YOM KIPPUR
In the Middle Ages throughout Europe, over-zealous priests in the Catholic Church were so afraid of Jewish thought that, betwefacen 1232 and 1319, they would gather up every Jewish book they could find and burn it. This way, they figured, Jews couldn’t be Jewish without their books, and they would ultimately disappear. It didn’t work, of course.
I revisited that history recently during this past summer when it became clear that across the country school districts were banning books that children should not be allowed to read. Their reason was specious, to state the obvious. Somehow the school boards felt that reading these books would cause immeasurable harm to children. I keyed on to one of those books and discovered something that, instead of causing harm, would actually make a child more sensitive and well-rounded. That book is a book we all read in High School; the Lord of the Flies. I well remember reading it and how deeply it affected me. You may, too. In fact, we were conditioned to believe that in the midst of a crisis of survival, it will be everyone for themselves and themselves only. Yet, that is only partially true and only part of the time. Because, at the same time I revisited The Lord of the Flies, I also revisted a counterpoint to it called Humankind: A Hopeful History. And what I found there was a still, small voice that affirmed what Jews have always believed: namely, that the soul of everyone of us is not intrinsically evil but rather intrinsically good.
Without trying to be the Cliff’s notes version of The Lord of the Flies, I will remind you of what happened, especially if don’t remember Grade 9 English.
Written by a very angry William Golding who once said, ‘I like to hurt people,’ Golding explored the problem of good and evil. And so he fictionalized a group of English schoolboys in a plane that crashed on a desert island. Quickly the boys created a leadership structure of sorts and assigned groups to build shelters, find food and maintain a fire to signal passing ships as well as cook and stay warm. So far, their dilemma brought forth constructive and meaningful ideas. But frustration lay just below the surface.
The first sign of trouble was that they spent more time playing in the ocean than paying attention to the fire. It gets out of the control and burns the adjacent forest, killing one of their group. And then the anger forms like a tsunami affecting every one of the boys. They start fighting each other for limited resources and, before long, three of the children were dead. As the book ends, they and we are left to wonder how they lived the rest of the their lives filled with the knowledge that they turned into barbarians in such a short time.
After reading that book I presume most people who nod in agreement about how easy it is for anyone to turn into a barbarian. And, these days, we hear the stories after every disaster. Remember Hurricane Katrina? Reports of rape and robbery were everywhere. We totally bought into the ‘Lord of the Flies’ narrative and we have been nodding every since. But more about that later.
But there was another story, this time a true story. Those of you who recall 1965 might recall the story of the 6 young teenage boys who ran away from school on the Pacific Island of Tonga to flee 500 miles on open sea to Fiji. Not a great idea but, then again, it was the Tonganese version of stealing mom’s car for a joyride, I guess.
In fact, it was a terrible idea. After a very short time, far away from shore, the boat became impossible to steer. There was no food, no water and they had no idea where they were or which way they were headed. Only by sheer luck did they find a small island right out of the movie ‘Castaway’ and managed to land there. This was Lord of the Flies in the making.
But it didn’t work out that way in the least.
Instead they created their own little tzibur, a community of mutual support and caring. Of course there were arguments. But they overcame those heated moments by having time-outs and de-escalating heated situations. As well, each day began and ended with singing and prayer. For 15 months this went on until they were rescued. The captain of the ship that rescued them approached and figured that, since they had no clothes on and their hair was down to their waists, he had chanced upon an isolated tribe which appeared vicious. Yet Captain Peter Warner was amazed to hear them speak and knew immediately this was no isolated tribe. He listened to their story and, in his captain’s log he wrote about, ‘ these amazing boys who had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, ….”
This was no Lord of the Flies moment. This was a moment of revelation. At least it should be. And yet, and yet we easily forget this story as the story of who we are and remember instead The Lord of the Flies. The novel of evil we remember; the true story of goodness, we forget.
We are conditioned to think that we are one step away from pure evil and that it only takes a small trigger to release it. For example, the story of Cain and Abel ends with the curious phrase:
‘Sin couches at the door; Its urge is toward you,’
And then there is the story of Noah which has God saying after the Flood, “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the inclinations of man are evil from his youth…”
And yet, Judaism and Jewish tradition reject the idea that everything and everyone is inclined to evil all the time. The inclinations of each of us can bend toward evil. But it doesn’t have to. Sin’s urge may crouch at the door, but we can walk right on by and don’t have to pick it up. To our Sages, evil is real for sure, but just because something is real is not the way we ought to define ourselves. Good is just as real and, though there are people whose evil is manifest daily and whose yetzer ha-rah – evil impulse is what defines them more than anything else, Judaism stressed and affirmed that the yetzer ha-tov – the inclination toward the good – is much more powerful. True, the evil deeds and evil people get all the press but the real world and the goodness in it far exceeds the evil in it.
We love to see the drama of evil in the same way we slow down to see a car wreck. It is almost like we are trying to affirm that people are evil by nature. And, as a colleague of mine once pointed out, we love it so much we try to manufacture it.
Jerry Springer made a career of pointing out immorality and the more violent it turned out, the better it was for him.
And yet, it doesn’t always work that way. My colleague reminded me that the “creator of the reality TV show Survivor, says he based the show on the book Lord of the Flies. He saw the success of the reality TV show with MTV’s The Real World and realized that he could play to the voyeuristic side of people wanting nothing more than to watch people turn on each other as the thin veneer covering up their evil sides was stripped away for everyone to see. Unfortunately, the producers of Survivor… ran into problems when people started to get along…”[i] In fact, when people embraced their yetzer ha-tov, they effectively killed the show because the contestants realized that helping to build a meaningful outcome far outweighed the viciousness needed to emerge victorious but isolated, alone, and ashamed.
Or consider the story that emerged from the ruins of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina:
After the storm newspapers were filled with accounts of rapes and shootings across New Orleans. Inside the Superdome, which served as the city’s largest storm shelter, some 25,000 people were packed in together, with no electricity and no water. Journalists reported two infants’ throats had been slit, and a seven-year-old had been raped and murdered and sewage flowed freely from the bathrooms.
Everyone believed it. Why? Because it fit into their Lord of the Flies idea that people are inhuman.
The only problem is that it didn’t happen. YES, there were people taking advantage of the situation to commit horrific acts against others. There is no denial of the presence of the evil inclination driving some people to act as scourge of the earth. At the same time…
What sounded like gunfire had actually been a popping relief valves on a gas tanks.
In the Superdome, a total of six people had died: four of natural causes, one from an overdose and one by suicide.
Even the police chief who bought into the Lord of Flies in the Superdome idea was forced to concede that he couldn’t point to a single officially reported rape or murder in the Superdome.
To quote a report, “There had been looting, but almost entirely by groups that had teamed up to survive. Hundreds of civilians formed rescue squads in some cases even banding with police looking for food, clothing and medicine to provide basic necessities to the survivors of the storm.
A veritable armada of boats from as far away as Texas came to save people from the rising waters.
Katrina, in short, didn’t see New Orleans overrun with self-interest and anarchy. Rather, the city was inundated with courage and charity.”
Judaism somehow always knew that people are attracted to the basest stories of what people are capable of. That is why Yom Kippur is, fundamentally, a positive day and not one of self-debasement.
We see this in our liturgy that affirms who and what we are and what we believe. Ours is not the liturgy of inbred and immovable sin. But rather the liturgy of quiet affirmation of the worth of our souls
Everyone is familiar with the Unetane Tokef prayer even if they aren’t familiar with what it is called. When I was in Rabbinic school our professor warned us that this is the part of the service where people sometimes pass out. Happily, that has never happened to anyone in any congregation I have served but, apparently it happens. ‘Who shall live and who shall die; Who by fire and who by water,’ and so forth is pretty direct language and absolutely has the effect of shaking someone to the core.
But that is only the middle of the poem. It is the beginning of the poem that is far more comforting. We read:
וּבְשׁוֹפָר גָּדוֹל יִתָּקַע.
A great shofar is sounded,
וְקוֹל דְּמָמָה דַקָּה יִשָּׁמַע..
and a small, gentle voice is heard
וּמַלְאָכִים יֵחָפֵזוּן וְחִיל וּרְעָדָה יֹאחֵזוּן
and the angels are alarmed, pangs of fear and trembling seize them…
Hear the words. The great shofar is sounded and the earth trembles. It is loud and shakes us to the bones. But even so, the angels just sit there. They are not impressed with the drama. Only after the ‘still, small voice’ does the poem tell us that the angels are aroused.
That still small voice evokes the memory of the biblical story of the prophet Elijah, who stood alone on the mountain looking for God when suddenly the Tanach tells us:
…A great and strong wind tore through the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces… but God was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake; but God was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire; but God was not in the fire. And after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard that, he wrapped his face in his cloak… and behold: God’s voice came to him.
As has been noted by so many but bears repeating, God is not in the flood, the fires, the hurricane, the moments of cataclysmic havoc, when the world trembles. God is in the in between spaces. God is in the stillness.
A midrash asks the question, why does the Ten Commandments begin with the letter aleph as in ‘Anochi’ – I am the Lord your God? It answers, because the aleph is silent and in order to pronounce it, you must inhale, inspire, make a conscious effort to bring God in and the only way to do that is to be in a literal quiet space. In the quiet response that often goes unnoticed. God is the good that is the true foundation of and it is in that good and away from the crowd that threatens God’s wrath that we find a God worthy of our worship and praise.
So, it begs the question, if people really are intrinsically good, why do we hang on The Lord of the Flies picture of people inherent evil? The answer is pure physics: loud noises get our attention.
But the loud noises those with the loud mouths won’t open our hearts and inspire us to action. Only the still, small voice we all hear in the depths of our being can do that and those are the people we ought to follow for they bring out the best in us.
I had a small taste of this this summer when, once again, I volunteered at grief camp a weekend summer camp for children who have suffered an immediate loss most often of a parent or sibling. My cabin had 7 boys all about 11 years old. Despite the fact that I was the oldest bunk buddy in camp and some of my kids started calling me ‘grandpa’ (which they meant affectionately and which I took as such) a special bond of understanding and accepting their grief was key to making this a meaningful weekend.
On Saturday night the grief work culminates in what is called the luminary ceremony where each child at camp makes a beautiful lantern of their names of their loved one which includes a picture and some words that come from their heart. A candle is placed in the jar and the jar is set afloat on the lake as a symbolic goodbye to their loved one whom the kids often never got the chance to say goodbye to. Each child would go to the waterfront and enter the dock where one of the grief chiefs was there embracing and letting each child take as much time as they needed to say their goodbye. As always, there were lots of tears. You would think that the kids would be filled with sorrow and grief after this ceremony and that they would just want to go back to the bunk and curl up, disappearing for long while. But that is not what happens.
We walked back to the cabin and one of the kids whose sister died at 21 years old and needed the human touch he sought held my hand and commented how amazing the stars looked that night. They did, indeed. The Milky Way was fully visible in its silent glory and every constellation visible to the eye was laid out in perfect splendor. The heavens were sending me a message. I asked him and the other kids in the cabin if they wanted to go to the field, lie on the grass and do some star gazing. After the emotions of the luminaries on the lake, they wanted to see the luminaries in the sky.
In a moment we were all on the field staring straight up. Kids being kids never stopped asking questions to me about space, stars, the size of the universe; you know, the kinds of questions teachers love to answer. After a short silent moment, the grieving child from Brooklyn who took my hand in his and who had never seen the stars before said, ‘I can’t believe how beautiful this is. I’ve never seen the sky.’ I didn’t want to talk away his moment of revelation but one of the other kids who was grieving the death of his father knew exactly what to say. He responded in the most loving voice, ‘It’s now time for you to start looking up.’
It is now the time of the year for us to start looking up. There is too much noise taking our attention away from the truly important things and the light is often a burning fire instead of the still, small light that brightens our souls and the souls of others. This day tells us that it is our decision to listen for that quiet voice and see the penetrating light of goodness that cannot be heard but only seen. That is the light in us all. It is the silent light and silence of each of our hearts that can always be inclined for the good. The noise in there but wisdom, goodness and love is always missing.
Today each of us begins to tell a different story. Let it be a story not of The Lord of Flies which exploits the worst impulses. Rather, learn from the story of friendship and loyalty and dedication and how much better each of us can be when we rely on each other, lean on each other and help one another to see the light that is around us all the time if we but take a moment to share it with others. Or, in the words of a colleague, ‘It is time to tell the story that emerges when we stop to hear that still small voice of the goodness that exists all around us if we just open our ears and be willing to believe in the possibilities.’
At the beginning of Alex Haley’s novel, Roots, Kunta Kinte, the main character and Alex Haley’s ancestor was lying on the dirt floor of his slave cabin on a southern plantation. The horrors of the slave-ship, the humiliation of the auction-block, have all but obliterated any memory of his native land, of his life there as a free man.
But that night, something happened as Kunta Kinte heard a woman singing, singing a song now strange to him, but irresistible. It was a song from Africa, and it awoke in him long-suppressed memories in his deepest soul. Kunta Kinte remembers that once he had a home. He remembers who he was. And he wept, in wonder and in joy.
This day the song that should stir in us is our basic worth, our basic goodness and the strength each of us has to listen to a voice so much bigger than us and so much quieter. It is the voice that tells each of us that we have a home in God and in each other, in our Jewish faith and in this world that can arouse in us a new direction where the shofar blows softly but awakens us to a life where each of us is an affirmation of the goodness of our souls.
Shanna Tova.
[i] The Goodness of Humanity – by Shalom Kantor – sermon
