 
|
Sermon Archive |
 |
Rabbi Janet Marder In Spite of Everything, the Stars
Sixty years ago in Holland, a teenage girl hiding in an attic opened a window and looked up into the night. It was the first time in a year and a half that Anne Frank had felt the night air on her face, and she wrote this in her diary: “It’s not just my imagination – looking at the sky, the clouds, the moon and the stars really does make me feel calm and hopeful.” Today everyone knows the name of Anne Frank. Fewer know the name of Hanna Szenes, a poet and Zionist pioneer who parachuted into Europe to save Jews from the Nazis, and was executed by firing squad at the age of 23. She, too, looked at the stars. And she wrote this:
Today if they call you a star it means you’re a celebrity, your name blazing bright as neon…until you flame out, sometimes in disgrace, or dwindle into obscurity. But there is a different way that a person can be like a star. For Hanna Szenes, a star is a symbol of constancy and brilliance and beauty, a radiance that endures and serves as a beacon to others. There are lives like that – lives that light up the darkness around them and continue to give light with the passage of many long years. Those who live in this way are lode stars, they are guiding stars, for the people around them. They are fixed stars, steady and reassuring and true. We look to these men and women the way we look to the stars in the heavens -- for strength, for comfort, for inspiration; for a sense of hope in dark times. Maybe you remember a person who was like that for you. In spite of everything, the stars. On this first night of the new year there are lamps in a dark sky – the same stars that have wheeled overhead since the beginning of time. As men and women look up to the stars, we Jews look up, on these High Holy Days, to our highest ideals. We look up from the noise and chaos of our own troubled world and scan the night sky, searching for what is beautiful and enduring and true, searching the darkness for beacons of hope. I want to speak tonight about three exemplary lives, three people of whom one might say “yesh kochavim – there are stars.” In spite of everything, there are stars. I met the first one in the pages of the New York Times, which last Veterans Day published excerpts from letters sent home by American soldiers in Iraq. There was Rachel, age 19, who wrote about the chilly nights in Iraq and asked her mom to send her a hooded sweatshirt, and who died 6 days later. There was Kevin, from Little Rock, Ark., who wrote poignantly to his wife about his modest dreams for their happiness, his wish to buy a boat and someday maybe an RV or camper, and who added in closing, “I love you very much. I can’t wait to get on with our lives. I really look forward to our future together.” Kevin, too, was killed in an enemy raid and never came home to his wife. Amid these sweet, sad messages from ordinary young people living far from those they loved, I came across an extraordinary young man. These are excerpts from the letters of Captain Joshua T. Byers, age 29, who wrote to his parents in South Carolina in the summer of 2003: “Dear Mom and Dad, …”I have to admit that I am really nervous and just pray that I am up to the task out here to lead 120 men in combat operations. I will give them everything I have to give – I love them already, just because they’re mine. I pray, with all my heart, that I will be able to take every single one of them home safe when we finish our mission here.” ….“In the past two nights we’ve been attacked each night while I am on patrol….I see more bravery in a day here than I have seen in my entire life prior to this. “I’m healthy and doing fine – although I really want to get that redeployment order and come home (as everyone does) – I don’t dwell on it. We are accomplishing our mission here and I think I’ll take a lot of pride in that for the rest of my life. Although the sacrifice is great, the rewards of service are so much greater. ….“I still love being a commander. I love leading troops and taking care of them. It is a huge responsibility and I feel the weight of it every day. I send the thing I love most out here – my men – into harm’s way every day and every night. I just do my best to ensure that they’re ready, trained, equipped and properly led in every situation. ….“I love you both with all of my heart! I’m working very hard here – adding honor to our country and to our family name! Love, Josh” America today has a volunteer army. Those who have a better, more comfortable, more promising and lucrative alternative tend to do something else, and leave it to others to fight our wars. So it is not the sons and daughters of privilege, by and large, who enlist in the armed services, but those who are recruited by promises of education, travel and training, and who see military service as a means of upward mobility, their best shot at a better life. And there are those who enlist because they believe in square, old-fashioned ideals like “sacrifice” and “service” and “duty” and “honor”; they believe in loyalty and responsibility and bravery and pride and love of one’s country. Josh Byers died two days after he wrote those last words to his parents, when a bomb exploded under his vehicle. Whatever our feelings about this war, how it was launched and how it’s been fought and how long we think we should go on fighting, we share in grief for the more than 1000 American troops who have lost their lives in Iraq, and for thousands more innocent Iraqi civilians who have died there as well. Think about the kind of person who puts himself in harm’s way, even though he is afraid, and who withstands heat and cold and boredom and dust and bad food and lack of sleep and sore, aching feet and endless uncertainty and constant danger, and who risks his life because he believes that it’s the right thing to do for his country. If we are opposed to this war, and to how it was launched and how it’s been fought and how long and agonizing our involvement in Iraq promises to be, then we will be especially angry at the waste of so many young lives so full of courage and high ideals. Yesh kochavim…there are stars that light up the darkness, and there are heroic lives, like Josh Byers’, that shine for us like powerful beacons of inspiration. I met the second person I’ll talk about tonight in a wonderful new book by Tracy Kidder called Mountains Beyond Mountains. It tells the true story of Paul Farmer, who was born in 1959 and grew up, as he puts it, “poor white trash” in the south, living in cramped quarters, without running water, in a trailer camp, on a bus, and on a houseboat in the bayou. Farmer went to Duke University on a full scholarship. He got interested in the migrant labor camps not far from the college, and in one of them he met some Haitian tobacco pickers, living in wretched conditions that made his own growing up look luxurious. Farmer began reading up on Haiti. After graduating summa cum laude from Duke, he applied to a graduate program at Harvard, where one could get a joint degree as a doctor-anthropologist. In the meantime, he visited Haiti to see what it was like for himself. The book tells the story of what he did there, against extraordinary odds. Today, at 45, Paul Farmer is a Harvard professor, a world-renowned expert in infectious diseases, a leader in international health, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and a man who has made it his calling to bring modern medicine and decent living conditions to desperately poor people in the Third World. In Haiti Farmer built a remarkable public health system, including sanitation facilities, improved housing, clinics and a free hospital. He still lives in Haiti most of the year in spartan conditions, working long hours and making house calls into the jungles and mountains. He has created an organization, Partners in Health, that works to eradicate infectious diseases all over the world. The title of the book comes from a Haitian proverb: “Beyond mountains there are mountains” – that is, “as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one, too.” Think about the kind of person who has earned a life of privilege and comfort through his own brains and hard work, but who can’t rest easy when he sees that others are suffering. The kind of person who knows that every human being deserves the necessities of life -- clean water and health care and school and food and houses with tin roofs and cement floors -- and is willing to make sacrifices so that others might have what they need. The third star I’ll talk about lived only half as long as Paul Farmer has lived, but he, too, felt the need to do something personal to address human suffering. Andy Goodman was described by those who knew him as “intelligent, unassuming, happy and outgoing.” He grew up in the 1950s, the second of three sons in a liberal Jewish household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Visitors to his family home included Alger Hiss, blacklisted actor Zero Mostel, and the lawyer who represented the Hollywood Ten, Marvin Popper. The Goodmans were well-off, and spent their summers at a lake home in the Adirondacks. Andy graduated from the progressive Walden School in Manhattan, well-known for its non-authoritarian approach to learning. As a high school sophomore, he went to Washington, D.C. to participate in a “Youth March for Integrated Schools.” As a high school senior, he and a classmate visited a depressed coalmining region in West Virginia to write a report on poverty in America. In April, 1964, when Goodman was a student at Queens College, he heard a speech by Allard Lowenstein describing the lack of civil rights in Mississippi. Lowenstein described Mississippi as “the most totalitarian state in America” and said that racism was deeply embedded in the fabric of everyday life. Andy wanted to help, so he applied and was accepted into the Mississippi Summer Project to work on voter registration. Recently I came across a copy of the application he filled out to be part of the “Freedom Summer.” It lists his age as 20 and says that he is an anthropology major who enjoys taking part in college theater productions. Shortly after Andy Goodman arrived in Mississippi, on the night of June 21st, he went to visit a black church that had been burned. In the car with him were James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, two young staff members of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). That night, on the road back to Meridian, the blue station wagon in which they were riding was pulled over by the Deputy Sheriff of Neshoba County. The three civil rights workers disappeared and were never seen alive again. After a two-month search by the FBI their bodies were found at a dam site where they had been buried following their murder by members of the local Ku Klux Klan. Yesh kochavim – there are lights that shine powerfully in the deepest darkness. A poet wrote those words. A soldier, a doctor, and a civil rights worker lived those words. All were young. All were idealistic – by which I mean that all were in pursuit of an ideal. All believed that their ideals were important enough to warrant personal action and personal sacrifice. Now, there is nothing so very remarkable about being young and idealistic. Youth is when you are supposed to be idealistic. But after a while, as conventional wisdom has it, you find out the truth about the world. You bump your head up against some stone walls and you see that change comes slowly, if at all. You find out that no one, including your heroes, is perfect, and you get a little disillusioned. You start to build your own life – your own family, your own home, your own work – and you get preoccupied. Your energy gets diverted elsewhere. And little by little, you make your peace with the way things are. Judaism sees things differently. Our tradition teaches that idealism is not a stage you pass through in your life; it’s not something you outgrow when you’re older and wiser in the ways of the world. Idealism, we believe, should stand at the core of the Jewish self for however long we may live. We should never grow resigned to the gap between the way things are and the way they’re supposed to be. And so the Torah tries to teach an ethic of personal service to others. We call it in Hebrew gemilut chasadim, translated as “acts of loving kindness.” It really means “direct interpersonal giving.” Gemilut, from the Hebrew verb that means “to grant goodness, to nurture, to nurse, to give in a way that overflows to another.” Chasadim, from chesed – covenantal love, the kind of love that arises from commitment and obligation to another. Torah teaches that when we see a fellow creature in pain, we should feel pain as well. And we should feel called to do something about it. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “What is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p.32). Can we help everybody? No. Does that let us off the hook from trying to help anybody? No again. Some people like to say that they’re “spiritual, but not religious” – that they distrust organized religion. Judaism is organized religion. It is a system for organizing people to fulfill ideals. It’s designed to create people who see wrongs and want to right them. It strives to create a community and a society and a world made up of such people. Today we live in a country where the bottom 95% of us combined have less wealth than the top one percent of households [Economic Apartheid n America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity, by Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel]. In the last thirty years, the average real income of the bottom 90% of American taxpayers has fallen by 7%. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1% has risen by 148%, the income of the top 0.1% rose by 343% and the income of the top 0.01% went up 600%. [Paul Krugman, “the Death of Horatio Alger,” NY Times, January 5, 2004]. The poverty rate has gone up for the third straight year, according to the Census Bureau. Almost 36 million Americans, one-third of them children, live in poverty and hunger. Many of them are working people with full-time jobs. [Statistics from MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger]. The number of those without health insurance went up last year, to 45 million. Significant gaps in income and education still separate black and white Americans [See “The State of the Dream: Enduring Disparities in Black and White,” by Dedrick Muhammed, Attieno Davis, Meizhu Lui and Betsy Leondar-Wright, United for a Fair Economy, January, 2004]. And what of the myth of intergenerational mobility – the idea that in America sons and daughters willing to work hard will surpass their parents and move up to a better life? Last January Business Week published an article called “Waking Up From the American Dream.” It summarized recent research showing that mobility has declined significantly in the past few decades. Very few Americans now move out of the class in which they were born. Too many are trapped in dead-end, low wage jobs with no entry to the middle class. Cuts to health care, public schools and higher education make it harder for the poor to escape their poverty. Judaism has a different vision of the kind of society we should create. Deuteronomy commands: “you shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer. You must pay him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets, for he is needy and sets his life on it” [Deut.24:14-15]. Our Sages understood this to mean that workers must be treated justly, must be paid a living wage – one that provides the necessities for self and family -- and paid promptly. Our Sages envisioned a community that protects its most vulnerable members, that does not let its children go hungry; that offers every person the dignity of self-sustaining work and the opportunity to create a decent life; a society in which those who have more, give more instead of focusing solely on enriching themselves; a society in which burdens are shared equitably and it is not the poor who bear the lion’s share of the sacrifices. Judaism aims to produce people who hear what Dorothy Day described as “the call to service”; people who want their lives to make a difference; people whose youthful idealism won’t burn out in the trenches of middle age, but who will keep on trying to live out their dreams. Idealism – rugged, resilient idealism that endures in the face of reality – is the most precious commodity in the world today. It is the deepest source of good that we know. Beth Am, at 50, is now officially a middle-aged congregation. I can say that because this year I, too, had my 50th birthday. What I treasure about this place is that we never have and never will outgrow our youthful idealism. We are a community centered on bringing Jewish ideals into being. We want to nurture children and adults who work to make a better world. Our worship, our education programs, our pastoral care -- everything we do is about building ideals. “Young as I am,” wrote Anne Frank in her diary, “….my feeling for justice is immovable…. I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love….If God lets me live,…. I shall not remain insignificant; I shall work in the world and for mankind!” [Diary of a Young Girl, 1944]. The spirit of Anne Frank – beautiful and brave – is alive in the young people of our congregation. It’s alive in Justin, who grew and sold his own vegetables this year to raise money for underprivileged kids, and in Anna, who is raising money for suitcases for children in foster care, and in Rachel, who cut off her hair and donated it to Locks of Love, for a cancer patient. It’s in Amy, who collected hundreds of books to create a book cart at Packard Children’s Hospital and is now training a dog to be a visitor to children who are sick. The spirit of idealism burns bright in these recent B’nai Mitzvah and in so many others like them. They live in a callous and cynical world that makes it hard to hold on to square, old-fashioned beliefs. They struggle, as Justin said on the morning of his Bar Mitzvah, to stay kind in a culture in which kindness isn’t fashionable, and the rewards go to those who are tough. They struggle to care for people, when the message all around them is to get ahead on your own. They look for lessons in how to live….and at Beth Am, we want to give them those lessons, and to show them adults who model the highest Jewish ideals. Yesh kochavim: here in our synagogue there are stars that shine in the darkness. There is an unpretentious couple who adopted an at-risk teenager to give him a better life; there is a spirited woman who, in the midst of her own personal sadness, volunteers as a clown in a hospital. There is a quietly determined member who raises money for children orphaned by AIDS in Uganda. There are two dentists who, when I asked them recently to perform reconstructive surgery on a young patient of limited means for free, hesitated for not a second before saying yes. And there is our beloved Rabbi Emeritus, Sidney Akselrad, who has for more than 40 years lived out his ideals in action, since the days when he went to Alabama to march with Dr. King, braving mounted police who chased him through the streets and the criticism of those in his home community who did not support his cause. He has devoted his rabbinate to acts of personal service, and today he continues to be a model of kindness, integrity and care. Speaking in the darkest days of the 1960’s, Bobby Kennedy once said: ”Our answer is to rely on youth -- not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination…” Now 83 years old, Rabbi Akselrad is one of the youngest presences among us. He personifies the spirit of Beth Am – the youthful, optimistic spirit we have carried with us for half a century and will take with us as we build for the next fifty years. I close with the words of another American soldier serving in Iraq. Private Jesse Givens wrote a letter to be delivered to his family in the event of his death. His wife, Melissa, and their six-year-old son, Dakota, received it after Jesse was killed, on May 1, 2004. A month later the son he never knew came into the world. For the rest of their lives, Jesse’s family will have these words to treasure: “Dakota…you have a big, beautiful heart. Through life you need to keep it open and follow it. I will always be there in our park when you dream so we can play. I love you, and hope someday you will understand why I didn’t come home. Please be proud of me. “Melissa, I have never been as blessed as the day I met you. You are my angel, soulmate, wife, lover and best friend. I am sorry. I did not want to have to write this letter. …Please find it in your heart to forgive me for leaving you alone. …Teach our babies to live life to the fullest; tell yourself to do the same. “I will always be there with you, Melissa. I will always want you, need you and love you, in my heart, my mind and my soul. Do me a favor. After you tuck the children in at night, give them hugs and kisses from me. Then go outside and count the stars. And don’t forget to smile. Love Always, Your husband, Jess.” As this new year begins for our beloved congregation, yesh kochavim. In our dark and troubled world, there are stars that light up the night: lives lived with courage and honor and love; beautiful, brave lives devoted to a better world; lives whose radiance inspires us and lives on forever. In spite of everything, the stars. |
|
|
|
|||
