The Movement for Reform Judaism

A Chasidic story tells of the two men who went to the rabbi during the month of Elul, to try and prepare for the Days of Awe, when God decides who will be written in the book of life, and who will be written in the book of death ,and whose fate will hang in the balance between  Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. 

One man was consumed with remorse, he had committed a terrible, awful sin during the past year, and felt beyond redemption, even God couldn’t allow a person as bad as he was to make Teshuvah. The other man was pleased to have such an evil man to judge himself against, somehow it made him feel less worried about his own fate, surely God would have to put him in the book of life, when compared with such a wicked fellow.  After all, he had just committed a lot of small sins during the year, he had been less than honest and gossiped about his fellow congregants, and cheated a little on his income tax, but wasn’t that what everyone did??

The rabbi listened to their two stories and said: I have a task for you to fulfil during the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah.  I want you to find stones that represent your sins and put them into a bag. 

A few days later, the men returned, the great sinner was sweating under the weight of a massive stone, so huge he could hardly lift the bag. ‘It’s no more than I deserve Rabbi, he admitted.’  His friend returned with a sack over his shoulder too… ‘It was really easy Rabbi, I have hundreds of little pebbles in here, they don’t weigh anything at all.’

‘Fine’ said the rabbi, now I want you to go up the hill overlooking the village, throw your stones off the top and come back to see me when you have collected them up again.

The sinner with the huge boulder shook his head, he wasn’t sure he could make it up the hill, still less have the strength to throw his boulder off ... but he trusted the rabbi’s wisdom.  The other man strolled off whistling, ran up the hill and merrily scattered his pebbles to the wind.

The rabbi sat in the synagogue waiting, soon the terrible sinner returned, red in the face with exertion and upset, but dragging his huge boulder.   They waited hours and hours and then days for the other man to come back with his sack of pebbles.  He was angry, hot and resentful.. ‘Rabbi, I don’t understand’, he said, ‘I have been searching for hours, trying to remember the shape of all these stones, representing all these small sins, and yet this evil man has been sitting comfortably in the synagogue with you, sipping coffee and feeling fine.’

The rabbi smiled gently, ‘NOW you see my son, he knew he was a sinner, he suffered terribly, feeling that his guilt was too great to ever be atoned for, and so he took the task seriously, you are like every ordinary Jew, you haven’t killed or committed adultery, but you have diminished the divine image by hurting people in many small ways, every day, so much so that you have even forgotten the details… searching for all these tiny pebbles has forced you to remember names and faces, to realise how gossip and cruelty can leave lasting wounds.

The man paused, feeling ill-treated, surely it wasn’t fair for an average man like him to be compared with a real sinner???

His struggle is ours too, as we struggle to make this High Holyday season have real meaning in our lives.  We look at a world that is full of suffering and real wickedness, on this, the day of Judgement, when God weighs up whether we deserve to be in the book of life or the book of death, whether this year will be one of spiritual growth or of stagnation and rigidity.   Rosh Hashanah, as well as being Yom HaDin, the day of Judgement , is also Yom Hazikaron, the day of memorial.  When we look back on the last year, its hard not to feel that God will judge humanity and find us sadly lacking.    I was reminded of the fragility of life when I read an email from a colleague in Haifa, who has lost several members of his congregation because of bus bombs during the last year.  Not only are their own families devastated, the whole community is traumatised. 

Part of the counselling effort put in by the emergency services in Israel is to try and help people make sense of the senseless, and so restore some kind of coherence to their own lives and meaning to the world.    The work done by counsellors is extraordinarily difficult, sensitive and brave work, trying to get beyond that natural desire to have vengeance for lives destroyed so  viciously and pointlessly. But mostly, understandably,  the suicide bombings incite Israeli responses and so the endless, pointless cycle of attack and response continues in its heartless, fruitless course, destroying innocent lives.     It really is a vicious cycle, something that makes it all too easy to despair when looking at it from the outside.   But I told you about the email from a colleague so that we could realise quite how close to home it is, that there is another Reform congregation, not all that dissimilar from this one, where their rabbi looks at his congregation at Rosh Hashanah and sees the gaps where the teenager he knew from the Barmitzvah class or the promising youth leader is dead.    There has been a lot of heartache and despair in the Jewish world seeing the situation in Israel this past year, wanting desperately for things to change, and not knowing quite how we can achieve it.  But despair is a great sin in Judaism , and our support for millennia has been hope, that active virtue that requires that we get involved with making the world a  better and more hopeful place.  As I said last year, optimism is a passive virtue, the virtue of the bystander who feels powerless but wishes things might  change, hope is an active virtue, the spiritual centredness that allows miracles to happen and human hearts and minds to contemplate a new beginning.  It’s not for nothing that the Israeli national anthem is called HATIKVAH- the hope.  That active, Jewish virtue of hope has been greatly needed closer to home too when we see the deterioration of civic society in our own country, a war that costs the lives of British soldiers and has left us still mired in Iraq, a  political world that seems to be entirely focused on power and lacking in integrity, and a general population who is utterly disillusioned with all those in power.   It’s terribly tempting to detach oneself from a world that seems so violent, so lacking in integrity or respect for human life and say, in the words of the folk song ‘ Stop the world I want to get off.’   But Judaism does offer us a different way forward ,a way that allows us to find a rootedness in a tradition that tells us that things CAN change, that there IS hope, and we personally can do our part to move the world further towards the messianic times of redemption and goodness.   That Jewish movement was personified in the life of Rabbi Israel Salanter, the 19^th century founder of the Musar Movement.  Musar means discipline, and was a kind of road map towards self awareness and an ethical life.  It was famously strict about avoiding gossip and exploitation of other human beings, and made great demands upon people for morality in business and community life.   Rabbi Salanter had a very sensitive and complex approach to the idea of tikkun, the mystical concept of restoring the sparks of  a broken world to hasten the redemption.  He believed  that there had to be both an outer process of Tikkun olam, social action and social justice in order to make the world a better place, and an inner process, which he called tikkun hamiddot, a restoration of a persons character traits in order to make him a better human being, what Salanter called a mensch. Salanters self-deprecating words in old age  can resonate for all of us, particularly at this time of year when we look inwards rather than outwards. ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘ I wanted to change the world.  I tried, but the world did not change. So I concentrated on changing my town, but my town did not change. Then I turned to my family, but my family did not change. THEN I REALIZED: first I must change myself.’    The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, also a supporter of Musar, quotes Salanter in his book on the prophetic message at the heart of Judaism ‘Radical Now, Radical Then.’  He hears Salanter’s call to change oneself as a gentle, authentic, Jewish way to begin to change the world as ‘the authentic moral voice that has sounded throughout Jewish life since the days of Abraham and Sarah.’  That protest against injustice, that need to change the world by beginning with ourselves, is the birthplace of hope.

Judaism is not a way of understanding or accepting or being reconciled to the world.  To the contrary, it is a protest against the world in the name of what the world ought to be.    Our great heroes, people like Moses and Abraham, argue with God when they feel that justice is not being done.  Just a few chapters before the portion that we read today, Abraham tries to persuade God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there are even 10 righteous people living there.  In a cry that has echoed down the centuries, he says ‘ HASHOFEIT KOL HA-ARETZ, LO YA-ASEH MISHPAT-shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?  

You may feel that Abraham had a little too much chutzpah in arguing with creator of the world on behalf of the dissolute citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah ,but that passion is at the heart of Judaism, and perhaps the secret of our survival against all the odds.  The very name YISRAEL, according to the torah means the one who struggles with God and human beings and prevails. So ,somewhere  hard-wired into the Jewish psyche is the idea of struggle.  Sometimes, throughout Jewish history, it has seemed that there is a little too much of the struggle going on, as the old saying says ‘if God chose the Jews, why doesn’t He pick on someone else once in a while?’  One can sympathise with the need to have a little serenity, something in all too short supply in the Jewish world, but there are ways to bring together contemplation and the passionate engagement with the world that has been part of Jewish history since the time of Abraham.   That passion can be transmuted into hope for a better future by doing the work that the Musar Movement requires of us at this time of the year, CHESHBON HANEFESH-often translated as ‘stock-taking of the soul.’  Musar requires, as I mentioned, a CHESHBON HANEFESH, an accounting of the soul as a precursor to the idea of TIKKUN OLAM, repairing the world.  CHESHBON HANEFESH is not at all a philosophical or theological idea, it is very much a real practical aid to raising ones own consciousness and taking responsibility for the effect one has on other people.  It’s a kind of a repair manual for the soul, what the Musar teachers called Tikkun Hamiddot, repair of the personality. One can choose to do it with a rabbi or friend, but equally, one can do as an inner process during the High Holyday season. It only requires absolute, even painful honesty with oneself.  So you look at your character traits and perhaps find a little too much anger, something that has spilled over during the last year and hurt people you love, or damaged relationships that you value.  Everyone has anger, but if it is a troublesome character trait, Tikkun Hamiddot demands that you make a realistic goal as to how to contain it better . Not to say, ‘ I will never lose my temper again, ‘ that’s not realistic. Not to say ‘well of course I am angry, I had a difficult upbringing’, that puts the blame somewhere else rather than working on it oneself. Tikkun Hamiddot suggests that one says ‘Ok I have a short temper, but I know now it hurts people, it distances those I love and damages my work relationships, so I will try and hold onto my temper for the next week.’ 

By setting realistic goals, the process of spiritual accounting can really move one forward and out of blind alleys or feeling stuck, or fated to always repeat the same mistakes.  Its painful work, because it requires searing honesty as we confront our character faults, our anger, our laziness and our despair at the world. But it can open an inner door, and to rethink the Chasidic image I began with, it can break down all those little stones, those small sins that we have committed during the last year.  Then we wont have to perform the spiritual equivalent of throwing the bag of pebbles off the hill, because we would have broken them down into dust by gentling tapping away at our character faults as part of our High Holyday task. Then by small changes, a ripple effect will move other people to change. Then we may merit the incredible assessment of Judaism by the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.  He said that ‘The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and religions.’

May God give us the inner strength to make that hope into a reality.

Ken Y’hi Ratzon

May such be the divine will

Amen