Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Amanda Williams Bat Mitzvah
August 10, 2002
No More "Cop-Outs"
If you checked your Hebrew calendar this morning, you noted that today’s date is the second of Elul. I don’t usually remind congregants of the Hebrew date, but it is important for Jews to recognize that Elul, the preparatory month before the Holydays, began yesterday. Five weeks from tomorrow night, Yom Kippur – the holiest day of the year – begins. Truly the season of repentance is here.
What that means can be summed up in a sign which appeared in a new-age bookstore in Berkeley, California. Outside the store, in great big letters, the sign said "Yoga doesn’t work." Below it in slightly smaller letters, the sign said "Transcendental meditation doesn’t work". Below that in still smaller letters, the sign said "Communism doesn’t work". And right below that – Psychoanalysis doesn’t work." Then, on the last line in great big letters, the sign said "YOU have to work!".
That sign sums up the whole point of these next five weeks – we have to work. Jews have to use these weeks to prepare ourselves for Yom Kippur. We have to look inside ourselves. We have to find the dark spots that have accumulated there since last year, and we have to scrub and scour until we can get them out. That is our job for these next five weeks. We have to take a long, hard look in the mirror and see where we have strayed, and where we have erred, and where we have missed the mark, and then do the tough work of resolving that we will not stray and err and miss the mark this way again.
Now friends, looking inside is not easy. Therefore, the temptation is very great to find "cop-outs." The temptation is almost irresistible to find someone else or something else to blame for our own shortcomings. Instead of blaming ourselves, we all love "cop-outs." Anytime we can transfer the blame to anyone else for what goes wrong in our lives, we are happy to do so.
Today some people complain about illegal immigrants who supposedly take their jobs away instead of thinking about what they can do in order to prepare themselves to do a better job. Some people prefer to blame their heredity or their environment or the way they were raised by their parents or the neighborhood in which they grew up. Instead of saying "it is too late to sue my parents for mal-parenting" and "it is too late to complain about my childhood"; what we should be saying is "what I have to do now is to determine how I’m going to improve myself."
We all love our "cop-outs" and we use them wherever and whenever we can. So let me share with you some of my favorite "cop-outs". The reason I quote them is not to make fun of the people who said them, but because when we hear someone else saying it, we realize how foolish we sound when we say the same sort of thing. So here are my ten favorite "cop-outs" of the last decade or so.
David Dinkins, the Mayor of New York City, when he was accused of failing to pay his income taxes, said, "I didn’t commit a crime. All I did was fail to comply with the law."
Congressman Joseph Early, Democrat of Massachusetts, at a press conference, when he was asked about his part in the House banking scandal, said, "They gave me a book of checks . . . and they didn’t ask me for any records. Is that my fault?"
Richard Darman, Director of the Budget, explained why the President wasn’t following up on one of his campaign pledges – "The President didn’t really say that. He was just reading what was given to him to read in a speech."
Richard Allen, the National Security Advisor to President Reagan, explaining how he got a thousand dollars in cash and two expensive watches from Japanese journalists, after he helped arrange a private interview for them with Nancy Reagan, said, "I didn’t accept it. I just received it."
Francis Gary Powers – the U-2 pilot who was held by the Soviets for spying – in an interview after he was finally returned to the U.S., said, "I was a pilot flying an airplane, and it just so happened that where I was flying made what I was doing spying."
President Nixon, when he was asked why he fired the Attorney General and the Special Counsel during that Saturday night massacre, said, "I was under medication when I made the decision. Otherwise, I would not have done it."
Here is one of my favorites. Former Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, D.C., said "Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country, if you don’t include the number of murders that are committed here."
Othal Brand, a member of a Texas pesticide review board on the safety of a new product called Chlordane, remarked, "Sure, it is going to kill a lot of people, but many of these people would be dying of something else eventually anyway."
Frank Rizzo, the Mayor of Philadelphia, said, "The streets are safe in Philadelphia; it’s only the people who make them unsafe."
And finally, the Congressman who said, "Of course, it is not my fault. If the people had not elected me, this would never have happened."
I believe that these are enough examples to make the point that the hardest words in the English language to say are "I did it," "I was wrong," "I am sorry," "I won’t do it again." Somehow these words get stuck in our throats and just won’t come out. People who know a dozen different languages still can’t pronounce those words. That is why our tradition has given us these five weeks – for cheshbon hanefesh, for self-examination, for looking inside ourselves, for learning how to stop passing the buck, how to stop claiming that somebody else did it, for learning how to say chatati – I have sinned and I am sorry and I am determined to change, to improve.
This is our job during these next five weeks. It is not an easy job by any means; but if we want to, we can do it. Let’s start today. Let’s take a long, hard look inside ourselves and see what needs straightening, what needs correcting, what needs mending. And let’s try our best to tell ourselves the truth, to tell God the truth. No more "cop-outs."
I conclude with the shortest, simplest and perhaps most accurate definition of Judaism which I know. It comes from Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotsk. He was once asked "What is the essence of Judaism?’. And his answer was "The essence of Judaism is arbiten off zich – working on yourself."
Elul is here. Let’s get to work on ourselves, and may God help us in this most important work. Amen.
This message is based on the writings of Rabbi Jack Riemer.
