Not Everything We Attempt Works Out

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Erev Yom Kippur — Sunday, September 27, 2009

A number of years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the best selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, published another book, appropriate to the times. He called it, When Everything You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough. It was about the unease of those who had achieved everything they set out to do and had acquired everything they had ever thought they wanted. It was a book for affluent, optimistic times and encouraged people to look in other places for satisfaction.

If Rabbi Kushner were writing that book today, I doubt that’s the title he would chose. More appropriate to today’s times, might be, When Things You Planned For, Haven’t Worked Out Quite Right. In a variety of ways, and to lesser and greater degrees, the future forecasts many of us depended on, have not panned out. For some this has effected retirement planning, for others the confidence that we have skills that will always be marketable. The assumptions we made about the future were often well vetted. They were based on trends of 20 or 30 or even 40 year spans, but the future is not always the next step along the trajectory of the past, as we have all learned.

On Kol Nidre eve, we pray that God will forgive us for the promises we made last year that we were unable to keep this year, despite our sincere and determined efforts. We ask for forgiveness for our sins and shortcomings.

There is a story in our tradition, which sets this prayer on its head.

It is the story of a poor tailor, who would do a reckoning before Yom Kippur. He would examine his merchandise and own up to those times he had kept a little bit of the extra cloth that should have been returned to its owner, so that he could have it for some personal project. He would own up to the lies he had said about when things would be ready, so that he could secure an impatient customer’s business. He had been short with his wife, impatient with his children, late for services, lazy in his personal study. He was basically a decent man, so his peckle, his pack of sins for the year, were fairly insignificant.

Then he would turn to God and ask, so what are your sins this year? The tailor would list the wars and natural disasters that had befallen the world. He would recount the list of friends and neighbors taken away by the angel of death before their time. Disease and plague, bankruptcies and foreclosures, all would be listed. Then he would turn to God and say, let’s make a deal. I will forgive you and you forgive me.

Past generations knew that life can be hard, but for us, the realization that not everything we attempt works out may be something new. Because of our good fortune in being born in the time and place that we have lived, this is a reality which we may not have confronted that very often in the past.

For some of us the first time we confront this, is when we try and get pregnant on a certain time schedule. For others it may have come earlier when as one of the outstanding students at our high school we got to a college full of outstanding students. But for some it may not really have happened until this past year, when all the skill and connections in the world, can’t create an interview, if you are in a market in which there are no jobs.

Things may be looking up a little bit economically, but I think we still feel weighed down by the number of issues confronting us. How will the economy become robust again, given some of its structural issues? How will we overcome the consequences of the many ethical corners we have allowed our society to cut in recent years? Looking more fully into the future, how will we secure the integrity of our planet as a safe home for living species, in light of the damage we have done and continue to do?

There is a part of Jewish tradition that is bitter and cynical. Man plans and God laughs, my grandmother would say in Yiddish. What do you expect?

The classic Jewish words of comfort are, “This too will pass.” They come from a story about King Solomon asking his advisors to give him something that would calm him down when he was too euphoric, but cheer him up when he was sad. They thought and thought, and finally crafted a ring for the king, with the Hebrew words, Gam Zeh Ya'avor: This too shall pass.

I found a reference to something similar in a story about a minister who was known for his ability to thank God even in the toughest times. One Sunday morning, it was bitter, bitter cold and snowing. He came to the Church and discovered the pipes had burst because the power was out and the heating system wasn’t working. As the 11:00am worship time approached, he looked around at the dark and empty sanctuary and began:” O God we thank You, that it is not always like this.”

It is comforting, to know when bad times come, that they will not stay forever, though when you are in pain, knowing that the pain will end, is only somewhat of a help.

More comforting to me is the rabbis’ insistence that “great scholars can come from families of thieves”, that the saying that “past performance is no guarantee of future results” is both a warning and a promise.

Twenty years ago when I came out to California to interview in Los Gatos and Carmel, I was asked to give a sample sermon. But it was early spring and the Torah portion was in the worst possible section of the book of Leviticus. It wasn’t even leprosy or menstrual impurities, but an even more challenging portion, with a list of sacrifices and detailed descriptions of offerings. I thought I was doomed — but then looking at the Jewish calendar, I noticed that it was also one of the special Sabbaths leading up to Passover. Each of those Sabbaths has a special reading: three of the four are dramatic and compelling but not the one for that week. Shabbat Parah covers the laws of the red heifer, the animal whose ashes were used in purification rituals when the Temple still stood. Fortunately for me, the rabbinic commentaries on this text were not satisfied with its simple meaning. They pondered the greater paradox, how can something impure render other things pure? And they said, sometimes, that is what happens. Sometimes we break through the usual laws of causality. Sometimes a great person emerges from a wicked family. Sometimes the past doesn’t constrain the future. The Rabbis wrote: Abraham, who believed in One God, came from Terach, the idol maker. Hezekiah the good king was the son of Ahaz, the most wicked king. Josiah an even better king, was a descendent of wicked Amon. Someday the future Messianic world will emerge out of the mess we call this world.

Being in Berlin this summer, was a reminder of the worst in history. Evidence from the holocaust period is everywhere, and is confronted without euphemism or excuses. You stub your toe on the street on little plaques that remind the passer by that so and so, Jew or Sinti, that is Gypsy, Homosexual or Communist was murdered in this place. I was in Berlin on Tisha B’Av as the Jewish community of Berlin reads its own book of Lamentations, megillat hashoah, the scroll of the conflagration, sung in the same plaintive melody as the ancient record of Jewish disaster. I visited a wonderful museum of German Jewish History, but it was exquisitely painful to keep walking through the centuries of Jewish life in German, knowing all the time, where this brilliant and rich history would end. Most moving to me was the museum at Wannsee, where the essential question was confronted plainly- how could human beings, sit at this beautiful lakeside home, and over coffee and pastries, plan the annihilation of millions of their fellows?

But Berlin this summer was also full of celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As we looked at various exhibitions on the events leading up to this liberation, what struck me most was how unprepared we all were worldwide for this major change. In 1980 certainly none of us believed that the wall would ever come down. Even in 1985, 1987, 1988 we were still not seeing the trends that lead to this conclusion.

For me that is very encouraging. Not only are there bad things that happen for which we are unprepared, there are other positive changes, bubbling perhaps beneath the surface, that will come to fruition and surprise us. That’s one explanation of the Hebrew word hope Tikvah , which means literally, a little piece of thread. Hope is the thin line that connects us in the present to the better potential future.

We do not see a path towards positive negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, but perhaps we should be building housing in the Galilea and Negev, for those who will someday need to leave their outposts in the distant areas of the West Banks, anyway. We do not know where our next job prospect will be, but we are still better off getting up and getting dressed, going to class and to volunteer, building for a yet unseen future. I don’t see the solution to all of the problems on the horizon for us, yet I believe that the future can surprise me in positive and not just negative ways.

Hannah Greenbaum Solomon the founder, of the National Council of Jewish Women, is one of my heroes. Long before women were permitted to become rabbis she out preached the very famous Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise at the World Columbian Exposition Parliament on Religions in Chicago in 1893. She achieved a great deal for a woman of her day, but her personal life was filled with trials and bereavements. Considering her experiences, her biographer concluded that “almost everything that she accomplished depended on something she did not do. In times of disillusionment, she did not forsake her task. In times of loss, she mourned deeply but did not crumble. In times of frustration she did not go into hiding.”

So may they say of us, that in difficult times, we did not forsake our tasks, in times of disappointment , we did not go into hiding, and in times of loss, we did not crumble.