Sermon for Erev Yom Kippur – 5780

On Rosh HaShanah, I spoke about truth, memory, and the process of teshuvah to help each of us make the most of these Holy Days; and I challenged us to look at our perceptions and actions through the eyes of others as well as our own so that we could build better selves. Tonight, as Yom Kippur arrives, let’s expand our focus and explore the Torah on how to build the kind of community, the kind of nation, we are supposed to create.

In Deuteronomy we read:

“Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God … Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery … You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ … If you ever forget the Lord your God … I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed.”  [Deut. 8:11-19]

With these words, Moses throws a gauntlet down before the Israelites, in effect saying: ‘Do not think that the forty years of wandering is the hard part, that once you settle the land your problems will be solved. The hard part will come afterward, when you feel safe and secure in your land, and the memory of your wandering becomes distant. Only then will your real spiritual trial begin.’

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observes: “The real challenge is not poverty but affluence, not insecurity but security, not slavery but freedom. Moses, for the first time in history, was hinting at a law of history.”[1] What is this law? Simply this: complacency and self-satisfaction are the beginning of the end of any civilization.

Complacency and self-satisfaction are the beginning of the end of any civilization.

What will this decline look like? Sacks continues:

“Inequalities will grow. The rich will become self-indulgent. The poor will feel excluded. There will be social divisions, resentments and injustices. Society will no longer cohere. People will not feel bound to one another by a bond of collective responsibility. Individualism will prevail. Trust will decline. Social capital will wane.”[2]

Sound familiar?

It happened in ancient Babylonia and Persia, in Greece and Rome, in Renaissance Florence and monarchal France, and in the British and Russian Empires. It is happening now.

Moses saw it all, and audaciously taught that it is possible for us to succeed where everyone else fails. While every great civilization throughout history has followed the same arc of growth and decline, we can do better. The book of Deuteronomy dares and challenges us to build a nation strong enough to overcome the very laws of history.

This is the great spiritual challenge we face – not just reaching the Promised Land but keeping it.

Today we see the signs of decline in both the United States and in Israel. Yet none of this is inevitable. There is a way forward, which Moses delineates carefully throughout the book of Deuteronomy.

First, we must remember the Source of our bounty and cultivate both humility and gratitude. I know that many of us are uncomfortable with this, with the very idea of God. We say we are spiritual, but not religious. Some of us find our conception of God to be incompatible with our sense of personal agency, or with science, or with whatever else we may place on a pedestal before us. I respect that, and you, and I struggle alongside you. Indeed, our tradition has revolved around the idea of challenging authority and struggling with God to serve the greater good. Yet, when we go so far as to remove God from our midst, when we assume that human agency is the only power in the world, then it is a short leap indeed to societal decline. For we will worship something in place of God, we always do. Moses reminds us to stay connected with God, lest we do the unthinkable, and begin to think that we ourselves are gods. We are not. We are human, imperfect, fallible.

Second, if we put ourselves in God’s place, and assume that we are the ultimate authorities, then to whom shall we be accountable – ethically or otherwise?  Torah exists to teach us that there is a higher authority, and a higher ethical standard. To beat the laws of history, we need to stay true to the ideals and values of Torah; we must hold ourselves accountable to that standard and teach our children to do so as well – even when it means swimming against the current. If we are going to be honest, we can do a better job here. Staying true to Torah requires more than just generalizations like “be a good person” – we need to teach our children better, with specifics. And I don’t mean religious school here. I mean what we teach as parents and grandparents. To do this effectively, we need to study and learn the details ourselves. We need to know Torah.

Here is just one example. In Deuteronomy, we learn how our leaders must lead. In most countries, the king was the law, but not in Israel. Torah teaches that when we have entered the land and decide that we want to appoint a king over ourselves, that the king must follow the same Torah as everyone else – he cannot be above the law. This is an amazing and radical idea. Even more, he is to be chosen from among our brothers, and must be subject to three specific restrictions: he may not multiply his horses, his wives or his gold. On the surface this seems a little archaic. I assure you it is not.

Rabbi Jack Reimer, one of the leading orators in the Conservative Movement, reminds us that in the rest of the world kings are generally seen as “above” the people, but not in Israel.[3] In Israel, they are chosen from among our brothers. The term achi (my brother) is only used in the Torah to describe one other kind of person besides the king: the poor man. For us, for our government, for any community built on Torah, the king is not some god or almighty ruler, but a human being – just like us – and must keep our interests in mind. As for the horses, the wives and the gold — calvary were the equivalent of tanks in the ancient world. Reimer teaches that Torah limits the military might of the king – he can have enough to defend, but not to conquer. The second limit, on wives, should make us uncomfortable for a lot of reasons. However, in the context of the monarchy, marriage was a form a diplomacy, a way to build alliances. By limiting the number of wives a king may have, Torah limits the king’s diplomatic influence – so diplomatic coercion as well as conquest is removed from the king’s power. The final limit, on gold, is especially emphasized in the Hebrew. How did a king acquire wealth? Through taxation. The king must not over tax the people, taxes should only be levied for what is needed to support the government as it serves the people.

Taken together, these details paint an extraordinary picture about the kind of nation Torah expects from and for us: leadership as national service not self-service, power calibrated to the minimum necessary to protect and serve the people, and protections so that the people may not be taken advantage of or oppressed by their government. Our goal is not conquest, but the establishment of a just community. And, these are just some of the specific values of Torah designed to help us beat the odds and prevent our civilization from decline.

Finally, when we remember that God is God and we are not, and when we collectively work to build our lives and communities with Torah, then we can pursue justice not only for ourselves, but for all people. One of the most famous verses in all of Deuteronomy is: “ צדק צדק תרדוף – Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you.” [Deut. 16:20] Since Torah is incredibly economic and efficient with its language, why is the word “justice” repeated here? There are many interpretations, but my favorite is this: we should read the passage as “Justice, justly, shall you pursue.” In other words, finding justice does not mean justice for ourselves alone. True justice requires us to see not only through our eyes but also through the eyes of others, and maybe even through the eyes of God.

When we try to see through the eyes of God, we try to see the bigger picture. Astronauts, looking down on our planet, have reported how this difference of perspective has caused them to see the pettiness of some of our personal, or even national, disagreements. When we see through the eyes of God, we see that there is a higher purpose to our lives. In Deuteronomy 6:18 we are commanded to do what is right and good in the eyes of God. Doing right and good in the eyes of God means asking ourselves, based on everything we know of our tradition: what would God think of our choices? Are we pursuing our own personal agendas, or are we pursuing the greater good?

Of the three key components to creating a sustainable, ethical and just community, I think that Beth Ami is programmatically strongest here. We are known in the community for our commitment to social justice through our tikkun olam program and our Critical Issues Forum. What you may not know is that we have just been awarded the prestigious Fain Award by the Union of Reform Judaism because of the extraordinary work both of these groups continue to do. In addition to recognizing our many, many tikkun olam volunteers, the Fain Award highlights a major achievement of the Critical Issues Forum: the enactment by the Maryland legislature of the Summer SNAP for Children program – which was mostly written right down the hall with our partner congregations. We can take great pride in our achievements in this area, even as we recognize that there is still so much more to do.

This year, we are also founding members of the first annual Harvest against Hunger competition – a high holiday food drive to help fill Manna’s new warehouse so that they can feed 10,000 more hungry people here in Montgomery County. We are competing with some of our neighbor congregations to see who can increase their giving the most over last year. Please be generous and check the list of nutritional foods they are seeking from the materials we have provided. The drive continues through Sukkot, so there will be a chance for us to see how we compare after Yom Kippur. What a great way to help the hungry, and win a real-life trophy shaped like a can of food!

Our efforts to feed the hungry, help refugee families, and support those in need are important, meaningful and necessary.

And … they are not enough.

Moses knew what he was teaching.

On this Yom Kippur, let’s instill these words of Torah in our minds, our hearts, and our souls. Let’s think of them on our way and when we are at home, when we rise up and when we lie down. For, taken together, the practice of humility and gratitude (God is God and we are not), accountability to a higher standard of behavior (Torah), and the pursuit of justice beyond our own agendas – these are the building blocks of an enduring and life-affirming culture, and a society built to withstand the ravages of history. And, like so many concepts in our tradition, they represent a series of successive steps, each one dependent on the last. If we will not recognize the Source of our bounty and our own limits, then we will have no motivation to learn Torah. If we do not learn Torah, then we will have no motivation to see the world through God’s eyes and pursue the large-scale justice that is beyond our own personal agendas. Many nations have risen and fallen since Torah was first given and received at Sinai, yet our success as a people and a tradition is directly connected to those times when, despite every force in the world pushing us to do otherwise, we have kept faith: with ourselves, with Torah, and with our Creator.

Today is no different.

There is still time for us to act.

_______________________

[1] Sacks, Jonathan. Covenant and Conversation: A Study of the Parsha with Rabbi Sacks. “Why Civilisations Fail” Eikev 2017/5777.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Reimer, Jack. “Politics Then and Now,” unpublished sermon to parashat Shoftim, Summer 2019.