Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman
  • Home
  • About
  • Writings
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Media Coverage
  • Soccer Rabbi

Emet - Truth. RH 5778

9/25/2017

0 Comments

 



A little old lady gets onto a crowded bus and stands in front of a seated young girl. Holding her hand to her chest, she says to the girl, "If you knew what I have, you would give me your seat." The girl gets up and gives up her the seat to the old lady. It is hot. The girl then takes out a fan and starts fanning herself. The woman looks up and says, "If you knew what I have, you would give me that fan." The girl gives her the fan, too.


Fifteen minutes later the woman gets up and says to the bus driver, "Stop, I want to get off here." The bus driver tells her he has to drop her at the next corner, not in the middle of the block. With her hand across her chest, she tells the driver, "If you knew what I have, you would let me off the bus right here." The bus driver pulls over and opens the door to let her out. As she's walking out of the bus, he asks, "Madam, what is it you have? "The old woman looks at him and nonchalantly replies, "Chutzpah."

...

Truth is an idea as important as any in human existence. It is as critical for human relationships as the air we breath, because without truth, there is no trust, and without trust, I can’t drop my kids off at school, or make a meeting with another person, or even buy a loaf of bread with these funny green papers in my wallet. We all rely on the truth.

And yet.

And yet at the same time, truth is impossible to assign a binary, absolute value. What one person sees as an obvious reality, another will say is a mere matter of opinion. In the parlance of our time, one person’s fact is another person’s fake news. From one perspective, one could argue that the lady on the bus lied to the bus driver three times in order to make it to the doorstep of her house without exerting herself. That would be true. It would also be true to say that she’s nothing if not honest. She does, indeed, have chutzpah.

When it comes to Judaism, and Torah, and us here now, Truth is absolutely fundamental to why we come here today. We come seeking understanding, and meaning. And not relative, subjective truth. We want God and Torah to be true in an unquestionable, unshakable way. We want to know that the Torah is true.

For starters, we’ll need to define some terms and clear up some misconceptions. Because the Torah is True, with a capital ‘T’, even when it isn’t actually true, with a lower case ‘t’. Let me explain.

There’s a handful of stories in the Torah that you’re all familiar with that have a few practical logistical problems to them, and yet, ever since you were a little bubbeleh in Hebrew school, you probably didn’t pay those problems much mind. There’s the story of Adam and Eve, in which, despite millions of scientific papers on evolution stretching back 200 years into the past, presumes that humans did not evolve from monkeys, but rather started with one couple in a garden with nothing but infinite access to fruit, not a lot of clothes, and a lot of free time on their hands. There’s the story of Noah, in which a guy was told to build a boat and save two of every kind of animal on the planet. There are, according to one scientific organization, 8.7 million different species on planet earth today. Even if we stripped out all the ones that could fly and swim and didn’t need a ride on the SS Noah, I don’t think they’d all fit on that ark. There’s the story of Moses, who talked to God in a miraculous bush that burned without being consumed, and could transform his staff into a snake, and through God’s might could turn rivers to blood and bring forth hail and split the sea in two and summon forth bread from the sky for 600,000 people and get water out of rocks.

So the question can immediately be asked- are these stories True? With a lowercase t, the answer is I dunno, but probably not. By that I mean, they might not have literally happened the way the Torah says they did.

But that doesn’t mean the Torah is a book of lies, and it doesn’t mean we should turn our backs on it in favor of something really compelling on Netflix. Netflix is great, but anyone who watched the first three seasons of West Wing and then saw the fourth and the fifth knows that you can’t just blindly put your faith in Hollywood to deliver.

The Torah is not necessarily true, lowercase t, because it isn’t meant to be. The Torah is True, with a capital T, and that is more important. What do I mean?

Here’s a story you all know. When George Washington was little child, he got a shiny new axe. To try out his axe, he went to the backyard where he saw a cherry tree, and he cut down that cherry tree. His father came home, and, seeing the tree, asked young George what he had done. To this, Washington replied “Father, I can not ____________ (tell a lie). I chopped down the cherry tree. According to the story, Washington’s father embraced him, and rejoiced that his son’s honesty was worth more than a thousand trees.

Now. Is that story true? No. After George Washington died in 1799, biographer and Protestant minister Mason Weems included the mythical story in a biography of Washington, written in 1806. The goal of the story was to illustrate to readers that that Washington’s public greatness was due to his private virtues. (Jay Richardson, George Mason University)

The story is not true with a lowercase t. But is it True, with a capital t? Does it illustrate the simple and straightforward concept, well ensconced American understandings of our first president, in  that George Washington was an honest man, full of moral virtue? Absolutely.

This issue of ‘True’ vs ‘Truth’ is the crux of the whole struggle between Liberal Judaism, including even Modern Orthodoxy, and the more fundamentalist elements of Orthodox Judaism. For the orthodox, for something to be capital T true, it must be lowercase t true as well. The earth is not 4.5 billion years old, it is 5778 years old. Dinosaur bones are not bones at all: they’re rocks, or mislabeled elephant bones. And Moses did all those things because the Torah says so. The Torah is true because God gave it to us, and we know God gave it to us because the Israelites were there to witness the exchange.

How do we know the Israelites witnessed the exchange? Because the Torah says so.

You all laughed because you see the problem. For Orthodoxy, the every word in the book must be literally true in order for the truths to be true, for the morals to be true, for the principles to be true.

And that, I would argue, is incorrect.

The stories of the Torah are true in a deeper than literal sense. They have resonance and meaning that makes it totally irrelevant whether they actually happened in exactly the way to Torah tells us. Take today’s torah portion as an example.

In it, we are told Abraham takes his son Isaac up the mountain, because God instructed him to sacrifice him as an example of Abraham’s true faith, his trust, his belief, in our God. And at the last moment, God halts the sacrifice. The story is jarring, for modern ears. In a literal sense, it’s the story of a father nearly murdering his son because voices in his head told him to. And that’s really rather disturbing.

But we as a people don’t read this story literally, because, I would argue, we are not supposed to. The truth in this story is not in the factual existence of a guy named Abraham and his son Isaac. While I’d like to think that they exist, since I mention their names every time I say the Amidah prayer, I can’t really know for sure if they did. What I can know is that our Torah wants us to understand that Abraham is a righteous man of faith, and that on Rosh Hashanah, we should see ourselves in relation to Abraham - are we true? Are we faithful? Do we place our trust in things that are eternal, and meaningful, like God? Do we put enough faith in ourselves because we were created by God? The story is True, Capital T, because it teaches eternal truths. It is not true because those animals all got on that boat.

With all that being said, the stories in the Torah are not lies. A lie, as I am defining it, is a deliberately told mistruth meant to lead an individual to believe something other than what the facts clearly demonstrate. It is not a lie for the lady on bus to say she has ‘chutzpah’, that’s an opinion. It would be a lie if she said she had an artificial leg from when she stepped on a landmine during the Revolutionary War. It isn’t a lie say that taxes in America are too high, that’s an opinion. It is a lie to say that our country pays the highest taxes in the world. We don’t. Depending on how you count it, American taxes are somewhere between the 10th highest in the world and 37th highest in the world. If something is real and compelling, the truth speaks for itself. And if you need to manipulate the facts or invent statistics about something, then it’s probably gonna resemble a steaming pile you’d find on the back forty of Joel and Karen’s ranch.

The Torah’s most important core value is truth. The Torah is a book predicated on the belief that we can peer past the veil and discern reality - that we can know God’s true will. That we invest so much belief in it, and that we push and pull and tweak its each and every word with such effort - is further evidence that we as a people believe that the Torah is true.

The Torah’s principal occupation is to apply truth in a way that regulates human behavior fairly and honestly. That act of discerning truth in order to be fair and righteous - we humans call it justice.

The Hebrew word for truth is Emet - Aleph, Mem, Tav. Aleph, you probably know, is the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Tav is the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet. And mem is the middle letter.

As Rabbi Louis Jacobs taught, The God of truth is found wherever there is truth and His absence is felt wherever there is falsehood.

As Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger would teach, that means that truth is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the Torah. Moreover, he taught
“There is no final depth or end to justice or truth. When the Torah tells us ‘Justice Justice shall you pursue, it compels us that we must go deeper, seeking out the truth even within the truth.”

The Torah is a model for us. It both stands as a document that reveals deep truths, but also demands that we be honest with others, and ourselves.

That is no small feat.

When I was 16, I got into a car accident. I rear-ended two cars making a left, pushing one of the cars into the opposite lanes of traffic. No body was killed, thank God, but my car and several others were totalled. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what happened. I suspect I wasn’t paying attention - I was fiddling with the radio or looking out the window, and I caused the accident.

But when my parents asked me what happened, I told tham a white van had blocked my view, and swung out of the lanes, leaving the two stopped cars in front of me with no time to stop. Simply put, I lied.

That day, I was dishonest. I was afraid of the truth - it wasn’t some other reckless driver that nearly killed somebody - it was me. I was responsible. But I was afraid of that truth. So I found an alternative that didn’t cast me as the irresponsible idiot teenager. But that was the truth - in that moment, that’s who I was. It took me a lot longer to come to grips with that truth, but I did. I learned that lesson every day for the next two years, as I pulled the bus pass out of my wallet and took the much longer and more inconvenient way home from school everyday. But eventually, we all must face the truth of our actions.

The High holidays are a time to be honest with ourselves and our actions. Rabbi Isaac Aboab in the 14th century wrote: “There are other matters which fall under the heading of falsehood; for example, when a man praises himself for having virtues he does not really possess.”

We are all capable of fabricating false narratives for ourselves and false images of who we wish to be, but are not. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are gut-check time- are you really this person that you’ve invented? Can we all drop the pretense of who we think we are, and be honest and true, capital T, with ourselves? As I said yesterday, will we really confront our flaws and consider who we truly wish to be? How will we go about this? Are we going to go to therapy? Are we going to apologize to a friend? Are we going to ask someone for their honest feedback? If the Torah is Truth and we are commanded to live in the Torah, then how can we not be honest with ourselves?

For us, that means we understand Torah as True, and we seek to understand the complicated moral dilemmas and complex allegories of Torah with open hearts and honest minds.

For us, it also means that we as Jews strive to seek truth and justice in every place and every time. We ask the hard questions when something doesn’t look right. We investigate the truth, and we never settle for alternate facts.

For ourselves in our personal deeds, it means taking seriously the refrains in the prayerbook that we say during these ten days of repentance, when we consider our past actions and strive to do better.

We have sinned against you -b’ chachash u’b’chazav - in denial and deceipt
We have sinned against you - b’hona’at ra - by defrauding others
We have sinned against you - b’azut metz’ach - through stubbornness.

May it be your blessing, Adonai, our God, that this year 5778 be a year for truth. That we see you, that we see Torah, that we see the world, that we see each other, that we see ourselves, in the light of truth. And let us all say, amen. Shana Tova.

0 Comments

Teshuvah with Jason - RH 5778

9/25/2017

5 Comments

 

The first time I sat and learned with Jason*, it was impressive, but nothing special. We read a text from Abraham Joshua Heschel on the path of the righteous and penitent, and how they hold up the world. Jason was clearly a bright guy, maybe smarter than me. I mean, he had understood an advanced Jewish philosophical concept in about 3 minutes, without a ton of background or even a smidgeon of Hebrew. Hell, he wasn’t even Jewish. But there wasn’t anything unique or earth-shattering about the 30 minutes we spent learning a text. So it was impressive because Jason was clearly smart and capable and well-adjusted. But lots of people are smart and capable and well-adjusted. So it was, like I said, nothing special. Other than the fact that Jason was a drug addict.

During one week this past July, I found myself at Beit Teshuvah, the ‘House of returning’, a substance abuse recovery program on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles California. They bill themselves as the only program in the world that combines 12 step recovery, psychotherapy, and Jewish text learning. They have about 120 inpatient beds, plus an outpatient program that’s roughly the same size, and they take all kinds of folks, for between 90 days and a year. Drug addicts, drunks, white-collar criminals, strong-arm robbers, ex-cons, the homeless, prostitutes, gambling addicts, people with sexual compulsion, and various permutations and combinations of any and all of the above. If you’re in a bad way; if you have seriously screwed up, if you are one hit, one deal, one bet away from the end of your literal rope, Beit Teshuvah is where you end up.

I was there to learn how the spiritual counseling team - the five rabbis and rabbinic students on staff - does what they do. To be a rabbi, I know how to do that. To work with someone in pain or in need, I can do that too. But it takes a special kind of person to work at Beit Teshuvah.

For one, the rabbinic staff there tend to swear. A lot. You never heard a rabbi say the f-word so many times as you heard Rabbi Mark Borovitz, Rabbi and Spiritual Leader of Beit Teshuvah, say the f-word, as well as the various and sundry permutations of the f-word that might facilitate the delivery of his message to someone who was in his care. At his core, Rabbi Mark calls himself ‘a con man for God’. That’s because Mark did two years in the mens correctional facility at Chino for check kiting and fraud before a rabbi led him back to seeing himself in a divine light, and then he did another 5 years in rabbinical school at the same school I went to. Mark’s gift, besides his intellect and his commitment to both his own sobriety and those who come to him seeing help, is his ability to pick out BS from a mile away. Truly, this is a gift in a place full of people who have become extremely good at lying to themselves and to everyone around them. But we’ll come back to that.

So back to Jason.

It was the second time I learned with Jason that changed my understanding of teshuvah, and of addiction, and of my own relationship to the High Holidays.

We were learning another philosophic text that Rabbi Borowitz had selected for us, and at some point, as often does in chevruta study, our conversation veered into our own lives. Jason was raised and went to a well-to-do school in the valley in Los Angeles in the eighties and nineties. So did I. His parents struggled in their marriage and divorced when he was eleven. So did mine. Jason felt tremendous pressure from a society that expects material and personal success from its educated and affluent sons and daughters. So did I.

The big difference between Jason and I was that when his father was stressed out and overwhelmed by life, he smoked methamphetamine, often leaving the pipe and the drugs out on his bed. So when Jason felt overwhelmed by life at the age of 15, it seemed logical and acceptable to him to smoke meth. And it took the pain and stress away. But of course, it is also highly addictive and completely destructive. And thus began a catastrophic and life-long battle for Jason against substance abuse that landed him back at Beit Teshuvah, at the age of 37, for the seventh time.

Seven times. Stop for a second and reflect on how you feel about that. Because, if you were like me when I stepped into Beit Teshuvah, you’re saying to yourself: wait, he went through the same treatment program six times, and it failed, and he came back for a seventh time? Why? Clearly it doesn’t work. Yeah, that’s how I felt too.

Except that that’s not an accurate understanding of addiction. Addiction is, in the words of one of the rabbis at Beit Teshuvah, a relapsing, remitting, chronic, and fatal disease. It requires ongoing treatment, and in lieu of treatment, it progresses rapidly and even suddenly, until the patient is dead.

With this understanding, let’s go back and think about what being back at Beit Teshuvah a seventh time means. In the words of Rabbi Borowitz, you’re not a failure because you’re an addict and you fell off the wagon. You’re a success. Because you came back. The failures are the ones that are still out on the street, pipe in hand or bottle in bag, hurtling towards death.

The other thing that had come up in my mind when I thought of addiction before Beit Teshuvah is weakness - the sense that an addict fell prey to a force and lost. And that because they need help they are weak.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The person that says ‘I am flawed, I have made a mistake, I am sorry, and I need help.’ ? They aren’t weak. They are strong, because they can stand in a place of honesty and truth about themselves after eons of self-delusion and finally be real.

And our tradition agrees! The Talmud in Berachot tells us -

במקום שבעלי תשובה עומדים - אין צדיקים גמורים יכולים לעמוד.

In a place where a baal teshuvah - the penitent, apologetic person - stands, even the most perfectly righteous individual cannot stand.
Think about that - the person that errs and admits it and repents and comes back! That person is holier and more exalted that a flawless, blameless, perfectly righteous man or woman.

And you know this! Because it’s Rosh Hashanah, the beginning once again of the aseret yamai ha-teshuvah, the ten days of repentance and returning! And you’re here! You’re here in strength to say - I’m a screw up. I’ve wronged people, and let myself down and erred before God, and I need help. I’m going to turn to these ancient words and this sacred community, and I’m going to lift up my mistakes and try and fix what I’ve done wrong.

We say as much in the prayers we say on the High Holidays to introduce our confession before God, when we say :

אין אנחנו עזי פנים וקשה עורף לומר לפנך צדיקים אנחנו ולא חטאנו; אבל אנחנו חטאנו
We are not so obstinate and stiff necked to say before you that we are all righteous, free from sin. We’ve all sinned.

We are the addicts and the screw ups . We are back for our seventh, or our 40th, or our 87th time. This is our rehab. Because hurting others, and hurting ourselves, through sin and lying and self-delusion and materialism and anger and hopelessness are all diseases of being human. They too are a relapsing, remitting, chronic, and fatal condition.

And this is our treatment.

So, here’s the other thing about Beit Teshuvah. I don’t want to oversimplify relapse as ‘hey, great, you’re back!’ Because that’s not accurate. Nobody wants to be in rehab. You lose your freedom. You can’t work. You can’t see your family or your kids. And no matter how much Rabbi Mark wants to bolster you for being strong enough to make this choice, there’s a lot of shame that comes with being in rehab - and particularly in the Jewish community - which is a conversation worthy of another sermon entirely. It sucks to be in rehab. It’s also an artificial solution to drug or alcohol or sex addiction, because the facility controls or restricts your access to those things artificially. You can’t live forever in Beit Teshuvah. It’s not the real world. The goal of Beit Teshuvah is to give you the skills to be clean and sober of your debilitating addictions in the outside world.

So a person who is back in treatment needs to figure out - the last time I was here, what didn’t I get? What didn’t I internalize?

We are here to work on ourselves for the next 10 days. To apologize for the mistake we made in hopes of avoiding them for the next time. To keep our tempers. To not spread hurtful gossip. To respect our parents, and our children, a little more. Mostly so that we will get catharsis and come back, renewed. But also, to spend a little time reflecting on our mistakes so that we won’t make them again. The Mishnah in Yoma 8 states:

One who says, "I will sin, and then repent, I will sin [again], and then repent," will not receive an opportunity to repent; [for one who says] "I will sin, and Yom Kippur will atone," Yom Kippur will not atone. Yom Kippur atones for transgressions between a person and God, but for a transgression against one's neighbor, Yom Kippur cannot atone, until he appeases his neighbor.

The work done in prayer at synagogue is to say and hear words that go to our hearts, so that we can put them to work when we are not praying at synagogue. If we come here, hoping it’ll make all of our flaws magically go away, we aren’t practicing Judaism. We’re just throwing pennies in a wishing well. We are here to become mindful of our errors, not so that we can nod at them silently and go right back to committing them again, but instead so that we might truly change our behavior.

This is really hard. This requires taking an honest look at yourself, and what you do well, and what you don’t do well. Being young, or old, or rich, or poor, or married, or single, or going through good times, or bad times, does not change this reality in anyway. There are no excuses. You either screwed up this year, and you’re willing to put your big boy pants on and own it, or you’re not, and you’ll be back here next year, wondering: why do I still feel bad about my relationship with my sister? Why did I still spend so much time at work, and so little time with my family? Why do I spend money on things that make me temporarily happy, instead of giving generously to others?

We’ve got to commit to serious change. How much so? Maimonides in Hilchot Teshuvah says it in the strongest possible language. “We’ve got to shout before God in pleading tears, and give tzedakah with all our strength, and put real distance between us and our sins.” According to him, we’ve got to go so far as to change our names, as if to say ‘I’m a different person - I’m not the same man or woman that did that thing.’

It’s no small thing. It’s a heavy lift. It’s real change. For the addicts at Beit Teshuvah, though, it’s life or death. I met a lot of people at Beit Teshuvah in the week I was there. They’d lost jobs, or careers, where they weren’t welcome back into the industry because of the lying and scamming they took part in while they were using. I met people who’d destroyed their marriages. I met people who only get to see their kids once a month under court ordered supervision. I met people who’s addiction drove them to commit crimes, and they lost years of their lives in miserable prisons with bleak names. Like Chino, and San Quentin, and Lompoc.

For Jason, the great fear was in the failure to internalize it. The sense that his attempt to keep up his image - of a stable, handsome, successful, likeable guy - was inevitably going to mean that his own commitment to sobriety was also equally only skin deep. Jason is good looking, and smart, and he can convince anyone that he’s “working the program”, even when he’s really lying to himself.

Everyday when I left Beit Teshuvah, I was emotionally exhausted from all of the intense conversations I had taken part in - about both the residents and about myself. I was confronting my own emotional issues and my own mistakes and feelings all week too. Every day when I left, I found myself thinking about someone I’d met there. I thought about how much I liked them and how hard it seemed they were working on themselves. Usually, I felt a little afraid for them, and what would happen to them when they left, enough that it made me cry on the way home each night.

Some of them succeed, and stay clean on the outside while living healthy, productive lives. Others fail, and fail, and come back again after a relapse. And others relapse, and don't make it back.


I’m really pulling for Jason. I want him to put aside the toxic bad habits that suck him back down into a cycle of disaster. I want him to be happy enough with the positive things in life that give long-term meaning, and ditch the things that fill the hole temporarily, but ultimately corrode who he is and who he can be. He’s smart and capable and deserving of a loving and happy life.

Jason might be in a situation of substance abuse that we might not personally be familiar with. But we’re all familiar with the problem of not really being aware of our own failings, of ignoring our flaws and papering them over as they weren’t really there. But they are there. Now is the time to address them. As our prayers tell us -
אין אנחנו עזי פנים וקשה עורף לומר לפנך צדיקים אנחנו ולא חטאנו; אבל אנחנו חטאנו
We are not so obstinate and stiff necked to say before you that we are all righteous, free from sin. We’ve all sinned.

Rehab starts today. Be the baal teshuvah - the penitent person, the master of return. I’m really pulling for you.

--  --  --  --
*Jason is not his real name - it has been changed for this sermon in order to protect his right to privacy.
5 Comments

    Divrei Torah

    A 'Dvar Torah'; literally a 'word of Torah', is an explanation of a verse or a concept from the Torah. Enjoy Rabbi Goodman's takes on the weekly Torah portion, the holidays, or a matter of Jewish ethics here.

    All work is copyrighted, but may be used with citation or attribution.

    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    September 2021
    March 2021
    September 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    October 2016
    April 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    March 2015
    October 2014
    July 2014
    April 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly