Congregation Beth Shalom

Isaac and Harry

Rosh Hashanah 5768

Rabbi David Wechsler-Azen

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”    Janis Joplin made the line written by Kris Kristofferson famous, and it has a certain appeal to it, with the promise of the wild abandon available when one in desperation goes for broke.    On the other end of things, in another melody, Bono sings that “freedom has the scent of the top of a newborn baby’s head.”    At the beginning of life, so much seems possible.

And yet, neither of these types of freedom speaks to those of us who would make conscious choices in our lives.    The desperate hobo and the innocent babe have neither the means nor the minds to be our models for freedom.    Instead, we look to the masked and bound hero of this morning’s Torah portion to find a paragon of freedom.

Masked, in the sense that so little of Isaac is revealed in the Torah.    Bound, seemingly a non-hero, a patsy and a pawn in his father’s grandiose spiritual quest.    Still, as some of you may recall from sermons gone by, I believe Isaac rises to the heights of personal power on the top of the mountain.    He, and not a supernatural angel, is the messenger of the Source of life.   Malach Adonai, malach, usually translated angel, but originally meaning one who bears communication from on high, can be human.    Isaac is he who intervenes by presenting his full humanness to the one who would kill him.     

Isaac is our very own Zen Master, the one who understands that being fully present in the here and now means giving up past and future.    Accepting the possibility of annihilation, he alters the ending.    Isaac has that strength because he is prepared to die, to give everything he has for a purpose holier than mere survival of the body.    And because he is a master, one who knows but does not say, and because the Torah chooses to keep that shroud of silence around his interior life, most people don’t realize who Isaac really was and what he has to teach us.

Nonetheless, Isaac creates the template for other characters throughout the ages who have stared death in the face.    And the words written about them would not be possible without Isaac as the archetype.    Isaac’s freedom is the result of having everything to lose, yet being prepared to lose it all, and in so doing, he gains new life.   

The latest in this series of characters who risk everything for true freedom arrived at the climactic moments of his journey this past summer, in the seventh volume of the journeys of Harry Potter.    I will speak as tangentially as possible so as not to spoil anything for those of you who haven’t gotten through the books yet.    However, if you think you might hear something that might spoil it for you, outside air is available at this time.

Without mentioning the plot circumstances, I will quote from what Dumbledore says to Harry, words that could have been said about Isaac:    “You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death.    He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying.”

And so, we come to the essence of our holydays, the tension of choosing between life and death.    Our climactic Torah reading on Yom Kippur seems to say it all:    “I have set before you this day life and blessing, death and curse.    Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants might live.”    The tricky part is that we have to choose death too.    That is, we have to accept death’s existence in order to choose life fully.    Unless we face the fact of finality, we will cower in fear and not be able to summon our full freedom to choose.

Ironically and paradoxically, being prepared to die brings one fully to life.    An enhanced appreciation of life comes from a brush with death.    “Slowly, very slowly, Harry sat up, and as he did so he felt more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before.   Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?    It would all be gone, or at least, he would be gone from it.    His breath came slow and deep and his mouth and throat were completely dry, but so were his eyes.”

Rabbi Eliezer once told his students:    “Turn your lives around one day before you die.”    His students naturally asked how they were supposed to know when the day before the day of their death would be.    Rabbi Eliezer naturally answered, “Precisely!    Because you don’t know, treat every day as if you might die the next.”

Rabbi Nancy on Yom Kippur will talk on Yom Kippur about life after death, but even if one believes this is our one and only shot at being alive, using mortality as a teacher, not an oppressor, makes perfect sense.

Fear is a necessary, but not sufficient survival mechanism.    Alerting us to danger, at the same time it can manipulate us, or be used to manipulate us into limited, narrow responses.    It is a signal we must heed, but it doesn’t help us examine the complete spectrum of options.    Only those who are able to acknowledge feelings, yet stand firmly rooted in a foundation beyond the material world have full freedom of choice and potential wisdom of action.   

Voldemort’s weakness is rooted in fear as well, and the assumption that superior force will always win.    Dumbledore points out to Harry that “…instead of asking himself what quality it was in you that had made your wand so strong, what gift you possessed that he did not, naturally he set out to find the one wand that, they said, would beat any other.”

We find ourselves, as a nation, in seemingly mortal combat with another way of life.    However, just as Bin Laden refuses to ask what gifts the West possesses that make us so strong, we too, perhaps, are simply seeking better weapons, rather than asking what makes our foes so strong.    In using means of force for supposedly democratic ends, our good intentions are in danger of paving a path to perdition.    We are at risk of losing the good that we stand for.

It cannot be that the only way to give one’s life for an ideal is to become a physical warrior and go into combat.    We support our troops in harms way, but it is time to recognize that we have opened Pandora’s box and let far too many demons out of their bottles to be able to stuff all the ills back in by our weaponry alone.    Our humanity cannot be apparent to the other when we try to force cultural change.    It’s not even that the ends don’t justify the means, they simply can’t be arrived at in any other way.

Isaac reminds those of us on the progressive path of spirituality that we too need to be warriors.    We need to be willing to put ourselves completely on the line for what we believe, we need to reveal our very humanness to those who seek only destruction.    Though the world is a frightful place, we need to make clear that life is here for joy and love and laughter, for connection and construction, and we are not afraid.   

What is really needed is a fundamental change in our attitude toward life.    We have to learn, as Victor Frankl wrote: “…that it [does] not really matter what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.    We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life – daily and hourly.”

The route to restoring our country to its greatness is rooted in what it takes to restore our own selves to greatness.    Death is not only of the body, but of the ego.    When we get attached to a particular way of thinking, speaking, acting, and we dimly realize it is harmful and counterproductive, we often persist anyway.    Many times, human beings wait for a crisis to force change.   

Well, the crisis in our country isn’t close enough yet, quite frankly, for us to be compelled to change.    Perhaps, heaven forfend, a fundamentalist, anti-Western revolution sweeps the Middle East and Asia and replaces the governments that still care enough about profit to do business with us with governments that don’t care about that at all.    Should our cars, planes, ships and trains sit idle and our economy screech to a halt, then we would be in crisis, but it will be too late.

What most of us don’t do well is to change simply because it is a better way to live.    We would rather keep our ailing ego alive then risk what feels like annihilation of the self.    How many times have you known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you messed up, yet did everything in your power to justify and blame something or someone else?    Repentance is hard, really hard.    We don’t want to die, and we don’t want what feels like an essential part of ourselves to die.    We fear change, Wayne’s World’s Garth said, as he pounded an inanimate object to smithereens with a hammer.    We could rather see our world destroyed than admit we were wrong.

So what would Isaac say to us?    Perhaps very little.    He was very subtle and under the radar in how he operated.    For sure, he would say that public mocking and belittling of another would only make things worse.    Certainly he would understand that people everywhere love their children and want to protect them at all costs.    He might also tell us that fathers sometimes come to believe that the only way to serve the Almighty and powers greater than us is to offer up their sons for the sake of glory and honor, and that only by seeing the human in the other can any progress be achieved.    And he would remind us to keep laughing, even in the face of danger, as his name itself, he will laugh, implies.

Harry would teach us that a piece of Voldemort lives in all of us, that none in the public arena can claim moral purity and superhuman omniscience.    We look at what others do to us and claim outraged victimization, but don’t have the guts to see how what we do looks to the other side.    Dumbledore, as great as he was, flirted with fascism, but survived enough to try to fight its dangers.    Others get swallowed by the very human longing for control and certainty in a world that is so everchanging and challenging.    After all, we really do like trains to arrive and depart on time.

We come together for these days of awe, judgment, mercy and cleansing to ask ourselves:    What do we live for?    What would we die for?    Do we accept a walk on part in the war, or take a lead role in a cage?    Will we take the risks of a hero’s journey, or fade into the mundane world?

As we join together and move through these services, you may find yourselves reacting to some of the phrases in the machzor, whether it be to the kingship talk or the insistence on divine perfection and human weakness, or even the inundation of Hebrew which many of us, even those who know how to pronounce the words, fail to understand.    I beg you to keep in mind that we are immersing ourselves in metaphors, allegories and allusions, not necessarily taken literally.    The truth is, no one knows God, not really.    No one knows for sure whether God exists, not really.    We can think we know all we want, but what we call knowledge is a limited hunch.

And yet, unless we stake our lives on something, we float on the slightest breeze, succumb to the merest suggestion, get lost in the next great experience, chase our tails or others and spend our lives in endless pursuits of pleasure with no lasting value.   

In this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine section, an article about Freud notes that he realized in his 80’s that Judaism’s insistence on an invisible God made enormous contributions to world culture.    As Mark Edmundson writes:    Freud maintained that “…Judaism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate [sensory] world, opening up fresh possibilities for human thought and action.    He also suggests that faith in God facilitated a turn toward the life within, helping to make a rich life of introspection possible.”

An invisible God means the place God resides is in the mind, which brings great treasures to the individual.    It meant the “…triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.”   By worshiping what is not there, people can also contemplate what is not present, and therefore to think in abstract symbolic ways that prepared monotheists to make advances in law, mathematics, science and literature.    Moreover, belief in an unseen God can lead to taking an inner life seriously and lead to knowing oneself better.    Judaism “…gives us the gift of inwardness.”

Our prayerbook and our Torah readings may or may not speak about actual people, places, events and realities, any more than Harry Potter was a historical boy who lived.    That’s not the point:    whatever your theology and outlook on the traditional claims made in our texts, you must remember this:    the life of the mind and heart is real, and has a great deal of power over the realms of flesh and matter, and Judaism helped make that possible.

And only through achieving some new mastery in our interior world will we be able to affect true change in the exterior world.    Only through developing Isaac and Harry’s ability to accept the true nature of life and how inextricably wound up it is with death can we find the power to risk everything for the sake of something better and greater.    "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them," Einstein said.

The fate of the world rests in your hands.    It is so, if you will it.    Without too much melodrama, it is up to each of us to restore ourselves, our families, our schools, our neighborhoods, our country.    Each act of integrity and kindness counts.    Each fully-committed bravery of the soul brings a new day dawning that much nearer.   

And because the realm of the senses and everyday desires is so compelling, powerful and potentially all consuming, it is critical that you use your time here well.    Unless we make time and space for asking ourselves the ultimate questions, what is my life for and for what would I give my life, we will merely survive – maybe.

Harold Bloom rebutted the criticism of religion as the opiate of the people by saying that Judaism is instead the poetry of the people.   What song will you sing in the year to come?    What marvelous juxtapositions of words and phrases and actions will you compose that bring joy and enlightenment to the world?    What contributions to the art of life will pour from your soul?    What will make this year worth living and what will make living this year feel most alive?

Shana Tova, v’nikatev atzmaynu b’sefer hachayyim:    To a good year, and let us write ourselves into the book of life, for a year of outrageous and courageous actions of Tikkun Atzmi and Tikkun Olam, repair of self and repair of the world.    Sally forth, good people and make the world a better place.    And just to leave us with a further integration of popular culture and ancient tradition, in the words of the young klutzy chef in Ratatouille as he faces the supreme test:    “Let’s do this thing!”

And let us say, Amen.