We stand at the beginning of our Jewish New Year and to varying degrees our lives are different than we ever imagined they would be. But amidst all that’s changed, Rosh Hashanah has arrived and we must listen to God’s unchanged call to account for things that we left undone, unfinished, untended, or took for granted. Like the opening words of this morning’s Torah portion, Acharai hadevarim ha-eleh: after all these things, the events of the past year, v’ha-Elohim nisa…God tests us.
Perhaps like no other year in our lives, the events of the past year themselves have tested us. As if climate collapse and mass species extinction wasn’t threat enough to our existence, a global pandemic exposed every weak spot in our personal and collective survival mechanisms. And as we faced the pandemic, our national political leaders proved to us they are more self-serving than in service. Instead of applying themselves to the work of healing our most broken places, they remained dogged in their effort to instill fear and sow discontent and division in our country. And then, when we didn’t think it could get any worse, the anger and suffering of those who have been targeted, ignored, rendered insignificant and invisible, suddenly became very visible. A single video of police brutality and a single phrase, “I can’t breathe” unleashed a tsunami of protest that still rages across our nation, tearing the scabs off of old sores of institutional racism and injustice that were festering just under the surface, a storm that blew furiously through windows and shops in neighborhoods and cities, including our own.
You may remember a sermon I gave many years ago in which I suggested that in this morning’s Torah reading, Abraham failed God’s test. When God asked him to take his beloved son, Isaac, to the top of a mountain and sacrifice him, in actuality God was hoping Abraham would refuse, draw the line, walk away from such a demand. And that when we read it each year, we should not glorify Abraham’s obedience but know that our God would never ask us to break our ethical code to test of our faith.
This year, I remembered another sermon I gave after that one in which I saw Abraham in a very different light. In that sermon, I suggested that one of the most insidious of human frailties is how often we choose to accept the familiar and comfortable even when we know we should walk away from it. And if we stood in Abraham’s shoes, we’d be just as likely to just go along. After all, this was the God we left everything and everyone we knew and loved to follow; the God with whom we and our children made a blood oath seared into our very bodies; the God, who saw fit to consult with us before destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Walking away from a relationship to that God would not be easy, even for the sturdiest of souls. Because sometimes walking into the unknown is the hardest test of all in life.
In my recollection, that sermon was well written and strong, a favorite.
And, as I often do, I went back to it for inspiration before writing ones for this season. And to my surprise, unlike many old sermons, I wasn’t jettisoned back to a former time and place. Admittedly, in times like these, I yearn for the problems of days gone by that I thought were so big that now seem so small. But this sermon wasn’t old. In many ways, even though I wrote it years ago, it was new, even to me.
And if that’s the way I felt about it, then I thought you might, too.
It started with Ursula Le Guin’s riveting short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” which poses a challenge to its readers; a test, like the one God gave Abraham that, in some measure, we all fail. Omelas is an idyllic, magical city with lovely parks and delightful music. It has no kings, soldiers, priests, or slaves, and no discernible socio-political structure. They celebrate the summer solstice with a glorious festival and a race featuring children on horseback. What’s notable is that the festive atmosphere isn't just reserved for special days, but is an everyday characteristic of this blissful community, whose citizens are intelligent, sophisticated and cultured. Because everything about Omelas is so perfect, the narrator of the story decides readers might not be convinced that it actually exists unless one critical element upon which the very existence of the city endures is revealed: there is a flagrant, heartbreaking atrocity in Omelas. In the basement of one of the buildings, a small child that looks about 6 but is nearing 10 is locked in a small room with one door and no windows. The child actually used to cry from behind the door, “Please let me out. I will be good!” But the people never answered and now the child just spends every day whimpering. It is terribly thin, living on a half-bowl of cornmeal a day, sitting in its own excrement. “They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas,” Le Guin writes. “Some of them have come to see it; others are content merely to know it is there. But they all know it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children ...depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” Naturally when thinking about it or seeing it, most of the people in Omelas feel horrible for the child. And in those moments, they hold their kids a bit tighter and then return to their happiness.
But a rare few see the pitiful child left there in the basement by their neighbors and they keep walking. They choose not to be part of the social contract that one child is sacrificed so that the others can be happy. Le Guin writes, “They leave Omelas; they walk ahead into the darkness and they do not come back.”
It would be easy to indulge ourselves and celebrate Rosh Hashanah like the summer solstice festival in Omelas- as a season of hope and joy. Perhaps that’s why our Sages assigned Rosh Hashanah a second, more sobering name- Yom Hazikaron, the day of Remembrance. Their intention was that this time of year be joyful without forgetfulness of what is neglected, what compromises we make and, in fact, depend on for our happiness, from what we have failed to walk away.
Today, I invite us all to do some hard remembering. I say hard because for the most part we, like the people of Omelas, live comfortably in an environment that protects and insulates us most of the time from experiencing or even recognizing that we have a basement as pitiful and cruel as the one with the crying child in Omelas. As Jews, we must do the hard remembering that our fervent belief is that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. And if that is what we truly believe, then it is impossible to justify using a human being as a means to an end. We know from our collective memory as a people that it is wrong to enslave a person, even if that slavery might serve a larger good. And that it is wrong to kill one person, even if many other lives are saved. And yet, we don’t actually live according to those moral imperatives. We all have lives that are filled with tragic trade-offs.
If we are brave enough to open our eyes, it is evident that we’ve profited from the suffering of some in a system created to deliver something good for a small set of privileged others. Most of us aren’t touched by the war our country wages on drugs because it disproportionately disenfranchises and targets people of color for incarceration. That is in our basement. We don’t like to see ourselves implicated in it, but our carbon reliant economy and our meat intensive diets are creating conditions that will doom millions of species and future people to extinction. That too is in that basement. When we buy a cellphone or a piece of cheap clothing, or a hand knotted carpet there is some exploited worker —literally a child languishing in a basement somewhere. While we tell ourselves and each other that their misery is necessary to lift everyone’s affluence, maybe it’s not. On this Yom Hazikaron, let us not forget how many children are locked in a basement to ensure our comfort and our happiness.
Perhaps the real test on this Rosh Hashanah and in the coming year is to how uncomfortable we can allow ourselves to get before averting our eyes from looking into the basement. The senseless murder of George Floyd and the most recent maiming of Jacob Blake, has brought us face to face with the children who grew up or are growing up in the basement under our bliss. Six years ago, I recounted a story of being at a dialogue of Blacks and Jews where a black gentleman told me that his community still lives with trauma from slavery and compared to that, the Holocaust was nothing. And how startled my heart was by the pain implicit in his claim, even as aware as I was and am of the tragic statistics that bear that truth. Black boys born in this country can expect to live five years fewer than their white counterparts because they are more likely to be treated to inferior health care, education and workplace opportunities.
If he lives in an inner city, he has a 1 in 3 chance of suffering from lead poisoning and thus often lifelong brain impairment. That boy also has 1 in a 1000 chance of being killed by police over the course of his lifetime. As a 2016 Brookings Institution study reports, if that boy is typical, the net worth of the white families he knows will be nearly ten times greater than his. Gaps in wealth between Black and white households reveal the effects of generational discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception. Our flawed system of financing public schools will perpetuate inequities for him. Black students in America are much less likely than white ones to attend schools offering advanced science and math courses. And the one public institution which does go out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is sadly the prison system. Because of our disastrous experiment in mass incarceration, if you are 19 and black in 2020, you have a 1 in 3 chance of spending time in jail.
I’m not sure we need to read LeGuin’s story of Omelas to compel us to ask ourselves if we are willing to continue to live within a society where we look away instead of walking away. Like the people who stay in Omelas, we aren’t bad; it’s just easier to go on with the misery we live alongside than to change course. But it takes a heavy toll on our souls. Perhaps, Omelas is also a parable illuminating for us that in navigating this ethically complicated and imperfect world of ours, maybe the shriveling child we’ve locked in the basement is our idealism and imagination that things can and should be different. And perhaps we’ve also locked away our share of the responsibility for it continuing to be like this.
Acharai hadevarim ha-eleh: after these things …God tests each of us. The test is to be brave enough to look at what we’ve locked into the basement to languish and hopefully forget. Looking into the basement might be reading a book like White Fragility by Robin DeAngelo. Or it might be taking Dr. Eddie Moore Jr’s 21-day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge. It might be joining the Lotte Meyerson Tikkun Olam committee’s efforts to do a cheshbon hanefesh, a soul accounting of how we’ve been going along, and what we need to do within and without to be part of changing it.
Friends, I’m not going to invoke our Jewish experience of slavery as proof to our innate sensitivity to the plight of the African American community. That thought habit has outlived its usefulness because it removes us from being part of the problem, when all the facts point to our privilege. We don’t have to train our children in how to approach a police officer because we generally feel protected by law enforcement. Our children aren’t hungry. Our greatest worry is whether they will find a job right after college or will it take them a few years living in their old room in our house before they stand on their own two feet. We weren’t always on the side of power, but we certainly are now.
The watchword that might hold the most saliency for us is a word repeated often in this morning’s Torah reading, Hineini. Each of our patriarchs was tested –whether or not they’d respond to God’s call. When that call came, they responded, Hineini. I am here. I am present. I will listen. I will be moved. At this moment, I am wholly unsure of where we are supposed to go and what we are to do to fix the deep problems of society, but I do know in the depth of my bones that we aren’t called to walk away from them but to walk toward them, and say Hineini.
We are like the man who was lost in a forest. For days he walked, seemingly in circles, finding no way out. At last he met another traveler. “Brother, tell me the way out of this forest!” the traveler cried.
“I know not the way,” the first man responded. “I, too, am lost. I can only tell you this: the ways I have gone lead nowhere, they have only lead me astray. Let us join hands and search for the way together.”
Let us join hands and search for the way together.
Friends, permit me to conclude with my ending to LeGuin’s story, the one that lives in my heart and imagination. In my version, no one walks away from Omelas. Many stop at the door to the basement, to look the child in the eyes and they are moved to say the only word they can think to say: Hineini, I am here. I will listen to you. Take my hand. We will go together. They unlock the door, carry the child out of the basement, and walk right through the center of the city only to discover to their amazement that it doesn’t shatter everyone’s happiness. In fact, as soon as hearts begin to break for this child, for all the children, suddenly everyone in Omelas can breathe deeper and feel a wholeness and a completeness unlike any they imagined was possible.
On this Yom Hazikaron, it is vital that we remember to give thanks for the incredible blessings we have in this land, in this community. We have wealth and ease that was unimaginable a century ago. We enjoy freedom and justice and live in a country that has not seen battle on our shores since the Civil War ended, before any of us or our parents were born. But it is equally important to remember on this New Year: at whose expense? Who has not been afforded a share in these blessings? Who isn’t being given keys that unlock every door?
Who has locked them out? And who languishes still in our basement? Somehow, I believe that we cannot be complete until we open our eyes and our hearts and say, Hineni, here I am, lost in the forest searching for the answers to those questions. And then when the crush of the heartbreak seems more than we can bear, I pray we will know exactly what we are willing to do to take each other by the hand, and find a way forward together.