Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Rosh Hashana, 2007

by Harold M. Schulweis

Rabbi Nachman Bratzlav, the renowned 18^th Century Hasidic master of stories, called his disciples together and told them a gripping parable:

Once upon a time, a king received a shocking report about the new harvest.  “Whoever eats of this crop will become mad.”   The king then said, “Since there is no other food which is available, we must eat of the harvest, but let a few of us remember that we are mad.”  

Our task is how to keep sane in a global asylum.  The madness comes to us rolled up in the newspaper, and in the relentless reports on television and the internet.  We are bombarded with stories of lechery, mendacity, greed, sexual exploitation, conspiracy, corruption, corporate crimes.  And then, for relief, the local “News at 11:00.”  Pity the madness of the pretty, monied celebrities who — with awesome predictability — end up in jails, in rehabilitation, in tears, drunken, drugged, mocked, emaciated and suicidal. 

And the war.  A war without limits.  We sink into the blood-drenched mud of Iraq from which we cry for graceful exit.  No exodus.

Rabbi Nachman of Koslov tells a story of the stork who fell into the mud and was unable to pull out his legs.  He thought, “But I have a beak!”  He stuck the beak into the mud and his legs were freed, but now his beak was in the mud.  All forever caught in the mud.  No exit.

We are a nervous society.  Every fire, every delayed plane, every collapsed bridge, every disturbance, is introduced with a flashing sign, “ALERT!” and “Breaking News!”  … and beneath the scrolling words announce the deepening colors of warning, of impending disaster  — yellow, orange, red.

We live “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

What kind of society is this?  What manner of man is this?  What is the stuff of human nature?  Who are we?

I turn to the master of the human psyche, Sigmund Freud.  What is his analysis of our human nature?  In his Civilization and its Discontents, he writes:

“The bit of truth behind this, one so easily denied, is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love.  A powerful desire for aggression has to be considered as part of his instinctual endowment.  The result is that their neighbor is not only to them a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him — “homo homini lupus” — “man is to man a wolf.” 

Who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history?”

Who can deny Freud?  Who can doubt his conclusions of our nature, knowing what we know?  You and I lived in the 20th Century, the bloodiest century in history.  In that one century, consider the numbers: 

• 50 million people were systematically slain by other people; 
• One and a half million Armenians massacred by Ottoman Turks in the first genocide of our century;
• 6 million of our own Jews, including 1.5 million Jewish children, who never lived to their Bar Mitzvah, slain; 
• … to which we add 5 million more non-Jews, gentiles exterminated in the Holocaust;
• Under Stalin — 3 million prisoners of war, 2 million Poles, 
• 20 million Russians, all destroyed;
• Under Mao Tse Tung —  30 million Chinese destroyed;
• Under Khmer Rouge —  1.7 million killed in the fields of Cambodia.

50 million in the 20th Century.  Statistics don’t lie.  Statistics freeze our blood.  Mercifully I leave out disease and starvation from the list of mass murders, including 100,000 Kurds and Iraqis under Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party wiped out.  800,000 in Rwanda, an entire people slaughtered in 100 days.  Darfur, Hezbollah, Hamas, Jihad beheading, kidnapping, homicidal suicide.  The resurrection of anti-Semitism in Europe — “Ever Again.”   Is that not madness?   Is the human being not truly a despicable creature?

Now, if I were not a Jew, if I were of another faith, Freud’s analysis of human bestiality would not shock me or challenge me.  To the contrary, Freud would only confirm my theological dogmas and doctrines that the human being is cursed by birth, stigmatized at birth with the stain of inescapable sin, and from birth guilty of cupidity.  “Cupiditas,”  a word made popular in the Middle Ages, meant “the sin of the wolf” — an inner black hole, a hole so deep within one’s self that no amount of money, power, fame or sex can fill its emptiness. 

If I were of another faith I would escape to the Book of Revelations in the New Testament, to the Apocalypse — await the end of time, the imminent, cosmic catastrophe in which you and I will all burn in hell, except those enraptured, who have been saved because they have thrown their faith onto a supernatural redeemer, the Son of God. 

But I am a Jew.  For Judaism, Freud’s dark portrait of human nature is a body blow to our faith.  Not that evil is a stranger to Judaism or to Jews.  Our people have known the face of evil for thousands of years.  Look at the lexicon.  We Jews gave the world a “new vocabulary” —   exile, expulsion, inquisition, auto de fé, persecution, pogrom, cremation, genocide, Holocaust.  We Jews have more reason than any other to believe in original sin, to the helplessness of the sinner to extricate himself from a twisted world that can never be made straight.  But why did patriarchs, prophets, sages never succumb?  Why did Jews never resort to the doctrine of contemptus mundi and original sin, to the curious stigma, the scar of evil branded by a hot iron on our souls?  

Like no other tradition, for a believing Jew to believe in God is to believe in the moral potentiality of the human being, created in God’s image.  The two are linked, connected, for Jews: God and man, man is the shadow of God on earth.  So, for a Jew to believe in God is to believe in man, and to believe in this world that must not be abandoned. 

There was a rabbi who was tempted to escape the world of the Roman Empire because of the rottenness of civilization.  Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was disgusted with the cruelty of the Roman tyranny, boasting all of its technology, bridges, aqueducts, sports arenas.  Shimon and his son fled from the marketplace and went into a cave to bury themselves in prayer, study, in bible, in law.  For twelve years, they remained secluded.  To save the wear on their clothes, they stripped off their  garments and sat in the sand up to their necks, and prayed and studied.

News arrived that the Roman emperor had died.  Shimon bar Yochai and his son left the cave and then looked at the world outside the hole they had dug.  They found the same kind of ordinary work as before, the same cruelties, persecution.  Angry and disillusioned, whatever they cast their eyes upon was immediately burned up, so great their contempt of the world.  Then a voice from Heaven cried out to Rabbi Shimon: 

“Have you come to destroy My world?

Return to your cave!”

That voice echoes the Jewish response down the ages.  I know your anguish.  Your place is not in a cave!!  Live in the world that God has created.  Repair it, heal it, sanctify it, improve it, fix it, rebuild it.  Don’t abandon the world!  Above all, do not denigrate the human being.  Said Rabbi Jose, “When a man goes on the road, a troop of angels proclaims, ‘Make way for the image of the Holy One.’”

So, in Judaism, more than in any faith, when you demean a human being you desecrate God.  And when a human being dies, for whom is Kaddish is recited?   The Hebrew poet Agnon maintains that Kaddish is recited to comfort and console God.  When a human being dies, God cries.

I must confess that much of my life as a Jew is the battle with the “ghosts of Freud” and the despair by so many philosophers and religions — Thrasymachus, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Nietzche — that argued that man is “mean, nasty, brutish and short.” Around Yom HaShoah and “9-11,” Freud is not easily denied.  But Freud’s portrait of human nature breaks my heart — drives me faithless, hopeless, disillusioned and mad.

Something crucial is missing in Freud’s analysis of human beings.  Freud, that keen-eyed visionary,  is right with what he sees but he sees the world with one eye closed.  He paints the portrait of man only with a thick, black brush.  For Freud, human beings are wolves in sheep’s clothing.  How do you live with that pathology, that portrait of selfishness and sadism?  How do you awaken the sanity in man? How do you live in a world of Godless madness?

Do you know why or how or who gave birth to a section in Yad V’shem, what drove the first Prime Minster of the State of Israel, David Ben Gurion — who lived through the holocaust —  to establish the Garden of the Righteous of the World in 1961? 

The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem took place in 1961.  So massive, so relentless the testimony of Nazi barbarism so disillusioning, the complicity of a world to Nazism and the heartless neutrality of church and state , and the shame of human shamelessness that Ben Gurion summoned the leaders of Yad V’Shem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.  He told them “Find twenty-four non-Jews who saved Jews at the risk of their lives, and bring them to Israel.  And let them plant a tree in a row that would become the Avenue of the Righteous.”  That’s how the Garden of the Righteous was born.

Why?  Why in the midst of rebuilding Zion, and absorption of Holocaust survivors, should the Prime Minister of Israel be concerned with Christian rescuers?  Why?  To keep sanity!  Fearful of a people’s post-traumatic depression, a post-Holocaust depression so heavy that it would crush our people’s will to live and a wave of disillusionment would suffocate any spark of belief and sink Jews in the morass of cynicism and madness.   Ben Gurion sought sanity — hope.

Like Ben Gurion, I struggle to strengthen my faith and keep my moral sanity, especially, around Yom HaShoah.  Like Ben Gurion, I searched for righteous gentiles.  I need witnesses that there is a spark of human decency in the world’s caverns.  I have met many more than twenty-four non-Jewish rescuers of my people.  I met Germans, and Poles, and Bulgarians and Belgians, and I read of thousands more.  Their stories moved me to tears.  Different kinds of tears:   Not tears of bitterness or fear, but tears of gratitude and hope, tears of sanity.  You have heard some of the men and women — not of our faith — from the pulpit. 

What drives me?  The search for sanity!!  To remember that there are human beings, and to remind myself that I am a human being.

So, when I think of Freud’s portrayal, when I think of his down-grading of the human being, I grow depressed.  But then I think of Stefa Krakowska, a simple, Christian Polish peasant, who hid fourteen Jews in a farm house — hid them in latrines, in cellars and pig sties and managed to keep them alive with stolen food.  No toilet facilities, no water and no electricity — just one pail for fourteen people. 

One of the fourteen was an old Jewish woman who was dying.  She spoke to Stefa, “What will you do with my body after I die?  You can’t bury me whole, you can’t put me in a hole, for the Nazis and the Polish informers — Schmalzoniki —  will discover it and know that you are hiding others.”   That’s a question!  “How do you bury a body that isn’t there?”  The old woman died, and late at night, secretly and in stages, they buried her dismembered body, piece by piece. 

I think of Stefa, I think of the old Jewish lady, and I think of Freud.  What would Freud say of these human beings?  Does Stefa figure in his portrait of human nature?  How do the countless documented stories of nuns and priests and peasants and businessmen who risked life and limb and treasure fit into his image of human nature.  They did it… for what?  For money?  For sex?  For fame?  Freud, you’re not wrong but you did not look in all the places of human nature.

One of the right places to find goodness, decency and moral courage out of the Holocaust is in a newly published book — Diplomat Heroes, by Dr. Mordecai Paldiel of Yad V’Shem.  It further restored my faith and reinforced my sanity.  (I urge you to read it!)  The book is based on recently documented and authenticated accounts of twenty-nine non-Jewish individuals who held life and death in their hands.  Twenty-nine diplomats — not of our faith!! — from Spain and Romania and Brazil and the Vatican and Holland, stationed in Nazi-occupied Europe  — among the names are Paul Gruninger of Switzerland, Sempo Sugihara of Japan, Ho Feng Shau of China who was stationed in Vienna  (How do you imagine 18,000 Austrian Jews escaping to China?) — all non-Jews, diplomats ordered to follow the repeated commands of their countries:   “You will issue no passport, no visa, no exit to Jews.  Or else!”   But the diplomats, hearing the pleading of helpless Jewish refugees caught in the Nazi trap, risked their pensions and property and prestige and positions.  They wrote forbidden signatures on thousands of visas, stamped passports, immigration certificates.  They held in their hands a piece of paper and a seal!

In the hands of these diplomats, the prayer was inscribed: 

“Who shall live and who shall die.”

One great aristocratic diplomat, Aristides de Sousa Mendes rescued thousands of Jews, against the absolute prohibition issued by Portugal’s Antonia de Oliviera Salazar  to let Jews find refuge.  Mendes had his entire estate in Portugal confiscated, his twelve children and his wife impoverished.  In his waning years, that family ate at the table of the Jewish soup kitchen. 

Aristides de Sousa Mendes carried out one of the greatest rescue operations during the Holocaust by a single person.  For money?  For fame?  For sex?

To keep my sanity I have to learn to balance Freud’s disproportionate, denigrating view of humanity with a recognition of human goodness.  How?  You have to search hard and promulgate goodness.   Goodness is not headline.  Goodness is buried in obituary.   “The evil men do live after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.”   

But where do I find goodness?   Where?  In Hurricane Katrina?  Tsunamis?  The bridge collapse at Minneapolis?  The tragedy in the coal minds of Utah?  In “9-11” ?   In Hezbollah katyushkas destroying Northern Israel?  In the flames of Auschwitz? 

If you but sift through the ashes and the waters, fire, wreckage, dust and hysterical headline, you will find human beings, strangers, who dove into murky, cold waters to search for the entrapped; human beings who ran up the stairways of fire; our brothers and sisters in Israel who opened their homes and lives to those who last year had their homes in the North bombed by Hezbollah; and the members of kibbutzim and moshavim who are offering their fields and homes to frightened refugees fleeing from Sudanese hell in Darfur.  500 beaten Darfurian refugees absorbed by Jews with kindness, who have found safety and work.  Where?  In one place — in Israel.  Why?  For money?  For power?  For sex?

And you?  Did I not see you in the corridors of a hospital, holding the hands of the sick, or attending the house of mourning during the Shiva?  Do I not know of your blood donations to virtual strangers and kidney transplants?  Do I not know of secret loans you gave to families on the edge of bankruptcy?  Do I not know of your sacrifices or causes that uplift the fallen?   You and I know members of VBS, busy with family and the daily duties of life, who take time, energy to join VBS’ Chesed Connection, who, with Rabbi Joshua Hoffman, went to the flooded areas in Mississippi and Louisiana — hammer, saw, nails, broom and compassion — to repair the damage done to peoples’ flooded homes and their deluged lives.

How do you keep sane in a crazy world?  You find sanity in sanctity, in “Emunah” — “faith.”  But! But not “cheap faith,” not a passive faith.  Not a faith that folds its hands, rolls its eyes upward and says, “God will help, God will fix it.”   That is not faith. That is “laziness!”  “Cheap” faith is irresponsible.  Irresponsible because I look to blame someone or anyone.  Pass the buck up to God!!  Active faith replies, “The buck stops here.”  Active faith doesn’t ask tirelessly “Where is God?” without first asking, “Where am I?  Where are we?”  It does not ask “Why did God not intervene?” without first asking “Why don’t we intervene?” 

How do you protect yourself from the long, dark night of insanity?  By candles!  Slowly, step by step.  Every time you protect the impoverished uninsured, submerged.  Every time you fight for the hapless, every time you clothe the naked, every time you feed the hungry.  Every time you protest ethnic, racial or religious threats against strangers.  Every time you act out of “rachmones,”   you prove presence and goodness and strengthen sanity. Every time you have a Sabbath meal around the table!   Family life:  Light the Sabbath candles!  Bless the wine!  Share your bread!  Speak to your children, help them to find a cause that serves others and gives them meaning.  Every time you praise their idealism!  Every time you look up at your mezuzah you create an oasis of sanity in a world desiccated, drained of hope. 

Friends, look:  We Jews have been there before.  There was hate and savagery — we did not become insane with hate of the world.  There was “churban,” once, twice.  We did not resign from the world.   We did not climb out of this world and into the cave in the sky.  We did not opt out of history.  We came back again and again — from Egypt and from Babylonia and from Rome and from Spain; from Nazism, Fascism, Communism.  We rebuilt synagogues and orphan homes and hospitals and homes for the aging, and we rebuilt Zion.   And we are here, and our children and grandchildren.  And we study, pray, sing and dance.  There is sanity in sanctity. 

Two people meet.  One declares himself a pessimist, the other declares himself an optimist.  The pessimist looks at his friend and says, “If you are an optimist, why are you so glum?  Why is your face so dark and drawn?”  The optimist sighs, “Do you think it is easy to be an optimist?” 

It is not easy , and it’s not easy to hope in a crazed universe.   But our ancestors did it — and so can we!  

“Sanity” and “SanL’Shana Tova. For a year of goodness and sanity in the world, and in us.

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