Rabbi Josh Zweiback
Yom Kippur 5769
October 9, 2008

What Keeps You Up at Night?

I know it won't come as a surprise to most of you that I spend a lot of time at the gym, working out. After all, a physique like this one doesn't come free, believe me. Now by "a lot of time" I'm talking once, sometimes twice each week for up to 30 minutes--that does include my commuting time from home but I live close.

When I go to the gym for my workout I like to be prepared. I have my two-liter reusable Nalgene water-bottle--because when you work out like I do, even for just a half an hour, all of your body fluid can actually evaporate, literally turning you into dust. It’s true—I read about it once in the Enquirer. I've got my hand towel because even at only level 3 on the StairMaster, I can work up a frightening sweat. I've got my iPod--need my tunes. My power songs. My songs of inspiration. Sometimes when I need that little extra push to get through the toughest part of the workout, I'll fire up Hall & Oates or maybe some Josh Groban or, when the going gets really tough, a little Air Supply.

I also like to bring along something to read. It keeps my mind engaged and helps the workout go faster. Sometimes it's the newspaper or a magazine or even a book. In fact, I just finished reading volume one of the "Harry Potter" series at the gym. It took me just ten years.

The other day I was getting set up on the stair climber when I realized that I had forgotten to bring a paper or magazine. I looked around to see if perhaps some fellow gym-rat had left behind the New York Times or Sports Illustrated. Or even an US weekly--anything. The best I could find was a business magazine. Not really my specific area of expertise – a lot of large numbers and words I don't understand like "equity" and "return on investment" and "profit." But it was the only reading material I could find and I knew it would distract me from my back-breaking exercise regimen.

I came across an article entitled, "What Keeps You Up at Night?" The author, a business consultant, shared the wisdom of how this question can help you clarify what your chief concerns are. He related how a CEO for whom he used to work used this question to begin an executive retreat. By asking, "What keeps you up at night?" he helped his senior management team think about the key areas on which they needed to focus in their work.

Next to the article was an advertisement for a conference sponsored by the Human Resources Association entitled, "Ten Human Resources Challenges that Should Keep You Up At Night." Topics included: how to get a seat at the executive table; how to take a dysfunctional team from unproductive to extraordinary; and how to make employees excited to come to work.

Maybe it was the endorphin rush, or maybe I was a bit dehydrated, or maybe it was the tuna fish from lunch, but I suddenly had a vision, a revelation: Yom Kippur is the executive retreat of the Jewish People. And God--the Holy One of Blessing--is the CEO who convenes the meeting. And all the liturgy and all the readings and all the reflection is really just another way of asking, "What keeps you up at night?" – and demanding that our answers will be of consequence.

To be sure, these days there is no shortage of things that can keep us up at night. We worry about our jobs and our financial well-being. Will we be able to send our kids to college? Will we ever be able to retire? Will we have to go back to work? These are real concerns.

During more stable times—remember that idyllic era… say about four weeks ago…remember those halcyon days of yore? Well, back then, in the good old days, during a stressful time at work we’d toss and turn thinking about matters which we knew were not of ultimate concern. They are not trivial matters, but we know that they are not life and death matters either. If we don't get a seat at the executive table or if our dysfunctional team just keeps on being dysfunctional, or if, due to the crisis we’re in now, if we don't get that promotion or can't afford the bigger house or the new car, or even if we’re out of work, as painful and as frightening as that surely is, we know that these are not the kinds of ultimate concerns that make the universe tremble.

But let me be clear about one thing: I know, Lord, I know that some of the people in this room were up last night worrying about personal matters of ultimate concern—their own health or the health of those closest to them. In this room today are some folks who didn't sleep well last night because they were worrying about test results and treatment protocols. And, for some of us, the very prayers of these days are what keep us up at night—when we or someone we love is facing serious illness, the very thought of having to come here and recite a prayer about "who shall live and who shall die," can make us toss and turn.

Still, that only makes it that much clearer what this day is all about.  Yom Kippur comes each year to remind us that the things that keep us up at night should be ultimate concerns. The kinds of things that make the universe tremble.

Instead of losing sleep, as most of us – myself included – so frequently do, over work-related minutiae whose consequence will be lost on us a year or even a month later… or over our fears that we’ll be unable to make it through the complex patchwork of household commitments that await us the next day… or over our bitterness toward another person who slighted or incited us… or over our frustrations that we can’t have everything we want to have, or be everything we want to be – perhaps instead of losing sleep over these things, we might lie awake wondering: “Why is my sleep uninterrupted by the calamitous suffering that exists outside my window… a suffering so profound that it literally calls into question the justice of life itself… a suffering that is actually treatable and perhaps even curable, if only our sleepless hours, and then our waking hours, were fixed upon it?”

What would be worth losing sleep over?  Well, for one thing, there are more than 862 million people in the world who are going hungry.  862 million people who lie awake fearful that they won’t have anything to eat come morning.  This, on a planet that could easily feed every human being twice over.  Perhaps we could toss and turn over the fact that effective debt relief to the world’s twenty poorest countries would cost $5.5 billion – equivalent to the cost of building EuroDisney.  Our nation has spent the past weeks vigorously debating a $700 billion bailout of America’s banks designed to rescue small business loans and retirement savings and college funds– none of us will dispute the importance of protecting those resources.  But for the comparatively low price of $80 billion, just about 10% of the banking bailout, we could provide universal access to basic social services and alleviate income poverty all over the world.  $80 billion would do that, and while that’s surely a lot of money, it’s less than the combined net worth of the two richest men in the world.

What would be worth losing sleep over?  Since our beds are situated in the finer neighborhoods of the wealthiest nation in human history, I would say that forty-seven million Americans lacking health insurance and therefore lacking assured access to decent medical care should awaken us in our beds at night.  It is a phenomenon that is unique to the United States among all industrialized nations.  Every other westernized country treats health care as a human right.  And while they all have systems that are flawed and can be easily critiqued, only the United States has no system at all.  Imperfectly or not, every other nation that we would consider civilized has been able to solve this problem.  We have not.  And why do we tolerate it?  Because, quite frankly, most of us have health insurance.  And while we rightly lie awake at night agonizing over our own illnesses and the illnesses of those we love, have you ever stopped to think of the middle-of-the-night agony of those facing the same illnesses without any hope of a skilled physician’s care?  The wisdom and dedication of our doctors is often our only emotional life raft during those frightful hours of the night.  All of our hopes and prayers are pinned to that doctor’s help.  And yet we sleep soundly as the crisis is faced by countless doctorless Americans who have no reason to hope.

What would be worth losing sleep over?  How about the fact that as many as 400,000 people have been killed in a genocide in Darfur that the world has now tolerated for more than five years.  Two and a half million innocent civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in the squalor of DP camps in Sudan or refugee camps in neighboring Chad .  And this has been going on for more than five years.  Five years of world complicity.  You’ve heard us talk about it so often that the term “Darfur Fatigue” has entered the lexicon of humanitarian organizations.  “Darfur Fatigue” means that genocide activists know full well that we’re not lying awake at night troubled by the wanton murder of dark-skinned Darfurians.  We’re fatigued… bored hearing about it.  We’ve adjusted to the genocide as an unfortunate but persistent part of reality, and we’ve convinced ourselves that it is so global and so far away that we are helpless to stop it.  But we know, of course, from every other instance of genocide in the past 100 years, that when the world takes action to stop the killing, the killing will stop.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Gee, thanks Rabbi! In addition to tossing and turning about all the usual things I worry about in my life, now you’ve reminded me of some truly awful things that should be keeping me up nights. Thanks!”

But there’s actually a pretty reasonable explanation for why, most nights, you and I don’t lie awake thinking about the problems I just described. The reason problems like these don’t awaken us at night is not because they don’t bother us – it’s because we feel that there is essentially nothing that we can do to solve them. 

Well, that reasoning might hold up, were it not for the reality that there are, in fact, some people who actually are kept up at night by these kinds of crises – and not coincidentally, they happen to be the people who make the biggest difference in combating them.  We all know one or two of them.  They’re the ones whose commitment to one of these issues borders on the “fanatical”, at least as we see it.  It plagues them around the clock.  It’s the prism through which they see everything.  These folks aren’t always much fun at parties, but you know what? They lead other people to take these problems seriously. And what little we do to fix them probably wouldn’t happen at all if it weren’t for those singularly purposeful individuals who lie awake at night because of those things that make the universe tremble.

Back in 1993, Roméo Dallaire was a career soldier who had reached the rank of Brigadier-General in the Canadian Army… which likely means that he saw almost as much combat as I did in my one year as a 7^th grade religious school teacher.  With his 29-year Canadian military pedigree, he was tapped by the United Nations to serve as commander of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda .  It appeared to be exactly the kind of assignment well suited to Dallaire’s background.  It was a simple mission of helping the Rwandans to implement the Arusha Accords, to which the Hutus and Tutsis had already agreed in ending their civil war.  Of course, we know now that the mission was anything but simple.  Thrown into the very center of the 100-day Rwandan genocide which resulted in over 800,000 murders, an undermanned Dallaire heroically risked his career and his life repeatedly to save tens of thousands of innocent lives and to rally the support of the world community to end the savagery.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning genocide scholar Samantha Power wrote the following about Dallaire:  “The genocide in Rwanda cost Roméo Dallaire a great deal.  It is both paradoxical and natural,” she wrote, “that the man who probably did the most to save Rwandans feels the worst.  By August 1994, Dallaire had a death wish.”  Dallaire recalled, “At the end of my command, I drove around in my vehicle with no escort practically looking for ambushes.  I was trying to get myself destroyed and looking to get released from the guilt.”  He returned home to Canada and tried to outrun his nightmares, but when he was called to take the stand at the UN tribunal four years later, everything that was causing him to lose sleep at night unraveled before the court.  Wrote Power:  “As Dallaire spoke, it became clear how omnipresent the genocide was in his life.”  And with his voice cracking and his eyes cross-examining everyone in the tribunal chambers, Dallaire said haltingly:  “It seems… inconceivable… that one can watch… thousands of people being… massacred… every day in the media… and remain passive.”

One would have forgiven Dallaire if he had simply slinked back to Canada and descended into depression.   But that wasn’t possible.  What would he do with the sense of obligation that kept him awake at night?  Today, 62-year-old Roméo Dallaire is a Canadian Senator.  His Roméo Dallaire Foundation builds schools and orphanages in Rwanda for the children of the genocide.  He is the force behind the Child Soldiers Initiative, which works to prevent the recruitment of children into armed groups all over the world.  He has written a book on his experiences in Rwanda that has garnered numerous international literary awards and spawned a full-length feature film.  And he has become one of the world’s most renowned activists on genocide prevention and conflict resolution.

This is what we do during the day when our nighttime is haunted by the ultimate concerns, the kinds of things that make the universe tremble.

Yom Kippur is supposed to be a day of ultimate concerns. A day to make us tremble. A day on which we reflect about the people that we are and the people that we ought to be.

It’s hard work.  But luckily, our tradition provides us with tools and teachings and symbols that can help us be the people we ought to be. 

The overarching symbol of these Days of Awe is the shofar.  We all love to hear it.  We all think we get it.  But the medieval sage, Maimonides, arguably the greatest rabbi who ever lived, teaches us the true meaning of this symbol of these sacred days.  The blast of the shofar, he writes, cries out to us:  “Awake, O you sleepers, from your sleep! Wake up, O you slumberers, from your slumber!”  It is, in fact, the sound of the shofar that is supposed to startle us from our sleep.

But once we’re up, well then what?  Maimonides teaches:

“V’zachru boracheim--Remember your Creator.”

It’s an interesting and somewhat unexpected teaching. The sound of the shofar will wake us up and then we’ll remember our Creator. Or maybe better, when we are truly awakened, when we are spiritually awakened, then, we’ll remember our creator.

What is Maimonides trying to tell us?  V’zachru boracheim: “Remember your Creator.” It’s a plea to do better than agonizing over our place at the executive table or our dysfunctional team.  The shofar reminds us that the ultimate goal is to get beyond ourselves, to think beyond ourselves – to transcend ourselves.  For this is the mark of those fanatical few in our world – the ones who make justice happen.  They willingly – or perhaps they simply can’t help it – they surrender a significant portion of their self-concern to what they envision to be God’s ultimate concerns.

Now, I don’t claim to know precisely what those concerns are. I don’t know what keeps God up at night. My guess is, God worries about things that are bigger than we can possibly imagine.

But I do know that our tradition imagines a God that wants our concerns to be bigger than they usually are – a God who wants us to put the other first.

Our Torah reminds us 36 times to remember the stranger. We must leave the corners of our fields for the poor. Even in our rejoicing, we are to think of others: on Sukkot, the Festival of our Joy, we are commanded to make sure that those who work for us, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow are able to rejoice too. To “remember our creator” is to transcend the self and to move toward the other.

We sit here each year on this day, considering what makes the universe tremble.  Might we consider this year what might be possible if we decided to make the universe tremble?  If we were to worry not just about our kids’ college funds but also about kids halfway around the world and right in our own back yard of East Palo Alto being able to go to university, we would transcend ourselves – refurbishing libraries, tutoring young readers, building book shelves, changing  the world.

If we were to worry not just about our own medical needs but also about making sure that children halfway around the world and right here on the Peninsula have health insurance, we would transcend ourselves – organizing, advocating, changing the world.

If we were to worry not just about being able to get a loan for our own small businesses or for our own homes or cars but also about ensuring that economic opportunity exists for the poor both here and throughout the developing world, we would transcend ourselves – funding free loan societies, providing micro-credit where it is needed most, changing the world.

The belief that our actions can do that—change the world—is the pipe dream of “lunatics” – but of the very “lunatics” who actually do change history.  Or as anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said it, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  Are the problems too big?  Is there nothing we can do?  Well, Romeo Dallaire and every other sleepless “lunatic” like him teach us about how one person can make a world of difference.

We can make a difference. We might not, all by ourselves, be able to solve the big problems, but we can make a difference. All on my own I might not be able to change the educational system in this country, for example, but I can certainly make a heck of a difference for one kid or for one school.

And who knows… maybe we can change the educational system – after all, a Princeton undergraduate named Wendy Kopp wrote, as her senior thesis in 1989, an idealistic plan to eliminate educational inequity in America.  Many of us wrote stuff like that in college.  But the next year, Wendy founded Teach for America , and 14,000 inner-city teachers later, she has become another “lunatic” whose pipe dream is coming true.

One person can’t make a difference? Tell that to my friend and teacher, Danny Siegel—mitzvah maven extraordinaire. Danny’s passion is tzedakah. Raising it. Giving it away. Teaching kids and old people and families all about it. And he’s inspired legions of synagogue youth groupers and rabbinical students and Sunday School teachers. Danny’s “crazy” about inspiring others to believe that they can make a difference. Spend an afternoon with Danny and you’ll wonder who’s the “lunatic”. Is it Danny? This compassionate, hyperactive, off-beat, selfless man whose inability to sleep at night has driven him to raise and distribute over 14 million dollars as the volunteer executive director of a grass-roots non-profit with almost no overhead. Or is it most of us most of the time, the “sane” ones who are kept up at night not by the plight of hungry families or disabled children or elderly Holocaust survivors who can’t make ends meet, but by the more mundane worries that we know are hardly “ultimate concerns”.

And here’s one more insight for Yom Kippur especially: even if this whole process, this attempt to transcend ourselves and to focus on ultimate matters, even if it fails, even if it doesn’t change the world at all – there can be no question that it will still change us.

We will be different people. We will be better people.

Look… we’re going to toss and turn.  We’re going to have our share of sleepless nights. The only question is the content of the disruption.  Wouldn’t we rather rise up in the morning inspired, energized, hopeful about how our efforts will make it so others can sleep more peacefully?

This new year dawns against a backdrop of anxiety.  Times are tough.  It’s tempting to turn inward, to focus more deeply than ever upon our own needs, our own self-interests.

But we have this wake-up call, we Jews… the call of the shofar.  “Awake, O you sleepers, from your sleep!  Wake up, O you slumberers, from your slumber!” 

The universe is trembling.  What will keep you up at night?  And what will you do about it come morning?

Let us sleep the fitful sleep of the righteous – including a good, worthy nightmare or two – and then awaken to a brand new day of sacred work.