Boredom
This Yom Kippur, I want to speak with you about one particular sin of the many that we're asked to reflect on this day. The one I have in mind is actually not on the official list in the Vidui section of the Machzor - I'm not thinking of betrayal, theft, slander, contempt for parents and teachers, violence, lust, or any of the others that appear in the print confessional, although those are things we should certainly be mindful of on this day. No, the sin I have in mind is something that I'd wager many of you don't even think of as a sin at all. I'm thinking about - boredom. I don't think we're used to thinking of boredom as a sin, because we most often associate it with something that is committed by someone external to us, something that is visited on us that we must endure. We're bored because the book is boring, or because the teacher is boring, or the program is boring, the friend is boring, the rabbi is boring. How could boredom then be our sin? If it's a sin at all, shouldn't it be considered a sin on the heshbon of the one who is boring us? Shouldn't they be more entertaining so that we won't be bored? I'd like to make a case this Yom Kippur that it is indeed our sin if we're bored, one that may be inevitable at times in a person's life, may even have its uses as all sins do, but a sin which is ultimately in our power to overcome.
Now I know it's probably a bit dangerous for a rabbi to deliver a sermon about boredom - kind of like a dentist giving a talk on pain infliction or a lawyer discoursing on billable hours - we all know they do it, so wouldn't it be better if they just do it and not talk about it, so that we can all pretend it's not a problem? Well, as a general rule, I'm opposed to avoiding problems, so I want to put this issue right out there on the table, and frame it as a sin to provoke thought and discussion. Why do I care so much about boredom? Well, if we look at modern society, you can forget H1N1 - the real, long term, plague that is afflicting us, I believe, is boredom -- ennui, apathy, tedium, disengagement, a "been there done that" malaise which sucks the energy and the life out of everything that touches it. To take just one example from the wider society, why do so few citizens vote? Why do so few watch or read or listen to the news, or take part in political activism? Ask people, and they'll tell you they find it boring and irrelevant -- and this widespread attitude has of course tremendous implications for our democracy.
But given what I do, the place that I'm most personally concerned about is the Jewish community, and within the Jewish community -- the synagogue. The synagogue is an institution where the plague of boredom is running rampant, and no amount of hand sanitizer is going to address it. I talk to Jews all the time, some of whom are shul goers, and some of whom aren't. If you ask non-shul goers why they don't come to shul, some will explain their absence on the basis of some principle or another.
But I believe that for every Jew who doesn't attend for a reason of principle, for 100 others their issue is just plain boredom in the sense that they don't connect with what's going on. They find services repetitive, dull, several hours too long, tedious -- just plain boring. Thank heavens, not everybody, I know; some love it as I do, and are engaged, and if that's you I cherish you more than you know…but I daresay even some regular attendees have had the experience of feeling their eyes glaze over in shul from time to time. As many of you know, there are shuls (not ours, thank heavens) where you can barely hear what's going on in the service for all the din of conversations going on in the pews. One shul in London had such a problem with people talking instead of praying that they put up a sign in the sanctuary saying "If this is where you come to talk, where do you daven?" People talk when they're disengaged from the content of what's going on, when they're bored. So this is an issue that affects non-shul goers and shul goers like. You begin to see why I as a Jewish leader consider boredom to be such a serious problem.
Having devoted a decent bit of thought to this problem, I've concluded that I find the issue of boredom to be ironically, quite interesting. It's certainly challenging. As a rabbi, I feel I know what to say to someone who tells me they're angry at God. I know what to say when someone tells me they don't believe in God, or doubt the efficaciousness of prayer. I know what to say when people take great exception to certain passages in the Tanakh or in rabbinic literature or in the prayer book. As difficult and emotional as these conversations may be, I actually enjoy them; I consider them the life-blood of my work. Give me an objection, an argument, and I can engage with it -- not necessarily respond with "The Answer" that makes the objection go away, but at least have a conversation with the person that maybe will allow us to explore some different ways of thinking about these questions, which are actually very old questions indeed, that sages and scholars have grappled with for many generations. But it's a much harder professional challenge for me to know what to say when someone tells me they're just plain bored. What can I do with that?
One reason it's hard is that the truth is, in some respects, they have a point. Some of the sacred texts of our tradition are very far removed from our experience in today's world, and a lot of the material is in fact quite repetitive. We can love shul as I do and still be honest about that. This day of all days we know that because the services are so long, and whole chunks deal with things like the scapegoat ritual of the high priest that hasn't been performed for close to 2,000 years, and other chunks consist of liturgical poetry so difficult that even the native Hebrew speakers among us have trouble figuring out what many of them mean, and even the rabbis among us find remote and uninspiring.
So what do you do? Well, the Reform movement, in which I did my rabbinic training, had one approach. The service is too long? Get rid of stuff. The same prayers repeat again and again? Tighten it up! Delete! The material is incomprehensible or completely irrelevant? Substitute the worst offenders with contemporary poetry or readings in English, which are addressed to people living in our existential reality. The approach makes perfect sense, but you know what? If the criterion of success is attendance at services, it didn't help. The changes did not have the anticipated effect of drawing lots of new people in. It appears that relevance is not all that it's cracked up to be. The people who found services boring before, still found them boring, even with the poetry of Marge Piercy and Judy Chicago and a guitar. The insight of a place like the Narayever, which is one of the reasons I love it so much, is - hang on to that traditional liturgy for dear life, even if it does sometimes feel remote. Hang onto it even as you do the holy work of including all kinds of people who have been marginalized in the Jewish world before. Hang onto it, and then address the profound spiritual challenge of boredom in other ways.
One way to address it is to stress the aspects of Jewish life which are fun, of which there are many. Yesterday we had a crew of people here working on building and decorating the sukkah - I think they had a ball. After Kiddush lunch each week, those who stay sing zmirot, traditional Hebrew songs, and that's always fun. Israeli dancing. The hakafot of Simhas Torah. Making hamentaschen. Going to the Jewish film festival or to Klez Kanada. Throwing candies at the Bar/Bat Mitzvah kid. Lifting the bride and groom up on chairs. Jewish summer camp. It's all great, and it's all lots of fun, and it's not boring.
But…my conviction is that all these things, however enjoyable, do not add up to a sustainable Jewish identity. They're just not enough. They're great additions to, but not substitutes for, the hard work of teshuvah, tefila, tzedakah, and Torah learning, which constitute the core of who and what we are as a people and which are, at the end of the day, actually quite serious. Can we stand it? Can we take it? Can we take up the challenge, knowing that to do so ennobles us and deepens us in a way that all our hobbies and all our entertainments, however fun and wonderful and enriching in their own way, do not?
When I hear someone say that they find services boring, I ask, compared to what? Compared to watching the seventh game overtime in the Stanley Cup final? Compared to watching a Tony award winning Broadway musical? Compared to diving off the Great Barrier Reef? Yes, compared to those things and some other examples you can come up with, perhaps services aren't a lot of fun. But the comparison isn't fair of course: services aren't actually meant to be fun. Services are meant to be meaningful, they're meant to help connect you with something bigger, something deeper, something much much older than yourself, something that will survive long after you and the Stanley Cup are no longer on this earth. They're supposed to fill you with the stature that comes from participating seriously and authentically in the life of the covenant people. They're meant to help you praise, thank, and petition God, together with your community, and those are hard things to do, challenging things to do. If there are elements of fun, and pleasantness, about services, then these elements constitute a wonderful adornment. But they're not the core function of davening.
Most people would, I think, acknowledge the importance of meaningfulness and depth. Most people, give them credit, get that life isn't only about fun. But the problem, many tell us, is that they're not getting the meaningfulness in shul either. And it's true -- you don't get the deep experience just by walking in the door of the shul. Once you're in, that's when the work begins. Some of that work can be done by the rabbi and the service organizers. There are ways of approaches to the presentation of the liturgy and the Torah reading and the dvar torah and the singing and the announcements and everything else that goes on in the service which are more engaging and stimulating and thought-provoking and spirit-provoking, and there are approaches to presenting these things which are less engaging and stimulating. There are communities where the lay and professional leadership value emotional depth, the life of the intellect, and the creation of a warm and supportive communal environment, and others where these characteristics are not particularly valued, and these differences can play a significant role in the level of boredom in the pews.
However, even with all the best efforts of clergy and lay leaders, I truly believe… if you're bored, most of the work that needs to be done to relieve that boredom has to be done by you. No day makes that clearer than this day, Yom Kippur. We know how long and repetitive the services are. For most of us, boredom is a natural experience for some part of the day, especially if we're feeling physically lethargic from our fast. What do we do about it? One option, not chosen by anybody in the room right now, is simply not to show up. Another option is to come, and to leave as soon as you exceed your personal BTL, or Boredom Tolerance Limit. Or alternatively, you can challenge yourself to hang around, and work through whatever boredom you might be experiencing, claim it as your own, and use it as a spur to think about your alienation from what's going on. Is there one prayer, one song, one phrase, one word that you can find a connection to? If you find yourself in a reverie, can you use it to focus on your breathing and do some meditation? If you find yourself drifting off to sleep, can you focus on a dream that you've had that might have spiritual meaning for you that can animate your Teshuvah as you come back into consciousness?
Erica Brown published a book just this month entitled Spiritual Boredom: Rediscovering the Wonder of Judaism. Among other insights, she notes that for most people the amount of time they spend in services is roughly equivalent to the time that they spend at a movie. (Well at the Narayever on Shabbat morning I admit it's more like a double feature.) Why do so many people find the couple of hours spent in a movie exciting and compelling, while the same time spent in shul they find to be dull? What does a movie have that shul doesn't?
For most people, Brown notes, the answer is -- conflict. The best movies, like the best stories in any medium, are full of it. But does shul have to be so conflict free that it serves as simply a nice, but boring, adornment to our lives -- something like the role of the king or queen in a constitutional monarchy, in which they're trotted out for ceremonial occasions once in a while to give the moment a little pizzazz, and they are beloved by everyone because they don't actually do anything? I don't think it has to be that superficial if we resist platitudes, embrace conflict, and if we accept the fact that the Torah readings, the prayers, the rituals - they're not all easy or "nice".
When I work with Bar/Bat Mitzvah kids on their divrei Torah, I always encourage them to take one issue in their parasha, and find commentators or sages with radically different approaches to the issue.. The legitimation of different approaches to a problem is a great gift that the rabbis have bequeathed us. So many people who convert to Judaism from other religions tell us that what they were most turned off in their religion of birth is the message that there was only one right way. Having more than one right way means conflict - but that's not only okay, that's what makes Jewish life interesting and compelling. It also means some of our key questions are left unanswered. So? That's what makes for an interesting drash. There was once a rabbi whose congregant approached him with an important question. "Rabbi," he said, "tell me, what is the purpose of my life here on earth?" The rabbi pondered the question for a few minutes, and then replied, "It's such a beautiful question. Why would you want to trade it in for an answer?" We may think we want the answers, but when and if we get them we generally find them to be so much less satisfying than we'd imagined, so much less "interesting" than the questions themselves.
Some people resist conflict in shul because they feel there's enough of it outside, and shul should be an oasis of peace. I see their point. There are definitely religious communities and congregations that don't allow the kind of conflict I'm talking about in the door, but rather insist that there is only one point of view not to be disputed - hence, no conflict. I don't go for that approach. I prefer to err on the side of naming the conflict and playing with it. Linda often teases me that she doesn't think I can get through a dvar torah without using the word "tension." She's right - I do look for tensions. I seek out inconsistencies and differing interpretations of the same text to share with you; I look out for and talk about aspects of traditional Jewish ritual that conflict with modern ethics and sensibilities, and those certainly aren't too hard to find. I don't know if these conflicts are as much nail biters as the kind you'll experience at the Cineplex, but if you give it a chance I think you'll find them quite interesting, quite compelling. And the other virtue of conflict, besides the fact that it's interesting, is that it's honest. Why pretend a boring uniformity when our experience is suffused with authentic, and interesting, tensions? But again, you have to give it a chance -- it's not just about me and what I do as the rabbi; for this to work, you have to engage with the conflict yourself, find your own questions and seek out possible responses to make your own.
Let's talk about young people for a moment. Their boredom is what we're always particularly afraid of. We worry, how can we motivate them to come to shul if they find it so boring? What can we do to help relieve that boredom so that they'll want to come to shul rather than sleep in, watch TV, go skiing, hang out with their friends, whatever. I say, if that's how it's framed, fat chance. Somehow we have to convey to our kids, and that means we have to come to believe ourselves that shul is not just another leisure time activity but rather has inherent value in and of itself. As a leisure time activity, it will never match the appeal of the ski hill or the golf course or the garden or whatever it is that floats your boat. If we had to compare it to another facet of our lives, I'd say it's closer to work than it is to leisure, and I know it's hard to think about taking on more work voluntarily. But this work is a mitzvah, an obligation. It's about figuring out who we are, in relationship to our community, our family, society, and God. It's about our humility. It's about being a strong link in a chain going back to Abraham and leading to an unknown future. That might not be fun exactly; in fact it might be really hard. But it certainly doesn't have to be boring. And the reward, while not monetary for this work, is great.
A question for you to consider: do you think it's possible that for some people, young or old, when they tune out in shul, and become restless and distracted, some of what's going on stems from a fear, perhaps unconscious, that if they did take an interest in what was going on, they might find themselves up against lifestyle demands that they're not prepared to consider? Might on some level they consider it better to keep themselves safely in a zone of apathy about the religious content of what's going on in the room than have to face the fact that it might have something compelling to say to them, that it might actually have a claim on them? To the extent that we go into that avoidant, apathetic place, whether we're regulars or occasional attendees, Yom Kippur is a good day to think about what it is we're really hiding from, and whether we might gain something from coming out of hiding and accepting the claim.
Now from everything I've said so far, you may be surprised to hear that I don't think all boredom is necessarily bad, a problem that must be immediately addressed. The attitude that a moment of boredom cannot be borne seems to stem from our modern need for constant gratification and stimulation. That's just not possible. Part of the spiritual challenge of boredom lies in learning to accept that it is a part of our human experience, and learning to live with it, to some extent. Traditional observance of Shabbat is a great teacher in this regard, especially those long summer Shabbat afternoons without TV, without computer, without Ipod or phone, without driving anywhere, or cooking anything. How do you fill the time? Board games are great, long walks wonderful, reading a book or studying the parasha a joy, a shlof -- essential. And if after all that, there's an hour or two when you're bored -- what a gift that is, in our overprogrammed, overly busy lives. What a gift to not be able to respond to emails or return a phone call, and just sit, just be.
We'll know when it's not a gift anymore when our boredom has become something very negative, very undermining of our ability to engage with the things we need to do. And then we need to address it. So what should we do if we get to that place? Brown has some interesting practical suggestions. One is that we make a conscious decision to drop the language of boredom in our discourse. Find another way to say it, she counsels. Another suggestion applicable to our prayer life is to smile when we pray; the physical act itself affects our mental attitude - and that's certainly the instinct of the traditional approach to davening which involves constant body motion. Brown encourages us to take on challenges that scare us, and there is certainly no shortage of such challenges in a shul like ours which encourages members to lead davening and leyn from the Torah. She urges us to study and learn, so that so that we have a deeper understanding of the structure of the service and perhaps then some of the repetitions for example might begin to make more sense to us, and we'll be able to play a bit with the Hebrew. In our lives outside of shul, she advises us to have more time with email and cellphones and electronic devices turned off, so that we can relearn what it's like to be more present in the moment, instead of multitasking ourselves to such an extent that we lose the skill of just sitting still. All these, and the other ideas she presents for addressing boredom, are worth considering, and I commend her book to you for your consideration. As I've said, observance of Shabbat can also be a great training ground for dealing with this problem. However we address it, this is the work we need to do, instead of avoiding it by not showing up. I'm convinced the spiritual reward will be great. As Elliott Malamet wrote in this week's CJN, "Out of the ashes of one's own spiritual dissatisfaction lies the path to renewal and to a new possibility for investigating what religion might bring to my life that can't be duplicated in any other domain."
I'd like to close this morning with a story not from our own tradition, but from a culture that couldn't be more alien from our own. It is a story told by a West African tribe, I'm not sure of the name, and retold by Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book Who Needs God. I hope you'll come to see why it touched me as I prepared for our great fast of Yom HaKippurim this year.
This is the legend of the Sky Maiden. It happened once that the people of the tribe noticed their cows were giving less milk than they used to. They couldn't understand why. One young man volunteered to stay up all night to see what might be happening. After several hours of waiting, he saw something extraordinary. A young woman of astonishing beauty rode a moonbeam down from heaven to earth, carrying a large pail. She milked the cows, filled her pail, and climbed back up the moonbeam to the sky. The man could not believe what he had seen. The next night, he set a trap near where the cows were kept, and when the maiden came down to milk the cows, he sprang the trap and caught her. "Who are you?" he demanded.
She explained that she was a Sky Maiden, a member of a tribe that lived in the sky and had no food of their own. It was her job to come to earth at night and find food. She pleaded with him to let her out of the net and she would do anything he asked. The man said he would release her only if she agreed to marry him. "I will marry you," she said, "but first you must let me go home for three days to prepare myself. Then I will return and be your wife." He agreed.
Three days later she returned, carrying a large box. "I will be your wife and make you very happy," she told him, "but you must promise never to look inside this box."
For several weeks they were very happy together. Then one day, when his wife was out, the man was overcome with curiosity and opened the box. There was nothing in it. When the woman came back, she saw her husband looking strangely at her and said, "You looked in the box, didn't you?"
"Yes?" the man said defensively. "But what's so terrible about my peeking into an empty box?"
"I'm leaving you, my husband. I'm not leaving you because you opened the box. I thought you probably would. I'm leaving you because you said it was empty. It wasn't empty. [For me, that box was full -- of sky. It contained the light and the air and the smells of my home in the sky. When I went home for the last time, I filled that box with everything that was most precious to me, to remind me of where I came from. How can I be your wife if what is most precious to me is emptiness to you?"
On that sad note, the story ends. No hope. The husband doesn't get it, so they have to split. If I were to rewrite the story for our tribe on this Day of Atonement, however, I'd much prefer a different ending. Here's what I imagine the Sky Maiden telling her husband: "I filled that box with everything that was most precious to me, to remind me of where I came from. You clearly didn't appreciate it. You disparaged it. In that sense, you sinned against me. My husband, I love you. Can I tell you about my world? Can I try, through song, and story, and ritual, to convey to you the richness of the Sky World from which I come? It's an amazing place, not empty at all. Would you like to hitch a ride with me on the next moonbeam, and come on a visit to meet my family? See my home? Maybe then, just maybe, you'll come to see the contents of that box as something more than just emptiness."
That's how I'd like it to end. Now, if the turkey still professes no interest in or curiosity about the Sky World, I'd say it might be advisable for the Sky Maiden to pack her box and her bags and catch the next moonbeam out of there. But if he is open to learning about her world, if he is prepared to view things differently than he's ever viewed them before, if he loves and trusts his wife enough to be ready to use his imagination to help him see something where before he only saw nothing - then she should be ready to give him another shot.
For me, this story is all about our relationship with our tradition. It's about all those sons and daughters of our people - bright, interesting, well-adjusted, educated and successful men and women, girls and boys - who look at their religious inheritance and see nothing but - emptiness. There's nothing there, they say. It's boring. The texts and rituals have very little applicability to our lives today. They're not relevant. We all know people like that; I dare say, many of us have been people like that at one time or another -- looking at the Jewish box and like the Sky Maiden's husband, seeing nothing and feeling nothing. If we've had that experience, for some of us it was long ago and for others of us it was as recently as this morning. Yet here we are, on Yom HaKippurim. Something has brought us here today, something has moved us to prioritize this over all the other things we could be doing on a Monday in September.
I sincerely I hope I haven't bored you for the last 20 minutes or so. I know it's an occupational hazard. Regardless, I sincerely hope we use the few hours remaining of this Day of Atonement to actively opening ourselves up to seeing something in the Jewish box, in the Yom Kippur box, that really touches us, moves us personally, engages us, interests us, helps us grow, something wondrous that brings us to a place where our cynicism and our boredom would be unthinkable, would in fact be sinful. That's not something I can do for you. Only you can do it for yourself.
Gmar Hatimah Tovah.