Rabbi Janet Marder

Erev Yom Kippur, 5768
September 21, 2007

Love Them More

            Question: What do you get if you cross a Jew and a Buddhist? Answer: someone who sits up all night worrying about nothing.

            Many of you, I’m sure, were sitting up late last night worrying about whether I would begin my sermon tonight by recounting, once again, the list of those who have passed on since last Yom Kippur. And I must confess that I, too, sat up many a night worrying about whether my husband, Shelly, would faithfully preserve the romantic ritual that has become our shared tradition during these High Holy Days: his festive presentation of the fat folder filled with obituaries from the New York Times.

            Let the suspense end now: Shelly did it again. So let us remember together for a few moments some of the lives that ended in the year just past: the famous and the infamous, the noteworthy and the merely bizarre.

            Lost to the world of sports were beloved pint-sized shortstop and announcer Phil Rizzuto; championship pitchers Johnny Sain, Lou Burdette, Clem Labine and Joe Niekro, master of the knuckleball; cigar-chomping Celtics coach Red Auerbach; 49rs and Stanford coach Bill Walsh; and Abe Coleman, a squat wrestler billed as the Hebrew Hercules or the Jewish Tarzan, known for the two-footed kick he copied from kangaroos, who met his future wife one night when he was thrown out of the ring and fell into her lap, dead at 101.

            The literary world lost some giants last year: William Styron, author of “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Sophie’s Choice,” and “Darkness Visible,” a harrowing account of his battle with depression; Kurt Vonnegut; brilliant short story artists Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen; as well as Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, who wrote “Cheaper by the Dozen,” dead at 98; Maureen Daly, whose first novel, “Seventeenth Summer,” written when she was a teenager, became an instant classic; and Richard Carlson, who wrote “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff,” dead of cardiac arrest at the age of 45.

            Gone from the world of science are Theodore Maiman, who demonstrated the first laser; Odile Crick, widow of the late Francis Crick, an artist who drew the double helix of DNA; Daniel Koshland, Jr., long-time editor of the journal “Science,” who donated millions of dollars to science education; and pioneer astronaut Walter Schirra.

            The social sciences lost economist Milton Friedman, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and psychologist Albert Ellis, founder of rational emotive behavior therapy. “Neurosis,” he once commented, “is just a high-class word for whining.”

            Journalism lost R.W. Apple and Israel Shenker of the New York Times, TV correspondent Ed Bradley; historian Arthur Schlesinger; author David Halberstam, killed last April in a traffic accident near the Dumbarton Bridge; and the most widely-read newspaper humorist of his time, Art Buchwald, who in February, 2006 was told by his doctors that he would be dead in weeks, and lived until January, 2007.

            Gone from the political scene are South African leader P.W. Botha, who fought to preserve apartheid; Boris Yeltsin, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; Kurt Waldheim, former secretary general of the U.N., and Jeane Kirkpatrick, our former ambassador to the UN; Thomas Eagleton, dropped from the ticket as McGovern’s running mate when his mental illness was revealed; brave and gracious Lady Bird Johnson; former president Gerald R. Ford; and Bob Hattoy, a gay man who spoke on the floor of the 1992 Democratic Convention, saying to then-president George H. Bush: “Mr. President, your family has AIDS” – dead, at 56, of complications of AIDS.

            The religious world lost Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority. The Jewish world lost Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, Israeli journalist Ze’ev Schiff, and beloved Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, dead at 95.

            The World War II generation is passing away. Gone now are Charles W. Lindberg, one of the marines who placed the first American flag over Iwo Jima; Moe Fishman, one of the last survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which fought the fascists in Spain; and Iva Toguri D’Aquino, the Japanese American woman known as Tokyo Rose, who in 1949 was convicted of treason by a San Francisco court and was pardoned in 1077 by President Ford. Gone also is Charlotte Winters, aged 109, the last surviving woman to have served in the American armed forces in World War I.

            Gone from the music scene are James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul”; 93 year old blues guitarist Etta Baker; 87 year old jazz singer Anita O’Day, whose last album, released this year, is called “Indestructible”; the unforgettable Luciano Pavarotti and Beverly Sills; Maestro Mstislav Rostropovich and composer Gian Carlo Menotti; lyricist Betty Comden, born Elizabeth Cohen in the Bronx, whose six-decade partnership with Adolph Green produced “New York, New York,” “Bells are Ringing,” and “The Party’s Over.”

            Gone also are Bobby Rosegarden, witty bandleader on the Dick Cavett show, who once played “I Can’t Get Started,” when the guest was a sex therapist; Herman Stein, who wrote the scary theme for “The Creature from the Black Lagoon,” Lee Hazlewood, who wrote “These Boots Are Made for Walkin,’” and Paul Vance, whose 2 year old daughter modeled the subject of his big hit song from 1960: “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

            Lost to the fashion world were Liz Claiborne, who became the most successful women’s apparel designer in America ; jewelry designer Laurel Burch; and Petra Cabot, age 99, best known for inventing the Skotch Kooler, an insulated pail covered with plaid.

            The entertainment world lost master directors Robert Altman, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Berman. Gone are TV talk show hosts Tom Snyder and Merv Griffin; actresses Jane Wyman, Betty Hutton, known as the “blond bombshell”; and Adrienne Shelley, born Adrienne Levine in Queens, New York, who took her stage name from her father, Sheldon Levine, found murdered in her apartment at the age of 40.

            Gone are actors Jack Palance, Edward Albert, Arthur Hill and Peter Boyle, better known as the monster in “Young Frankenstein”; comic actors Charles Nelson Reilly, Tom Poston, Ron Carey of “Barney Miller” and Calvert DeForest, known to fans of the Letterman show as Larry (“Bud”) Melman.

            Gone from the world of business are Vincent Sardi, Jr., who owned and managed Sardi’s, a theater-district landmark restaurant, and Jerry Berns, for 50 years the proprietor of New York’s “21” Club, the first restaurant to charge $21 for a hamburger. Gone also are Rose Mattus, who with her husband created the fake Danish-sounding Haagen-Dazs ice cream; Florence Melton, who created Dearfoam slippers, sold millions of pairs and donated her money to adult Jewish education; Paul Secon, who started the Pottery Barn with three barns full of slightly damaged ceramics; Alfred H. Peet, who started his business in 1966 with a single retail coffee bean outlet in Berkeley; and Edwin Traisman, who helped standardize McDonald’s French fries and, at Kraft Foods, created a mysterious bright yellow substance called Cheez Whiz.

            There are always a few notables who don’t quite fit into any category: aristocratic philanthropist Brooke Astor and Baron Guy de Rothschild, patriarch of the banking dynasty. And our list wouldn’t be complete without Leona Helmsley, who left 12 million dollars to her dog, $100,000 to her chauffeur, and nothing to two of her grandchildren – for reasons, she says, that they will understand.

            One other name on the list gave me a special pang this year: it was the death, at age 96, of Jane Wyatt, who played the mother on “Father Knows Best.”  For those of you in the MTV generation, “Father Knows Best” was a primitive version of the family situation comedy. It was born on CBS the same year I was  -- 1954 – and it remained a fixture of my childhood, living on in reruns through my elementary school years.

            “Father Knows Best” actually began as a radio series in 1949, but back then it had a question mark at the end of the title. Transferred to television, it became a story about parental infallibility. The show brought us into the lives of Jim Anderson, an insurance salesman, his loving wife, Margaret, and their three kids: Betty, a high school girl, also known as “Princess,” Bud, a mischievous junior high school boy, and Kathy, the youngest, affectionately known as “Kitten.”

            Each episode brought another challenge to the Anderson family, as they coped with the trials of ordinary life in Springfield , a typical town somewhere in the Midwest . You can get a sense of what sorts of crises they faced from the titles of some of the episodes: “Bud: Campus Romeo,” “Father Delivers the Papers,” “New Girl at School,”  “Margaret Goes Dancing,” “Margaret’s Old Flame.” Fortunately, all of these dark nights of the soul were neatly wrapped up and happily resolved in thirty minutes.

            What we didn’t know, all those years we were watching “Father Knows Best,” was the reality behind the rosy façade. Robert Young, the actor who played Jim Anderson, suffered from depression and alcoholism; he attempted suicide later in life. Billy Gray, who played young Bud, got into trouble with the law a couple of years after the show went off the air; and the actress who played little Kathy was divorced as a teenager and became, for a time, a heroin addict and prostitute.

            In the half-century that’s brought us from the Andersons to the Simpsons and Sopranos, we’ve grown up and lost our innocence. Our tv shows now acknowledge that real family life is more than a situation comedy: there’s sadness and anger, too; spouses who bicker, get bored and sometimes hurt each other; parents and kids who yell and curse and drive each other crazy; human beings who flounder and fail.

            Tonight, on Yom Kippur, we acknowledge the ways we’ve failed, or been failed by, the people who matter most to us. And if you think you haven’t failed or been failed by anyone, then you’re in denial – and these days, that’s the worst sin of all.

            Disappointment is as inevitable as death and taxes; it’s as much a part of our lives as birthday parties and Bar Mitzvahs. Disappointment is universal, but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Over and over again, family members and friends let each other down in painful ways.

            Over the years you’ve told me about some of your disappointments:  meddling, guilt-provoking parents; a distant and critical father; a demanding, intrusive mother; a workaholic spouse, an unsupportive spouse; a passionless marriage; an irresponsible brother; a judgmental, passive-aggressive sister; a grandparent who favors your sibling’s kids; a cute little girl who’s become a secretive, surly teen; a troubled boy who’s hanging around with a bad crowd; an adult child who’s too busy to visit, or can’t seem to get established in a career, or has married the wrong person, or has cut himself off and rejected you; an irritable, unappreciative boss; an insensitive friend who snubbed you or didn’t come through when you needed her. And I haven’t even gotten to the in-laws!

            Of course, all those people I just described – the difficult, annoying, thoughtless, self-centered, moody, bad-tempered ones who can make our lives so miserable – they’re also us….seen through other people’s eyes. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that’s true. Most painful of all, perhaps, is the disappointment with ourself.

            On Yom Kippur, we take our tsuris to shul, hoping to lay down our burdens of frustration and hurt; hoping to leave here feeling lighter and stronger, better able to face what the real world dishes out. That’s what this day is for. Infallible parents, spectacular spouses, flawless families and fabulous friends have no need of Yom Kippur. The rest of us need all the help we can get.

            What can we do about disappointment, about people who fail us in large and small ways? I see two basic approaches to this problem. The first comes from Stoicism, a philosophy that flourished for centuries in Greece and Rome and continues to influence many thinkers today. The first century teachers Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius were Stoics; Albert Ellis, the psychologist who died last year, derives his method from Stoicism as well. You can get a sense of what it’s about from the title of one of Ellis’s books: “How to Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything” [1998].

            The Stoics taught that no event or person makes us miserable – we make ourselves miserable by the way we react to them. The universe, they said, is governed by absolute laws of nature that are beyond our control. The only thing we can control is our own response. They were quite sure of both of these ideas: the universe is the way it is, and we are rational creatures who can govern our own feelings and thoughts. Change the way you think, and you’ll change the way you feel.

            Happiness, the Stoics said, comes from accommodating ourselves to nature; unhappiness comes from refusing to see that the universe is not set up for our comfort and convenience.

            All of our disappointments and frustrations arise from “the same basic structure:  the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality” – that is, beating our heads against a wall and demanding the impossible [Alain de Boton, The Consolations of Philosophy, p.80].

            How does Stoicism work in practice? Don’t adopt “dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like” [Consolations, p.83]. Don’t believe that you have a right to kindness, peace, prosperity or good fortune – none of them are guaranteed you. Anticipate the worst, lower your expectations and you won’t be disappointed. The Stoic strives to become “apathetic” – one who is not driven by the passions such as grief, desire or rage, but responds rationally to all the vicissitudes of life, and accepts everything with calm equanimity.

            A nasty driver cuts you off in traffic? Your dinner guest breaks a precious crystal goblet? Your mother says something hurtful? Your spouse is unfaithful? Your son gambles away his inheritance? Your business fails? Realize that fortune is unpredictable, material things are ephemeral and human beings are imperfect, and you won’t be upset. “We will cease to be so angry,” writes Alain de Boton, “once we cease to be so hopeful” [Consolations, p.85].

            The Stoic aims to face even death with courage and composure. The death of a loved one is inevitable – and so is our own, because human beings are mortal. Our loved ones were never ours to own; our own life, too, is but a temporary gift. A rational person knows and expects that death is part of existence – why then should we weep or fume with rage when it happens?

            Certainly it can help to be a bit of a stoic: to talk sense to ourselves, to have realistic expectations of others, to approach life without a sense of entitlement. Stoicism erects a kind of “psychological fortress” against suffering and disappointment; we try to use the tool of reason to make ourselves immune to pain. In their own time, though, the Stoics were mocked as “men of stone” because they believed we can command our emotions and free ourselves from the attachments that lead us to grief.

            Fortunately, there’s another, very different, way to approach the problem of disappointment and people who let us down. Most Jews, I think, are not so good at being Stoics. We’re not known for maintaining a stiff upper lip. The Hebrew Bible is full of emotion and  passion – joy and grief, desire and rage. The Hebrew prophets don’t accept the world as it is; they express a fierce yearning to re-make the world as it should be.

            So what’s a Jewish way to deal with disappointment?

            To answer, here’s a real-life Jewish story.

            Rabbi Jonathan Slater writes: “My younger son went off to college and set off on the next stage of his life. I was happy for him….As the winter moved toward spring, I began to look forward to Passover and his presence at our seder….Our conversation about his attending the seder got off to a bad start when we disagreed about co-ed sleeping arrangements in the home. …Into this already [emotional conversation], I added my concern – my exasperation – that he would not set aside his needs for even two nights to attend the seder! What would he do instead? His response, that the seder was not so important to him, after all, threw me completely for a loop (even though I already knew that he no longer involved himself in Jewish activities). I ranted and raged, argued from every angle I could come up with – and got nowhere” [Mindful Jewish Living, p.87-88].

            This is not a new situation. Here’s a famous Jewish story from the 18^th century:

            Once a man came to see Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. The man was despondent. When he sat down he broke into tears.  “What’s wrong, my friend?” asked the Baal Shem Tov. “It’s my son,” said the man. “He has abandoned our faith. He’s turned away from our people. Rabbi, I feel like a failure. What should I do?”  The Baal Shem Tov said gently: “Love him even more.”

            It’s a strange story. What does it mean? To react to those whose actions hurt and disappoint us by “loving them more” – how is that possible? How would we do it?

            Here’s how I understand what the story is saying. When someone close to you does something that gives you pain, you can will yourself to care less (as the Stoics would say) or you can will yourself to care more. That’s the Jewish way. Both ways can ease your pain. Both will affect the kind of life you live.

            You can will yourself to care less if you practice stoic self-discipline and use reason to dampen your grief. You can will yourself to care more if you make the decision to love.

            Years ago Erich Fromm wrote a little book called “The Art of Loving.” In it he said: “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes, and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?”

            When someone you love disappoints you, you can make the decision to love him or her even more. You do not have to, of course. If you are in a relationship that is dangerous to your health or well-being, you can make the decision to get out.

            But much of the pain we experience in life comes from relationships that are dangerous only to our peace of mind. We sit up all night worrying about them. Why can’t our parents love and accept us as we are? Would it kill them, just once, to say that they’re proud of us? Why has our child rejected what we’ve tried to give? Why does he act like he hates us?  Why is there always an argument when we try to help? Why is our partner so self-absorbed? Why don’t friends reach out to us more – why do we feel so alone?

            In the face of disappointment and anguish, how do we make the decision to love even more? In Jewish terms, we would say that we can choose to offer the people who have let us down an extra measure of chesed – kindness and generosity. Instead of closing down emotionally, we try to open our heart even more – to reach out, with imagination and compassion, to the people we’re struggling with. We try to understand how the world looks to them. We try to understand why they are the way they are – what happened to them growing up; what forces have shaped them, hurt them, driven them to take the path they’ve taken.  

            Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch teaches us that when God tells Abraham, in a verse from Genesis, to listen to his wife, God says “Sh’ma b’kola – hear her voice,” not “hear her words” [21:12]. Hear her voice – meaning: don’t just listen to your wife’s words; listen to the undertone of emotion in her voice. Hear her anguish, her fear, the tone of pleading in the voice of this woman you have been married to for so many years.”

            When we make the decision to love, to offer an extra measure of chesed, we try to listen to the feelings underneath the words. We hear the loneliness in the voice of our nagging mother. We hear our disapproving father’s fear of growing old and losing control. We hear, beneath the anger, our child’s pain and confusion; we hear our children struggling to find their own way and figure out who they are. We hear in our spouse’s complaints the desire for greater closeness to us. We hear, in the preoccupied voice of a friend, her own efforts to manage a difficult and demanding time of life.

            We do not have to condone behavior that is illegal or immoral. We do not have to let others abuse us. But when the people we love let us down, we can make the decision to love them even more. We can try, for a few moments, not to see ourselves as the center of the universe. Not everything that other people do is directed at us. They have their own dreams, their own problems, their own commitments. They have the right to be who they are, not who we want them to be.

            We can decide, consciously and deliberately, to offer them a gift of chesed: to be patient with their shortcomings; to see them as ordinary people like us, sometimes weak, sometimes foolish; trying their best to get through this life but often falling short. We can meet them more than halfway. We can decide, in the hardest situations, that we will wait for them, without giving up or walking away, until they are ready to talk.

            This Jewish path, the path of open heart, the path of chesed, isn’t an easy one to walk. Neither is the Stoic path, of course. Both of them take effort and time and courage. It’s very hard to detach: to teach ourselves not to care, not to feel sorrow or anger or frustration. It’s equally hard – or maybe harder – to teach ourselves to give more when we feel that we’ve been denied; to teach ourselves to offer an open hand when we want to clench our fist.

            Both ways, I said, can help to ease our pain. Stoicism does it by shrinking down our emotional core, making us harder, tougher, less vulnerable to the wounds that the world can inflict. The decision to love someone more expands our emotional capacity. As we seek to understand other people better, listen more deeply, respond more patiently, we grow in generosity and compassion.  We may come to see them differently, and so their actions may hurt us less.

            The words of Rabbi Jonathan Slater: “In the end [my son] did not come [to the Seder}, and despite my disappointment I was grateful….I had not adjusted to [my son’s] growing maturity. I was stuck in my role as ‘father,’ the one who knows best, the one who sets the agenda, the one to whom the children come for family celebrations. … [I had to learn that ] my love for [my son] is not and cannot be dependent on his living as I would like him to live” [pp.88-89].

            The path we choose affects the kind of life we lead. Stoicism may protect us from pain, but it closes us off from the joy and beauty of deep attachments. An extra measure of chesed, an open hand, an open heart, allows relationships to continue even when we disappoint one another. 

            We don’t have to wait years and years for our loved ones to change, or to say the words they aren’t able to say; we can learn to appreciate what it is they have to give.  We can treasure what is good and lovable in a child who’s struggling to find her way; we can respect the choices that others make even when they go against our deepest, most cherished desires. We can accept our friends and siblings and spouses for who they are. We can forgive people for not living up to our expectations. We can forgive ourselves, too.

            A woman once came to the Baal Shem Tov and begged him to pray for her to have a child. At first the rabbi did not want to do it, but she kept returning and pleading so earnestly, that he finally relented and said, "There is a soul which could be born to you in a child, but are you strong enough?" The woman said, "Yes, Rebbe, I’m strong enough to have a child. In fact, I'm in perfect health."

            So the rabbi blessed her, and, nine months later, she bore a healthy baby boy. She nursed the child herself, and lavished every kind of love and attention upon him. The mother and child were very happy together. But on the boy's third birthday, he suddenly died for no apparent reason. The grieving mother traveled to the rabbi again and asked, "Why did God give me a child, only to see him die in my arms?"

            "Don't you remember," the rabbi said, "how I asked if you were strong enough to have a child? The strength I referred to was not the strength of the body, but strength of the heart."

            To love another person deeply and truly takes strength of the heart. To keep loving in difficult times, to love them more, to forgive them for letting us down and for failing, takes all the strength we can give. Hardest of all is to go on loving in the face of death.

            Every time we love we take a risk. We open ourselves to pain even as we open ourselves to joy. Are you strong enough?

            On Yom Kippur we come to lay our burdens down, because it is very hard to love real people as they deserve to be loved, as we deserve to be loved. During our brief time together we pray to become the people we want to be: good mothers and fathers and grandparents, good sons and daughters, good spouses and lovers, good sisters and brothers and friends to the ones with whom we share this life.

            We pray for strength of heart, for patience, mercy, forgiveness and wisdom. We pray to leave this place, when the holy day is over, ready to open ourselves, once again, to the anguish and the glory of love.