Tikkun Ha-am: Renewing our People; Sermon for Yom Kippur 5768

I recently heard a story about a philosophy professor who lost his connection to Judaism. The chair of his department once asked him to pick up a visiting scholar who was arriving in town. The professor asked the chair, “why me?” and his colleague said, “you’re are a philosophy professor, and so is he, I think you’ll have an interesting discussion. He met the scholar, who turned out to be [none other than] Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the two of them were having a pleasant conversation on their way to the university when suddenly Dr. Heschel asked, “Are you Jewish?” to which the professor responded matter of factly, “yes.” At which point Heschel added, “And what are you doing about it?”

Heschel knew that the question, “Are you Jewish?” is more than a question, it is an existential challenge. And he knew that, “yes,” is no conclusive answer. It merely invites the next question, “and what are you doing about it?”

I find several things particularly interesting about the exchange between these two Jewish philosophy professors. First, if they discussed philosophy at all, it is not part of the story that has been passed down. After ascertaining that the young professor is Jewish, Heschel doesn’t ask him what he thinks about Judaism, or what he believes. He asks him what he is doing about it!

Second, the discussion is extremely personal, to some, maybe overly personal. You meet a person who is doing you the kindness of driving you from the train and immediately start challenging him about his identity and how he chooses to express it? What chutzpah!

This is not the time to go into the biography of Heschel, but suffice it to say, he was a man of courage and conviction. But in this instance, he must have a sense that the man was Jewish, and having determined that indeed he was, he addressed him as one Jew to another, like a member of his family. And indeed, that young man did return to Jewish life.

Before Judaism was a religion, we Jews were a people, an extended family, the children of Abraham and Sarah. God’s call to Abraham, Lech l’cha, “go forth from your native land… to the land that I will show you,” continues with a set of promises, the first of which is, “and I will make of you a great nation.” God asks no commitments of belief and makes no promises about launching a new faith. Judaism begins with a people, the Jewish people. Surely over time we became more than just a people, but at our core, we remain a people. We are bound to one another as family. And as professor Heschel demonstrated, members of a family care about one another.

Over these holy days I have been speaking about the Jewish concept of tikkun; repair. I have shared with you the wonderful teaching of the mystical book, the Zohar that we are part of a great chain of being in which all things are connected. Every act therefore is consequential. Every deed we do, for good or for bad, matters, and affects the balance of life.

Tikkun, I suggested, is about restoring balance, in our selves, in our relationships, and in our world. I have spoken about tikkun olam, our responsibility to repair the world, and tikkun nefesh, our efforts to heal our selves, and today I want to speak about tikkun ha-am, restoring wholeness to the Jewish people.

In the haftarah we are about to/just read Isaiah declares the meaning of our fast this day is to open our hearts to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, and never to hide from our own kin…”

This last phrase, mib’sarcha lo tit-a-lam, is better translated, “and not to be indifferent to you own flesh.” We Jews are like limbs of a single body. Whenever and wherever Jews suffer we should feel their pain, cry out for them, and most importantly, rally to their aid.

Jewish spirituality demands action. It is not enough to just to care about others. We need to act on their behalf. This was the import of Heschel’s question to the young professor. You’re Jewish? So what are you doing about it?

Tikkun Ha-am begins with reminding one another that we are Jews, and that to be Jewish means to take responsibility for one another.

Rabbi Danny Gordis tells a story I heard from my dear friend Rabbi David Weis about just such an act of tikkun ha-am.

It was 1990, and a group of Israeli girls from Jerusalem were on their high school’s annual trip to Poland. One day, while in Krakow, they noticed a young man selling dolls. They were “Jew dolls,” made to look like traditional Jews. Jew dolls for sale in a country where nearly 95% of the Jewish population was destroyed at the hands of the Nazis and their Polish collaborators! But business is business, and with so many Jews making pilgrimage to Poland, Jew dolls are surely a good sell.

Having very little money, the girls were going to pass on these ‘souvenirs’ until some of them noticed that the “books” these dolls were holding looked remarkably authentic. The Hebrew looked like real Hebrew. In fact, the letters looked very much like the calligraphy one would find in a Sefer Torah. On closer examination they were convinced that these miniature books had been cut from an actual Sefer Torah.

They complimented the man on the authenticity of his dolls and asked where he’d gotten the beautiful parchments. Flattered, he told them his uncle had a big scroll of it in the nearby town. When they asked where his uncle had gotten it, he told them it had been in the house of a Jew during the war and his uncle had taken it after the Jew disappeared. “Could we see it?” they asked. He agreed and brought it back the next day.

He showed them what was left of the scroll and the girls saw immediately that it was Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus – the first three books of the Torah. Apparently, the two other books had already been carved up for the dolls. The girls instinctively knew what they had to do. They pooled their money, bought the Torah, smuggled it out of Poland and brought it home to Israel.

They took it to a place in Jerusalem where such scrolls are repaired, but the work was too expensive, and the project was put on hold.

Those girls graduated, moved on with their lives, and the Torah remained un-repaired.

Fast forward to 2004 - fourteen years later -and another senior class from the same High School made the trip to Poland. These girls had an extraordinarily powerful experience, and during their trip, heard the story of the Torah that their predecessors, now in their thirties, had smuggled out of Europe.

This class decided to complete the work their schoolmates had begun. They raised the necessary funds, had the Torah repaired, and on a Sunday evening in Jerusalem it was danced into its new home in the school auditorium qua synagogue, where, instead of being carved up for dolls, it is now read by young women who understand what it means.

And what does it mean? Why did those girls spend all their money and take such risks to rescue a damaged Torah scroll from Poland? And what moved those girls 14 years later to go to such lengths to have that scroll repaired?

I am convinced it was more than the religious significance of the Torah that inspired them. I believe they saw Jewish souls in that Sefer Torah; that it represented to them the tangible remains of Jews who had lived and died near Krakow. By smuggling that scroll out of Poland they redeemed those Jewish souls and brought them home. 14 years later that next group of girls understood this and decided to complete this sacred task by bringing that Torah back to life.

It was an incredible act of tikkun ha-Am, Jewish healing, to renew the last remnant of Jews they never knew yet embraced as their own. It was an extraordinary act of Jewish love.

How did those girls see Jewish souls in that broken Sefer Torah? They saw it with their Jewish souls, because one Jewish soul can see another. And once they saw, they knew in their hearts they had to perform the mitzvah of tikkun.

As Israelis, the mitzvah of tikkun ha-Am, repairing the Jewish people, was in their blood. It is an integral part of what being Jewish meant to them, and so it must be for all Jews!

Israel embodies and embraces this mitzvah as its reason for being. Even before the State was born, the Jewish Agency was created for the purpose of tikkun ha-Am, to bring Jews home to Israel, one by one. Not just young vibrant Jews who could build the land and fight for freedom, also broken, sick and defenseless Jews from Europe and Arab lands; they too, were brought home to be healed and renewed.

Many of us grew up in homes with a little blue tzedakah box, for the Jewish National Fund, some of us have them still wehave them here in our religious school. Abraham Joshua Heschel describes how “years ago young… yeshiva students, would go around to houses and exchange empty boxes for the full ones. Once, a young boy went to empty the boxes in the town of Sanuk in Galicia, and as he entered the doorway of a shoemaker he said, “I’ve come to empty the Jewish National Fund box.” At first the shoemaker was silent, then he asked the visitor to sit down. He removed the boy’s shoes and began to put new soles on them. The young man was dumbfounded. “What are you doing?” he asked. The shoemaker replied, “I am a poor person and I cannot afford to make contributions to the Jewish National Fund, so I want to put new soles on your shoes.” You walk from house to house to save our people, “and I wish to have a portion in this mitzvah.” (Moral Grandeur p.65)

This mitzvah of tikkun-ha-am, this expression of love for our people is a light that has burned brightly in the hearts of Jews across time and space, like my great cousin David Kaplan of blessed memory, who helped bring Jews to Palestine when the British barred their entry. It was the driving force for Jews who smuggled arms for the Haganah, the Jewish army of the Yishuv. And it was this spirit that energized us to rescue the Jews of Russia and Ethiopia in more recent years.

Tikkun ha-Am means acting out of love to help our fellow Jews. It means never to hide from our own kin; never to treat them like they don’t belong to us, or us to them; never to act like they are not our family.

Friends, like that shoemaker, all of us here have a portion of the mitzvah of tikkun ha-Am, the act of repairing our Jewish people. Some of us know it, and some of us may not.

Every Jew who teaches their children and others to love and care about their fellow Jews and to love their Jewish heritage has a portion in the mitzvah of tikkun ha’am.

Every time we grow our Jewish souls, our yiddishe neshamas, by learning, praying, celebrating Shabbat and holy days, we help repair the Jewish people.

Every time we give to Jewish causes, to the synagogue, the Federation, the JCC, Jewish Family Service, and others, we help fix our Jewish world.

Every time we stand with Israel against those who deny her legitimacy, even if we disagree with the government in power, we do a great mitzvah for our people.

We show our love and help to heal our people’s wounds when we conquer fear and go to Israel when times are tough; when we remember the sacrifices Israelis have made for our land and for us; when we don’t forget our young soldiers like, Ehud Goldwasser, Gilead Shalit, and Eldad Regev who still languish in captivity.

When we remember Jews in distant lands and help them, be it Belarus or Buenos Aires, we keep faith with our creed.

Every non-Jew who lovingly supports their Jewish spouse, their Jewish child or their Jewish grandchildren, helps to sustain our people and deserves our deepest gratitude.

Every Jew who is a member of a synagogue fulfills the mitzvah of tikkun ha-Am; some by giving time and energy, and all of us, even the least involved, by what we give to support its mission. Sitting among us are founders and long time members of this temple. We salute you for all you have done for your people. Those of you who are guests, we welcome you and invite you to join our family. And I urge all of us to reach out to our Jewish neighbors who are not affiliated and encourage them to join a synagogue. Join me in resisting the trend of fast-food Judaism, the practice of purchasing Jewish services like buying a bar mitzvah or renting a rabbi and then discarding the package, the synagogue and the Jewish community. We must reject the idea that a Jew “no longer needs the synagogue,” when their children have grown up. Our people need us until the day we die! Just imagine what our Jewish community would look like if every Jew kept faith with every other Jew!

When we resist the tensions and pull of the secular world and tell our children that their Jewish education cannot be sacrificed for sports or clubs, and must not end with bar or bat mitzvah, we help to save a Jewish soul.

We bring wholeness to the Jewish people when we treat each other lovingly at all times, especially when fellow Jews challenge us to act on behalf of our people. For example, when a fellow Jew asks us to give to a Jewish cause, we should thank the caller kindly for their devotion to our people, and give what we can, if we can. Like the shoemaker, by our caring, we acquire a share in the mitzvah of tikkun ha-am.

Those Israeli girls saw Jewish souls in a broken Sefer Torah and resolved to affect a great tikkun. The task of our time is to rekindle the spark of the Jewish soul in every Jew, so that every Jew will feel his or her kinship with the Jewish people. So when we are asked, we will fervently declare, “yes, we are Jews, and we are doing something about it. We are living Torah, doing the sacred work of tikkun, tikkun ha-nefesh, tikkun ha-am, and tikkun olam; repairing our souls, lifting up the Jewish people, and bringing wholeness and healing to the world. V’chen yehi ratson!

Tikkun Ha-nefesh: Healing our Souls; Sermon for Kol Nidrei 5768

Tikkun Ha-nefesh: Healing our Souls

Sermon for Kol Nidrei 5768

The biblical story of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, is a tale about a man who has everything… except happiness. He succeeds in amassing great wealth and wisdom, the highest values he can imagine, and still he is unsatisfied. He tries soaking his flesh in wine and indulging every worldly pleasure, and this, too, leaves him unfulfilled. His conclusion, “Utter futility! All is futile!” There is no lasting value in anything, he declares, because the same fate awaits us all. 

Kohelet looks at the world and sees wickedness alongside justice, and evil alongside good, and concludes with disappointment that God will not solve our problems for us. Saint and sinner alike, will die.

Most commentators, ancient and modern, find Kohelet morose and pessimistic. I do not. I see him as a realist. And though his final analysis doesn’t seem to bring him peace, I think Kohelet has a valuable lesson to teach us: Too much of any one thing is not good. Wealth is better than poverty, he decides, and wisdom is better than ignorance, though excessive pursuit of either won’t bring fulfillment. Live life and enjoy it, make a good name for yourself and guard your tongue, he says, and all the good fortune that does comes your way, view it as a gift from God. Sounds like sage advice to me!

The masters of the Zohar, the great compendium of kabala, shared Kohelet’s belief that God will not solve our problems [for us]. They also agreed that we don’t live in a perfect world. But they were not pessimistic about our fate. They believed that we have immense power to effect tikkun, to set the world right, and they taught that we must begin with ourselves. As Rabbi Simcha Bunim taught, “You cannot find peace anywhere save in your own self… When we have made peace within ourselves, we will be able to make peace in the whole world.”

The most important teaching of the kabala is that we are part of one great chain of being, that everything is connected. Every act, every deed matters because it affects everything else. So when we mend something in the world, we repair something in ourselves. And when we fix something in our selves, we repair the world.

On Rosh Hashanah I spoke about some of the serious imbalances in our world, and how they stem from imbalances in our lives. I shared some of the ways our reckless consumption is degrading our health, our environment, and threatening the very future of life on earth. God willing, it is not too late to fix what we have broken. We must be hopeful and believe that this is so. But we must not wait. We must begin in earnest to do the work of tikkun.

Tonight I would like to talk about fixing our selves, tikkun ha-nefesh, repairing our souls, and share with you several ways we can go about this. First a little background about kilkul, my sense of what is broken, and then three ways I think we can effect tikkun.

We are in need of repair. Most of us will agree our lives are out of balance. We are living the life of Kohelet, constantly testing the extremes in search of satisfaction, and too often failing to achieve it.

Dr. Wendy Mogel was a psychologist with a successful practice in Los Angeles. Her work provided significant challenge, responding to families that came to her in distress. Many days this required giving parents “bad news,” about their children’s psychological profile. But there were also “good news,” days when she was able to report to parents that their child’s tests revealed problems within normal limits.

Over time Mogel began to detect a strange new pattern. Increasing numbers of children were testing in the normal range but simply weren’t thriving. They were constantly complaining about a variety of ailments from tummy aches to unfair treatment by teachers, coaches and peers. At home there were constant battles over homework, and never-ending negotiations over goods and services. These usually sounded like this: “Well Lindsay has the latest i-pod… or, Brittany’s parents let her get her ears pierced… or, all the other kids are allowed to stay up and watch TV! 

None of these families seemed to be suffering from any clinical disorder that Dr. Mogel could diagnose, yet all seemed off course, out of balance, and chronically unhappy.

Mogel’s conclusion: these children were victims of their parents’ success, of a culture of excess and overindulgence in which parents were failing to set appropriate boundaries. As a result, their children weren’t learning to set boundaries for themselves. If no one ever says no to us, how can we learn to say no to ourselves? And then, when the inevitable happens, when someone has the audacity to say no to us, be it a parent, a teacher, or even “the law,” is it any wonder we rebel?

This past year I received a phone call from the superintendent of Montgomery schools. He wanted to discuss recent incidents of anti-Semitism at our High School. When we met, I insisted these events were really symptoms of a larger problem. Such hatred, I argued, is sprouting from the seeds of competition and alienation we are sowing in our children’s souls. I saw this when our younger daughter was completing high school. The students were whipped into a frenzy about tests and scores in one huge competition to get into the right college, to get the right job, to earn the right salary, to be winners and not losers in the game of life.

On Rosh Hashanah I related how the Zohar sees the world as a place of abundance, of sufficient resources to sustain all life. Our children are receiving the message that there is not enough to go around; that the person sitting next to them is the competition. If she scores higher than I do, she’ll get my place at Harvard; he’ll get my job, my income, my success, and rob me of my life and my happiness.

Isn’t this the world in which we live? A place of winners and losers where our neighbor has become our enemy? Is it any wonder that sometimes our schools and campuses erupt in violence? Should we be at all surprised when those who feel like outcasts or losers want others to suffer for their pain?

The first tikkun I would like to suggest is tikkun yachasim, repairing our relationships.

Too often we are treated or treat others as objects, as tools to accomplish tasks, only to be discarded when they are no longer useful. Many companies treat their machines better than their employees. After all, it can be less costly to replace a worker than a piece of valuable equipment. Even husbands and wives readily dispense with one another if their needs and desires are not fulfilled. How else can we explain divorce rates upwards of 50%?

If we hope to be valued as human beings, we need to start seeing each other differently. The Zohar imagines the corresponding attributes of God as faces. Only when the faces are turned toward each other is there harmony and balance in the world. In a stunning interpretation of the psalm, “Hinei ma tov u’ma naim, how good and how pleasant when brothers dwell together in unity,” (ps 134?) the Zohar teaches that the divine faces line up only when our faces are turned to one another; only when we see each other as brothers and sisters down here on earth. This is the kind of tikkun one rabbi spoke of when he “asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun.

“Could it be,” asked one of the students, “when you can see an animal in the distance and can tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?”

“No,” answered the Rabbi.

Another asked, “Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell whether it is a fig tree or a peach tree?”

“No,” answered the Rabbi.

“Then what is it?” the pupils demanded.

“It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that it is you sister or brother. Because if you cannot see this, it is still night.” (Spiritual Literacy, p. 502)

The Hebrew word for the pupil of the eye, ishon, is derived from the word, ish, which means man or person. What’s the connection? When you look another person in the eye, you can see your own reflection, literally and figuratively. What a significant tikkun it would be if we could learn to see our selves in one another’s eyes, and to see it as the face of God.

Another tikkun for the soul is to develop the value of histapkut; sufficiency, or knowing when we have enough.

I have friends and family members who grew up with very little by middle class standards, but never thought of themselves as poor. Surrounded by family and friends, they enjoyed the fellowship of their synagogue community, and felt enriched celebrating the cycles of the seasons and marking the passages of life. Without knowing it, they lived the teaching of the Sages that to be rich is to be happy with what you have. Today we have so much more, but on the whole, we seem less happy.

A recent edition of Time magazine included a chart comparing average food portions today with those 20 years ago. A bagel was once 3-inches in diameter and contained 140 calories. Today it is 6-inches round and has 350 calories. The average blueberry muffin was 1.5 ounces and 210 calories. Today it is 5 ounces and 500 calories. Drive around Somerset County and compare older houses in nice neighborhoods to new ones being built today. Have our families grown in size over the last 30 years that we need double the square footage to house them?

A really significant tikkun for our souls would be to cultivate an ethic of sufficiency; the ability to say dayenu, enough! One good reason for this was expressed by a bumper sticker that read: “Insatiable is Unsustainable.” It is true! One of the primary purposes of Jewish law is to help us control our appetites, limiting the foods we can eat and the urges we can indulge. Our health and the balance of the world demand learning to live within limits!

Another good reason to learn to say dayenu is it’s the only way we will ever feel rich!  If enough is never enough, our focus is never on what we have, only on what we lack. If this is the case, how are we ever to feel grateful? Dayenu is more than a song at our seder, it is an important tikkun for our souls!

The final tikkun I would like to discuss is one I particularly struggle with myself, and that is managing our time.

The latest census reveals that we are working longer and longer hours. One in every 8 people now leaves home before 6 am because of the increased demands of our jobs. And because of computers, blackberries, and e-mail, we are never completely off-duty. Even when we are off, we are often on the run.

One of the most beloved passages in the Hebrew Bible is the 23^rd psalm. It speaks of God as a shepherd who loves and cares for us, his sheep, bringing us into verdant green pastures, where we can lie in the cool grass and rest, leading us beside still waters where we can be refreshed and renewed. Such an inviting picture of tranquility and peace, a slice of heaven on earth! Yet what is our primary association with this psalm? We read it at funerals and memorial services! Do we have to die before we can enjoy this kind of peace and rest? Shouldn’t it be possible to enjoy such pleasure in this life? And not just on vacation?

I remember as a child being allowed to play. My parents didn’t schedule play dates for me. They didn’t fill all my afternoons and weekends running to structured classes and supervised programs. I played with children in my neighborhood, on the playground in Queens, and up the street when we moved to the suburbs. Nor did my parents push me on the fast track to Ivy League schools. They let me be a child, and I believe we should give this gift to all our children. This is the conclusion Wendy Mogel reaches in her important book, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, which I recommend to every parent.

One of the most famous passages from Kohelet is in chapter 3, “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.” Read in context, Kohelet meant to say that there are limits to our lives. It’s certainly true. But that doesn’t prevent us from reading his words as an expression of possibility, as well. Within the boundaries, there are limitless possibilities for the way we can choose to live and experience life. We don’t have to be slaves to anyone, not even to ourselves. We can find a reasonable balance between work and rest and play.

Do you remember the old advertisement for Club Med? It described their vacations as the antidote to civilization. We Jews have our own antidote to civilization and all its encumbrances, and it can help heal our souls like a tonic to an ailing and worn-out body—Shabbat! One of God’s greatest acts of creation was an act of non-creation, carving out an island in time as a refuge for our souls, a taste of paradise.

Our challenge is to accept this gift and to learn how to use it to achieve tikkun nefesh. Our traditional Jewish brothers and sisters know something that has escaped most of us non-Orthodox Jews. We tend to think that of prohibitions of Shabbat restrictions on our freedom. It is exactly the opposite! They liberate us from the shackles of our tools and allow us to respond to the rhythms of our souls. Shabbat is a tikkun that makes possible many other tikkunim. It offers us time for relationships, time for appreciation, to grow in mind and spirit, time to feel our connectedness to God and to all things, time just to be; and that is a real blessing!

I conclude with a story about a traveler who was making a long trek in the deep jungles of Africa. To assist him on his journey coolies were engaged from a local tribe to carry his supplies. The first day they marched rapidly and went far. The traveler had high hopes of a speedy journey. But the second morning these jungle tribesmen refused to move. For some strange reason they just sat and rested. On inquiry as to the reason for this strange behavior, the traveler was informed that they had gone too fast the first day, and that they were now waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies.

We desperately need to slow down to allow our souls to catch up with our bodies, to become whole again, to find rest and peace and healing. May this be our blessing in the New Year that lies before us. 

V’cheyn yehi ratson!

Tikkun Olam: Restoring our Balance; Sermon for Rosh Hashanah 5768

In Judaism, you know, there is a blessing for everything. Even for attending to our bodily functions. It’s true! In liturgical shorthand it’s called asher yatzar. We thank God for making our bodies with wisdom, combining veins, arteries, and vital organs into a finely balanced system. That’s the version in our prayer book. The traditional wording speaks of ducts and tubes and acknowledges how, God knows, if one of them should be open or closed at the wrong time… Oy! Have we got tzuris!

Life is, indeed, a delicate balance. Our health, our strength, our emotions, our time, our resources, and especially our relationships, what a struggle to keep them balanced!

Among life’s great joys are those opportunities to see and experience the perfect balance; to eat a meal in which the blend of flavors is just right; to behold ballet dancers floating gracefully across the stage; to see a work of art that achieves just the right use of light and color.

Such experiences are moving and inspiring because they reveal the sublime beauty and harmony of being; that exquisitely delicate balance that so often feels elusive.

When I was a student rabbi in Westfield, a friend on the clergy council told me a story about a man who stood at the top of Niagara Falls and saw a rope stretched form one side to the other. As he watched, a man started to walk across the rope, pushing a wheelbarrow. The first man couldn’t believe his eyes. When the other arrived safely at his side, he said to him, “Wow! I didn’t think that was possible.” “Well,” said the other, “Do you think I can make it back across?” Yeah, I believe you can.” “Great,” said the other, “hop in the wheelbarrow!”

What would you say? Would you accept the invitation to jump into the wheelbarrow? The truth is, we don’t have a choice! We’re all inside that wheelbarrow, crossing the tightrope of life, our knuckles turning white, as we hold on for dear life. As Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav put it, “The whole world is a narrow bridge.” “And the key,” he said, “is not to be afraid.” I would add; the key is not to lose your balance!

This is no simple thing, especially because we are not in the wheelbarrow alone. Each of our actions affects the balance of the whole. We’re all in there together. And as such, we are responsible to and for each other. The Midrash compares humanity to a group of people sailing together in a boat. Suddenly one of the passengers starts drilling a hole under his seat. When the people object, he retorts, “What are you complaining about? After all, I’m drilling under my own seat.” (Vayikra Rabba 4:6)

All over the world today, people are drilling holes under their own seats, and our boat is taking on water, literally. Once it was possible for human beings to imagine that the earth was impervious to our influence. Today it is increasingly clear that our imbalances of consumption are threatening the balance of the entire planet.

The CFC’s I release in my home drill a hole in the ozone layer that protects your skin. The coal they burn near Beijing produces acid rain that falls on Korea and Japan, degrading their environment. The toxic wastes that leach from the industrialized animal farms in Arkansas show up in their neighbor’s drinking water.

Truth be told, we’ve known about the human impact on the environment for a long time. 1962 Rachel Carson exposed the hazards of pesticides, especially DDT, in a landmark book entitled, Silent Spring. She demonstrated how DDT “entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, causing cancer and genetic damage.” And most shockingly, she showed how DDT had contaminated the entire world food supply.

Fifteen years ago, in a book that now reads like prophecy, Al Gore warned us about the danger of treating the earth as a collection of “resources,” to be exploited at our will. “…we are in effect, a natural force just like the winds and the tides…, he wrote, and “we are threatening to push the earth out of balance.” (Earth in the Balance, p. 2)

Two summers ago in Israel at the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research in the Negev we saw satellite images of the earth taken over a period of decades. They reveal the undeniable facts of global warming. Deserts are expanding. The polar icecaps are melting. And a bitter irony dawned on me. If current trends continue, we will literally drown in the desert as the landmasses dry up and the seawaters rise. It’s not that there isn’t enough water it’s just in all the wrong places!

The Torah teaches that God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, “to till it and to tend it,” l’ovdah, u’l’shomrah, “to work it and preserve it.” Our role was a balanced one, entailing responsibilities of stewardship that we have abdicated in modern times. We are already paying a heavy price for this and the stakes are getting higher. We need to start guarding and protecting the garden of the earth before we work it and ourselves to death.

There is mountain of data that I could share with you about the environmental crises we have wrought. Virtually no corner of our planet is unscathed. So I urge you to learn more. If you haven’t seen the film, An Inconvenient Truth, I urge you to do so. I have only one significant disagreement with the film, and that is its title. The truth about our environment is not an inconvenience. It is an outrage and a scandal.

Recycle, reuse, and think about every product you consume. Replace your incandescent light bulbs with CFL’s, compact fluorescent lamps. They are readily available. Most importantly, multiply your personal acts of environmental responsibility by engaging in advocacy. Every time we go to Washington to lobby we learn how few people make their voices heard, and how powerful that makes those who do speak up.

My colleague Rabbi Michael Namath of the RAC likes to tell the story of a town located alongside a river. Now the townsfolk were truly good people and as such, they were greatly distressed to hear that someone had fallen into the river and needed to be rescued, right in the middle of their town. When it happened a second and third time, they became really concerned, and began posting guards who would be there to save people from the river. But the problem only seemed to get worse, and because these were truly good people, they added even more guards to the effort. Until one day a member of the community came to the town council with a suggestion. Instead of putting all of their efforts into fishing people out of the river, why not go upstream and find out why they were falling in, in the first place? Within weeks, the townsfolk had installed railings and fences along the dangerous places up river, and the problem was solved.

It is vital that we do everything we can to soften our personal footprints on the earth. But that is not enough to slow down the accelerating pace of global warming. We must deliver a message to all our representatives that we will be judging them by their actions on these issues. And we must make certain that the path to the White House in 2008 is green. We need a new energy policy that is focused on renewable resources that are non-polluting. And that means shifting budget priorities to ones that are truly pro-life!

Jewish tradition has a powerful set of metaphors for the challenges of thinking globally. It is the language of “tikkun,” “repair,” that was developed by the masters of the Kabbalah, in 13th century Spain.

Over the course of these holy days you’ll be hearing more about this important concept. Today I want to talk about its essence. At its core, the mystical idea of tikkun is about balance, about achieving harmony between the different forces and qualities in life.

For as pressing as the environmental crisis may be, it is downstream from the source of the problem. It is a symptom of larger issues of imbalance in our lives. This is the message of the Zohar, the bible of the Kabbalah.

At the beginning we humans lived in paradise, a garden where everything co-existed in perfect harmony. Quoting Genesis 2, the Zohar teaches: “A river flows from Eden to water the garden.”

From Eden, from the Source of Being there is an ever-flowing stream of energy that nourishes & sustains the world- the garden. And our role is to till and to tend the garden, to maintain its balance and our own! For we are not only caretakers of the garden, we are rooted in its soil. Its wellbeing and ours are intertwined, dependent upon the proper balance of nutrients, of qualities and attributes that flow from the Source of all being.

Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? A perfect symbiosis! So what went wrong? Who and what spoiled the perfect harmony and balance of the garden? We did!

According to the Zohar the sin of the Garden of Eden was not that Adam & Eve ate the fruit of knowledge. It’s that they ate of it exclusively, to the exclusion of the other fruits, all the other qualities needed for a healthy balanced life. The fruit of knowledge was so desirable, so enticing, that they overindulged. And so have we!

I understand that environmental paradigms can be divided into two groups, theories of scarcity and theories of abundance. The masters of the Zohar saw the world as a place of abundance. The river flows from Eden; in the present tense. It is ever flowing, always sufficient to nourish and sustain the garden… if! if the resources are properly distributed; if there is proper balance!

But there is not proper balance! Too few of us consume far too many of earth’s resources. And often we do so recklessly, at the expense of our health, our relationships, and our environment.

Take the example of food. All the food in the world comes from one source. Do you know what it is? The sun!

Plants transform the sun’s energy into nutrients through photosynthesis. We get our sustenance either by eating those plants, or by eating the milk & meat of animals that eat those plants.

So long as the sun burns bright, the source of our food is inexhaustible, an ever-flowing stream of energy! Scarcity or abundance is all a function of distribution – of balance and proper management. Yet hundreds of millions of people are hungry or starving in the world today. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving. Over 4 million people will die of hunger this year.

At the same time, two-thirds of Americans are overweight, half of them are obese, and far too many of them are children. Some of this is overindulgence. A significant factor is the poor quality of our food.

A few years ago, an independent filmmaker named Morgan Spurlock came across a story about two obese girls who were suing McDonald’s for making them fat. Intrigued by their story he set out to make a documentary about the health effects of eating fast-food, with himself as the guinea pig. A normally healthy man, he engaged several doctors to monitor his health while he proceeded to eat McDonald’s for three meals a day for thirty days. The results far exceeded all expectations. By the end Spurlock had sustained liver damage, stomach pains, significant weight gain, and depression.

Spurlock’s film, “Supersize Me!” is eye opening in particular because one-third of America’s children eat at a fast-food outlet every day.

This summer I read a book that changed the way I eat and think about food called, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It is a very serious, very important book written by Michael Pollan, a frequent columnist for the NY Times Magazine. Pollan investigates our food chain, tracing several types of American meals back to their sources in nature. What he discovered is that all aisles in the supermarket lead to the corn-belt. Corn is in almost everything we eat, from the obvious to additives, to the fact that most of the meat, poultry and even the fish we eat are now raised on corn. Yes, farm-raised fish are swimming stalks of corn!

Why so much corn? The turning point was after WW II when the government found itself with a surplus of ammonium nitrate, the main ingredient for making explosives. It turned out to be an excellent fertilizer, providing the nitrogen that allowed hybrid corn to be grown denser and denser, year after year on the same soil. The result was massive quantities of cheap corn, and the rest is nothing but the logic of the market place. Cattle and chickens don’t naturally eat corn, and it actually makes them sick, but the price couldn’t be beat, especially when the animals could be raised in CAFO’s—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. They are exactly what they sound like, large pens that can be located anywhere, in which animals are fed a mixture of corn and antibiotics from a feeding trough.

So what’s bad about this picture? As Pollan documents in great detail, corn is a great American industrial success story. The problem is we eat too much of it, and too little else, for our health. Its imprint is on our waste-lines and more importantly, on our medical charts. As we have learned from the Zohar, it is not good to overindulge on the fruit of one tree in the garden.

Industrial agriculture leaves its imprint on the land, as well. Nature favors diversity. And mile after mile of hybrid corn grown in soil kept alive by fertilizers is unnatural and ecologically unsound as it depletes the earth and pollutes the water.

So too are CAFO’s an ecological disaster. Raising animals out of their natural element, on a diet unsuited to their digestive systems, living amid their own waste, was bound to create environmental and health problems like polluted water and air, toxic wastes, and a variety of pathogens.

And all this is the only the tip of the corn stalk! Take my word for it we would all be well served to know more.

Keeping kosher, Sarah and I already read labels in the supermarket. Now we read them differently so as to remove ourselves from the industrialized food chain, as much as possible. We buy as many natural unprocessed foods as we can, organic and locally grown if possible, in our quest for a diet that is balanced and healthy for us, and the planet. We never eat fast-food, and I urge you to consider doing likewise.

There are many levels of tikkun. It begins with our selves, our bodies and our souls, and continues out to our families, our communities, our people, our country, and the world, all of which are connected to each other.

The most important teaching of the Zohar is that all of creation is connected in one great chain of being. God is not some entity above and apart from the world. God is present in all things including you and me. This means we are extraordinarily powerful. Every action, every deed we do affects everything else. We can and we have made a terrible mess of the world. But as Rabbi Nachman taught, “if you believe that you can do damage, believe that you have the power to repair;” to effect tikkun. The Kabbalah teaches us that we have great responsibility. God and the world need us and no act is too small or too insignificant.

We are walking a very narrow bridge, we are all riding in that wheelbarrow, and we need strength and courage to keep our balance. But we can make it to the other side. We can repair the world!