Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Jaime Chasen Adult Bat Mitzvah
August 23, 2002
My Wish for You in the New Year
I’m delighted that my colleague, Rabbi Ken Chasen of Westchester, New York, could be here to participate in this family simcha tonight. As Rabbi Chasen well knows, inspiration for sermons comes from a wide variety of sources. As I was thinking about what I wanted to say tonight, I was also working on a little New Year greeting from the staff and officers for the September bulletin. What to wish for the congregation in 5763? There is so little space – I could say health and harmony and peace and maybe one other thing. So I asked myself: if I had more time and space, what would I wish for you in the New Year?
I am guided by the wisdom of Rabbi Chaim Luzzato who wrote a classic book of Jewish ethics. This is how it begins: “Dear Reader, there is nothing whatsoever new in this book of mine. Nothing that you have not read and heard before and, therefore, you should read it everyday, because it is the things we read and hear and see the most often that we tend to take for granted and that we do not pay attention to the way we should.”
That quote expresses an important truth which is that there are many wonders in this world which we have seen so often, heard so often that we take them for granted. It is only when we see them through the eyes and ears of someone who has never observed them before, or we lose them, that we realize how precious and important they are. I relearned this truth recently from a man named Bob Edens who lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
Bob Edens was born blind but, recently, thanks to a delicate and complex operation which involved attaching a detached retina and implanting a transplanted cornea, Bob Edens has gained the ability to see. This is how he describes his new world.
“To me, yellow is amazing, but red is the best, although, I haven’t seen anything yet that I don’t find wondrous.
I never would have dreamed that yellow was so, so yellow. I don’t have any words with which to describe it. I am amazed by yellow. I am simply dazzled by yellow.
But red is my favorite color. I just can’t believe red,” said Edens who says that the first thing he ever saw in his life was an eyedropper in the hands of a nurse, a week after his surgery.
“Grass is something I had to get used to,” he said. “I always thought it was just fuzz. But to see each individual stalk, and to see the hair on my arms, growing like trees, and to see birds flying through the air, and everything, it’s like starting a whole new life. It’s the most amazing thing in the world to see things you never thought you’d see.
I saw the purple and orange recently in the face of a tiger. I could see the individual hairs and the color of his eyes.
I can see the shape of the moon now and I like nothing better than seeing a jet plane flying across the sky, leaving a vapor trail. And of course sunsets and sunrises.
I can’t wait to get up each day to see what I can see. I am still seeing most of it for the first time.
And at night I look at the stars in the sky and at the flashing lights on the highway. And I am learning how to read and write like a first grader. Everything is like a constant high. You could never know how wonderful everything is!”
Edens had been blind from birth and yet he managed to graduate from Furman University, learned Braille, married and had a daughter. He even coached a Little League baseball team, while working as a masseur! He claims that every single governor of South Carolina since 1963 has come to him for a massage. But right now, he would rather talk about what he can see than about what he has done.
“I saw some bees the other day,” confided Edens, almost as if telling a secret. “And they were incredible. And I jumped a covey of quail too. I had heard of quail before, but to actually see them, what an experience
And I saw a truck drive by in the rain the other day. It threw a spray into the air. It was marvelous!
And did I mention, “ he said, genuine rapture in his voice, “did I mention that I saw a falling leaf, just drifting in the air! What a wonder that was!”
I was moved by Bob Edens’ account of what it is like to see things for the first time, and I hope you are too. We who see sunrises or sunsets or birds or yellow or red every day and who, therefore, are bored and blase about them, need to listen to his account of what it is like to see these things that we take for granted for the first time. We need to try to regain some small part of the wonder that Bob Edens feels, that we once felt years ago when we saw these things for the first time.
There is a prayer we say every time we put the Torah back into the ark, a short prayer but a profound one. We say “Chadesh Yamaynu Kikedem”. The translation in the prayerbook is “Renew our days as of old.” Rabbi Jack Riemer suggests it means more than that. It means make our days new again as they were when we lived kedem – east of Eden.
If you were going to ask God to transport you back in time, then why not ask God to bring you back into Eden? Why does this prayer say “east of Eden”? Because all the first human beings had to do when they lived in the Garden of Eden was not eat from the fruit of knowledge full time, I suspect that their days must have been dull, empty and repetitive. But, when they left the garden and moved kedem, east of Eden, then their new life began. They had to experience what Bob Edens describes. There they truly saw red and yellow and blue and birds and trees and sunrise and rain and fog and everything else on earth for the first time. And what a wondrous thing to experience them it must have been. Leaving Paradise – where they had everything without any variety or risk of loss or effort on their part – was an eye, heart and soul-opening experience.
That is why I think we pray to God to refresh our days, to make us feel the way we felt when we began east of Eden. It is a prayer for the ability to recapture the sense of wonder, the sense of excitement, the sense of gratitude that we once had and that we have lost.
Can you still remember the thrill of your first airplane flight? What it was like to look out the window and see the plane leave the earth behind, to see the clouds, from on top. That was a thrilling moment. And do you remember how we used to dress when we went on an airplane? We dressed up. Well, this summer Nancy and I were on a number of planes. First of all, we were amazed at how people dress to fly and then, as the plane takes off, you see most of the passengers reading, dozing, talking, as if the takeoff was nothing worth noticing.
Do you still remember your first date? Your first kiss and your first visit to the land of Israel? I envy those who have not yet been to Israel because they can have an experience I can never have again – the experience of being there for the first time. And so it is with many, many other experiences – not only the obvious ones like seeing Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon for the first time, but the little ones. Like seeing your daughter’s first party dress or your son’s first soccer goal or your first day at work or any of the many glorious milestones in your life that you have experienced for the first time.
Part of the Chasen Family’s enthusiasm for Temple Israel is that this is the first time they have ever belonged, they tell us, to such a caring congregation – a community that reached out to welcome them, and to which they responded with energetic involvement, participation, volunteering. Jaime and Jeff, Julia – and even Scott and Zoe on their own level – have learned a very basic lesson here. The opposite of religion is not atheism – it is boredom.
The great Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin wrote: “‘If you can look at the stars and yawn, I created you in vain,’ says God.” Religion can refute every argument made against it except a yawn. For if you can look at the stars or at the birth of a child or at red or yellow or at the opening of a flower or any other of the other wonders that are all around us and not be moved, then religion cannot pierce your callousness and cannot enter your soul.
A group of students in a geography class were asked to list what they considered to be the Seven Wonders of the World. Though there was some disagreement, the following got the most votes:
1. The Great Pyramid
2. The Taj Mahal
3. The Grand Canyon
4. The Panama Canal
5. The Empire State Building
6. St. Peter’s Basilica
7. China’s Great Wall
While gathering the votes, the teacher noticed one student, a quiet girl, hadn’t turned in her paper. So, she asked the girl if she was having trouble with her list.
The quiet girl replied, “Yes, a little. I couldn’t quite make up my mind because there were so many.” The teacher said: “Well, tell us what you have, and maybe we can help.”
The girl hesitated, then read, “I think the Seven Wonders of the World are:
1. to touch
2. to taste
3. to see
4. to hear
5. to run
6. to laugh
7. and to love.
Two weeks from tonight we shall begin a new year. My hope, wish and prayer for you and me in the new year is that you and I and all those whom we love will recognize those things in our world which are truly wondrous. Like Bob Edens, may we see with astonishment and with appreciation the wonders of creation, the beauty of family, the lights of our lives. Then how very blessed our lives will be. Kayn y’hi ratzon, may this be God’s will and ours. Amen.
I am indebted to Rabbi Jack Riemer, whose writings inspired and informed much of this message.
