KOL NIDRE 5766

It is not up to us to complete the work, but we are not free to neglect it: 

This year I traveled a long way

to view the silence of my city.

A baby calms down when you rock it, a

City calms down

From the distance. I dwelled in longing. I

Played the

Hopscotch

Of the four strict square of Yehuda ha-Levi:

My heart. Myself. East. West.

I heard bells ringing in the religions of time,

But the wailing that I heard inside me

Has always been from my Yehudean Desert.

Yehuda Amichai, “Hashanah nasati harchek…” (Jerusalem 67)

Sabbatical afforded me the time, and the focus, to travel a long way and in different directions, to play the hopscotch of my heart and myself, as an American Jew at camp or in Israel or in a church social hall in the mountains of Western Maryland.  But in the end, like the poet, what I heard and what I learned came from deep inside myself. As Dorothy learns from the Wizard of Oz, “if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard.”  When we travel to far-off place and try new things, the only souvenirs we can really take home are those implanted in our hearts.

And so my sabbatical lessons cannot be easily translated, or transferred to you. What I discovered about my love of music, or how I learned to draw, gave me fulfillment because they resonate with who I am, with my own life story.

Mordecai Kaplan once wrote, “Fundamentally our lives are what we make them…In the biblical story of Creation man is represented as a reflection of Divinity. That fact makes him in part the architect or artist of his own life.”  (Religion of Ethical Nationhood, p.109)

And yet, there are overarching themes to the idea of sabbatical that I do want to share, as a way of encouraging us all to find a Shabbaton, a time and place of peace and respite.

One goal was to do things I never get to do. Read. Draw. Voice lessons, But my dearest goal was to do something with my hands, to help in ways I never get to help. That led me to Cumberland, MD, a week that stands out from all my experiences.

And the main lesson that I drew from every pursuit, was the importance of time.

Amichai writes:

 “pa’amonim metzaltzelim bedatot hazman”—

I heard bells ringing in the religions of time.

But the wailing that I heard inside me

Has always been from my Yehudean Desert.

Time clocks, billing time, schedules and appointments,

“Time is money.” We talk about time as a commodity, as a thing to be used, wasted, killed.

In Amichai’s words, the bells ring to mark sacred time.

But when I read that verse, I was struck by the way we make time itself into a religion, the way time itself oppresses us, turning us into individuals crying in our own deserts.

There is a story of Evans Pritchard, an anthropologist who studied an African tribe. He made observations of their culture and religious practices, their habits and customs. Before he left, he asked if they had any questions for him. One man asked, “What do you call that god on your wrist? You consult it every time you have to make a decision.”

On Yom Kippur, we feel more keenly than any other day of the year, the limited time allotted to each of us.

 “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” says the Psalm (90:12) How do we respect the precious time that we have, without becoming a slave to time? I found inspiration and instruction from the sage advice of Pirke Avot.

Rabbi Tarfon was known to say:

The day is short and the work is great. The workers are lazy and the pay is good, and the boss is demanding!

He also said:

It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.

(Avot 2:16)

We all have deadlines that we have to meet, bosses who are anxious. Work has to be done. How can we really believe that we “don’t have to finish the work?”

This is such a familiar quotation in Jewish literature, one that has been turned into song, and is basically the motto of most teenage Jewish youth groups. I have often thought of Rabbi Tarfon’s adage as a call to “do my part.”

The day is short and the work is great.  It is overwhelming to consider all the work to be done in the world. In this past year, we have witnessed horrific destruction, genocides and tsunamis, war and famine, in Indonesia and New Orleans, in Darfur and Iraq, among the Jewish settlers of Gaza and the Palestinians of the refugee camps. In our own country, we worry about poverty and hunger, about health care for the uninsured and quality nursing care for our parents, about racism and homophobia that divide and polarize our citizens. We have much to protest, many ways to volunteer, many causes that demand our money and our time. How can we choose? What impact can one person have?

But Rabbi Tarfon promises us: It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.  Don’t get overwhelmed by the list, just jump in somewhere and start working.  I have often been comforted by Rabbi Tarfon’s simultaneous urging and assuaging us, to do as much work as we possibly can in this life.

But in the context of sabbatical, I have come to hear Rabbi Tarfon’s words differently this year. With six months to spend, I could have felt obliged to fill every moment of every day with a new experience or produced a great new work. But I chose not to. I decided to focus my attention on doing one thing at a time. That in itself was a pleasure, but I was afraid that once I returned, in losing that open-ended time, I would lose that gift of focus. And toward the end of the six months, it all came together for me, thanks to Rabbi Tarfon.

It started on a warm Monday morning in August, the first day of work in our week-long sojourn in Cumberland, Maryland. Twenty-three of us, 11 parents and 12 kids from age 11 to 20, arrived at the work site run by the Interfaith Consortium of Cumberland, bursting with energy. We had visions of building homes, of learning new skills, of giving every ounce of our beings to this important work. But we spent much of that morning waiting:  waiting for an assignment, waiting for materials to arrive, waiting for directions, waiting to use the saw or the drill, waiting once we discovered that the wall we were supposed to paint was so badly rotted that painting was the least of our concerns. By the end of the day, which came way to early for us, at 1 p.m., when we stopped for lunch, many were frustrated and annoyed. Why had we wasted so much time? Couldn’t it have been organized better? Why weren’t the materials ready for us? Weren’t there too many people working at each site? And why did we need to stop working when we had barely gotten started?

We were filled with righteous indignation. After all, we only had a week to give. We had come with enthusiasm and smarts. The adults were competent in various fields, and accustomed to solving problems. The kids were bored. We saw ourselves as valuable contributors to the enterprise, and our time and skills were being wasted.

We have all been in this situation. We invest so much in making our “time” worthwhile, that we become annoyed and frustrated when our time is “wasted.” Not only our valuable time. We worry about our children being bored, not getting the most out of an experience. Human beings are endowed with a brain and we pride ourselves on the power of critical thinking. Why not apply that to a situation that is lacking?

As it often turns out, things at the Consortium were not what they seemed. We learned that the project had suffered a setback three weeks before, when the foreman suddenly walked out. Without a foreman to organize the work and provide the materials, Cathy, the executive director, had to do the work of two people. And what she needed at that moment, were some helping hands, not well-meaning suggestions and complaints. After all, she had been doing this work for years, managing a different group every week. She was also responsible for supervising the two inmates she picked up from the federal penitentiary every day. Andre and JR, whom we came to know and respect, were doing their community service and getting on-the-job training, by working on these sites all summer. Even the two inmates knew more about what needed to be done than these visitors from the Northeast. What Cathy needed was carpentry and building. Fortunately, one of the adults had experience, and quietly, without complaint, set us to work.

Was it wrong for us to complain, or to indulge in problem-solving? It certainly was in character. We Jews are after all, still the Children of Israel. Our story is one of witnessing miraculous events and then complaining about them. In the Torah, the Israelites are called “Am keshei oref,” a stiff-necked people. I can just imagine the Israelites approaching Moses, “what are you wasting our time for? Either take us to the Land of Israel, or bring us back to Egypt. You are a lousy tour guide.” In our time-obsessed culture, we can become so concerned with using our time productively, that we lose sight of our goal.  In Cumberland, we momentarily forgot the purpose of our visit—to be helping hands—and instead, thought we were there for our own benefit. As Ecclesisastes taught so simply, “There is a time for every purpose—a time to build up and a time to tear down.” Unfortunately, too often our critical faculties are employed to tear down.

On the second day, we all got a second chance. While some folks stayed behind to pick up where we had left off the day before, a group of us reluctantly left Cumberland to deliver a truckload of food to be packed and picked up by folks in West Virginia. These people participate in the Consortium’s SHIP program, a partnership between the recipients and the food banks. The Consortium delivers food once a month to a distribution point, where donated goods end up in individual baskets. In West Virginia, we worked side-by-side with poor women who were doing their volunteer share in order to receive a monthly basket of food. Though this work seemed less compelling, and certainly less exciting than using power tools, and though it meant we were doing the most menial tasks of unloading the truck in an assembly line, carrying boxes, emptying cartons, and breaking them down, we found real meaning in the work.

Many of us were tempted to complain about the food we were delivering. On this trip, we unloaded an appalling number of boxes containing the least healthy food we could imagine:  pop-tarts and pie crusts, candy bars and cake mix. We were tempted to protest, to opt out, to demonstrate our indignation that we couldn’t bring fresh fruit and vegetables. And later, some of us asked why these were the choices, and learned a great deal about the complexity of the food bank system, how it relies on the “good will” of the manufacturers, like Nabisco and Hershey, and Kelloggs, and responds, in part, to the requests of the recipients, who stopped Cathy before we left and insisted that they preferred sugar cereals next time. We had good questions, and were not completely satisfied with the answers. But in the end, our work was necessary and it was helpful. And if we have a complaint with the system, we realized, let’s take it to those in charge, not the driver of the truck.

By the end of the week, we had learned a great deal about the realities of poverty. By the end of the week, we had all found redemption in unloading cartons of food. By the end of the week, we had recognized just how important our work was, and how unimportant our complaints were. The skills that we thought we brought, intelligence, efficiency, and a take-charge attitude, needed to be set aside, at least temporarily, for the good of the project. But other skills emerged that took us all by surprise.

First, we brought the good sense not to try to run things. We brought our ability to be followers, taking orders, hauling boxes, carrying tools.

Second, we brought our good cheer, to keep everyone’s spirits up despite the snafus. The kids demonstrated this by pulling out a Frisbee and having some fun when work was slow.

Third, we brought acceptance and generosity. One of the most inspiring moments of the week was when there were too many people on one job, the kids would look up every once in a while from using the beloved power tools, turn to someone else and say, “I’ve been doing this for a while. Would you like to take over?”

On our final day, we looked at what we had accomplished.

We all went to Cumberland with enthusiasm and commitment, prepared to “repair the world.” We didn’t repair the world, but we repaired a few floors.

We didn’t build any houses, but we made a rotting home more stable.

Not one of the places we worked on was finished when we left.

And we thought of Rabbi’s Tarfon’s words:

It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.

Whether we complete the work or not, whether we built an entire house or tore apart a single porch, doesn’t really matter, says Rabbi Tarfon. By being present and doing the work that is called for in the moment, we answer the call.

Knowledge of the preciousness of our time need not press us to do more, go more places, see more things. It is the awareness of our lives, not the living, that made my sabbatical so rich. That awareness arose from respecting time itself, from giving myself a shabbaton, time to rest my body and my mind, so that I could truly appreciate the blessings of my life. I will forever be grateful for the time that you graciously granted me, and now that I am back in the whirlwind of my work, I will do my best to find that time, to make the Shabbat a practice of patience, reflection, and acceptance every week.

On my sabbatical, I learned a different way to approach the minutes of my day. I learned to slow down and pay attention to what I’m doing, even if it’s unloading a truck full of pop tarts, or appreciating the beauty in the shadows of the trees as they cross the road. I discovered that things that I had once thought so important really didn’t require a lot of my time. I realized that some questions require a short answer, and others a more involved explanation. In the end, it is up to me to pay attention and to choose. Living a rich life depends less on how many things we accomplish, and more on what we choose to do well.

On his way to the bet midrash, Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev saw a man racing across the market square. He ran so fast that his coattails and tzitzit flapped behind him. In one hand he clutched a tattered briefcase; the other hand was clamped on top of his hat to keep it from flying off his head. As the man ran past, Reb Levi Yitzchak called to him. The man stopped for a moment in deference to the rebbe, and greeted him between gulps of air.

“Where are you running to so swiftly?” the rebbe asked.

“What do you mean, Rebbe?” the man said sharply, making no attempt to hide his displeasure at having to make this detour. “I am earning my living, running after my livelihood. There are opportunities for success ahead of me, and if I don’t race after them they will escape me.”

 And how do you know,” the rebbe asked, “that these opportunities lie before you? Perhaps you are racing right by them? Or even worse, perhaps they are behind you and you are running away from them?”

 The man simply stared at the rebbe uncomprehendingly.

“Listen, my friend,” Reb Levi Yitzchak said, “I am not saying you should not earn a living. I am only worried that in your obsession with earning you are missing out on the living.”

May we each appreciate the time that has been given us is a gift, and may we learn to assess our days, that we may attain a heart of wisdom.