WW III. Don't attack, and possibly watch a mortal enemy develop, and God forbid use, a weapon of mass destruction. When I was in Israel this summer, our group of rabbis at the Hartman Institute heard lectures from two different ex-generals - one said the threat from Iran was so serious that Israel had no choice but to attack militarily, and soon, because a nuclear Iran wouldn't even have to use its Bomb to completely change the dynamic in the Middle East in ways that would pose a mortal threat to Israel. The other said an attack now would be a disaster, the Iranians are not nearly so close to having the Bomb as we've been told, Ahmedinejad is more interested in Iraq and its oilfields than in Israel, better for Israel to focus on the Palestinians and let the Americans worry about Iran. If there's no consensus among the security people about this existential problem facing Israel, what are the rest of us supposed to think? Even though we who live in the Diaspora won't face the immediate consequences of such a grave decision, we still are members of the Jewish people, we care about Israel, and we have to make judgment calls and lend our energy and support to the positions we believe in. The challenge is arriving at those positions in a scenario where we don't have all the information we'd like and every option has potentially horrible consequences. We do so with great humility, and then we hope and pray that God will give our people the strength to deal with the consequences of those decisions. With the benefit of hindsight, the rabbis affirmed Gedalyah's instinct with regard to the Babylonians and honoured him with a fast day. In the midst of a dilemma like the Iranian problem, however, we don't have the benefit of hindsight, and judgment calls have to be made by our leaders, as best as they can. We pray that they decide wisely.
These matters of war and peace are hard decisions. But far from the realm of politics and national and international affairs, in our personal lives, we also make hard decisions. And in this regard I want to touch on another type of decision, in this case much more personal. This particular personal challenge we all face requires judgment calls which may not have the mass impact of political or military decisions made by our leaders, but which can have an overwhelming impact on the course of individual lives.
The struggle to achieve enduring intimacy with another person is now, and probably always has been, one of the most difficult challenges we know. To reach out to another human being and create bonds which transcend the pleasures and needs of the moment is as rare an achievement today as it has always been. Virtually every adult here today, I would venture to say, bears wounds, some still fresh, from the struggle to transcend our loneliness by building an enduring life with another person[2]. That struggle is marked by decisions that we make along the way, judgment calls about who is the appropriate person for us, how committed to them we should be, and what accommodations we're prepared to make in order to build a life with someone who is, inevitably, different from ourselves.
So we make our decisions about relationships, as best we can, and hope for the best. Sometimes it's a decision to marry, filled with the promise and hope of love and a new beginning. Sometimes it's a decision to split up, filled often with pain and sorrow and anger. The rabbis knew that there would be times when the pain of living together would be so intense that wisdom would allow, indeed demand, the healing and compassion of divorce. So, as opposed to some other religious traditions, the decision to divorce has always been affirmed as a possibility in our tradition.
But so too of course is the decision to stay together. The tradition understood that the other people with whom we are in intimate relationship can drive us crazy, and we them -- but unless we want to live lives of detachment and isolation, we have to learn how to tolerate reasonable amounts of pain and frustration and disappointment and tension and all the other imperfections which characterize any relationship. And the tolerance of all that negative stuff represents a decision too, a decision which - up until a certain point - is a noble one. Some of the old fashioned vocabulary about relationships - patience, fidelity, forgiveness, obligation, continuity, duty, responsibility, commitment - may sound preachy to 21st century ears -- but I think these words can still have meaning for us as we go about making some of the decisions and judgments before us about our personal relationships.
The ideal of committed, monogamous, lifelong relationships has been under a great deal of stress in the modern world, but it is definitely not dead. I work with enough couples getting married, and enough singles who want to get married, to know that. The fact that many same-sex couples want in to the world of marriage as well testifies to the strength of the ideal. And in addition to everything else we can say about relationships, they have spiritual power. Being in relationship is the thing we human beings do that most strongly inoculates us against the human weaknesses of narcissism, self-absorption, and looking out for #1. Not that marriage is a guarantee of selfless character, I know. There are plenty of narcissistic people in relationships, and plenty of selfless people who are not. But if we can learn to be sensitive to the needs of one other person as we must in any true relationship, if we can learn to be truly forgiving of one other person, if we can live in true covenantal commitment with them - then we've learned some crucial spiritual lessons that we can apply in the rest of our lives as well. Is it easy? Anyone who has ever been in relationship with another person, whether a marriage, or an intimate friendship, or a close familial relationship, knows the answer to that. To endure, it takes some combination of Szymborska-like serendipity, God's help, and the judgment calls that we make at various crucial junctures along the way. Absent one of those elements, relationships become very hard to sustain indeed.
One ingredient is crucial: if we're to give our intimate relationships a fighting chance against so many odds, our tradition does ask us to remember that we must be as forgiving of our partner as we would like God to be forgiving of us. God's forgiveness of us is not infinite - sometimes we just go too far, and that is true in human relationships as well. But God is pretty forbearing, especially on Yom Kippur, and forbearance is a divine quality that we would do well to emulate, especially with our spouses or those who are closest to us. As Rabbi Sandy Ragins reminds us, somewhere, perhaps next to you, going home with you after the service, perhaps somewhere else, perhaps someone who is no longer on this earth, or in some mystical way someone whom you've not yet met, there is someone waiting to be forgiven, or someone waiting to be asked for forgiveness, someone waiting to be treasured.
My grandfather made a good call when he left Poland for America. It could easily have gone another way, and I wouldn't be standing here today. We all face decisions, and sometimes the burden of those decisions seems too heavy for us to bear, the consequences too unpredictable. Whether it's an ordinary citizen at the ballot box, a national leader sitting at the Cabinet table rendering judgments about war and peace that could affect millions, a husband or a wife going through a rough patch and trying to figure out whether to cut their losses and run, or stay and try yet again to make it work, or any one of a hundred other examples - these moments of human decision making are often overwhelming to us. We will doubtless face many such moments of decision in the year ahead. We might want to run away, but we know that even not deciding is a decision. Yom Kippur is a day of humility, on which we acknowledge that we don't always have the answers. We pray for God's guidance and God's help on this day of divine judgment as we think about the judgments we have made in the past year, and the ones we are likely to face in the year ahead. We pray for wisdom combined with heart, strength combined with humility, self-awareness combined with compassion for others, as we go about making the decisions we must in this life as individuals, as members of a family, as members of a community and a covenant people, as citizens of a democratic society, and as human beings resident on God's earth.
Ken Yehi Ratzon.