Here is this year's Yom Kippur sermon:
Let us take a
poll: What is more annoying?
1. Being stuck in a line at
Ralph’s and the person at the checkout is paying by check.
2. Calling the credit card
company, trying to figure out which number to press to get a person, and then
when you get a person, being put on hold. Or
3. Waiting a minute or two while
your email downloads on your phone at Starbuck’s because the free Wi-Fi is
slow.
Of
course all three of these things are pretty annoying (to most of us, I guess),
but why do we find them so irritating? I think it is because they all try our
patience. During these situations we think we can always be doing something
better. We have people to see, things to do. I didn’t go to the grocery to wait
in line; I didn’t go to the café to sit and…wait a second; I did go to the café
to sit. Just sitting is hard for us today. We are texting, tweeting, checking
our email, thinking about whom we should be emailing, looking at sports scores,
stock quotes, or political polls. We never have the patience to just wait a
second. Many of us don’t have patience for much. I know all about it. I have a
two and a half year old. Every day I’m trying to get him dressed, get him to
eat, get him to take a bath. Not to mention, he always is asking me “Why?” Why
do I have to do this? Why is it sleeping time? Why are bananas yellow? Why
can’t I drive the car? I admit, sometimes, regrettably, I have lost my
patience. I know that my son, Eitan, is just trying to learn about the world or
assert his little independence, but I feel that I always have something better
to be doing. But do I?
In Hebrew the
word patience is savlanut. You will not find this word in the Bible,
but you will find other words with the same root like sevel (suffering) or lisbol (to
suffer). Other related words are sevolet (tolerance)
and sovel (burden or load) and sabol (a porter or carrier). As Alan Morinis, the
contemporary teacher of Mussar, the Jewish self-improvement method, teaches: “Seeking out the common element in all these words
(suffering, tolerance, burden, load, porter) teaches us a fundamental lesson
about patience, as Jewish tradition would have us understand it. Being patient
does not mean that you are in a completely calm and unruffled state of mind,
but rather that you are able to bear the burden of your hostile and explosive
feelings without reacting. Think of your emotional load as a heavy suitcase,
and you as the porter who can take it on his shoulder to bear the burden.
In other words,
we don’t have to learn to love traffic or being put on hold, but if we learn to
tolerate them, we can live lives of less grief. The classic Mussar teacher
Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Satanov states: “When something bad happens to you and
you did not have the power to avoid it, do not aggravate the situation even
more through wasted grief.” As Morinis writes, “We truthfully have so little
control over so many features of our lives that it doesn’t make any sense at
all to put ourselves through useless suffering as if we did have control. And
that’s just what we do when we slip into impatience.”…We don’t have much
control over the person in the checkout line in front of us; so, why does that person
have to cause us grief? Wouldn’t our lives be easier without that grief. Maybe
it is human to always want to be in control, but I think that one huge theme of
these High Holy Days is that we are not totally in control. Maybe letting go of
that need to be in control all the time can lessen our tzuris--our
grief and stress.
One more quote
from the above quoted Rabbi Menachem Mendel: “Woe
to the pampered person who has never been trained to be patient. Either today
or in the future s/he is destined to sip from the cup of affliction.” But it
does not have to be that way. We, the Jewish people, are a patient people. Some
traditional Jews, every morning, pray this line, “I firmly believe in the
coming of Messiah; and although he may tarry, I daily wait for his coming.” We
have over two thousand years of patience. Individually we need to work
A story: A respected woman once came to ask the advice
of the rabbi of Apt. The moment he saw her, he realized that he knew a secret
about this woman. He shouted, “Adulteress! You sinned only a short while ago,
and yet now you have the chutzpah to step into this pure house!” Then from the
depths of her heart the woman cried, “The Creator of the world has patience
with the wicked. God is in no hurry to make them pay their debts and God does
not disclose their secret to any creature, lest they be ashamed to God. Nor
does the Eternal One’s face hide from them. But the great rabbi of Apt sits
there in his chair and cannot resist revealing at once what the Creator has
covered.” The rabbi let his impatience with sin, his grief over the idea of adultery, affect
the way he interacted with a real person. He didn’t have the patience to meet her need. She
might have been coming to him to ask advice on how to right her wrongs, but the
rabbi let his tzuris affect their relationship—the relationship of rabbi
and searching Jew. He didn’t see her as created in the image of the Divine,
only as a sinner.
Impatience can lead to grief and grumpiness, anger and
even affliction. This grief and grumpiness from impatience affects our
relationships.
As I mentioned a few minutes ago, I sometimes get
impatient with my son. I’m sure many of us often get impatient with our loved
ones--our spouses and partners, our kids, our friends, our parents. Sometimes
it is because we are tired, or stressed out from work. Our impatience at other
events affects our attention to our loved ones. We don’t have time to hear
about their day or how they are feeling. When we allow our impatience to
overtake us, we close our ears to what another is trying to tell us. We don’t
hear the excitement, or the pain, or the exhaustion in their own words or
actions. When we are overly impatient in our lives, it spill over to our loved
ones, we can put wedges in our relationships.
Losing our patience at things beyond our control can
make us testy with others, dampening our interactions. It can even block us
from seeing the image of God in another.
While impatience can hurt our human relationships, it
can also turn us off from a relationship with God and Jewish community and
practice. Notice how I said Jewish practice—something you must work at. Let me
illustrate with an encounter I once had:
I was at my friends’ wedding in my hometown on St.
Louis. At a brunch the day after the wedding, some relative of the groom,
knowing that I am a rabbi, came up to me to chat. She said: “Rabbi, I need some
advice. I just can’t find a synagogue that I like here in St. Louis. After my
rabbi retired, I thought I should look around. Two years ago for Rosh HaShanah
I went to such-and-such Synagogue. I didn’t like the music. Last year I went to
Temple so-and-so. I didn’t connect with the rabbi’s sermons. I don’t know what
to do for this year’s High Holy Days.”
I told her, “Don’t go. If you really want a community,
go on Shabbat. See what the community is about. Then go on another. Maybe go to
an adult-ed class. We can’t always expect to be wowed on the first time,
especially when it is the High Holy Days. They are meant to be a little scary.”
My conversation partner, it seemed to me, did not have
the patience to enter into a community. She only gave the community and its
rabbi a ten day chance. And, I know that I was being impatient with her. Instead
of telling her, kind of curtly, “don’t go”, I should have suggested that she
stick with the synagogue a while after the High Holy days and then make her
decision. I shouldn’t have discounted her eagerness to find a community. With
my impatience, she might not have heard my answer. Her spiritual impatience,
though, reminds me of a great Hasidic story about the founder of Hassidism, the
Baal Shem Tov.
The great rabbi was once in the synagogue and he
prayed for a very long time. All of his students were done with their prayers,
but he continued without paying any attention to them. They waited around for a
while and then went home. After a couple hours of running errands and what not,
the students went back to the synagogue and found their rabbi still deep in
prayer. Later he said to them: “By going away and leaving me alone, it was a
painful experience. I needed my community.” The Baal Shem Tov then said, “Let
me tell you a parable.
“You all know about migrating birds that fly to warm
countries in the autumn. Well, people in one of those lands once saw the most
glorious multi-colored bird in the midst of a flock that was journeying through
the sky. Nobody had ever seen such a bird. It was so beautiful. The bird landed
on the top of the tallest tree and nested in the leaves. When the king of the
country heard of it, he made the people fetch the bird with its nest. The king
ordered a number of people to make a ladder up to the tree by standing on each
other’s shoulders. It took a long time to build this living ladder. Those who
stood nearest the ground lost patience and shook themselves free, and
everything collapsed.”
The people needed each other to reach spiritual
heights, but it takes patience. To be in a community and pray takes patience.
There is a reason we say religious practices. We
cannot always expect to have a “spiritual moment,” be wowed every time we enter
into a synagogue (although we do try our best to create a spirit-filled
atmosphere). We have to work at it. It’s like Ikea. Yes, the Swedish
put-it-together-yourself furniture place. They give you the little book (just
like we do at a synagogue), you look at it and it doesn’t make any sense. (Ikea’s
books are all in cartoons; ours have Hebrew.) You start to put the furniture
together, it doesn’t look quite right, and then you throw down your allen
wrench in frustration. Or, at least, I do. But, if you clear your mind, take a
deep breath, and work at it, often you can put together a nice bookshelf. After
you do it once, you start to learn to patterns of Ikea furniture, and it is
often easier the next time. So, if I haven’t lost you with my metaphor, Jewish
life takes practice. Prayer takes practice. We need to attend synagogue over
and over to learn - the prayers, the melodies, the movements. Rituals take
practice. And, by having the patience to do them, sometimes over and over, we
can bring meaning and joy into our lives.
We need patience in relationships and to make Judaism
more meaningful, and now I would like to offer a way to bring these two
together: Shabbat. What is more Jewish and family/community than that? Shabbat
is the perfect time to instill a sense of calmness and centeredness in our
hectic lives; a time for prayer, community and relationship. Think about it…when
we are impatient it is often because we think we could be doing something
better with our time. When we are stuck in a long line we say, “I don’t have
time for this.” Shabbat, though, is a time of timelessness; a time to refresh. A
time when we realize that that email is not so urgent. A time when we realize that
reading a book is more rewarding that a thirty second YouTube video. The
opening chapter of the Torah says that God created the world in six days, and
on the seventh day God rested. Things can wait. We don’t always need to be in a
hurry. We have time to eat, to sing, to read, to pray, to be with our community
and our loved ones. On Shabbat we can practice patience because we realize that
we are not ultimately in control of time. We are not ultimately in control of
much, so on Shabbat we can just be. It takes some practice, though.
Now, I know that an “Orthodox” idea of being Shabbat
observant does not fit into many of our lifestyles, but there are many things
that we can do to slow down once a week, that we can do to cultivate our
patience. The writer Judith Shulevitz, in her recent profound book “The SabbathWorld”, offers this example of a modern Shabbat, “My husband and I work hard at
the celebratory aspects of the Sabbath. We spend the week scouring farmers’
markets for fresh fruits and vegetables, and on Friday mornings and afternoons
we make an elaborate dinner, and sometimes, if we get home in time, take baths
and dress up, and we invite friends over or we go to their homes, and we light
the candles, and we bless the children, the wine, the challah, and the washing
of our hands. As for the negative proscriptions—the ‘do nots’—we observe those
largely by keeping our electronic devices off, including cell phones. These we
use only if we really, really need to.”
Turning off our electronics—it sounds so easy, but
it’s not. I know I’m addicted to my iPhone, and I know that having a computer
in my pocket that can send a message, look something up on the Internet, and
show a video all in milliseconds adds to my impatience. Why, because I now
expect things to happen right now. Just think, it was not that long ago when we didn’t
have phones in our pockets let alone computers way more advanced than the
computers that put men on the moon. What did we do with ourselves? We talked to
each other, for one thing … We had conversations that were longer than 140
characters. Now, I’m obviously not anti-technology, but sometimes with our
technology we think that we can control everything, and then our technology
controls our mood or our time. It makes us impatient. On Shabbat, we don’t need
to control; we can be patient.
There is now a group of young Jews who have created
the “Sabbath Manifesto” to encourage people to experiment with Shabbat
practices as I have described. On their Facebook page (of course) they give
their “10 principles that can serve as an antidote to our increasingly
fast-paced way of living.
1.
Avoid technology
2.
Connect with loved ones
3.
Nurture your health
4.
Get outside
5.
Avoid commerce
6.
Light candles
7.
Drink wine
8.
Eat bread
9.
Find silence
10.
Give back
“They
can be interpreted in any way you want, and practiced with friends, family, or
even your local bartender.”
On their website you can even buy a little sack called
a “cell phone sleeping bag” to put your phone in on Shabbat to remind yourself
to relax and refresh yourself. A congregant reminded me recently that in
personal fitness, if you want to build muscle, it happens when you rest. Lifting
weights tears your muscles, and resting lets them grow. Just like with Shabbat,
our stress, our aggravation, everything that makes us impatient during the week
can tear us down, but Shabbat can help our individual lives and our
relationships grow.
I
said a few moments ago that in our tradition, God rests on Shabbat so therefore
we should try to emulate
God. During these Days of Awe, we remind God through
our prayers over and over that God is erech apayim, literally “slow to anger,” another way of saying
endlessly patient. We say that God is so patient, that God waits for us to
return to our true paths towards God. Because God is patient, we should strive
to emulate God. Can we teach ourselves this year to not get angry at things we
cannot control and save our righteous indignation at true injustice? Can we
make 5773 a year where we don’t always focus on what we can be doing instead of
focusing on what we are doing right now? What would our relationships be like
if we strive to practice patience this year, maybe through the observance of
Shabbat?
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