Rosh Hashanah Sermon delivered by Rabbi David Bockman, Croton Jewish Center, October 2009

Shana Tova! It’s been quite a year here in Lake Wobegone… Actually, it’s been quite a couple of years, what with the financial system toppling and people out of work, houses being  foreclosed and discretionaryspending such as eating dinner out and  synagogue membership becoming luxury items that are only for the very wealthy or only for rare occasions. And don’t get me started on  Bernard Madoff…

So when I look back on this time period, I’m not sure what I’ll be able to say about it, should anyone ask. But I’ll tell  you about something that happened to me this year, something big –  really big – and most of you don’t know about it. The reason you  don’t know is the same reason – I suspect – that members of Madoff’s  family didn’t know about his manipulations for so many decades. It’s  so large and so embarrassing, I don’t know how to even admit it to you.

First some history: when my last synagogue merged and I  became a ‘rabbi on the move,’ I was forced to pack my office into  boxes and rent a storage space where my books could be stored. For  me, this was quite a blow, because even though I became the rabbi of  the Croton Jewish Center, not having daily access to my 40 or so  boxes of books meant that I became like Spanish moss – getting my  nutrition from thin air, rootless, hanging around atmospherically,  but without any real anchor and without flower or fruit. I was living  the life of the Jewish people in exile, a ghostly existence, with  hardly any handhold to cling to.

You see, being a rabbi is – in large part – being a repository for ancient and powerful books. Travellingthrough the country for the last 23 years meant packing up those books and shlepping them along  with me from community to community. And that is no small feat, for in most of the places I went (Kansas City, New Orleans, Annapolis  Maryland, Temple Hills Maryland, Raleigh North Carolina) my office was the most complete Jewish library that existed anywhere nearby! I had a complete Talmud, Babylonian and Palestinian, Hebrew Aramaic and English. I owned two or three shelves of Biblical commentaries,  ancient, medieval and modern. I collected literary works in Hebrew,  English, Yiddish, Russian. Books for educating students and works of philosophy, Midrashim and codes of Jewish law, dictionaries in seven languages, prayer books of all sizes shapes and proclivities. Books 
of psychology and history, complete sets of all the articles and sermons I had ever written. Ancient near eastern texts in pictures  and documents, a beautiful set of the mishna with many commentaries.  An entire bookshelf of music notation – choral, jazz, folk music,  liturgical music I had rescued from a defunct synagogue in a small  town in Eastern North Carolina, book collections from the home  libraries of dozens of old Jews who had passed away over the years,  whose kids had brought the books in milk crates to the synagogue , themselves unable to read the words their parents had cherished for a  lifetime. A tiny book in German given to me in my first congregation by a woman who had survived the Holocaust and had brought this book  with her throughout all her peregrinations, knowing that if she could  only make it out of Europe with this one token of her childhood boyfriend, then life would somehow carry on.

So, being without these things, these little safety deposit boxes filled with the lives of thousands of Jews from all across the face of the globe holding thousands of years of time – being without them  for even a month or two was excruciating. We couldn’t fit so many  boxes in our house, you see, and maybe soon I would have an office again and a place to display the accumulitus of a life of the mind  and of the heart.

But the story did not work out that way.  Before I had this job in  Croton, I worried about how I would pay to store all these books with no income. I searched the area and found the absolutely least  expensive storage facility, only 20 minutes away in South Hackensack.  And what a bonus: if you rent from them, they’ll lend you – free of  charge – a U-Haul truck to help you load in your stuff! All you need  is an access code to get in the gate and visit your things. But then  the time goes by, much longer than the six months you had  guesstimated you would need. And the little inconsistencies in the  facility’s billing process annoy you and confuse you. Your check  always seems to cross in the mail and they’re charging you extra  money each month in strange fees. You call and they say they’ll  straighten it out, but it never seems to become clear. To make an  already long story… no longer, this past spring, as I was trying to  find the access code to get in the gate to take my boxes of books home (no, you only get to use their truck to move in, not to vacate,  so you have to lug them out, bit by bit) and simultaneously trying to  straighten out my account, I finally reached the office on the phone  and they told me they had sold off my space at auction and cut off  the padlock and emptied it that morning!

Push came to shove and I finally, a month later, discovered that the  people who bought all my thousands of dollars worth of holy books  ripped them up and deposited them in a large dumpster outside the  storage facility. Now I don’t approve of bilking Elie Wiesel’s  charitable foundation out of its lifetime of savings, but I’m pretty  sure that even with Madoff in the running, I had perpetrated perhaps  the largest scale Hillul Hashem (desecration of God’s holy name) that had taken place in a decade. Because of my bumbling and uncertainty,  and in order to save just a few dollars, I had allowed the voices of 
millions to be snuffed out in a moment, like when Obi Wan Kenobi  sensed a great disturbance in the Force when the Death Star destroyed  the planet. Now, the words of generations spanning the globe were  lost for good, and with them (perhaps) my claim to authenticity as a rabbi. I mean, who allows such a thing to happen? God’s name in a hundred thousand iterations, placed in a landfill or incinerated in a  furnace to contribute to the hazy smog I so often curse when I drive past Newark.?

I was responsible for that great silencing, the loss of the name, the  descration of the blessings and the utter scouring of human and  divine presence from a thousand worlds born of a million words. Is it  too much to use terms like Hurban and Holocaust and Katrina? How  would I be any different than Eichmann, sitting in a glass booth,  made to answer for crimes against humanity and genocide, but having  no adequate response –for what is the appropriate thing to say when  you’ve done something so heinous? So, I didn’t mean it – that doesn’t  make much of a difference now, does it? I was just trying my best to  protect my family – the final refuge of the morally bankrupt  sociopath. Oh, and just so you don’t become complacent wallowing in  your self-pity, a collection agency starts hounding you a few weeks  later to squeeze another two hundred bucks from you to square up your  bill, because they only were paid $25 for all the contents of your  locker. “And to tell you the truth,” says the district manager, “I  would have given it to them for free, just so they would clear it  out, because that space is money to me, and renting it out as quickly  as possible to someone else is frankly all I care about.”

So please forgive me if I seem preoccupied, because I have a lot to  answer for this year. The silencing of a million-odd worlds leaving  behind only…what? Memories? Well, yes and no. Some of those books I had read from cover to cover, absorbing all the facts and dates – so  what they had is not completely lost. It’s also true with the  articles and sermons I’ve written over the years: although I surely  don’t remember each and every word, I did the work in coming up with  textual readings and connections between contemporary and ancient  life. Those streams of thought will not be entirely lost. But now I 
must admit – yes, another embarrassing self-disclosure – there were  also some books I owned that I had not read completely, and some I  had never even started. I have no doubt that I owned some books not  worth the effort and the time it would have taken to read them, but  I’ll never know! There’s just no way I can critically evaluate any of  them now, especially not even having kept a list of everything that  was there. Yesterday, worlds of bright possibility, today only the  dark and silent cinders of what will never be.

And it seems that within the great battle between light and dark,  between knowledge and fear, I unintentionally made a great blow  against the light. And we certainly see things in that manner: the  medieval and superstitious dark ages versus the rationality and  intellectual flowering of the enlightenment leading to modern times.  And I do so love thinking! It quite literally pains me to be an agent  of the dark side.Maybe this all happened for a specific reason, I rationalize. Maybe I  was the perpetrator of  “the great silencing” because  I needed to be  reminded to speak up for the silent people: the citizens of Darfur,  the  residents of Sderot, Americans without health insurance or even  the illiterate. Maybe I need to fight for increasing the light in our  poorly performing schoolchildren.  The darkness and the light, the silence and the words – they may be arrayed in this manner so that I  can learn an ethical lesson about caring for the Other.  Or at least  that’s how the loss of my books can make sense to me.

But there’s a statement in the Talmud, in tractate Yoma, that  explains something else that hangs on this distinction, something we  might not have considered before. It says there that the quality of  sound is different in the night than in the day. Now I know this to  be true, for I have waited outside in the gathering darkness and  heard the ramping up of the crickets and the amplification of the  hoot owls, the haunting echoes of unexpected footfalls and the  clarion call of a latch being undone. The Talmud explains that at  night, the sound of the sun’s globe as it saws through the sky is  absent, a sound that masks and mutes all other minimally audible  voices. So powerful is the pre-eminance of the sun that it even has  the ability to mask the chaotic noise that emanates from the urban  landscape, the din of commerce and the hum of the hustle that takes  over every stretch of sidewalk, pavement or rooftop. The two great  ruling sonic paradigms are the solar and the political, life in the  daylight and life in the city. And both of them, both of them, cover over the naked sounds of the night.

As we learned in Seattle this summer at the Experience Music Project,  which is not only about Jimi Hendrix or guitars, is that the engineer  who mixes the layers of sound has the ultimate say over which voices are heard, which become merely background, and whether the music will  ultimately be majestic or mysterious, harsh or hushed, psychedelic or  suave. But, as we can see, Barry Gordy of Motown records – as savvy  as he was - did not invent the hitmaking “wall of sound”, nor did the  Beach Boys invent layering. The Talmudic rabbis recognized the effect  as a major theme playing in the background of human history, day in  and day out. Interestingly, some commentaries and translations of the  passage explain that it refers specifically to the urban din emanating from Rome, the city that brought destruction and exile upon the Jews. In this view, then, the ‘sound’ of the bright and rational  sun as it saws its way westward is almost exactly balanced by the ‘sound’ of the controlled chaos that is the regnant earthly power,  Imperial Rome. Sometimes one side prevails, and sometimes the other. 
But at night, as the volume of the daytime human cacophony subsides,  the sonic texture of the world shifts away from singing the story of  power, to a very different musical paradigm: one characterized by  subtlety and delight, by surprise and the unseen pull of silent tidal  forces.

For silence may be empty, but it can also be teeming with the unseen,  and hitherto unheard. Silence can be full to the brim with  possibility and potential, chomping at the bit, waiting to become.  Silence can be the abode of presence and the foundation of significance.

The daytime struggle between the preeminence of sunlight and urban  chaos, between the dominance of the intellect or the will to power,  between the “voice of Jacob” and the “hands of Esau,” the struggle  that plays itself out relentlessly in the history of human society, 
the struggle over whose words will preempt – that struggle is muted  by the setting of the sun, the closing of shutters and gates, the  retreat of human domination. It is then that other sounds, the  absence of voices, come to the fore. This is a time when silence  sings its own song, when a world outside society takes over its  (perhaps) rightful place in the design of the world. Psalm 65, a  psalm of praise to God, uses the words Lecha Dumiya Tehila, which is  understood by the Hassidic tradition to mean that silence or quiet is  a means of praising God. Rather than finding the right words,  sometimes we need to learn the lesson that the absence of words, the  quieting of sound, can demonstrate the greatest respect for God.  Rather than using the means by which we exert our control in the  world of speech, if we open ourselves to listening in silence, we may  find a greater appreciation of God, a greater show of respect by actually stepping aside.

This is, in a way, the essence of the Shabbat we should have each  week. To stop talking and actually listen: to the world, to each  other, to ourself. And, today being Shabbat, we forego the sounding  of the shofar (a sound we ourselves produce) to actually listen  instead to the world. In the first book of Kings, we  read of the  prophet Elijah travelling to Mount Horev (or Sinai) and looking for  God’s presence. There was an earthquake, but God (we are told)  was  not in the earthquake. There was a fire, but God was not in the fire.  There was a  whirlwind, but God was not in the whirlwind. And there,  at the end of the sequence, when all the CGI budget has already been  squandered, there was Kol Demama Daka – the thin sound of silence, or  as is often translated “the still, small voice.”  And Elijah heard 
God not in the mode of domination and control, but at the point of  silence. Because, if we think about it, God doesn’t need all those  theatrical production values to be in charge. It is enough for God to  be the background radiation that permeates the universe, the sound we  can hear when we finally manage to step back and , despite our human  urge to name everything, simply perceive and desire, praise through  respectfully listening.

Moses, we are told, would go into the tent of meeting to speak to God  “face to face, as a person speaks to his buddy.” The midrash  elaborates, explaining that Moses would stand there inside that tent,  and God’s voice would tremble there, drawn down from heaven,  fluttering between the outstretched wings of the cherubs on the ark  cover. And Moses would hear God’s voice coming from within. Did it  emanate, as the midrash probably means to say, from within the ark?   From within the space between the wings over the ark? From within  the tent? Or, perhaps, when Moses listened in-tent-ly, he could hear  God’s voice coming from the silence at his own core! To the extent  that he could stop talking, he could actually hear how God spoke  through him! Would that we could all learn to listen like that!

This year, this day and this moment, are leading up to the point in  the service when we would normally attempt to storm the gates of  heaven (as Joshua and his krewe did in Jericho) by tooting our own  horn.. But how beautiful is it that today, we are holding off on  blowing the shofar, remaining silent enough so that we can listen and  perhaps train our ears and our hearts to long to hear the still small  voice emanating from within. When I was installed as the rabbi here  at CJC two years ago, I wandered what our synagogue would be known  for. I think that if we all indicated our deep yearning to improve  and to find those gifts that are hidden in plain sight in our lives  by adopting the slogan “CJC – longing to hear the still, small  voice,” we’d find others who would like to accompany us on this path.

I may have been the agent of the loss of words, but I am doing my  darnedest right now, trying to be the agent of a revelation that is  just as strong, just as traditional, and oh so meaningful if I can  pull it off. Let’s close our eyes for a few moments and listen to all  we can hear, beyond and behind the call of the shofar, listen to the  silent sounds that give needed context to the various vectors in our  lives; listen to the voices that have never yet been spoken. .. . .  Lashana Tova Tikateivu ve-Techateimu .