Sermon, September 14, 2001
A Yiddisha Kop
A rabbi preparing his Holyday messages cannot help but review the year coming to an end with a particular eye toward Jewish news. The news from the Middle East for most of this past year has been a downer. A considerable amount is now being written about Diaspora Jewry's silence and lack of support. Jews are wringing their hands in despair.
I have a slightly different attitude. Throughout the centuries of ups and downs, the Jew has managed to make sure that there is a Jewish New Year. No matter how bad or how good the economy is, regardless of Mideast geopolitics and the status of anti-Semitism, am Yisrael chai - the Jewish People are still alive.
We Jews have many enviable traits, but there is none better than the one that has carried us through the best and worst of situations in our history. No matter how hard times were, whether Jews merely survived or prospered, or survived prosperity, the Jewish People had one thing which maintained our equilibrium and permitted us that extra edge. It is a much practiced but little known rule in the Talmud that three-quarters of realizing a goal is believing that the goal can be reached. Am Yisrael chai, the Jewish People kept themselves alive in spite of terrible odds because we believed in ourselves, or we believed in what we were doing. Without tripping over molehills that became mountains in the eyes of the shortsighted, our ancestors were the ones who went about their business and did it. Jewish law counseled that you were to look at every problem as if it were an opportunity, to watch for the rainbow in every storm, that the night was black so that you could find your way by the light of the stars.
It is said that when Goliath appeared on the horizon, the Israelites quaked with fear. After all, the giant blocked out the sun, and the Israelites felt like nothings before him. "He's so big," they said, "how can we possibly win?"
Yet when David saw that same monster of a man, he was able to say to himself: "He's so big, how can I possibly miss!"
That is what it means to have a "Yiddisha Kop", a Jewish head. It was not a pejorative term, it was not the anti-Semites' view of the Jew in business, it never meant to be clever or sly. On the contrary, as the saying goes, dress British, think Yiddish - a Yiddisha Kop was something that made Jews know how to turn a disadvantage into an advantage. You did not have to be Jewish to have a Yiddisha Kop, but it helped. After all, who had more disadvantages to overcome? A Yiddisha Kop just meant that everything has a positive side and if you are going to live and be well, you had to find it and often find it fast.
Consider the tale of two elderly ladies who meet at the supermarket. "Wish me a mazel tov," one says to the other. "My daughter just married a surgeon."
"Takka - a surgeon!", the other cried. "Mazel Tov! But wait a second. How many daughters do you have?"
"Just the one," said the proud mother.
"But wasn't your daughter married to an attorney?"
"Yes, that's the girl. She married an attorney, divorced the attorney a few months ago, and married the surgeon."
"But wait a second," said the puzzled lady, "wasn't this the same girl who was married to the accountant?"
The mother beamed. "You remember that wedding! Yes, she divorced the accountant, married the lawyer, divorced the lawyer, and is now married to the surgeon."
"But," said the lady, "wasn't this the girl who married a dentist first?"
"Yes," the mother beamed, "she first married the dentist, who wasn't any good for her, then married the accountant, divorced the accountant, married the lawyer, divorced the lawyer, and now she married the surgeon."
"Nu," said the second lady, "Such nachas from just one little girl!"
"Our tradition says, "everything has its possibilities for an upside." It is said we begin our Holydays and holidays in the evening because we understand that even the darkest of nights should have the possibility of celebration within them.
It is interesting how in the Hebrew language the word shachor means "black", "dark." Yet those very same letters with different vowels spell the word shachar, which means "the dawn of a new day." In the midst of the darkness of despair, we Jews must never forget how close we are to the promise of a bright dawn.
Voltaire once wrote this dreary prescription. "When all hope is gone, death becomes a duty." Not so for us Jews. When all hope is gone, the Jew invents new hopes and resolutely new optimism. Even in the midst of despair, we Jews find grounds for hope.
How else could a Jew, hiding from the Nazis in an underground bunker in Cologne, Germany, have written those famous words on the walls of a bleak, dark dungeon:
"I believe in the sun even when it is
not shining. I believe in love even
when I do not feel it. I believe in
God, even when God is silent."
Who else could do to the death camps with Maimonides words: "I believe in the coming of the messiah, and even if he tarries, every day I will wait for him to come"?
Who else but us, after the destructions and massacres and pogroms and Holocaust, could take as our national anthem Hatikvah, The Hope?
Cotvinu b'sefer chaim, our Machzor says, "inscribe us in the Book of Life." I can't believe it was ever meant to be taken literally. I cannot conceive that the geniuses of Judaism thought that Rosh Hashanah was the day we are judged to die or to live. You see, our tradition teaches by means of stories and metaphors. The Book of Life is one of those wonderful metaphors that speaks to us in a very spiritual sense - cotvinu b'sefer chaim. When you open up the book of what your life was and what it will be, do you die a little over the should-of's, could-of's and might-have-beens? Or do you see a life with the possibilities and potentials that lie before you? Are you going to look at your life as the things that cannot be done or the things that with a little thought, a lot of mazel and the right attitude are just a dream away from happening?
The book of our lives will be open very shortly. We can write anything in it we want. Believing is seeing. Any fool can tell you how things cannot be done. "I can't do this." "I won't do that." "This will never happen." It was Theodor Herzl who said it best: "If you will it, it is not a dream." Now that is using a Yiddisha Kop.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. In order to be able to do something, you have to believe that you can do it first. The Talmud says: change your thoughts and you can change your world. I believe that there aren't any hopeless situations; there are only people who have come to feel hopeless about them.
Cotvinu b'sefer chaim, Rosh Hashanah tells us to write it in your Book of Life: Today I shall believe; I shall believe in what I do, because if we feed our faith, our doubts will starve to death. Years may wrinkle the skin, but if you cannot look positively at your life, and if you cannot dream, years will wrinkle your soul, and that is far worse than wrinkled skin.
A true story. Thomas Alva Edison had over two thousand patents registered and only 50 of them turned a profit. All the should-ofs, could-ofs and might-have-beens in Edison's life were wrapped up in 1950 failures. You never heard of Edison's concrete lawn furniture, it was the patent that came before the light bulb and it came before the phonograph and it came before the movie projector. If Edison had stopped at his lawn furniture, how much poorer we would all have been, and how much poorer he would have been.
One of the greatest challenges to the Yiddisha Kop - the Jewish attitude that we can change the world, that we can turn disadvantage to advantage; our realistic optimism, our confidence, our hope - is the people who are downers, the gloom-casters and doom-sayers whom you can always count on to have a complaint or criticism. Some people see nothing but a dismal future for our whole world, for our economy, for geopolitical security, for the future of the family or for institutions of morality. Such people have become skeptical and cynical. And they can infect as well as affect us.
As we look toward the new year, I want to emphasize for those of us who have any contact with young people - whether it is as parents, grandparents, teachers or neighbors - this matter of hope and hopefulness, of optimism, of looking for the dawn gets really serious where our children are concerned. I believe that remaining optimistic and refraining from cynicism is crucial for those of us who deal with the young. Some time ago Ann Landers printed an article entitled "Saturday with a Teenage Daughter."
Are you going to sleep all day ? . . .
Who said you could use my hair spray? . . .
Clean the dishes off the table . . .
Turn down that radio . . .
Have you made your bed? . . .
That skirt is too short . . .
Your closet is a mess . . .
Stand up straight . . .
Somebody has to go to the store . . .
Quit chewing your gum like that . . .
Your hair is a mess . . .
I don't care if everybody else has one . . .
Turn down that radio . . .
Don't slouch . . .
Didn't you make your bed? . . .
Quite banging on the piano . . .
Why don't you look it up in the dictionary? . . .
Why did you ever buy that?
Take the dog out . . .
You forgot again . . .
Turn off that radio and go to sleep.
Ann Landers ends with this -
Another day gone and not once did I say, "I love you." Dear Lord, forgive me.
The Book of Proverbs teaches us: a downcast spirit dries up the bones. Too many of our children go off to school or fall off to sleep with these censorious messages ringing in their ears.
And sometimes, I hate to admit it, religion contributes to the poisoning of our attitudes. There are too many people today who are willing to condemn other people just for believing their own faith. My friend, Rabbi Ed Cohn of New Orleans, writes about going to an airport late at night. He was going to meet a guest speaker who was coming in. In an entire wing of the airport there were only two people. "I was there," Rabbi Cohn says, "and so was a Redcap, sitting in a chair, waiting for the plane to pull up to the ramp. I mentioned to him that there is nothing lonelier than being in an airport late at night."
The man's response was, "Yes. But you don't have to be lonely if you believe in Jesus."
"I told him that, in fact, I understood well the importance of religious faith as I was a rabbi." The man looked at me, shook his head in disbelief, in sadness, and then said: "Too bad about you. You look like a perfectly nice fellow, too. As a Jew, you know you are going to burn in hell, don't you?"
I believe that genuine religion is intended to be more a set of wings for the human spirit than a weight dragging on the human soul. More a blessing than a burden, more a sense of hopefulness than a dark cloud over one's eternal prospects. Hope should be at the very heart of religion and of life.
It is only 18 inches between a pat on the back and a kick in the pants. When people believe in you, it makes all the difference in the world. It gives you hope and it gives you confidence and it gives you a chance, while negatives give you nothing but heartache.
In this new year every person - every one - who we are going to meet will be struggling with some kind of burden and in a variety of ways they are going to be asking us "how am I doing?" What good word will we have for them? Maybe it will be a child off for school, an insecure teenager, a husband or wife having a difficult day, a neighbor facing some medical test or someone who stumbles into our presence with the flavor of their day not yet determined. What is the good word that we'll be able to speak? It may be that more will depend upon it than we will ever come to know.
You've got to believe, then you've got to work, and then you will see. But first you have to believe. If you will it, it is not a dream. Am Yisrael chai, the Jewish People lives.
Bill Cosby says he once asked his father whether life had taught him to view the glass as half empty or half full. The older Cosby replied philosophically, "Son, it all depends on who's pouring."
This New Year let's pour faith and hope and confidence into our life. Let's use our Yiddisha kop to make 5762 a shana tova u'metukah, a good and sweet year. Amen
The writings of Rabbis Edward Paul Cohn and Dannel I. Schwartz have contributed significantly to this message.
