Choosing Our Lives

I gave this sermon at Temple B’nai Shalom in Braintree, MA, on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, September 24, 2006. By describing life choices I made, to convert to Judaism and, much later, to become a rabbi, I urge my congregants to choose the paths they will follow.

My very dear friends:

When I was a young father I kept a poster under the glass of my desktop at home. The poster showed a young father carrying his son on his shoulders as he walked along a path in a wood. The poster also included the words of the Robert Frost poem about choosing that I’m going to read in a moment. I loved that poster and Frost’s poem because I had made an important choice in my life and I identified strongly with that young father as he made his way down that path.

The poem is one I bet many of us studied in high school. It’s called “The Road Not Taken”:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

“And that has made all the difference.” “And that has made all the difference.” What exactly is it that makes all the difference between a life of satisfaction and a life of frustration? What makes all the difference is to make choices. What makes all the difference is to choose your own path, to open your own doors and to choose your own life.

In 1967 I made a choice. I chose Judaism. I converted to Judaism during my last year of law school. That choice has made all the difference in my life.

I was born and raised in a believing Christian family. My mother’s parents were Christian missionaries. We believed that God performed supernatural miracles in historical time. We believed in the divine and miraculous origin of a man named Jesus. When we celebrated Christmas, we believed we were celebrating the birthday of the son of God. We believed in the literal resurrection of this man from the dead by a supernatural miracle. When we went to church on Easter Sunday, we believed we were witnessing to the resurrection. We believed that God ruled the world and could choose to make anything happen without regard to the physical laws of the universe.

In my childhood, and for my family, those beliefs defined us as Christians. We understood that anyone who did not hold those beliefs could not be truly called a Christian.

In 1958, when I was 16 years old, I was a high school junior at a Protestant New England boarding school. A teacher assigned us to read a book by John Hersey. It is called The Wall. It described in graphic detail the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto. In that book I first learned that the Holocaust had happened.

Some may be surprised that I didn’t learn anything about the Holocaust until thirteen years after it ended. But actually I’ve learned more recently that many people growing up when I did had little idea about the Holocaust, because it wasn’t much discussed then.

Not only did I not know about the Holocaust. I had never even known anyone Jewish. I went to Sunday school. I learned about ancient Palestine at the time when Jesus lived. They taught us that Jesus was Jewish and lived among Jews. But I had no idea that there were still any Jews living in the modern world.

My family lived then in Darien, Connecticut. Perhaps some of us recall a 1947 movie called “Gentleman’s Agreement.” It includes a town in Connecticut where the real estate agents would not sell homes to Jews. That was Darien, where I lived then.

Learning about the Holocaust destroyed my Christian faith. I could not understand how God could permit it. More than 6,000,000 Jews killed, and millions more besides. More than 1,000,000 children. Why? How? In my view of God then, God could have chosen to intervene and prevent those deaths, but God chose not to do so.

I challenged my poor mother about this. I asked her to explain how she could keep her faith in a God who would act in this way. She had no answers that I found convincing. She wept with me and mourned, as I did, the loss of all those innocent lives. She said, however, that she believed that God could have saved the victims of the Holocaust. She also said she believed that God actually chose not to do that. She agreed that this was entirely beyond our ability to understand. But she also said that she had faith that God had a larger plan of which this was a part and we needed still to believe that God was good.

I found I could not do that, not if God had the power to rescue the victims and chose not to exercise it, no matter for what reason. I could no longer hold the beliefs that defined me as a Christian. For the next ten years, I lived essentially without religion in my life.

In college, I met and got to know Jews who were my classmates. Some of them became my close friends. One was Joe Lieberman. Yes, that Joe Lieberman, who ran for Vice President with Al Gore in 2000. Joe and I lived in the same residential college and shared an apartment in Washington the summer after college.

When Joe and I were out walking in New Haven a homeless man [at that time we referred to them as “beggars”] held out his hand and Joe reached into his pocket and gave him a few coins. I asked Joe, “Why did you do that? Don’t you know the guy will probably just spend the money on liquor?” Joe answered, “If he’s low enough to need to ask for money then I feel obligated to give to him.” In fact, Joe always carried coins in his pocket specifically so that he wouldn’t have to shrug and walk by without giving. That’s how I learned about tzedakah from Joe, not as charity but as an obligation to the poor.

When Joe and I would push our trays down the rail in the dining hall to get our meals, Joe’s meals were different. They were wrapped in aluminum. The cutlery was wrapped in plastic. That’s how I learned about keeping kosher.

Living an observant Jewish life as Joe did wasn’t easy and certainly was far from common at Yale in the early 1960’s. Until 1965, the year after Joe and I graduated, Yale still operated a quota system that set a limit on admissions, allowing no more than ten percent of each class to be Jewish.

When I went on to law school, however, I found that a great many of my fellow students were Jewish. I chose two Jewish roommates. I made many close friends among Jewish students.

I’ve thought about what drew me to have so many Jewish friends. I’m sure that was partly because of my childhood experiences. From the time I was born until I went to college I had 27 different addresses, both here and in Mediterranean countries. My family moved so often because my father worked for an oil company that frequently transferred him to different foreign countries, like Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, and my mother and sisters and I would pack up again and go where he had been assigned. I must have attended at least a dozen different schools and was therefore very often the new boy in the school. I often felt isolated and friendless and marginal.

The Jewish friends I made in law school had also lived as minorities, and even more so their parents and grandparents had had experiences in some ways like mine. I also liked my friends because they were smart and funny and ironic and at the same time warm and welcoming. I found a circle of friends who embraced me warmly and accepted me fully.

I dated several Jewish girls. Then I met Alice, who is Jewish. I fell in love. By then I was very interested in Judaism. I took a course in Judaism taught by a wonderful, warm rabbi with a great sense of humor, Rabbi Beryl Cohon, alav ha’shalom.

What a wonderful world I discovered with Rabbi Cohon! Both in what he taught and how he taught it I found a marvelous, complex world filled with both joy and sadness. I learned the ancient saying, “Keep two truths in your pocket and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one truth be ‘For my sake the world was created.’ And the other truth: ‘I am dust and ashes.’” I lit Chanukah candles and began to learn some Hebrew. In the spring, even before I had converted, I led a seder and took delight in the songs and discussions. I changed the haggadah we were using because it ended “Next year in Jerusalem” and I didn’t think we should say that if we didn’t mean it. That led to a fascinating argument with the others at the table.

Here was my most important discovery in Judaism. We didn’t have to agree with each other about what we believed. Do you want to believe that God can fix anything but chooses not to? Fine, you can believe that and be Jewish. Do you want to believe that God cries when God’s creatures suffer, but God can’t step in because the entire system depends upon predictability and free will and now it’s up to human beings to act when injustice occurs, looking to God for inspiration but not for intervention? Fine, you can believe that and be Jewish.

Ever since I had learned about the Holocaust I had been searching for a way to understand what appeared to me to be God’s silence in that dreadful time. I had been hoping to find a way to make religion part of my life again.

I found in Judaism a long tradition of arguing with God. Abraham argues with God at Sodom not to destroy the city if even ten righteous people can be found there. Later God threatens to destroy the rebellious Israelites and Moses persuades God not to do that. In these stories, God listens and responds with changed behavior. As I considered these stories in relation to the Holocaust, I thought maybe I could again have a relationship with God without having to figure out exactly what God could or could not do about suffering in the world. I discovered that it was OK to have a different idea about how God operates than some other Jew might have. We could argue with God. We could dispute with each other. But we were all Jews.

As I studied I came to feel in my heart that I was truly Jewish. I seemed to have a Jewish neshama, a Jewish soul. And so I converted to Judaism.

People who choose Judaism are sometimes called “Jews by choice,” to distinguish us from “Jews by birth.” In America today, however, in this society that provides such a wonderfully broad range of freedom, any Jew can choose to live as a Jew - or not. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, has said that all Jews in America today who affirm their Judaism by living as Jews are Jews by choice.

What choices can we all make to live as Jews?

        My cousin Sarah married John, a very nice young man, very supportive of her Judaism, but who is not Jewish. Sarah and John responded very positively and enthusiastically to my suggestion that I would help them dedicate their home by putting up a mezuzah. They read the prayers together as John nailed the mezuzah to the doorpost. Now they see the mezuzah every time they go in and out. And this week Sarah told us that she and John were having the entire family over to their home for Rosh Hashanah dinner.

I know another young man who is living more than 2,000 miles away from his parents and won’t be home for these holidays. We learned, however, that he found a group of young Jews who would organize their own Erev Rosh Hashanah service followed by a potluck dinner.

 Eight couples who belong to a synagogue in Newton and who are now in their 70’s and 80’s have been studying Jewish subjects together as a study group for more than 30 years. They meet once a month under the guidance of a teacher they’ve hired. They prepare for their classes and have a lively discussion each month. They used to meet in each other’s homes, but one of the women has MS and is now in a nursing home. So they now hold their monthly meetings in the conference room of the nursing home so she can join them.

The possibilities are nearly endless. All we need to do is choose to add to our experience of Judaism and we will find ways to exercise those choices and enrich our lives.

And choice is of course not only about making our lives more Jewish.

We heard James tell us yesterday about the young man, only 45 years old, who recognized that he had been far too focused on career and not enough on family only when he had a nearly fatal heart attack and was forced to take stock of his life.

We don’t have to wait for that kind of crisis. We can use Rosh Hashanah and the sound of the shofar as a wake-up call to us right now, to figure out what’s important in our lives or what’s missing from our lives and then make the necessary changes.

Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking, “I wish I could make that choice but I know I can’t.” Let’s allow ourselves in this season to concentrate first on how we’d like to improve our lives. Once we’re clear about that, then we can turn to finding solutions for any problems that we think there might be. Let’s not give up on choosing but instead explore all the ways that choices are in fact open to us.

For a time in the 1970’s I worked with John Boone, the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. He ran all the Massachusetts prisons.

John Boone taught me a lesson about choice. When a prisoner approaches a door in prison, the prisoner stands and waits for a guard to open it. When the prisoner is released from prison, the prisoner has to relearn opening doors. Often a newly released prisoner will stand and wait at a door before realizing that nobody else is going to open it.

Let’s not imprison ourselves. Let’s open our own doors. Let’s not merely walk through doors that happen to open in front of us. Let’s reflect upon our lives. Let’s consider what we want from life. Let’s make choices.

Choosing our lives is one of the central ideas of Rosh Hashanah. We devote the month of Elul, before Rosh Hashanah, to reflections upon our lives. We pray to be written in the Book of Life for a good year.

Each of us can seize that Book of Life in our own hands, turn the page to a new chapter, and write the chapter as we want it written. Not just once. Repeatedly, and throughout our lives.

            I wish for all of us the ability and the determination to continue to choose our lives. May this be a good and sweet year for all of us, a year in which we pursue our dreams and make good choices.