Kol Nidre Sermon
Kol Nidre: October 8. 2008/5769
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit

I want to begin my D’var Torah tonight with a story. The story appears in a collection called Echoes of the Maggid. In Jewish life in Eastern Europe, a maggid was an itinerant storyteller, a Jewish preacher. I learned this story though the writing of a wonderful rabbi Dov Taylor whose work inspired me to speak about these issues tonight. I told this story once many years ago but this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about it again. Here’s the story:

An Orthodox Jew delivers a speech at a fund-raising dinner for the school his son attends - a Jewish school for learning-disabled children. His son's name is Shaya. “Where,” he begins, “is the perfection in my son Shaya? Everything God does is done with perfection. But my child can’t understand things as other children do. My child can’t remember facts and figures like other children. Where is God's perfection?” Though he does not quote it, the father is alluding to a verse in the Torah. The verse says, Ha-Tsur tamim po'olo, The Rock, His work is perfect. The audience knows the verse and shares the belief in God's perfection. Why, then, does a perfect God make a learning-disabled child? They hear the father's anguish and are silent. Now, it is the right of every Jew to question, even to question God's actions. Abraham questions, Job questions, you and I question.

The father, however, has not come to question or complain about defective merchandise. Let me tell you what he goes on to say, and then I want to discuss the implications of this story.

"I believe," says the father, "that when God brings a child like this into the world, the perfection that He seeks is in the way people react to this child." And then comes a story within a story. Shaya attends the special school Monday through Friday and a regular yeshiva on Sunday. One Sunday afternoon, when Shaya and his father arrive at the yeshiva, the kids are playing softball. The boy looks up at his father and says, "Do you think you could get me into the game?"

This is a child who is not athletic, who is even awkward. He knows what it means to be rejected. He knows how it feels to be the last one picked when the kids choose up sides. He knows the humiliation of being unwanted by either team. His father knows all this as well, has felt his son's pain all along the way. "Do you think you could get me into the game?"

The father looks around. He doesn't know what to do. There's no adult in charge - it's a pickup game. So he walks over to one of the boys in the field. He probably chooses the kid with the most compassionate face, and says, "Do you think my Shaya could play?"

The boy looks around for guidance from his teammates and gets none. Maybe they don't hear, maybe they pretend not to notice. So, bravely, the kid takes matters into his own hands. He says, "We're losing by six runs and its already the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him up to bat in the ninth inning." Shaya smiles, the father is ecstatic. The kid’s given a glove and sent out to play short center field.

In the bottom of the eighth, Shaya's team scores three runs and is now down by three. In the bottom of the ninth they score again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded and the tying and winning runs on base, they're at the bottom of the batting order and it's Shaya's turn to bat. Are they really going to let him bat and blow their chance to win?

Shaya is told to take a bat and try to get a hit. Try to get a hit? This kid doesn't even know how to hold a bat, let alone get a hit. But he’s really excited and he steps to the plate, and as he steps to the plate, the pitcher moves in a few steps so he can lob it in so maybe Shaya can at least make contact with the ball. Here's the pitch-Shaya swings clumsily and misses by a mile. The poor father moans silently--he has been here before. One of Shaya's teammates comes up behind Shaya, puts his arms around him and together they hold the bat and wait for the next pitch. The pitcher moves in a few more steps and lobs the ball in. Shaya and the teammate swing and hit a slow dribbler back to the mound-an easy third out.

The pitcher fields the ball and throws it-not to first base but way the hell out to right field. Everyone yells, "Shaya, run to first, run to first!" Never in his life has Shaya run to first. He runs down the first base line. By the time he reaches first base, the right fielder has the ball. But instead of throwing it to second, he throws it way over the third baseman's head, and everyone yells, "Shaya, run to second, run to second!"

Shaya runs to second as the runners ahead of him circle the bases toward home. As he reaches second base, the opposing shortstop turns him in the direction of third base and shouts, "Shaya, run to third!" As he rounds third, the boys from both teams run behind him, screaming, "Shaya, run home, run home!" Shaya runs home, steps on home plate, and all eighteen boys lift him on their shoulders and make him the hero who has just hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.

Here the story ends. "I believe," says the father, "that when God brings a child like this into the world, the perfection that God seeks is in the way people react to this child.... That day, those eighteen boys reached a level of perfection."

My friend Rabbi Larry Kushner writes, “You are going about your business when you stumble onto something that has your name on it. Or to be more accurate, a task with your name on it finds you. Its execution requires inconvenience, self-sacrifice, even risk. … you have to tell yourself the truth about where you have been placed and why.” Or here’s another way to look at it: The Talmud teaches, “In a place where there are no men, it’s your job to be a man. In a place where there are no women, it’s up to you to be a woman” (Pirkei Avot: 2:5). It’s your job to be present, to respond with intelligence, creativity, courage and compassion.

In these weeks leading up to Yom Kippur, I’ve been thinking a lot about “compassionate leadership.” We had a compelling program here at Tufts recently where Queen Noor of Jordon, Rabbi Irwin Kula and The Sakyong, an important leader in Tibetan Buddism spoke on campus and they reflected upon what it meant to be a compassionate leader. People quickly go to the role of presidents or executives but I want to suggest, on this Kol Nidre evening, one of the holiest times in the Jewish year, that we shouldn’t think about compassionate leadership as something that happens apart from us, in Washington or boardrooms or executive offices, but something close to our hearts and present in our lives. The way that we chose to act can transform the experience of people around us. Sometimes those people are strangers. Sometimes we are privileged to change the lives of those much closer to us for good.

I remember several years ago, a student I knew at Tufts decided to leave school because his father was ill and there was no one else in the family to run the family business. I had never seen a student do this before. I commented that his action seemed to be a big sacrifice. He answered that his mother stood to lose everything if the family didn’t pull together. He said, I’m sad to leave my friends here but I’ve worked in our family business since I’ve been fifteen. How can I not do this? This is my job to do.

On this Kol Nidre evening, let me ask you a theological question. What if God didn’t create us but instead it’s our job to create God in the world? There is a wonderful Midrash, a rabbinic story that teaches that God stopped the work of creating the world at the close of the sixth day but even though God stopped, it was clear that the world wasn’t finished. So God designated men and women as “partners in creation.” Recently, this teaching has been used to stress our responsibility for social justice, repairing the parts of the world that are broken. And if we follow the reasoning in the Midrash, that means that now God takes a back seat, while you and I ideally keep the world going. But if God has taken a back seat, how do people know and experience holiness in their lives? Perhaps now, it fully falls upon you and me to act in such a way that we create the kind of communities, families and friendships where God’s presence, compassion and justice are felt and experienced in the world.

In the Torah, God says to the Jewish people: You be holy, because I the Lord, your God, am Holy. But what does it mean for us to be holy? If we want to know what holiness, what “Godliness” looks like, one way is to consider the names that we use for God in the prayer book. Every morning, we praise God who clothes the naked, frees those who are captive, raises up people who are bowed down, gives strength to the weary. To the extent that we engage in acts like these, reaching out to people who need us, being actively concerned with and committed to people’s freedom, giving our counsel, help and comfort when we are needed, to that extent, we are making God real in the world.

And what about that student who took a leave of absence to save his family business? Well, one of the names of God in our tradition is “magen avot,” shield of our fathers and mothers. I can’t think of a better example of being a magen avot, a protector of family what that student did when he was needed at home. I think it’s fair to say that he lovingly and responsibly brought God’s presence into his family during that difficult period.

And then there are times when you meet a task with your name on it and, like the prayer we say on Yom Kippur, the theme is: who will live and who will die. I have a friend in Annecy, France named Jeanette Brousse. She’s in her mid-80s and has an astounding amount of energy. I met her many years ago when I started teaching at the Tufts European Center in Talloires. Madam Brousse is humble and unassuming. She has a wonderful smile. If you saw her sitting at a café by the lake, she wouldn’t stand out from the crowd. But when Madame Brousse was 19 years old, during the Second World War when the Germans set up shot in Annecy, she got a job as a clerk in the local police office and it just happened that all the fiches, the forms, and the official stamps, were in a drawer in the office where she worked. So in 1942 when desperate Jewish families were trying to get papers so they could buy food rations and travel to try to escape the Nazis and cross into nearby Switzerland, Jeanette started to forge papers to help them. By the end of the war, she had forged papers for hundreds of families. If the Gestapo stationed in Annecy caught you forging papers, they didn’t give you a trial. They took you outside and shot you. I’ve had many conversations with Madame Brousse, to try to understand why she acted like she did. Over the years, she has told me, “Jeffrey, these people were in trouble. I was in a position to help.”

But you don’t have to put your life at risk to be a hero or to have a profound impact on someone’s life. I sat with a student in my office this week and she told me about how good friend from High School was recently killed in a car accident. I responded, “I’m so sorry; is there any way that I can be helpful?” She said, “I’m really fortunate, my friends, the people on my floor, have been amazing. I can’t even express what a difference their support has made for me.”

If the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur teach us one thing, that thing is that our actions in life matter. What we do makes a difference. We’re going about our business and we stumble upon a task that has our name on it. It’s in our power to respond, to step forward, to create opportunities for compassion, for support, for understanding, to transform people’s lives. I hope that through our actions and words, we’ll work to make God real in the lives of our friends, families and communities. Through our deeds in the coming year, may we seal ourselves for blessings in the book of life.