09/29/2022
Text of Rosh Hashanah Sermon on Presence below
Sermon Video here: https://www.facebook.com/ThatJewishRabbiT/videos/503067227977301
My son turned ten just the other day
He said, thanks for the ball, dad, come on let's play
Can you teach me to throw, I said-a, not today
I got a lot to do, he said, that's okay
And he, he walked away, but his smile never dimmed
It said, I'm gonna be like him, yeah
You know I'm gonna be like him
And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man in the moon
"When you coming home, dad?" "I don't know when"
But we'll get together then
You know we'll have a good time then
This famous song by Harry Chapin first gripped me when I went to my first Jewish summer camp in fifth grade. When I spent a week at camp OSRUI this summer, it was heartwarming to see that this song was still part of the campfire rotation.
The song describes a parent and a child. In the first two verses, the dad is too busy with other tasks, so he misses the moments that his son learns to walk, or when his son reaches out to play baseball with him. The final two verses invert the dynamic. The dad now wants to spend time with the son, but the son has grown up to be like him. Distracted and busy, and unable to be present.
Hebrew has a special word, familiar to many of us, for full deep presence. Presence, attention,
readiness to act for the sake of another. The word is Hineni. Here I am.
Hineni is a word imbued with courage. Being present for another has unexpected results, and will change your life, in unknown ways.
A moment ago we chanted Akeidat Yitzhak, the binding of Isaac. In the whole Torah, hineni is said just 8 times, but three times occur in this Torah portion. At the outset, God wants to test Abraham and calls out “Abraham”. “Hineni” Here I am God, fully present and ready to act for your sake. This hineni appears to be sincere, whatever God asks, Abraham will do. Remember, he didn’t yet know what would be asked of him, but had the courage to be present.
Six verses later, as they ascend the mountain, Isaac calls out, Father! And Abraham says “Hineni, my son.”
“Where is the sheep for the offering?”
“God will provide it.”
This second hineni has caught my attention these yamim noraim, these High Holy Days. Isaac calls for his father’s presence, but Abraham’s hineni is a false one. It is a feigned presence. Asking for all of his father’s attention and love, Isaac receives only a hurried explanation.
It is the giving of a baseball, but no time for a toss.
It represents the times we say to someone I’m listening, but we’re actually listening only to our own thoughts, our own needs. The times we are in class, but peeking into our phones. The times we are teaching but waiting for the bell ourselves. The times where someone asks for us and we listen only to find a way to get out of listening.
This morning I argue that the turning point in the akeidah is not the binding, it is this moment of false presence. For Abraham says Hineni, I am here, but in actuality, he is just trying to get through the moment and move on. That is betrayal. From this moment on, Isaac never speaks to his father again.
The story’s final hineni, is when the angel calls to Abraham to stop his downward hand, Abraham says hineni, present to God’s shifting command, but never, in the whole of his story,
does Abraham ever seek Isaac again. He never turns his attention back to his son. Never returns to him.
Absence is a betrayal.
Presence is a gift.
In our most precious relationships,
presence is an obligation.[Presence is the true gift we can offer one another.]
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner once wrote:
Each lifetime is the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
For some there are more pieces.
For others, the puzzle is more difficult to assemble. But know this:
you do not have within yourself all the pieces to your puzzle.
Everyone carries with them at least one
and probably many pieces to someone else’s puzzle. And when you present your piece to another,
whether you know it or not,
whether they know it or not,
you are a messenger from the Most High.”
When you present your piece, you may be completing their puzzle. But most of our puzzles still have missing pieces. Or, when harm has been done to us, it puts a corrupt piece into the puzzle,
one that doesn’t quite fit, and can throw off the arrangement of the whole puzzle. At some point, this piece must be returned to, dealt with, fixed, for the puzzle to be whole.
And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game
The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell…also still part of the campfire.
Joni says we’re captive on the carousel of time. She says “We can’t return.” That is true in the realm of experience. We can’t return to when we were children, wandering and wondering. We can’t return to re-experience something for the first time.
But the central message of these days is opposite Joni’s. We CAN return in a moral sense. We can return in repentance and atonement, to harmony between ourselves and God,between ourselves and another. We can return to readdress an earlier error. We can return to a moment of absence and fill it with presence.
Return is the most literal translation of teshuva. While there are many kinds of sins, and many methods of repair, in most cases, the sin was a failure to be hineni to another.
Someone else was in pain and you did not see it.
Someone else was harmed while you fulfilled only your own needs.
And so Teshuvah, return, demands that we re-present ourselves to another.
The Talmud famously says that for transgressions between a person and God, Yom Kippur atones; however, for transgressions between a person and another, Yom Kippur does not atone until he appeases the other person.
In the frame of hineni, this makes all the more sense. On Yom Kippur, sure, we can be present with God. Returning to whatever sin occurred bein adam lamakom. But the sins bein adam lechavero, require presence with that other person.
You need to return, not to a self-satisfied sense of purity, you literally need to return to the person harmed, and demonstrate your presence.
Abraham never went back to Isaac, and teshuvah never occurred. Before we get to Yom Kippur 10 days from now, and certainly before the span of our lifetime concludes, what returns can we make, what presence can we restore.
There is a remarkable book about someone who never went back, never returned, who left a corrupted puzzle piece in another. The book is called The Apology, written by the playwright who now goes by the name V, formerly Eve Ensler, the author of the world-famous Va**na Monologues. She had been sexually abused by her father as a child, and abused emotionally for many years after that. Her father died without ever making an effort to repair, or at a minimum acknowledge, his wrongdoings.
Even though he’d perpetrated such evil, V still needed him to say “hineni, I am here to admit my wrong.”
And so V wrote her father’s apology, the apology he never gave. The apology most abusers never give. The return to presence that she needed. She had the courage to put into his voice words that he never did.
“Who are you, Eve? I missed everything, I missed you. I refused to know or see you. And this in some ways was the most destructive and punishing deprivation. Isn’t that all any of us crave, really? To be known. For how else can we trust that we are even here?”
Presence affirms existence. And V has said that an apology can re-establish a shaky ground because an apology is a re-membering. It connects the past with the present. It says that what occurred actually did occur.
But what V had to do, is not something she should have had to do, it’s not something that most people can do.
The apology is meant to be from the wrong-doer. And an apology, V says, cannot be said in passing. An apology cannot be general, vague, unattached to the details. The apology must be full, and wide-eyed.
We come together on these days to access that fullness, to become alert, and to act. In these holidays, the pageantry of the High Holy Days, the music and the shofar, and invocation of a king. We are practicing presence. These are days to wake us up.
We speak of God as king because monarchs capture our attention, just look at recent events around the queen.
We sound the shofar to pe*****te beyond the walls we’ve put up.
We tell stories, because as Rebbe Nachman says, the world nowadays tells stories to put people to sleep, but I want to tell stories to wake people up.
The whole of Rosh HaShanah is to arouse in us a sense of presence. HINENI.
I am here, I am ready.
There is a special hineni prayer that a cantor recites, to ready their presence on behalf of us.
Hineni, as our new Cantor defines it, I’m here for you and I’m with you.
And on Yom Kippur, we will chant from Isaiah, about the people we must be with
“share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.”
אָ֤ז תִּקְרָא֙ וַיהֹוָ֣ה יַעֲנֶ֔ה תְּשַׁוַּ֖ע וְיֹאמַ֣ר הִנֵּ֑נִי
If we take these just actions, then when we call out, it will be finally be God who can respond hineni.
But aleinu, it is upon us to begin this process.
Teshuva, the great returning of this period,
is through our own hineni.
Whose puzzle piece do you hold. Whose puzzle piece have you withheld.
May these ten days be an exercise in presence.
May 5783 be a year of hineni, echad l’sheni, from one to another.
Shana Tova.
Eve Ensler V-Day
