Here is a text version of Rabbi Schwartzs Yom Kippur - TopicsExpress

Here is a text version of Rabbi Schwartzs Yom Kippur sermon: The Book of Life The central image of the High Holy Days is the ספר החיים the Book of Life. We conclude every amidah that we recite throughout the Aseret Yemay Teshuva with the words “May we and the entire Household of Israel be remembered and inscribed for life, blessing, sustenance, and peace in the Book of Life.” In the Unetane Tokef prayer, the most compelling of all HHD prayers, were are told “on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed,” the implication being our fates are recorded into that very same Book of Life. And even the greeting for the season, לשנה טובה תכתיבו ותחתימו - is a reference to the Book of Life - may you be written, and may you be sealed for a good year. I want to say that I do not believe literally that God is sitting somewhere above us today, with a huge leather bound tome on a vast mahogany desk, choosing whether or not to write our names in this book. But the metaphor is a powerful one, and it speaks to the innate sense that we all have that life is precious, and that when we begin a new year we just do not know what that year will hold. And there is a sense that we have on these sacred days that we are being evaluated - whether by God, by others, or by ourselves, or all three. The Talmud (Bavli RH 16b) extends the metaphor, imagining that God opens three books on Rosh Hashanah - one for the completely righteous, your name goes in there, and you are in the Book of Life, you don’t even have to fast or come to shul on Yom Kippur! One for the completely wicked, your name goes in there, don’t ask. And the third book, for all the rest of us, caught somewhere in between, with good qualities, not so good qualities, but with the ability to change, to do better, and ultimately to make sure our name will get into the right book. Strange as it may seem, it is exactly that process that colleges use to evaluate their potential students for admission. Admissions committees sit around large tables, surrounded by applications, and they create three piles. The first pile, those students who will be offered admission without any question. The second pile, those students who don’t have a chance. And the third pile, students who are somewhere in between. Becky and I have two of our children in college this year, our oldest Talia and our son Josh, so we are acutely sensitive to the college admissions process. It is largely based on numbers - primarily test scores and high school GPA, and class ranking, but also the high school resume, a listing of the student’s activities, awards, and accomplishments. The challenge the colleges and universities have is that they have thousands upon thousands of students to evaluate, so the easiest way is to do it by numbers - by the book, if you’ll excuse the pun. But there is a growing discomfort in higher education circles with this process. We know, for example, that a numbers based evaluation system tends to favor students from a higher socio-economic class, or students that go to private school, students that can afford tutors for the SAT. So the college system, which at one time was a way a person could bridge the gap between the haves and have nots, has actually become part of the problem, increasing the gap, funneling those of means to the better schools, leaving behind those without. There is also concern in the higher education world that that numbers based system has begun to affect not only the way students are admitted to college, but also the way they are taught when they arrive on campus. At the end of the day the question is what is the purpose of higher education? Should it be to train a young person for a career? So they can come out of college and jump right into the work force, get a job, earn a living. Or should college be about something more than that? Should it be about growing character, about helping to refine a student’s sensibilities and giving them a deeper sense of their place in the world? Over the last 6 months a debate about precisely that question has been raging on college campuses around the country. This summer the New Republic published an essay by the social critic William Deresiewicz called “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” Deresiewicz argues that elite universities have lost track of the true purpose of higher education, which should be to grow a more mature, complete, learned, and wise human being. What has happened instead, he writes, is that elite schools have bought into the commercial ethos of our time. They’ve become resume builders, goal oriented spring boards to jobs where students can earn significant salaries upon graduation. To put it crassly, his central thesis is this: a college education used to be about building character, making a better human being, what we might call in Judaism making a mensch; but today, it is all about economic advancement, and quality of character has become an afterthought. The essay clearly struck a chord. Within a matter of weeks the article became the most read in the 100 year history of the New Republic, and has at this point been viewed more than 2 million times on the magazine’s website. As you may imagine, some people were incensed at the suggestion that the ivies could have gone so terribly astray, and a vigorous debate ensued involving academicians, parents, and students around the country. As the father of two current college students, I followed the debate with interest. I asked myself the question: what do I hope MY children get from their college experiences? And again and again I came up with the same answer - a JOB! But as I followed the debate about the purpose of higher education I began to think about the issue from a different perspective, a distinctly rabbinic perspective. And that is when I meet a family to prepare for a funeral, which I have now done in the course of my rabbinate some 800 times, and that family talks about the person they’ve lost, what is it they say? What do they remember? Which aspects of a person’s life leave the deepest impression with their family and friends, the people they care about the most? And I have to say that as I went through those conversations in my mind, the answer became quite clear. People by and large do not talk about their loved one’s professional success in those conversations. The truth is your wife doesn’t care that much if you were a successful doctor. Your daughter doesn’t love you because you ran a successful business. Your son does not respect you because of the amount of money you are able to earn in the course of the year or the title of your job. Instead, your wife cares about the fact that you have been a devoted, loyal, listening, and loving life partner. Your daughter loves you because you’ve been kind to her, because you’ve helped her through a challenging time, because you were always there for her. Your son respects you because you are honest, because you are generous, because you’ve been able to give him good advice over the years. And that is what they remember, that is what they talk about, when they sit down with the rabbi. Shared laughter, time spent together at ball games and during vacations, respect and admiration because of quality of character and purposeful living. So it seems to me, in this great debate about what the role of higher education should be, and how we want to form our young people, about who we want them to be, that William Deresiewicz has something important to say. Would I like my children to get a job after college? You bet! But do I want their pursuit of a job to define their college experience? I do not. Becky and I sent Tali and Josh off to college hoping that it will be a formative experience for them, in terms of their character, in terms of forming lifelong relationships, in terms of learning about and understanding the world, and their place in it and responsibility for it. In other words, I hope that while my children are in college they come to a deeper understanding of how they will answer the question ‘who do I want to be.’ Not in the sense of who do I want to be professionally. But who do I want to be as a person, as a member of the Jewish people, as a human being? Now that, without a doubt, is a question worthy of consideration on a Yom Kippur day. It is a question that Judaism has been wrestling with for a long time. Some 2000 years ago Rabbi Judah the Prince, the codifier of the Mishnah, asked it this way: איזוהי דרך ישרה שיבור לו האדם - what is the proper path that a person should choose in the course of life? And that is a question that cannot be answered by numbers. It is not a question that is answered by a score on a standardized test, or a grade in a course, or the square footage of a home, or the amount of money in a bank account. The valuation we place on our own lives and on the lives of others has become more and more a numbers game today. In every area of life. We track and evaluate everything: the number of steps we walk daily, our sleep patterns, our heart rhythms, our weight, the number of ‘friends’ we have on FB. But at the end of the day, numbers do a very poor job of measuring the quality of a human life. Some months ago I officiated at the funeral of a man who had lived a long life, into his late 80s. Three children. Six grandchildren. Multiple great grandchildren as well. Long marriage, close to fifty years. On paper it all looked good, and most folks, seeing those numbers, would say ‘sign me up.’ But the story behind the numbers was much more complicated. There was an earlier failed marriage that he never was able to come to terms with. There was a deep sense of unease, a restlessness that never allowed him to feel he had what he was looking for. Family relationships were challenging and rarely satisfying. His numbers were great, but his life, in many ways, had been difficult and painful. Judaism has always been uncomfortable with counting people, assigning a number to a human being. In the Bible, a census was completed by using a half shekel to represent individuals, so as not to directly count a person. Even today the tradition is not to count individuals directly using numbers when checking if the required ten are present for a prayer service. I had a statistics professor in graduate school who told us that statistics are like a bikini – they reveal general curves but conceal essential truths. How do you quantify thought, mindfulness, attentiveness, laughter, love, Shakespeare, Torah, sadness, how you feel on a bright summer morning, or when you watch a baby take her first steps. Somewhere in all of those things, and so many others, is a sense of what it truly means to live a human life. And you see, that is what is actually recorded in the Book of Life. The Book of Life is not about quantity. It is not about the number of years we will walk on this earth, how long we will live. It is instead a recording of how we have walked, of the way we have lived. If we could look into its pages we would see a record of laughter that we shared with people that we love, and tears that we cried. We would see written there kind deeds that we performed, and encouraging words that we spoke. We would see on its pages would be the beauty that transformed us, grief that we struggled with, celebrations we were blessed with, relationships that fulfilled and enriched our lives, understanding we acquired, selflessness that characterized our daily deeds. It is a book of quality, not quantity. That is the book which we ourselves inscribe throughout the year, and we ask to be inscribed in on this Yom Kippur day. And so let this be our prayer today: ’May the inscription in that sefer hahayim that we and the entire House of Israel make during this holy season, be a record of good deeds, of meaningful days, of purposeful living, of deepening understanding and hope. Then we will be remembered before God and those we love, for life, blessing, sustenance, and peace in this new year and all the years we are granted.” may they be many, may they be full -