Four Jewish brothers, a lawyer, a doctor, a hedge fund manager, and a retail tycoon, one more prosperous than the next, were chatting after Chanukah dinner discussing the gifts that they gave to their elderly mother. The first said, "I built a big house for Mom." The second said, "I had a $100,000 theater built in the house." The third said, "I had my Mercedes dealer deliver her an 600SL with a chauffeur." The fourth said, "Listen to this. You know how Mom loves reading the Torah and you know she can't see very well. I sent her a parrot that can recite the entire Torah. It took 20 rabbis 12 years to teach him. I had to pledge to contribute $100,000 a year for twenty years but it was worth it. Mom just has to name the chapter and verse and the parrot will recite it." Soon thereafter, their mother sent out her sons thank you notes. She wrote:
"Milton, the house you built is so huge. I live in one room, but I have to clean the whole house. Thanks so much." "Menachem, you give me a theater with Dolby sound, it could hold 50 people, but all my friends are dead, I've lost my hearing and I'm nearly blind. Thanks anyway." "Marvin, I am too old to travel. I stay home, I have my groceries delivered, so I never use the Mercedes...and the driver is a Nazi. A million thanks." "Dearest Melvin, you were the only son to have the good sense to give a little thought to your gift. The chicken was delicious."
We are living with so much loss today, I didn’t want to deprive you all of a little Jewish humor before we dive into the gravity of this holy day. All kidding aside, it is useful to pause and acknowledge that we are undergoing a period akin to grieving a loss of a loved one.
At this moment in history, we are all grieving the loss of a way of life; of the ability to meet up with friends and extended family; perhaps the loss of trust in our civic leaders. It’s also the loss of the educational experiences we’re used to, given school closures, modified openings and virtual schooling. It’s the loss of rituals, like weddings, graduations, and funerals, and even lesser “rituals,” like going to gym and eating at restaurants. As for myself, I usually spend the month of Elul coffee shop hopping to write my high holiday sermons. This year, I commuted across the hall to my new home office in my daughter’s bedroom.
As painful as the losses resulting from the pandemic are, they come on top of already tense political divisions in our country. For some of us, issues related to Covid-19 have exacerbated difficult relationships or have become the last straw in ending contact with family members who are observing different levels of distancing than we do, or friends who are promoting the latest conspiracy theory on Facebook, or co-workers who are insisting Covid-19 deaths are exaggerated.
On this holy night of standing before God, let’s be honest. The state of the world is dark. And we are suffering from grief and loss, and we are, in some ways, lost. And it is painful. And what I’d like to suggest to you tonight is that it might not be particularly helpful or healthy to suggest that we all keep a stiff upper lip and focus our sights on the silver linings, in essence refusing a place at the table for our discomfort. Perhaps there is some value to paying attention to our pain.
In the early 19th century, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was the forefather of a school of thought loosely call “pessimism.”
His complicated relationship to Judaism and theism aside, Schopenhauer was willing to put his finger right on the darkness in life- the pain, the failures, and the randomness- and he was able to embrace them as fully as the joy, the triumph and the tranquility. Rather than downplaying suffering in human life, he believed it revealed to us an underappreciated truth about the universe and our place in it.
Schopenhauer put pain at the center of our experience instead of pleasure and well-being. He reminds me of what we are doing on Yom Kippur. Each year we make spiritual pilgrimage to this 24-hour period of time, abstaining from all pleasure in order to plumb the depths of how we’ve caused harm and how we’ve been hurt. On this day, we wrestle with the scars we carry in our psyches and in our flesh from other’s assaults. And we place before God our own trespasses. For this one day, we confront the reality and the inevitability of our finitude. We face the fact our lives are short and our time is limited. For twenty-four hours, we keep our fingers right on the pessimistic side of life. And why do we take a deep dive into this dark on Yom Kippur? In order to come out on the other side with a better perspective on how to live into the new year that we entered only ten days ago.
Intellectually, we know that life offers us no promises. We know that the distribution of pleasure and ease will be inequitable and incomprehensible. Intellectually, we know that bad things will happen even when we are as good as we can be. Nevertheless, on most other days the allure of believing that brighter days are just around the corner persists. I am not suggesting that is a bad thing. But I am inviting you to contemplate whether a worldview that doesn’t meaningfully allow for pessimism can ever hope to withstand the full weight of experience?
In today’s America, we often teach our children that they can be whatever they want to be. But on the whole, is that really true? In our American culture of infinite possibilities, we are seduced by the optimistic impulse. As we emphasize opportunity and innovation and the certain benefits of all things new, as Americans are wont to do, we downplay the obstacles that naturally exist in human life. After all, we consider our pursuit of happiness one of three basic and self-evident human rights in our American credo. The pursuit of happiness.
There is nothing wrong with happiness or with having an optimistic outlook. But psychologists warn that too much optimism can be harmful. Over-optimism can cloud our minds with a distorted sense of invulnerability, leading us to miscalculate risks and make unsound decisions. It can cause us to falsely assume that positive things are more likely to happen to us than to others. And vice versa- that bad things are more likely to happen to others than to us. Such a bias becomes clear in parents who typically believe that their children are more talented than others’, in how newlyweds perceive themselves as very unlikely to divorce despite prevailing high rates of divorce. Optimism bias is evident in how we routinely engage in unhealthy lifestyle habits such as smoking and drinking, thinking that we are less likely to succumb to illnesses like cancer and liver failure. Psyching ourselves up with positive thinking can also make us optimistic to the point that we overestimate how much of life is within our control. Optimism and over-confidence can decrease motivation and increase complacency. Nowadays, there is so much pressure to think positively because our thoughts may affect the way we feel and behave. So what happens when we fail to think positively and things don’t work out? Then we believe we are the ones at fault.
We’re not trying hard enough to pull ourselves together and make something positive happen out of a bad situation. Now we have an additional emotion to deal with, on top of what was troubling us in the first place: the guilt for being unable to convince ourselves to be optimistic!
Fear, worry, anger are often the most appropriate emotional responses to difficulty. Our psychological well-being doesn’t simply improve when we attempt to will away all our unpleasant feelings with positive thoughts. Without feeling the emotional pain that inevitably arises from setbacks, we will never be driven to change things for the better for ourselves and for others. Allowing yourself to feel a wide range of both positive and negative emotions will help you find meaning in life and grow as a human being who lives in the midst of all sorts of adversity. I don’t have to tell you this but permanent bliss is unattainable and sustained happiness is wishful thinking. Your best shot is to be intimately familiar with all the flavors of human experience and emotion, your pleasures and your pain, and ultimately to cultivate emotional agility in meeting the vicissitudes of your lives.
In developing his philosophy, Schopenhauer was fluent with ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts which identify suffering as the base condition of life. Even our own sacred wisdom sources contain a precursor to Schopenhauer’s school of pessimism. After searching the world for meaning, Ecclesiastes’ ultimate conclusion is that it would be better for him to never have been born. I do not go as far as Ecclesiastes. But I wouldn’t agree with Schopenhauer either. He was a lifelong misanthrope who lived by himself and concluded that the only way to cope with the misery of existence was to retreat from it.
I’m not into that. But to visit the dark side of life every Yom Kippur? Absolutely. And to practice living each day with the full awareness that my time is a gift and someday I will die? You bet. To experience each moment fully, the pleasure and the pain, observing all the time how they both arise and pass away, as all things do? Of course. These keep me balanced. These amplify and magnify the preciousness of my life. These actually build in me a greater capacity for compassion for the whole of humankind who lives, like I do, on the razor’s edge between life and death, joy and pain. And they build in me a greater empathy and desire to be a partner in easing pain wherever I encounter it.
The way 20th century philosopher and another pessimist Albert Camus put it, being alive always was and will always remain an emergency, an inescapable “underlying condition.” Camus wrote a novel, entitled The Plague, and you won’t believe this but, its about a virus that spreads uncontrollably from animals to humans and wipes out half a city. In that story, he reminds us readers that the real plague is our ever-present susceptibility to death. Recognizing this as an absurdity of life, Camus believed, as I do, that it should lead us not to despair, as his predecessor Shopenhauer, but to a redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from being judgmental and moralizing toward joy and gratitude. In the deepest recesses of our hearts, we all know there can never be complete safety — and that is precisely what, for Camus, should turn us to the task of loving our fellow damned humans and working without hope or despair for the amelioration of whatever suffering we encounter.
We can’t cure all the pain that there is in life. And if we think about it, we know that from loving, our most ennobling of human emotions.
When we love, we invite the possibility of pain and suffering into our lives on purpose. But part of what makes life worth living is the willingness to love people who will one day be taken from us. Oh yes. We can live smaller, solitary lives and endure less pain. For Schopenhauer, perpetually living under the cloud of suffering, meant a kind of endless nightmare, escapable only in death. Reggie Ugwu, a NYT columnist writes, that life becomes a nightmare “only if you assume that things should be otherwise — that pain is an insult to pleasure, rather than its fuel, that darkness is a refutation of light, rather than a testament to its mercy. The [hardest thing to do] is accepting that it’s never [just] one way or the other.”
I am reminded of the story of a certain rabbi who had a close disciple who had fallen into a depression that troubled him deeply. He felt as if all meaning had been drained from his life, and when he prayed, his prayers turned to chalk and died in his mouth before he could utter them. The enthusiasm that the student had for his studies and for his relationships was gone. In the secret darkness of his heart, the disciple felt like nothing was worth caring about. The rabbi, aware of his disciple’s problem, took him out of the village to a deep, dark forest. Before they entered the forest, the rebbe said to the student, “As you are entering the forest, ask God to give you the answer to your troubles, then forget about this prayer. You must pay very close attention to the path through the forest, otherwise, you’ll get lost and never come out of the forest alive.” As his rabbi had instructed him, he prayed to God to help him with his misery; to find new meaning in his life; to renew his sense of enthusiasm. Then, as he started walking, he devoted all his attention to this path. He took pleasure in the working of his body as it found its pace on the trail and in the fall of his foot on the cool forest floor. He was taken with the path itself - a verdant mossy path of deep, brilliant green.
When he finally came out of the forest, he was smiling broadly. The rebbe asked, ‘Did God give you an answer?’ The student started to weep. ‘I forgot all about the question. I paid so much attention to the path, and I enjoyed so much what I was seeing, that I forgot about the question altogether.’ ‘In that case,’ the rebbe said, ‘I would say that God gave you your answer.’
For the next twenty-four hours, let us immerse ourselves in the tough stuff, not as an insult to pleasure, but its fuel. Let us venture into the dark so we can be reminded of the mercy of the light that will shine even as the sun sets tomorrow evening at Neila. Yes, we have loss. And we stand before God with all our pain and suffering and our questions. May this Yom Kippur, be rich and meaningful, and the beginning of our path to the answers.