Rabbi Kamins - Yom Kippur 2019 Sermon - Life and death are in our hands

Life and death are in our hands
Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins
Yom Kippur Sermon 2019

“See then that I, I am the one …  I deal death and give life; I wounded and I will heal; none can deliver from my hand.”  (Dt. 32:39) The rabbinic tradition has established we read these words of Torah on the Shabbat just before or after Yom Kippur, reminding us of the power of life and death that we hold in our hands.  Life and death are in our hands.

Just last week I was marvelling at the 21^st century equipment my ophthalmologist used to analyse the condition of my eyes.  I was astonished to learn that while it is all 21^st century technology, the basis of the equipment goes back to the genius of a 20^th century man, Professor Hans Goldmann, who began his work as a teaching assistant in Prague in the 1930s, influenced by some of the great minds of his time.  [During his stay at the University of Prague, he was influenced by the famous people of his time, such as Einstein (physicist), Mach (physicist and psychophysicist), Lorenz (behavioural scientist), Popper (philosopher), Schlick (physicist and philosopher), Hering (physiologist), and others. Goldmann absorbed the essence of these disciplines to a very large extent.] “Goldmann became known in particular for his exceptional and fundamental work on glaucoma and he managed to cast his basic insight into practical, easy-to-operate, high-precision diagnostic instruments which, several decades after their invention, are still used by every ophthalmologist. He will enter history as one of the very great pioneers in ophthalmology.”  Yet, if he had not found refuge in Switzerland during World War II, this Jew would have been one of six million victims of the Shoah murdered by the hands of the Nazis; his contribution to humanity would not have eventuated. One can only imagine what other contributions to humanity were extinguished at that time, whole worlds of knowledge. 

Our sages state in the Mishna (Sanhedrin 4:5) that: “Adam [from whom all humanity descended] was created singly, to teach us that whoever destroys a single life in is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world and whoever saves a single life in is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.”    Like that first “Adam”, each one of us is of this world, each one of us is a world in ourselves, and each one of us holds the world in our hands. What would our world, what would world of Israel and the Middle East be like if Prime Minister Rabin had not been assassinated by the hand of a zealot but rather lived to pursue his dream of peace and the end of bloodshed?

“See then that I, I am the one …  I deal death and give life; I wounded and I will heal; none can deliver from my hand.”  The ancient tradition, as expressed in Torah and the liturgy of these ten days places the power of life and death in the hands of God – on Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed – who shall live and who shall die….The mystery of the Infinite One, the mystery of life and death, lies beyond us.  On the macro scale we are just a speck of life compared to the infinite source of life.  But we live our lives on a human level, where each of us is the one who deals death and gives life, who wounds and heals, and none can deliver from our hands.  We are not speaking literally about the lowest murder or the highest altruism of saving a life.  But we know our words and actions have real impact on the lives of others. Aggression, bullying, intimidation can destroy the self-esteem and well-being of another; kindness and compassion can encourage, open the heart and uplift.  Our words and deeds have real and lasting consequences, and today is the day we account for that.

It’s terrifying.  Yet it’s true. In our largest moments, and in our smallest encounters, everything we say and everything we do affects the lives of everyone we touch. If we have been doing our cheshbon hanefesh these ten days of repentance, then we know that as we stride and stumble through life, we will both lift up and inevitably cause hurt and pain.  Yom Kippur asks us to internalise and feel this pain, for it is only through the remorse for what we  recognise that we can move forward. 

As such, Yom Kippur holds great promise for us as well, for this morning’s teaching of Torah that repeats through the prayer for the day of Yom Kippur is the phrase, “For on this day expiation shall be made for you to purify you of all your sins; you shall be pure before God.”  Alas, repentance and forgiveness requires more than fasting and praying.  That process makes us clean with the life force, with God. The rabbis teach that: “For transgressions between a person and God, Yom HaKippurim effects atonement, but for transgressions between a person and another, Yom HaKippurim does not effect atonement, until the one has pacified the other.”  (Mishna Yoma 8:9).  In other words, without the tachlis, the actual feeling of remorse that leads to restitution and change, this day means nothing on the human scale.

While the stories of Hans Goldmann and Yitchak Rabin are examples of how large life can be on the human scale can be, this day reminds us that each of us is a world in ourselves, each of us holds the world in our hands.  We do this as individuals, and we do this as a community and society, in the way we hold hands together, in our action and in our apathy.  This season of Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur focuses our awareness on what it means to be a living being – but not just a living being alone, rather one within a network of relationships, from our families, our colleagues, our peers, and the others with whom we share the city streets and the shops, with whom we share this planet. This is why all our prayers are in the plural form. Today is the day we must confront what we write into our Book of Life, for what we write in ours also affects the content of the other’s Book of Life. 

“See then that I, I am the one …  I deal death and give life; I wounded and I will heal; none can deliver from my hand.”  We elders recognise, we hear the plaintive cries of the generations to come who are calling out to us to respond to the environmental degradation of the planet.  We Jews teach in our Torah the commandment to be custodians of this planet and not to waste; we have created Shabbat to have one day out of seven not to produce or consume at all.  We all know the impossibility of an unfettered consumerist and waste society – we see the evidence in our oceans and our countryside.  But until we actually care, until our hearts open, until we have some remorse for the situation we have created, nothing will change.  We will deal death and we will wound. 

We all know that there are 70 million displaced persons on planet earth, more than at any other time in the history of humanity.  And we Jews, who have been displaced and suffered the consequences for over 2,000 years of our history? Do we care? Not when the elected representatives of our country say, regarding offshore indefinite detention: “It’s essential to know that the hard-won success of the last few years could be undone overnight by a single act of compassion in bringing 20 people from Manus to Australia.”  There have been suicides and deaths in detention, and while not all of us are culpable each one of us is responsible, for we are citizens of this great country.  We deal death and we wound, and none can save from our hand.

We non-Indigenous Australians know that there was a continuous culture of 65,000 years on this land before we arrived – a culture that has been decimated by both paternalistic ignorance and intentional genocide – the mass murders and stealing of children from their families to breed them into white culture and assimilate.  And we Jews, who have suffered under authoritarian regimes that have attempted to stifle our culture and genocide our people? Do we care? Not when so few of us Australians actually take the time to learn about the history and culture of the First Nations of this land, to hear their stories, to understand the Uluru Statement from the Heart – from the heart!

While each of these examples have political ramifications, I am urging us to approach these and other societal issues from a spiritual perspective.  A perspective that understands that the Infinite One, who has given us life and connects us all, invites us to live not just with deeper consciousness, but deeper compassion as well.  The prayers we recite these ten days are about God’s being loving, forgiving, compassionate, generous and kind. If that is what we expect of God in our prayers, what should we expect of ourselves?  God manifests through our words and our deeds.  In a world where words have become false, cheap and mean, may we be inspired by the words of our tradition to be truthful, thoughtful and caring.

Pulitzer Prize winning American poet Mary Oliver wrote before her death this year, “We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.”

Let us prove her wrong.  We know what we know.  May we open our hearts as these days call us to do, knowing that the fate of the world rests in our hands.  Yes, I am the one, you are the one, we are the ones who deal death and give life; who have wounded and who can still yet heal; none can deliver from our hands.

Which hand will it be?