Inside Out: Choosing a Meaningful Life -- by Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins (Sydney -- Rosh Hashanah, 5770)
[Comment: Traditional thought and wisdom has value regardless of one's faith and whether one has any “faith”. PmR]
Inside Out: Choosing a Meaningful Life
(sermon) by Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins
Sydney
Rosh Hashanah, 5770
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, as our common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for,” writes Vladimir Nabokov. Elaborating on this point in his challenging book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker notes that of all animals, it is only the human who has this awareness of the abyss for which we are heading, calling our existential paradox the condition of “individuality within finitude”. He writes that “man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this self-consciousness, gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature.” Thousands of years ago, the authors of Psalms knew this well: “what is man that you have been mindful of him, mortal man that You have taken note of him?” it says in one place (Psalm 8). Yet, in the only Psalm attributed to Moses, he reflects upon the human condition and writes, “you return man back to dust” (Psalm 90).
The rabbis reflected this contradiction when they said humans are in some ways like animals and in others like the ministering angels. We eat, procreate, excrete and die like animals, yet we speak, perceive and understand like the ministering angels. So human, so difficult: to be able to soar with our consciousness yet always to know our time on earth is limited and brief. As Moses writes in his Psalm, “A thousand years in Your sight, God, are as a watch in the night.” The question of how to deal with our brief time on earth lies at the heart of this day.
Many do not realise it, but according to the rabbinic tradition this first day of Rosh Hashanah is not as we say the birthday of the world, or the anniversary of creation, but more specifically the sixth day of creation, the day in which human was created in “the image of God”, with the “breath of life” animating the earth from which we come. The story goes that only hours after being placed in the Garden of Eden did we eat of the fruit – not an apple – of the tree of “knowledge of good and evil” leading us to the curse “By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat until you return to the ground for from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” And then we are exiled from the Garden to this life.
Creation, followed by exile. This is the human condition, and it is doubtful that there is a person who does not feel a sense of distance or alienation from another human being - a parent who has been unfair, a child who has been rebellious, a partner who has grown in a different direction, a friend who has disappointed, a fellow worker who has misunderstood. It is even more doubtful that there is a human being who does not at times have a sense of alienation from their own core being. How clever of our ancient sages to establish this first day of Tishrei as the anniversary of the sixth day of creation, the creation of Adam, our prototype. This is the day in which we confront our exile.
The rabbis also gave us a process through which we can begin to deal with our existential crisis. They called his day Yom HaZikaron - the Day of Remembrance and also Yom HaDin - Judgement Day. They established it as the opening of a ten day period known as the Aseret Yamei Teshuvah - the ten days of repentance, or the Yamim Noraim, the days of awe. They set the tone of it through magnificent liturgy, such as the powerful prayer Unetaneh Tokef, with which we open and close these ten days. That prayer declares: “This day is awesome and full of dread.”
It is awesome in the way that we come together, in beautified synagogues, among relations and friends and family with whom we may not have connected since the year past, hearing beautiful music and the stirring poetry of prayer.
It is full of dread in that it confronts us not like other new year’s celebrations at the end of a secular year but with its intent for a fearless accounting of all our deeds. Unetaneh Tokef says that on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die. The proverbial Book of Life, that holds our future, does not exist in some place out there called heaven ruled by a parental figure called God; rather, that book exists “in here”, in our hearts and minds and deeds. The Book of Life contains “The Book of Remembrance” which each of us has signed by our deeds. However, what has come before influences but does not determine what will come. We remember the past to take responsibility for the future.
Imagine that everything we have ever said or done is actually retained in this magnificent mind each of us has, much in the way that data can be recovered from the hard disc of the computer even after it has been “erased” or “deleted.” This is after all Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance. How does it feel to take what in the 12-step tradition is called a “fearless moral accounting.” What of this day being Yom HaDin, Judgment Day, an opportunity to sit in strict moral judgment of all we have ever said and done?
The allegorical story of that sixth day of creation encapsulates all this tension with which we live: awareness of our highest capabilities and our lowest falls, combined with the awareness of our own mortality. Our prototype, Adam, established our parameters: we have knowledge of good and evil and the freedom to choose either. You have the freedom to be a mensch or a Madoff.
On that sixth day of creation, after having eaten from the tree of knowledge, God calls to Adam: “Ayekha?” – where are you? And Adam replies, “I heard the sound of You and I was afraid so I hid.” This day is awesome - we hear God call. This day is full of dread - we hear God call: “Ayekha? Where are you?” And our reply can no longer be “I was afraid, and so I hid.” If we really intend to make this Rosh Hashanah a new day of a new year of a new life then: no more, “I was afraid and so I hid.”
So no more hiding. No more hiding from our own mortality, pretending that we and our resources are infinite, that we can produce and consume without taking responsibility for our actions. No more hiding behind the horrible things that happen out there in this world. There will always be things that are unfair and unjust, from natural disasters to illness to people wronging us – but we cannot hide behind those misfortunes to justify our poor action or behaviour. We must take full responsibility for who we are and what we do. We must not hide anymore.
No more hiding behind the excuse that we do not believe in God to avoid the hard work it is to be human. You may believe. You may not. If you do, then engage with the process you should already understand with that belief. If you do not, then substitute the word “higher self” or “life” or “higher consciousness” and allow the teachings and prayers of our tradition to work for you in that way. Allow the process to work for you.
Unetaneh Tokef sets up the process of how to live fully human, how to deal with our existential crisis. It is teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah that “annul the severity of the decree.” What does this mean, the severity of the decree? The decree will not change: we will die. The question really becomes how will you live?
When the moment of death comes will you know that you have lived life to your fullest and best potential? Will you have responded to the call of your higher self? In reality, few of us will get to the extreme of being a Madoff, just as few of us will always be a mensch. But all of us will stumble along, doing right and wrong, doing wonderful things at times and at others causing harm - sometimes intentionally, most often inadvertently. To live life with meaning we must begin living it from the inside out – taking full responsibility at all times for our words and our deeds, striving always to improve our intellectual, emotional and spiritual being.
Tefillah is the first step of doing that. Taken literally, tefillah means prayer, but it also means self judgement and criticism. Tefillah is not easy, but it is the only way for personal growth. It can be achieved in so many ways – as one gains in knowledge, both in the beautiful Hebrew and in the multi-layered metaphoric meaning of traditional prayer, one understands the power of “tefillah”. Tefillah includes meditative practice. It can be reciting a mantra, such as the first six words of the Shema, or any other passage from our collected Scripture and liturgy. It can be a visual focus on an object like the “Shiviti” or a candle flame. It can be simply observing one’s breath. Tefillah is the time that we take for honest self-reflection, without which we have no hope for true grounding, balance, focus or purpose. We speak about the meaning of life, as if it exists somewhere “out there”, yet few of us take the time to search for it “in here”. If we really are searching for personal transformation and life’s meaning, if we really intend to be fully living and responsible human beings, we must take this personal time out, this time of tefillah. This practice will enable us as Moses says in his Psalm, “to acquire a heart of wisdom.”
Teshuvah and tzedakah contain further insights into what it means to live as a fully responsible human being, and those points I will address over these ten days. Suffice it to say that even with meditative tefillah, even as we get more grounded and balanced, more clear about our focus and purpose, we will continue to fall short of our goals, we will continue to make mistakes, we will continue to hurt others, we will continue to feel remorse. So this day gives us an extraordinary opportunity to begin that process of reflection, to think about all we have done that has brought us to this place in time, and to imagine where we would like to be, say, next Rosh Hashanah.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, as our common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The eternity before and after may be darkness as postulated by Nabokov or full of light as taught by Judaism and all other spiritual traditions. Kerry Packer gave testimony to the darkness, Dr. Brian Weiss to the light. No one knows for sure what exists beyond our death.
What we all know is that we are here in this brief crack of light , during which all we can do is take responsibility for who we are in it. Let us all strive, through disciplined practice, to attain a heart of wisdom. This day is awesome in its potential. This day is full of dread in its challenge. Today is the celebration of the creation of the human prototype. What kind of human will you be? Ayekha? Where are you?
Rosh Hashanah 5770 Rabbi Jeffrey B Kamins
Inside Out: Choosing a Meaningful Life
(sermon) by Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins
Sydney
Rosh Hashanah, 5770
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, as our common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for,” writes Vladimir Nabokov. Elaborating on this point in his challenging book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker notes that of all animals, it is only the human who has this awareness of the abyss for which we are heading, calling our existential paradox the condition of “individuality within finitude”. He writes that “man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this self-consciousness, gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature.” Thousands of years ago, the authors of Psalms knew this well: “what is man that you have been mindful of him, mortal man that You have taken note of him?” it says in one place (Psalm 8). Yet, in the only Psalm attributed to Moses, he reflects upon the human condition and writes, “you return man back to dust” (Psalm 90).
The rabbis reflected this contradiction when they said humans are in some ways like animals and in others like the ministering angels. We eat, procreate, excrete and die like animals, yet we speak, perceive and understand like the ministering angels. So human, so difficult: to be able to soar with our consciousness yet always to know our time on earth is limited and brief. As Moses writes in his Psalm, “A thousand years in Your sight, God, are as a watch in the night.” The question of how to deal with our brief time on earth lies at the heart of this day.
Many do not realise it, but according to the rabbinic tradition this first day of Rosh Hashanah is not as we say the birthday of the world, or the anniversary of creation, but more specifically the sixth day of creation, the day in which human was created in “the image of God”, with the “breath of life” animating the earth from which we come. The story goes that only hours after being placed in the Garden of Eden did we eat of the fruit – not an apple – of the tree of “knowledge of good and evil” leading us to the curse “By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat until you return to the ground for from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” And then we are exiled from the Garden to this life.
Creation, followed by exile. This is the human condition, and it is doubtful that there is a person who does not feel a sense of distance or alienation from another human being - a parent who has been unfair, a child who has been rebellious, a partner who has grown in a different direction, a friend who has disappointed, a fellow worker who has misunderstood. It is even more doubtful that there is a human being who does not at times have a sense of alienation from their own core being. How clever of our ancient sages to establish this first day of Tishrei as the anniversary of the sixth day of creation, the creation of Adam, our prototype. This is the day in which we confront our exile.
The rabbis also gave us a process through which we can begin to deal with our existential crisis. They called his day Yom HaZikaron - the Day of Remembrance and also Yom HaDin - Judgement Day. They established it as the opening of a ten day period known as the Aseret Yamei Teshuvah - the ten days of repentance, or the Yamim Noraim, the days of awe. They set the tone of it through magnificent liturgy, such as the powerful prayer Unetaneh Tokef, with which we open and close these ten days. That prayer declares: “This day is awesome and full of dread.”
It is awesome in the way that we come together, in beautified synagogues, among relations and friends and family with whom we may not have connected since the year past, hearing beautiful music and the stirring poetry of prayer.
It is full of dread in that it confronts us not like other new year’s celebrations at the end of a secular year but with its intent for a fearless accounting of all our deeds. Unetaneh Tokef says that on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die. The proverbial Book of Life, that holds our future, does not exist in some place out there called heaven ruled by a parental figure called God; rather, that book exists “in here”, in our hearts and minds and deeds. The Book of Life contains “The Book of Remembrance” which each of us has signed by our deeds. However, what has come before influences but does not determine what will come. We remember the past to take responsibility for the future.
Imagine that everything we have ever said or done is actually retained in this magnificent mind each of us has, much in the way that data can be recovered from the hard disc of the computer even after it has been “erased” or “deleted.” This is after all Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance. How does it feel to take what in the 12-step tradition is called a “fearless moral accounting.” What of this day being Yom HaDin, Judgment Day, an opportunity to sit in strict moral judgment of all we have ever said and done?
The allegorical story of that sixth day of creation encapsulates all this tension with which we live: awareness of our highest capabilities and our lowest falls, combined with the awareness of our own mortality. Our prototype, Adam, established our parameters: we have knowledge of good and evil and the freedom to choose either. You have the freedom to be a mensch or a Madoff.
On that sixth day of creation, after having eaten from the tree of knowledge, God calls to Adam: “Ayekha?” – where are you? And Adam replies, “I heard the sound of You and I was afraid so I hid.” This day is awesome - we hear God call. This day is full of dread - we hear God call: “Ayekha? Where are you?” And our reply can no longer be “I was afraid, and so I hid.” If we really intend to make this Rosh Hashanah a new day of a new year of a new life then: no more, “I was afraid and so I hid.”
So no more hiding. No more hiding from our own mortality, pretending that we and our resources are infinite, that we can produce and consume without taking responsibility for our actions. No more hiding behind the horrible things that happen out there in this world. There will always be things that are unfair and unjust, from natural disasters to illness to people wronging us – but we cannot hide behind those misfortunes to justify our poor action or behaviour. We must take full responsibility for who we are and what we do. We must not hide anymore.
No more hiding behind the excuse that we do not believe in God to avoid the hard work it is to be human. You may believe. You may not. If you do, then engage with the process you should already understand with that belief. If you do not, then substitute the word “higher self” or “life” or “higher consciousness” and allow the teachings and prayers of our tradition to work for you in that way. Allow the process to work for you.
Unetaneh Tokef sets up the process of how to live fully human, how to deal with our existential crisis. It is teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah that “annul the severity of the decree.” What does this mean, the severity of the decree? The decree will not change: we will die. The question really becomes how will you live?
When the moment of death comes will you know that you have lived life to your fullest and best potential? Will you have responded to the call of your higher self? In reality, few of us will get to the extreme of being a Madoff, just as few of us will always be a mensch. But all of us will stumble along, doing right and wrong, doing wonderful things at times and at others causing harm - sometimes intentionally, most often inadvertently. To live life with meaning we must begin living it from the inside out – taking full responsibility at all times for our words and our deeds, striving always to improve our intellectual, emotional and spiritual being.
Tefillah is the first step of doing that. Taken literally, tefillah means prayer, but it also means self judgement and criticism. Tefillah is not easy, but it is the only way for personal growth. It can be achieved in so many ways – as one gains in knowledge, both in the beautiful Hebrew and in the multi-layered metaphoric meaning of traditional prayer, one understands the power of “tefillah”. Tefillah includes meditative practice. It can be reciting a mantra, such as the first six words of the Shema, or any other passage from our collected Scripture and liturgy. It can be a visual focus on an object like the “Shiviti” or a candle flame. It can be simply observing one’s breath. Tefillah is the time that we take for honest self-reflection, without which we have no hope for true grounding, balance, focus or purpose. We speak about the meaning of life, as if it exists somewhere “out there”, yet few of us take the time to search for it “in here”. If we really are searching for personal transformation and life’s meaning, if we really intend to be fully living and responsible human beings, we must take this personal time out, this time of tefillah. This practice will enable us as Moses says in his Psalm, “to acquire a heart of wisdom.”
Teshuvah and tzedakah contain further insights into what it means to live as a fully responsible human being, and those points I will address over these ten days. Suffice it to say that even with meditative tefillah, even as we get more grounded and balanced, more clear about our focus and purpose, we will continue to fall short of our goals, we will continue to make mistakes, we will continue to hurt others, we will continue to feel remorse. So this day gives us an extraordinary opportunity to begin that process of reflection, to think about all we have done that has brought us to this place in time, and to imagine where we would like to be, say, next Rosh Hashanah.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, as our common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The eternity before and after may be darkness as postulated by Nabokov or full of light as taught by Judaism and all other spiritual traditions. Kerry Packer gave testimony to the darkness, Dr. Brian Weiss to the light. No one knows for sure what exists beyond our death.
What we all know is that we are here in this brief crack of light , during which all we can do is take responsibility for who we are in it. Let us all strive, through disciplined practice, to attain a heart of wisdom. This day is awesome in its potential. This day is full of dread in its challenge. Today is the celebration of the creation of the human prototype. What kind of human will you be? Ayekha? Where are you?
Rosh Hashanah 5770 Rabbi Jeffrey B Kamins
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