Sermon Rosh Hashana 5769 – Day 1
WHAT NOW?
An Italian, a Frenchman and a Jew arrive in Heaven and each is judged. The angel escorts the Frenchman to his heavenly reward. They enter a beautifully arranged banqueting hall with all the foods that a French connoisseur could dream of.
The Frenchman turns to the angel and says, "This can't be mine. There must be some mistake. I was immoral most of my life and I was hardly G-d fearing."
The angel replies, "There is no mistake. These delicacies are yours but there is a catch. Every day at 5:00 pm they will bring in a large pot of soup that is boiling hot. You will be immersed in it. If you can take the pain you can partake of the banquet."
"Sorry" said the Frenchman "I just could not tolerate the pain."
The Italian, too, is taken to his reward a similar banquet with pasta and all the best Italian food you can wish for on Rosh Hashanah.
Again a similar dialogue takes place, the Italian admitting to a life of financial fraud and corruption. "This can't be mine. There must be some mistake.”
He too is advised that at 5:00pm each day he will be immersed in a boiling hot pot of minestrone soup and he again states that the pain would be too much to bear. It’s just not worth it.
Finally the Jew is taken to his eternal rewards. They enter a beautifully arranged banqueting hall with all the foods that a Jew can only dream of... Chopped liver, kugel, gefilte fish, sweet herring, salty herring, kishke, cholent, sushi, beef lo mein, and of course, the most beloved food for Jewish men – tofu and soy beans.
He too cannot believe his luck.
"This can't be mine. There must be some mistake. I never went to Shul, I never did anything Jewish…
How can this be mine?"
Again the same response: "5:00 pm each day, you will be immersed into boiling hot chicken soup with kneidalach. If you can take the pain the banquet is yours."
"Fine", said Yankel, "I'll take it".
The angel is stunned. “The Frenchman and Italian – and countless other gentiles – have declined the offer; what makes you different?"
Yenkel responds: "What should I tell you? I know Jewish functions all too well. 5:00 is not 5:00 and the soup is never that hot."
Well, welcome all to one of the great Jewish functions of the year. But one in which we are on schedule…
Plus, many of us have been through some serious “hot water” these past few months… weeks… days.
So now you’re ready for amazing blessings. Yes, we’re going through very difficult times at the moment which is affecting many of us directly and all of us indirectly. But Judaism places great emphasis on the New Year being a new beginning – To quote the Talmud: Tichleh shono ukloloseah,
may the year end with all of its curses; Tachel shono ubirchoseha, may the New Year begin with all of its blessings. It’s a new year, a new page, a brand new book. May all of us and our families, along with Klal Yisroel, and through us all good people, be blessed with a year filled with blessings; good health,
happiness, nachas, fulfillment, and yes, some gelt…
***
So it’s an election year. The refrain seems to be change, change, change… Change we can count on…
Change we can believe in… Change is coming… Why the big deal about change? Someone said: Can
anyone come up with another slogan… for a change? Why is it that virtually every candidate, from the right and from the left, feel that the surest way to touch a nerve with the electorate is by invoking change?
Yes, we’ve been through a few difficult years, but I think there’s more to this change thing… People need change. We crave change, something new. Just ask the 40 year old suburbanite why he went out and bought himself a sports-car convertible; “I needed a change”.
Isn’t it a most interesting fact that fish swim to the surface when it rains to get a drink of the rain water… here they are surrounded by an ocean of water. But that does it cut it. They want something new and fresh.
I believe it is our nature to look for change, for something different… something above the ‘surface’, something satisfying. We’re surrounded by so much wealth and comfort but it doesn’t satisfy. We’re constantly looking for something fresh and refreshing that will.
***
I want to talk to you today about what I believe to be the most common question people ask themselves:
What now?
No matter at what stage in life; after every milestone, challenge, success or accomplishment. We then turn around and ask ourselves: So what now? Is that it?
We’ve just landed the perfect job for ourselves… we just drove out of the showroom with the car of our dreams… we just bought a new home in the exclusive neighborhood we’ve been talking about getting
into for 15 years… we just completed a complicated business deal… a deal that took us four years to complete… the deal of a lifetime, bringing together companies from across the country… netting us more profit than we’ve ever imagined possible… The next morning… or a week or two later… we invariably look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves: What now? Is that it? It doesn’t satisfy. There somehow never seems to be a finish line that
we can cross and we’ve arrived… they seem to keep moving the finish line each time we advance.
Subconsciously this is why we are so hungry for change… for something new. Give me something more, something satisfying. Something where we can feel we’re doing something real, something that’s not a means to some further end but is an end in itself.
We’re stuck in the cycle it seems where the lines are blurred between what are the means and what is the end. We work hard to be successful so that we can give our kids a good education; they in turn will use their education to be successful so that they’re kids can get a good education in order to provide for
they’re kids’ education… repeat steps 1 and 2…
Try sitting down and drawing up a chart of two columns: things you do that are the “means” and things you do that are the “ends”… I think that would be an excellent exercise every once in a while just to clarify our priorities and where we’re headed…
You know the story of the pool simple “yiddle” (European immigrant) who is out fishing, only to be harassed by a CEO who took an “important” day off from his busy life to fish… (The yiddle is totally chilled and relaxed while the CEO is quite anxious to make sure his important day off or relaxation is a success…) The CEO, impressed with the other guy’s intelligence is trying to convince him to go into business and become a CEO one day. But the poor guy can’t understand why. “You’ll manage a whole team of people”. “So what?” “You’ll make a good living and be a macher…” “So what”? “You’ll be
so successful you’ll be able to go on vacations and go fishing.” “Vell” he says in his strong Yiddish accent; “that’s exactly vot I’m doing…”
The whole world is debating what is life really all about… what is the purpose, where are we headed…
I don’t want to become too philosophical… that could have its own hazards…
The ten year old boy was home from school due to the flu. He was alone with the nanny who didn’t speak a word of English, when he started feeling really bad. So he decided he’ll call the doctor. But he didn’t know the phone number. He picked up the synagogue bulletin: Rabbi Dr. Jerome Goldstein.
Perfect, my rabbi is also a doctor, let me give him a call. Rabbi takes the call, pleased to hear form one of his junior congregants. How can I help you, my son? Well, I have this terrible flu… Sorry, son, but I’m not that kind of doctor, for flues… I’m a doctor of philosophy… “Philosophy? What kind of
sickness is that?”
So there’s the ongoing debate…
Some say it’s all meaningless, just enjoy. I saw a license plate the other day: LIV42DY. Just enjoy yourself while you can… OK, that’s an interesting world’s view… Just have some ice cream… know for any intelligent person that doesn’t cut it. Besides, after a tub of ice cream we always ask
ourselves the question: What now…?
Others say its retirement that makes it all worthwhile, when we finally get to relax and cross that finish line… now that’s when we’ve arrived… But how much sense does that make? To work 50 years for a ‘maybe’ of 15?
Still others believe it’s all about the hereafter … it’s in the afterlife where life gets some meaning …
"Do you believe in life after death?" the boss asked one of his employees.
"Yes, Sir," the new employee replied.
"Well, then, that makes everything just fine," the boss went on. "After you left early yesterday to go to your grandmother's funeral, she stopped in to see you ."
But us Jews are too practical to accept that… we know intuitively that this awesome, beautiful world of ours has got to have lots of meaning and purpose in it… right now in the here and how… not just in the hereafter… But it seems to keep alluding us.
Friends, each time I walk away from officiating a funeral I hear the same sentiments: Is that it? Is this how life works, it’s just over? Even if the person lived until 98, and I’m happy to say I’m increasingly doing more funerals for over 90’s… people still feel a void, an emptiness inside. Yes, they’ll pay lip
service to it - “He lived such a full lie, he did everything he ever wanted to do, traveled where wanted to go.” But on the inside people are shaken up. They walk away shaking their heads… Is that it? We just collect all the pieces and the game is over?
Some people try to defy mortality by becoming famous. “True, it’s all meaningless, but at least let’s perpetuate this meaninglessness into eternity…” I recently went to see a very wealthy man to discuss his
getting involved in our building project, maybe he can help us complete the new building… When I walked into his office he was on Google. He was Googling himself… “Rabbi, do you know how important I am? I have 25 pages on Google!?” Oh, so that’s the purpose of life – lots and lots of Google pages?
What now? (Besides, what’s 25 pages? Some people have 50 pages, 100, and more…)
Read any of the interviews on famous people and you’ll see they invariably come back to something personal, a relationship, a child, a charitable endeavor. They know, perhaps better than anyone, that fame just doesn’t cut it; that when 100 million people know your name you still ask the same question,
perhaps with even more emphasis: what now?!
***
I said to you earlier that the businessman will always come back after even the most successful deal and ask that same question, what now. How about a doctor, after healing someone and saving his life. Does he also say – what now? How about a paramedic who brings someone back from cardiac arrest and saves their life? Does he also ask the question? How about when you hold your new born child in your hands… or your grandchild… do you still ask the question? I don’t think so... Somehow we sense something real is going on. We’re dealing with life itself. So there are some real things in life after all…
My dear friends, it’s because life is sacred. It’s holy.
What does holy mean? Let’s demystify this. People think of holy as special, important, significant, etc. but why use the word holy? What does it really mean? It sounds so mystical…
The Torah says: Vehiskadishtem – you shall be holy people. Ki kadosh oni – because I (Hashem) am holy. Holy than means being like G-d. G-d is holy; we should be holy too.
How do I mean? G-d is not a means to an end; He IS the end!
A teenager recently said to me: Rabbi I have two questions. Who made G-d and why do we need Him?
Good questions… In our material, scientific world where everything is relative, where the value of anything is only what can I get from it… where kids have parents only because they need someone to
pay for college… the question bothered him – why do we need Him. I explained to the young man that G-d was not made and we don’t need Him. He is not a utility, he is not here to serve a purpose; he IS the purpose. I tried to introduce to the young man the concept of REALITY, that there are somethings that
are real. G-d is real, and was always here, so no one had to create Him. G-d is Reality with a capital R!
That’s what holy means, sacred, true, real, an end unto itself. G-d is asking us to live lives filled with holiness, with acts of mitzvahs which are the end itself, not a tool or a utility.
That’s what a mitzvah is. Mitzvahs are G-d’s representatives here on earth, and they carry His quality of being real, true, satisfying. A Torah scroll, for example, is holy, not because you use it, not because you read from it. Many torahs never get used, they are still holy just the same. It’s not about what you can do with it. It’s a torah…
The only thing other than mitzvahs that carries this quality of holiness is human life. Life is sacred, because man is created in the image of G-d. As such, life is an end in itself. We do everything possible to save a life. We don’t consider the costs when it comes to saving a life, regardless of whether the
person is 19 or 90. That’s because life is something sacred, real, Divine, not a utility that can be measured in terms of how much return there will be.
It always upsets me when I hear people say: “It’s too bad we lost the 6 million. I can only imagine how many doctors, scientists, musicians, artists were amongst them…” this type of talk makes me nuances.
Is that what the value of human life comes down to… their contribution to society? Are we beginning to view human life like a commodity to be evaluated on its merits? Isn’t that what the Nazis did?
That’s how they priced things out in the slave trade, based on how many years of work you have left, just like when you buy a used car you pay based on how many miles its got left in it.
There’s the problem today with medical insurance companies and hospitals and the government not wanting to spend money on people unless they know they’ll live a certain amount of time, so that the investment makes sense…
Director of HMO dies and comes to heaven. He’s greeted by G-d who says: Welcome to heaven. But you can only stay 48 hours, then you got to go. We need the bed.
So the doctor who saves a life doesn’t ask – What now? Because he or she knows intuitively they’ve just done something real.
Think about it. The doctor is just doing his job, and he will move on to the next patient as is his routine.
But somehow he knows deep down that something real just happened. It doesn’t leave him wanting. It satisfies him. But why? If you think about, what’s the big deal? So he saved a life… so that it can now continue to wander around aimlessly like the rest of us for 80, 90 years… If life has no purpose, why
suddenly is there purpose in preserving it…
Its because life is holy, we’re created in the image of the Creator and carry that quality. We know this intuitively. We feel it in our gut when we hold our child or grandchild… this is not a tool to anything; this is reality!
My dear friends, allow me to impress upon you today that the same holds true with every mitzvah.
When you light a Shabbat candle, this is a holy act. It is an end in itself. When you put up a mezuzah you are not just doing a nice tradition. You have crossed the finish line… you’ve experienced truth…
you are touching the Divine… Ever wonder why mitzvahs are so satisfying… they make us feel good... they don’t leave us wanting.
I asked you last year on Yom Kippur to take a moment each morning and night to place your right hand over your eyes and recite the six words of the Shma – Shma yisroel adonoi eloheinu adonoi echod…
Why did I ask you to do this? Did I get a raise from the Board of Trustees? Am I expecting some extra
brownie points in heaven? I asked you to do this because it is something real… I know you will feel
fulfilled each time you do it. It will change your life because each day you will do something real…
something that if we lived for one day alone would make it worthwhile…
***
This is why, throughout history, our people lived and died to do a mitzvah. With their last breath they used the opportunity to say the Shma… Why did they do that? Under the worst of circumstances they held fast to their Jewish observance. Why? They weren’t doing it for return. It would have been much
more “beneficial” at the moment not to do the mitzvah.
My own father grew up in Communist Russia. As a 5 year old child, orphaned from his mother, his father would take him into a closet each night to teach him that there is G-d who created this world, teach him the holy letters of the Aleph Bet, the Hebrew alphabet… He did this in the closet with candlelight so that the communist neighbor, living in the same room separated only by a curtain,
wouldn’t get wind of it…
A Chasid by the name of Rabbi Cahn, who spent years in the Russian gulags for the crime of teaching Torah to Jewish children, writes in his diaries about the only two times he cried during this entire ordeal.
Once at the train station when he said goodbye to his family. He held strong and didn’t want his wife to
see him cry, but there she was, infant in hand, a 6 year old next her… but he still held strong… It was only when his 3 year old daughter got onto her tip toes and began jumping up and down so she can get a glimpse of her dad in the train car before he is taken away… not knowing when and if she’ll see him
again… He broke down…
He arrived in the Siberian Labor camp a few weeks before Rosh Hashana. He had two concerns… He didn’t have his Tefillin… and what will be about a shofar… Days before Rosh Hashanah a package arrived from his father. He goes through it… there is some food… some underwear… he’s searching,
looking, and then suddenly beneath it all… there they were… his Tefillin!!! It was as if he’s just discovered the Crown Jewels! He put them on and prayed, even though he had already prayed that day
he prayed again… and he cried…
And beneath it all – he discovered a shofar… his joy was limitless. He told some Jewish inmates but they thought he lost his mind. Here you are in the gulag, doing time for spreading Jewish observance,
and you want to blow the shofar? On the first day of Rosh Hashana, he writes in his diary, he blew only one lone sound, a tekiah. After all, he didn’t want to get caught, in which case they would confiscate the shofar… what would he do on the second day… do you hear this, my friends? Second day he already
blew a full set of ten, figuring, what could happen already? If they take away the shofar, he doesn’t need it anymore…
***
As many of you know, I often go to pray at the gravesite of the Rebbe, of blessed memory, in keeping with the time-honored tradition that the resting place of a tzaddik (righteous person) has tremendous merits and their prayers on our behalf from on high are very effective. Many of you here, as I look
around the room, have been with me to the Ohel, as it’s called, in Queens.
On occasion Chassidim will gather to spend a Shabbat at the site, to honor the Rebbe’s yahrzeit of birthday. A few thousand Chassidim gather, camp out in tents and celebrate the Rebbe’s life and his teachings. These Shabbats are most memorable and meaningful.
Last winter, in honor of one such occasion, my three older boys and I decided we would spend Shabbat at the Ohel. As luck would have it, my watch battery died that Friday. So there I am relaxing around the house, when my wife says to me: Shalom, do you realize its 45 minutes to Shabbat… Oy vey… the
boys and I decided we’re going for it. We grabbed the things we needed… I grabbed my special card I got from Chief Ronnie, which helps me in case I ever get pulled over for any minor traffic infractions…
After all, I’m a busy rabbi… And we set out.
We now have 40 minutes to get to Queens… it’s Friday afternoon at rush hour… as you well know, it
takes 40 minutes to get to the LIE… Anyway, armed with my “rabbi” card I drove like never before… I
did a maneuver at the Lord & Taylor-Shelter Rock Road intersection that will go down in the annals of
rabbinic driving history…
The clock is ticking… It’s now 20 minutes left. We finally get to the LIE, which is packed bumper to bumper. But there’s always the shoulder. No problem, I’ve got the card… But then we get onto the
Cross Island Pkwy, bumper to bumper parking lot… and there’s no shoulder to speak of… here my card
helps vi ah toiten bankes… It does me no good.
It’s 6 minutes to sunset, my boys look at me, I look at them… we’ve heard these stories before… but it
now became clear to us we were going to have a “story” of our own… with 2 minutes left to sunset we
pulled off right there on Union Turnpike, got out of the car, took whatever clothing we can put on our
person (no carrying…), I even put my talit under my coat, we closed everything up, clicked the alarm
clicker, put the keys on top of the tire (don’t tell a soul)… and we looked at each other.. Shabbat
Shalom!
If I tell you, dear friends, this was one of the best times we’ve had together… It was the most exciting,
bonding experience we’ve ever had. First we davened the mincha prayer because it’s got to be before
sunset… we prayed mincha right there – Union Tpke… We prayed with extra concentration because we
don’t know if mincha was ever prayed at that spot before… Then we headed out for a nice walk. It took
a little over three hours and we arrived at the Ohel… a bit cold but fine, and we had a most inspiring
Shabbat!
When I told the story the next day to my JLI Adult Education class someone asked me: Rabbi, do you
feel bad that you have this restriction? I said – Bad? There’s nothing better! “But rabbi, isn’t Shabbat
about rest and relaxation?” No, it’s not. True, Shabbat (usually) offers rest and relaxation, but there are
many other ways to accomplish those things… Yoga, exercise, vacations. Shabbat is not about that.
Shabbat is a holy day… It’s not negotiable. It’s the real thing…
My friend Larry Pinner taught me something I’ll never forget. As you might know Larry and Sheryl’s
architectural firm, Pinner Associates has been totally dedicated to Chabad and our various construction
projects for the past ten years. I once was trying to express my gratitude to them for this amazing
dedication and generosity, when Larry turned to me and said: “Rabbi, but this is the good stuff!” He
nailed it right on the head. Life is filled with lots of stuff. But a mitzvah, that’s the real thing. It’s the
good stuff!
***
So friends, lets make it a year of change. Change for the better. Change we can truly believe in. Let’s
not accept the status quo of the regular rat race of life. That is all good and important and will continue,
and may we all be successful in every area of life. But like the fish, let’s come up a little bit.. let’s try to
rise up a bit above the surface of things… for a refreshing drop of something different, something real.
Let’s resolve that we will give ourselves the pleasure of nurturing ourselves with mitzvahs, with
additional acts of goodness and holiness. May G-d grant all of us the gift of a year of health, wealth and
nachas… a year filled with fulfillment, purpose and satisfaction.