Rabbi's
Corner My theme for this Rosh Hashanah? I’d like you to tell me what it is through the following three brief vignettes: "Hello?" And finally: The results of a computerized survey indicate the perfect Rabbi preaches exactly fifteen minutes. He condemns sins but never upsets anyone. He works from 8:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. and is also a janitor. He makes $500 a week, wears good clothes, buys good books, drives a good car, and gives about $100 weekly to the poor. He is 28 years old and has preached 30 years. He has a burning desire to work with teenagers and spends all of his time with senior citizens. The perfect rabbi makes 15 visits daily to congregational families, shut-ins and the hospitalized, and is always in his office when needed. If your Rabbi does not measure up, simply send this letter to six other synagogues that are tired of their Rabbi, too. Then bundle up your Rabbi and send him to the synagogue on the top of the list. In one week, you will receive 1,643 Rabbis and one of them will be perfect. Have faith in this procedure. Needless to say, one congregation broke the chain and got its old Rabbi back in less than two weeks. The first is called the perfect husband, the next - the perfect son, and finally the perfect rabbi. Perfection - that’s my theme for this day. It’s a goal for which all of us strive and on this Rosh Hashanah, isn’t a particularly worthy one? We are here to use these hours wisely in prayer and contemplation, considering our deeds of the past year that we might correct the flaws within us, to be even better than we were in the past. It’s a difficult path on which we travel to attain this goal, fraught with many successes but also with slips and errors along the way. Perfection: unfortunately we may not be able to achieve this for ourselves but I ask you - to what lengths would you go to bring perfection into this world, let’s say, to create a more perfect child? One with fewer genetic flaws, with the characteristics, both physical and otherwise, that we might desire in an ideal son or daughter? It sounds like the stuff of science fiction but, my friends, it’s a reality that is much closer than you think. Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times (Op-Ed - July 23, 2007), recently described the technology known as PGD, short for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Embryos created outside the womb, only a few days old, can now be tested for various types of serious genetic abnormalities, Tay Sachs, for example, being one of them. But the technology can go farther, much farther. Do you want a boy of a girl - you choose. What about height or weight? If there are other genetic predispositions in a family - diabetes, schizophrenia, cancer, in the future they will be taken out from the cells which constitute this embryo. Kristol also notes that non medical screening would also be possible. For example, Dr. Dean Hamer, a well-known geneticist, believes that the VMAT2 gene is the “God gene,” connected with spirituality. What if you wanted a child with a religious sensibility? Would you make sure the embryo possessed that gene as well? And to make things even easier, it’s already possible - listen carefully - to choose the embryo you want and then pay a surrogate in India about $4 - 5,000 to carry it to term. Just think about it - no swollen ankles, weight gain, doctor’s visits, and no worry about governmental regulations. How much more perfect can it get! The question with which I’d like to challenge you today is: why not? Why shouldn’t we create really perfect children? To what ends might we go to achieve perfection? We can breed out the problematic qualities and enhance our DNA with the much more desired characteristics we seek. In time, we might be able to create such perfect beings that we could just do away with the need for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur! I pray though that we never arrive at that point. I do believe we can and should help to develop genetic strategies for cancer, diabetes and other diseases but going beyond that smacks of playing God. Some things should be left to the domain of the Divine and not to scientists. Unfortunately, even though we may be able to create perfect children from the womb at some point, in raising them we often drive them towards that elusive goal. The best schools, more and more after school activities, sports - anything and everything to help them achieve the ‘perfect child’ status we believe they need. If you, as a parent or grandparent, have not read “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” by Dr. Wendy Mogel, I urge you to do so. Her wisdom is not gleaned merely from her training as a clinical psychologist, but the decision to immerse herself in Judaism and Jewish texts. The subtitle of the book describes it well: ‘Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self Reliant Children.’ And in it she asks the question directly “Why are parents so anxious to be raising perfect children?” (p. 41) She offers two explanations - fear of the future and pride. The first is a concern that children may be ill equipped to deal with what might await them. To alleviate that concern, many believe we must do everything in our power to prepare children for any eventuality, though none of us knows what it might be; and the second, pride - it’s the feeling that our children’s achievements or lack thereof will reflect on their parents and grandparents own sense of self worth, either in a positive or negative way. It’s something of which we’ve all been guilty at one time or another. Understandably many are anxious - we want our children to succeed whatever the future might bring and it’s natural that we want them to do well, ‘shepping naches’ gives us such a warm feeling, for them and for us. But we must exercise great caution that our children become nothing more than naches machines. We must learn to respect their individual, natural talents as reflections of who they are intrinsically, not what we might like them to become. Mogel reminds us of a Hasidic saying, “If your child has a talent to be a baker, don’t tell him to be a doctor.” It’s an expression worth pondering. Some of you may have heard the name Danny Siegel, a man often called the ‘Pied Piper of Tzedakah, who will be our guest at Adath Israel this January. Danny once remarked after noticing bumper stickers on people’s cars such as - my child is an honor student, my child is a star member of the tennis team, etc. Well, in response he had his own made. It says simply, ‘my kid is a mensch’. Wouldn’t it be sufficient if were able just to say that about our children and grandchildren? Not every child is gifted, the top this, or the top that, but every child, regardless of their abilities is a gift and as Mogel reminds us, “Children are a precious loan, and each one has a unique path toward serving God. Our job is to help them find out what it is.” At some point, we must learn to accept them as who they are, not only with all their imperfections but with equally endless possibilities whatever those might be. And, my friends, if we can truly learn to do that, to accept our children as they are, not who we’d like them to be, couldn’t we do at least the same for ourselves? On this Rosh Hashanah, I ask you to remember that God does not ask or demand of us that we be perfect, only that we strive to do the best we possibly can. God accepts us as we are, even if we haven’t been liposuctioned, botoxed, whitened, microabrasioned, nipped or tucked. We need not be perfect on the outside, nor must we be on the inside. As a matter of fact, perfection should never be the goal of our existence, especially as we begin this New Year. In a recent book entitled “The Case Against Perfection” by Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard, he vigorously argues that very point. “To believe that our talents and powers are wholly our own doing is to misunderstand our place in creation, to confuse our role with God’s (p. 85).” And he continues, “One of the blessings of seeing ourselves as creatures of nature, God, or fortune is that we are not wholly responsible for the way we are (p. 87).” That does not mean that we never accept responsibility for our actions and mistakes. Just the opposite. Sandel is confirming an important truth found in Judaism: we must learn to accept our flaws and those of our friends, family, any human being. None of us is infallible and we should never expect that of ourselves or others. But to believe this, to truly comprehend what it means for us as human beings can be liberating in the most exciting sense of the word. It reminds us that our mistakes, our errors and poor judgment are, at times, just reflections of our humanity, of the fact that we have been created little lower than the Divine. Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of ‘When Things Happen to Good People’ among many others says it best in his work, “How Good Do We Have to Be?” He writes that, “God knows us all too well to demand perfection of us. Why would God set us up for failure, establishing a standard that none of us could meet?” (p. 170) That’s all well and good, we might say. But, in what direction does this statement lead us? Does it imply that our imperfections and limitations give us license to never strive for anything higher, for some greater sense of purpose for ourselves? Kushner suggests that we learn the answer from our patriarch Abraham, one of the central figures of the Torah reading for both these days of Rosh Hashanah. Abraham is told by God, “Walk before me and be tamim.” (Gen. 17:1) What does the Hebrew ‘tamim’ mean? In some editions the word is translated as ‘perfect’. Our chumash uses ‘blameless.’ However, both words speak to a level of existence which is beyond our capacity as human beings, something which even God does not expect us to achieve. A better understanding of God’s request of Abraham, and, in turn, to each of us, is to be wholehearted - to be sincere, to live your life with purpose, to live it with all the potential with which we have been blessed. Perfection is not the goal which God asks of us but integrity for when we appreciate our flaws and limitations as well on this day, can we then approach God and each other. And that my friends, is truly a worthy objective for which each of us can strive and which God can rightly expect of us during this new year of 5768. Shanah Tovah.
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