Life as a Jew is A Process of Becoming Known and Knowing Oneself
Rosh Hashanah Evening Sermon 5765 (2004) by Rabbi Julie Schwartz
The characters are Helen Keller as a deaf and blind 12 year old girl and her teacher, Annie Sullivan who is engaged in the well known struggle to teach Helen a means to communicate. Annie is using an alphabet shaped by her fingers which she then places in Helen's hand. Helen has yet to recognize that these finger shapes have a larger meaning.
This selection is from Act III of "The Miracle Worker" by William Gibson.
The stage is totally dark, until we see Annie and Helen silhouetted on the bed in the garden house. Annie's voice is audible, very patient, and worn; it has been saying this for a long time.
Annie: Water, Helen. This is water. WATER. It has a name.
(A silence, then)
Egg, EGG, It has a name the name stands for the thing. Oh, it's so simple, simple as birth, to explain.
There's only one way out, for you, and it's language. To learn that your fingers can talk. And say anything, anything you can name. This is mug. Mug MUG Helen, it has a name. It has a name.
We listen to her words once again:
It has a name, Helen, it has a name
That key piece of information, that each item we encounter, every situation we meet, and every individual who enters our world has a NAME, that is the first and most monumental learning of our human existence. We celebrate with our community as we formally pronounce the prayers that link a name with a new life. We thrill as an infant is able to name the dear ones who are adoring family and friends. We hold our breath as a young man or young woman steps up to the Torah at the dramatic moment and the cantor calls out the individual's name and the Torah blessing is chanted. And we hold one another's hand - figuratively or actually - as the yarzheit list of names is read; the solemn recitation of loved ones that takes us from one generation to the next.
It is so simple - having a name, knowing a name, calling upon another by name - all of these actions move us from being mere creatures into being unique individuals. Can you remember the first time that you met another child who had a name similar to yours or even the audacity to have the very same name as your own?! While it may have been a comical surprise, there is also a sense of deception or danger that is attached to such experiences. Who took my name? Have they taken over my identity? And in our modern day, the newest and most underhanded and hurtful of all crimes is just that: identity theft. With the correct computer keystrokes and the magical combination of information, another person can hijack a name and in so doing, wreak havoc on a life.
But importantly, when we like Helen Keller realize that there are names for each of us, when we know another by name and so relate to that individual personally, we move from one realm of relationship to another: we move from being strangers to being known persons. Interestingly there is no obvious noun that is the antonym for stranger - rather there are a whole host of words that indicate some degree of known-ness. We move from being strangers to acquaintances, to friends, to neighbors, to co-workers, to colleagues, to intimates. We have an entire world of relatedness ahead of us once we have passed from the cold, dark territory of the stranger.
Indeed, the world of the stranger is a recurring theme in our Torah and in the Jewish texts that grow from her. We have heard the warning phrase calling to us from the books of the Bible: Remember the stranger, Do not harm the stranger, Care for the stranger, Do not oppress the stranger and all because: You were strangers in the land of Egypt. Our corpus of caring regularly returns to our own communal experience as those who were the strangers and who know that place. We, who have lived as strangers, are expected to have no difficulty in understanding just how important it is to prevent that from being the lot of any other people. Interesting isn't it, that the history of our lives as strangers is the same history of our lives as slaves in Egypt. Once the name of our father Joseph is forgotten by the new Pharoah, and the land is ruled by someone who did not know our ancestor, we then lose our names in that foreign land and we become the slaves. Strangers and slaves are intertwined people. There is an inter-relationship between estrangement and enslavement. Play with this idea with me. When I do not know anyone and when no-one knows who I am, when I cannot count on anyone caring to recognize me or acknowledge me or personally relate to me then I begin to feel powerless. That sense of powerlessness contributes as well to a feeling that others have the power to control me, to take away my ability to chart my own course or to determine my own actions. On the one hand, I may have an immediate sense of freedom that comes from being unknown. Like the Invisible Man, I can move about without concern that others will make demands of me or even be concerned about me. I know many rabbis who yearn for such anonymity and hide under pseudonyms during their vacations so that they might participate in a Shabbat service without being asked to "rabbi" for an entire morning. But unlike the Invisible Man, the anonymous rabbi can return to a known place, a place where his or her name is used for good and for bad, and most wonderfully for the opportunity to serve the Jewish people. That Invisible Man, that nameless one is ultimately enslaved by his lack of perceived identity. Without a way to be engaged by others, he has no rights, no access, no future. Without a name we are slaves once again.
Our charge as Jews is to earn the crown of a good name, to put down the mark of the stranger to find meaning, honor in the name that we have been given by our birth and earned by our lives. But we spend so very much time lost as strangers and in struggles to know the depth meanings of our names. Indeed we shrink from calling ourselves to accountability and we avoid the messy challenge of being in a personal, named relationship with ourselves, with our community, with our God. Others say to us and we perhaps to them, "Don't be a stranger" but are we the ones who are strangers to ourselves? Have we met ourselves and named ourselves and do we know ourselves?
How wonderful is the Hebrew language! In fact, it is the musical beauty of Hebrew poetry that drew me into my love of Jewish texts. And one of the most lovely ways of our sacred language is her habit of taking one word's meaning and twisting it into another understanding. Such is the journey of the Hebrew word for strangers, Gerim. In the Biblical story of the Exodus, the gerim are us - we are the gerim, the strangers. That is the very wording for all of the commandments that I have listed concerning our behaviors toward strangers, gerim. But then in Rabbinic Hebrew the meaning of gerim changes and the term gerim becomes turned almost inside out. Gerim moves from meaning strangers to meaning converts. A ger is one who has moved from being a stranger to the community into one who chooses to join the community. A ger is one who we once did not know and who now knows us and is known to us even more closely than those who may have been born members of the community. The term is enlarged to include the word tzedek, a ger tzedek - one who chooses this new name and in doing so is a model of righteousness. Now we come to see that our commandment to care for the stranger is transformed into a commandment to care for the convert. Our tradition moves us to recognize that joining a family, becoming adopted into a new tribe is a journey of taking on a new name, a new identity, a new future.
It is in that transformative process by which a stranger becomes a member of the family that we can each renew and rejoin our Jewish family. We modern Jews do not actively proselytize and we intentionally live with respect towards those of the many different faiths within our diverse American culture. We do not engage in the pursuit of others with other beliefs and attempt to tell them that our way is their only course or that our beliefs are their only hope. We live in a society that has given us honor as Jews and we return that honor to those of differing religions. But we do regularly have individuals join our Jewish family. Some come to us as they pledge their love in marriage and enlarge that covenant to include the covenant of a shared religious faith. Some come to us after years of living with extended Jewish families and practicing Judaism as their de facto faith. Some become loving supporters of Jewish families and while they may never formally join the Jewish community, they too have cast their lot with the Jewish people because they have so merged their lives with Jewish people. Some come to us after years of seeking for a spiritual home and finding that Judaism is the place that they know with certainty is their true home. Without commercials, without coercion, and sometimes, sadly, without enough love and support, people find their way to Judaism and their names are changed. They search through the bible and through naming dictionaries, enjoying the unusual opportunity to re-name themselves, to choose the way that others will come to know them. Our sages have taught that gerim are most precious to us because they help us to know ourselves. In fact, gerim help us to refocus, to remember what is beautiful and meaningful in our faith as they hold up a mirror to our collective self-image and say, see how good and lovely this people is, let us all join together.
Recently I invited members of the congregation to join me in this process of helping strangers become brothers and sisters. We will begin in November a class designed to prepare willing and able congregants to join gerim on their journey into Judaism. We will build into our synagogue structure a corps of lay people who can support, teach, and share with Jews in training. Rather than have our potential gerim remain dependant solely upon a class and upon a rabbi, we will formally provide them with community and ensure that they feel welcomed and shepherded into this magnificent and complicated and inspiring family we call Judaism. And if that brief description has now piqued your interest in joining this class, please call the office within the next week because we have just a few spaces left in the program.
But that is the process for those who are officially gerim, those who have officially joined the Jewish community. As I have already taught this year in Confirmation class, in modern America today, all of us are gerim of a sort, all of us are Jews by choice. We can be select to be strangers to the community. We can opt out, drop out, disappear, let it slip away. Choosing to come to services on the Holy Days demonstrates that we have made a Jewish connection and that we have some inclination to stay in touch with our faith. And then it requires from us another choice and then another. Each time we act Jewish, we eat Jewish, we think Jewish, we feel Jewish, we are marking ourselves as members of a religion that no longer has the legal or even the communal ability to choose us, to control us. We can all be gerim in the way that Bible uses the word - we can all be strangers to Judaism and find it a tradition which no longer embraces us as we no longer embrace it. We can, each of us, be estranged from our people - we can actually give up our family bonds, cease to call ourselves related to one another and without any formal court proceedings renounce our relationship. Or as this holiday period begins, we can be gerim who choose each and every day to be Jewish. What a remarkable opportunity. Every morning I can arise and determine the way that I will be Jewish, the ways that I will live out my chosen identity as a Jew. What an enormous responsibility. We are truly among the first generations in history that has had this opportunity and this responsibility. I tell you personally that it is through the inspiration of those who come to Judaism without any ties by birth, it is through the journeys that I take with those who choose to go through the formal conversion process with me - these people are my regular reminders of the enormity of my daily choice. Sometimes those who are born Jews find that those who choose Judaism actually make them feel ashamed. This twinge of discomfort comes from the reality that those who are opening brand new doors to our faith are even more able and comfortable speaking about everything that is powerful and meaningful and essential in Judaism. And we who are Jews by accident, Jews by birth may have become cynical, less excited, less energized by our daily choice to be Jews. I am thankful for our gerim - those who have made themselves Jewish by process. I pray that such optimism and willful embrace will reach each of us as we face the challenge to remain known by the name Jew.
There are so many ways to be lost in this world. I share with you my husband's and my fears this summer as we put two children who are no longer really children on an airplane alone to travel to Prague on a life changing summer tour that included seeing the extermination camps of Poland and then the renewal of Israel. Aside from the brief commercial that every child in this congregation MUST go to Israel - there is no excuse and there is no reason to fear that outweighs the benefit of knowing Israel personally. Aside from that word, I share with you our truest fear - that our kids would lose their passports en route and then they would be without their names - their personal names, their family names, their country's name. They would be lost, at least by paper. Giving full credit to them and their capabilities and with some relief to us, they are here, they lost no passports and they returned along with other teens from our congregation from a transformative trip to Israel which has the potential to ensure that our children will choose their Jewish identity with pride and ease for the rest of their lives.
But beyond passports, we can each be lost in this world through the pain of our lives, through the travail of our journeys. I think about the moments when we feel most lost and estranged from one another - times of grief and loss. It is at that moment when a loved one dies and we cannot imagine how we will even lift our heads again that we human creatures feel at our most estranged. Loving arms may embrace us, kind words may be spoken but the isolation of the loss can leave us feeling as though we have left all that is familiar and known. I go back again and again to the liturgy that our sages have constructed for us and see the brilliance in their selection of the 23rd Psalm as the ultimate source of recovery. God is my shepherd, I shall not want, God's rod and staff comfort me. Its words paint a picture of God standing as the shepherd for us and providing us with the most basic of psychic needs - a sense of direction. There is God, holding a staff up high so that we can see that there is a way ahead of us. There is God saying, I will be with you and I will care for you but most importantly, I know how to lead you out of this terrifying and strange place. Lean against my staff, my rod, lean against me and I will help you find a way. I will help you come to know yourself again. The 23rd Psalm never says that you will feel better soon - that would be cruel and untrue. The 23rd Psalm never says that you deserve this pain or that you should try harder to overcome it - that would be even more than cruel and untrue. Rather the 23rd Psalm teaches us that even in this place that is sadly part of our human existence and sadly a place that strips us of the identity that we had known before the loss, that even in this place, God will surely guide us, shepherd us slowly and deliberately out to a way of knowing ourselves once again.
But while the words of the 23rd Psalm may be in our prayer books and we may even find ourselves reciting them at such difficult times, how do we know that we are moving forward? What keeps us from feeling like strangers during all of the times when we cannot see God's leadership, when our faith is unsure or our beliefs are shifting? And what about the smaller moments when we simply feel - without any clearly precipitating factors, that we are all alone, that no matter our name or our connections, that we are all by ourselves?
At such times, we are told to open our eyes and look at another of our fellow creatures. Indeed look at someone who looks nothing like you - look all around! We are gathered here in a congregation, in community because by being together we can reassure one another that we are never truly strangers, we have simply not yet found the unspoken, unnamed way that we are most essentially related. Because Judaism tells us that we are more than a religion that we are all meant to be family, we will never be without kin. Rather we are expected to be involved in a most wonderful life long journey of finding our family, of uncovering the ways that we are known to one another even without ever consciously knowing the other's name. My tradition commands me to look into another's eyes and see the presence of my Creator there. And since I see God in your likeness then I know we are related. And then I must take the next step to understand the ways that we can truly be in relationship with each other. There is a Chassidic teaching that states, "Each and every soul from the house of Israel has within him or her something from Moses, a rooted-ness from the root of the soul of Moses." Each of us possesses something from father Moses and then of course that means from those even before Moses, from Joseph and Jacob and Rachel and Leah, from Isaac and Rebecca, from Sarah and Abraham - and then all the way back to Adam and Eve. We are all finally, wonderfully family. We have reasons to respect one another - we have an impressive family tree and traditions. We have reasons to help one another - we have struggled and sinned and reach for wholeness. We have reasons to always know one another - we are mishpachah and that is our comfort and our challenge and our truth. Judaism's teachings always lead us back to the same core - we need never be strangers when we remember that we have never been strangers. Thus we are always in the process of coming to be known to each other. Our tradition inspires us to reach out our hand and say, you are my brother, you are my sister, let us walk on this journey together.