Through Our Own Eyes
Erev Rosh Hashannah, October 5, 2005/5766
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit
I want to begin by telling you a story that I heard from my friend, teacher and running partner Rabbi Dick Israel, alav hashalom. Dick told me that it was a true story. I like true stories. Dick said that this happened when he was a young rabbi, recently ordained and he decided to do something adventurous so he went off and became the chief rabbi of India . Now, their Jewish community is very small and he was the only rabbi in India, so that probably automatically made him chief rabbi, but none the less, this story happened at the beginning of his stay in Bombay when his guide and translator was taking him around to be introduced to various community groups in the area. It so happened that when people heard that a rabbi, a spiritual leader, from America was coming, hundreds and hundreds of people turned out to welcome him. The mayor got up to give a speech and the children sang a welcome song and then Dick's translator stood and said in English, and then in Hindi, thank you so much for your warm welcome and now the esteemed Rabbi Israel, a famous rabbi from America, had a speech to give to the assembly. Now, Dick, who at that point had just finished rabbinic school and was hardly famous, thought he was just there to be welcomed and say hello and he had no speech whatsoever prepared to give and there he was about thirty seconds from having to give a major talk to hundreds of people gathered before him.
He said, it felt like that nightmare, that dream where you go up to the podium and all of a sudden, you realize that somehow you forgot to get dressed that morning and you're standing there in your pajamas. So he stands up, praying for something, anything, a little inspiration and he sort of muddles through a speech on inter-cultural cooperation and loving your neighbor and Jewish values. Dick said, the speech did not feel like a stellar moment in his speaking career. He finished feeling a little flustered and embarrassed. But , when he's done, hundreds of people rise to their feet and cheer and clap and they keep clapping and Dick sits down amazed and thrilled that he has pulled this off. Wow! I guess I did better than I thought! Then his translator goes to the podium says a few sentences in Hindi and sits down and Dick leans over and asks, "What did you just tell them?" The translator answers, "Oh, I told them that in your speech, you said that you were very happy to be here. I needed to translate because no one in this village speaks a word of English."
There are many problems when we judge ourselves through the eyes of others. First, our assessments are often not accurate. We often misread people, not only people from different cultures, even people we know well. It's not a good thing to base our self worth too much on what we think other people are thinking about us. Rosh HaShannah is a time for, self assessment, in Hebrew, heshbon hanefesh and if we are to do that well, we have to refine and consider our own judgment of how we have acted over the year that has past. We have to make our own assessment about who we are in the process of becoming. Our tradition gives us two categories to help us organize how we do that assessment: the first is the category of interactions that happen between you and other people (ben adam v'havero). The second is those things that happen between you and God (ben adam l'Makum). Many people interpret that category, between you and God, to refer to the transgressions we make on the ritual commandments that don't actually hurt other people, such as not observing Shabbat or not keeping kosher. But this evening, I want to suggest another way to look at the meaning of the category ben adam l'makum, that is, when you are sitting in that quiet place, in that quiet time, just with you and however you define God, what are the questions you need to ask that will help make this Rosh Hashanah be a time for real spiritual and Jewish growth? How do you get clear enough to ask your own questions in order to take a thoughtful look at your life? How do you determine what is important to you in the new year that's beginning? Now, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't value and pay attention to what our friends and teachers and parents say. We should always listen to them, except in one area: that's when other people try to tell us who we are.
When I was a freshman in college, I had a very important teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schacter Shalomi, who gave me a way to think about how I could work to become my own judge, not constantly see my actions though the eyes of others. He said, each of us walks around with an "internal audience" people who we choose and then place in a viewer's gallery looking down at us as we go through our day. We put different people in that internal audience: It might be your father or your mother, a teacher, a new person you've met who has made an impression on you. Then when we speak, or write or do something, we think; how would that person respond to what we said? Would this impress a new friend? What would this professor think if she heard me say this clever retort? Now, it's totally natural to wonder what other people think of us. And as I said before, I'm not saying that we shouldn't pay attention when friends and parents and teachers sit down and thoughtfully share their perspectives on the work we have done or how they've been affected by our words or our actions. But Reb Zalman said, and I'm saying now, the imagined reactions of your internal audience won't give you much valuable information about how you, as a person, must live your life. Ultimately, we each must be the judge of what is important to us, the work we do we wish to do, the relationships we need to nurture and the person we wish to become.
So, this is hard. How do we judge ourselves through our own eyes? How can we use this special time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to bring us deeper clarity and direction? Tonight, I want to talk practically and make some suggestions that hopefully will be helpful to you over the next ten days. I've organized my suggestions in three sections: the place, the questions and what happens after that.
Getting to "The Place." I'm always struck by the word the rabbis chose for God when they describe that category of transgressions between us and the Holy One. They call God by the name "Hamakum," which literally means "the place." Here, God isn't conceptualized as an external being or power, rather God is understood as a destination, a place where our purpose becomes clearer, where our true self is revealed. And I want to use that name of God as a hint at how to proceed with the first part of this self assessment. So my first suggestion is you actually have to choose a place to do this examination. And in fact, we should know this about ourselves already. Our lives are so busy, so full, that it's impossible to do any kind of serious self assessment as you run from class to class, from meeting to meeting. You can't learn much about yourself, or make important decisions, if you pay fleeting attention to these issues. Minimal effort produces shallow answers. The place needs to be a quiet place, or at least, a place where you won't be distracted or disturbed. It might be a garden or the library roof or under a tree or even a coffee shop where you won't bump into friends but you actually need to purposefully go somewhere to meet with yourself. If you're especially busy, and it's hard to make the time, something that I do is actually making an appointment with myself. I write it in my book and block out an hour and then when someone says, can you make a meeting next Thursday at 4:00? I say, I'm sorry, I have an appointment then. Let's chose another time. (I don't tell them it's an appointment with myself or they'll think I'm stranger than they already might think I am.). And then you go there and you just get comfortable, you turn off your phone, because what you're going to do next is to spend some time with yourself asking the questions.
So, what are the questions. When I first started working in Hillel, the International Director was a rabbi named Norman Frimmer, alav hashalom. Now, Rabbi Frimmer had this thing he would do when he saw you. You'd sit with him and shmooze and he'd ask how was this person and how was that person? And then at some point he'd look at me and say, "and how's Jeff Summit?" And even though I knew it was coming, his question would always catch me off guard because I was always very busy and I rarely had time to stop and think, much less articulate, how Jeff Summit, how I actually was. And Rabbi Frimmer wanted a real answer, not the ritual dribble that passes for conversation when someone says "how are you?" "Fine, how are you? Blah, blah, blah, blah." So, the first question, in the deepest sense, is how are you, really, how are you?
Now, I want to state clearly that I don't and can't know the questions you need to ask yourself. I'll share with you some of the questions I'll be asking over the ten days. I'll be putting them up under "The Rabbi's Corner" on our webpage, www.tuftshillel.org . But these are only my examples, my questions. I'll ask: who are the people I love and how has it been going with them over the past year? Have I been honest with them? Have I put enough energy and time into my relationships with them? Are there things I have taken for granted? Are there things I need to apologize for or do differently in the year to come?
I'll ask: what do I really feel passionate about? (you know, this changes from year to year) and am I making enough time for those things in my life? Am I taking care of myself, intellectually and emotionally and physically?
I'll ask: As I look at the world around me, am I actually making some kind of contribution? Am I, in my own small way, moving my community, my country, this world in a good direction? Do my words match my actions? Have I just been talking a good game or do I feel satisfied about how I have been acting in my life?
I'll also ask about myself as Jew: Is my Jewish practice helping me to grow spiritually? Do I need to think more about what I want from, and what I might give to my community? Have I learned something new this year about my history and traditions, about Israel ?
Now the point of the questions, I want to stress, is not to beat yourself up and not to make you feel guilty. It's to bring some clarity to how we need to redirect our actions, our priorities. The questions should help us consider the way we need to turn in the year ahead. So the third part of this practice of heshbon hanefesh, taking a personal account, is "the peace that happens next" and as I was writing this d'var, I spelled peace, "peace." I realize that's a pretty hopeful approach but I do believe that if we do the next part correctly, it can bring a sense of peace and direction to our lives.
After this self assessment, we begin to get a feeling for how we would like this coming year to look in relationship to the year that has past. I'm hesitant to use the word "resolutions" because we all know how easily and quickly new year's resolutions seem to get broken. Instead, I use the traditional word "redirection," teshuvah. That word doesn't so much imply resolutions that are set in stone, but a direction toward which we turn, a goal on which we set our sights. It implies moving towards a vision of a life where we hope to do a little better living in a way that reflects who we really are and what is really important to us. This is so important. There is no pain as deep as the pain we feel when we are exiled from our true selves. There is no joy as profound as the joy we experience when we feel we are acting with integrity, treating the people we care about they way we know we should treat them, preparing for, and doing, those things which are deeply meaningful in our lives.
I want to close with a story. In the Torah, when Moses was leading the Jewish people into the land of Israel , he sent a group of twelve people to spy out the land and gather information. They returned carrying a bunch of grapes so big that two men had to support it on a pole between their shoulders. And they said, "It's not only the grapes that are big. The people in the land are so big that when we saw them we felt like grasshoppers. And we must have looked like grasshoppers in their eyes, too. (V'chen hayinu b'eneichem.)" I learned this next part from my friend and teacher, Rabbi Larry Kushner. In the Hassidic commentary Iturai Torah, the rabbis say that when the spies said those words, that was a sin. Why? The rabbis continued, If you looked at imposing people and say that you felt like a grasshopper, that is a reasonable thing to say. But when you say, "we must have looked like grasshoppers in their eyes," what possible good could it do you to be concerned about how you appeared in others' eyes? There were two people, Joshua and Caleb, in the group of twelve who filed a minority report. They said, We're not paying attention to how we think we might be perceived in others' eyes. Yeah, they're big, and we are about to embark on a task that is huge but "yachol, nuchal lach," We know that we are able to do it."
The people in our internal audience won't tell us the ways we need to change and grow in the coming year. Seeing ourselves through other's eyes won't chart the direction that we need to turn. Each of us must take careful account of our own priorities and values, who we are and who we wish to become, to move us successfully into this new year. Shanah tovah. Wishes for a productive and meaningful Rosh Hashanah.