Sermons

Erev Rosh Hashana 5772: "Commencement"

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I have a friend who leads silent retreats. At the end of the retreats, when people come out of the silence, they often wonder what to do with this powerful experience. What to take away from it? How to carry something of the experience into their regular lives? My friend tells them: do something outrageous! Let that be how you live out of this retreat. Don't be hemmed in by a bland version of reality that suggests only a few options for you . God holds thousands of possibilities for you – not just one that is hidden like a little jewel in a tight little fist. God's possibilities for you are more like a thousand gems in the open palm of a hand.

I was thinking about this, about the possibilities for any one life, as I sat under the tent at our daughter's college graduation in May. Commencement is such a lovely idea – we complete a stage of our education, and rather than focusing on the culmination or ending of a part of our life, we turn our attention toward the future. We look to a new beginning, to the opportunities that lie before us.

Even age 22, with your whole adult life ahead of you, sometimes it's hard to recognize all the possibilities that life holds out like a thousand gems in an open palm. How much harder then, as we get older, to continue to see the opportunities that life offers. How fantastic it would be to have ongoing commencement ceremonies to inspire us to keep dreaming and following our dreams. And here's the great news – we do! Judaism has built into our lives a commencement ceremony every year. Rosh Hashanah is our annual commencement, the day when we celebrate new beginnings. A new year lies before us. We have the opportunity, if we choose to accept it, to start our lives afresh. Some of you may remember the TV show Mission Impossible and those who are younger may know the movies based on the TV show. In each episode a small team of secret agents are given a mysterious tape recording that concludes with: Your mission, should you choose to accept it … And no matter how daunting, how impossible the mission seemed, the intrepid team always chose to accept it.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur challenge us to accept the mission impossible. These ten Days of Awe challenge us to refuse to accept the limitations that have been placed on us or that we place on ourselves; they challenge us not to be passive or apathetic or to just go with the flow, doing things the way we've always done them because… Well, because that is the way we've always done them.

Here we are again at the beginning of our annual Commencement Day being given another chance. And since it is commencement day, I thought it would be appropriate to share with you excerpts from some commencement speeches that were given this year by well-known Jews. These words about how to live a meaningful, productive life were addressed to young adults, but I think they have something to say to all of us, whether we are 22 years old or 42 or 62 or 82.

Elena Kagan Associate Justice of the Supreme Court spoke to the graduating class at the University of New Mexico School of Law. She said: You should now, and always, do what you love. Surround yourself with people you think most interesting, throw yourself into whatever has the greatest prospect of giving meaning to your life and providing satisfaction in your daily activity. Do whatever you can, whenever you can, to put yourself in a position of feeling passionate about what you do.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, speaking at Rice University , had this to say:

I once interviewed a man who spent his life studying happiness, and he came back with this result: Happiness is love. Full stop. The surest way to measure whether a person is happy, healthy and well is to ask, “How deeply is that person enmeshed in deep, passionate commitments?” You can be enmeshed with family and friends. You can be enmeshed with your community and co-workers. You can be enmeshed with great poets or artists. But you have to be enmeshed.

Thomas Friedman, another NY Times columnist spoke at Tulane University used the metaphor of slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt . He said:

At the end of the day there is no substitute for human beings out in the streets, ready to stand and fight for what they believe in. There is no substitute for real people, not mouse clicks or avatars, going out in large numbers and making politicians see that they are insisting on change and are ready to risk something for it. That is how we got civil rights in this country, that is how we got labor rights and that is how we got women's rights. It is how we ended the Vietnam War. It is how the Egyptians ended their tyranny. And it is the only way we will get a green economy. So if you want to get something done in the world, never forget — ultimately — you have to get out of Facebook and into somebody's face.

Tony Kushner, a playwright who wrote Angels in America , spoke at Muhlenberg College . He said:

Everywhere, the world is in need of repair. Fix it. Solve these things. Even if you're a mess and broke and facing a future of economic terror. Who isn't? Help. Help. Help. The world is calling. Heal the world, and in the process, heal yourself. Find the human in yourself by finding the citizen, the activist, the hero.

Elie Wiesel, nobel laureate and holocaust survivor, told students at Washington University in St. Louis that first he needed to define himself. You should know that I am Jewish. Maybe you don't know it, but to me, to be Jewish is… an opening. It is really as when a conductor conducts his orchestra; he offers the person to sing or to play a certain part, a certain tune. I offer my memory to you.

Out of his memory, Wiesel tells them : The greatest commandment to me is not the Ten Commandments. My commandment is, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” Which means when you witness an injustice, don't stand idly by. When you hear of a person or a group being persecuted, do not stand idly by. When there is something wrong in the community around you – or far away – do not stand idly by.

Passion comes up a lot in commencement speeches. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at the University of Southern California . He said: Find passion. This is not easy. People think that passion is something you either have or you don't have. People think that passion is something that has to manifest itself in some kind of explosive and emotional format. It's not. It's the thing that you find in you life that you can care about, that you can cling to , that you can invest yourself in , heart, body and soul.

Finding your passion, standing up against injustice, repairing the world, being deeply involved with other people – these are the themes of most commencement speeches because these are the themes of life.. Probably you heard similar words at your own high school or college graduation. Yet, we need to keep being reminded because it turns out these are not such easy things to do. We need our yearly Commencement Day because we forget; we get discouraged; we think it's too late or the road is too hard; we lose our way.

In Tractate Bava Metzia (28b) in the Babylonian Talmud there is a legend that when the Temple still stood in Jerusalem, there was boulder called even ha- to'an , which is usually translated as “the stone of losses.” The Talmud tells us that “anyone who lost something would go there, and anyone who found something would go there.  The person who found something would stand by the stone and announce what was found, and the person who lost something would go there and describe the lost object and reclaim it.”

Even ha To'an literally means “the claiming stone,” but the Talmud is written without vowels so some have vocalized it as even ha to'in – “the stone of errors” or “the stone of those who make mistakes,” since presumably the loss was a mistake. A homonym that is spelled slightly differently yields “the stone of wanderers or those who go astray” because stray animals could be claimed there.

I think of the High Holidays – these Yamim ha Noraim , the Days of Awe – as a metaphorical even ha to'in for those of us who have gone astray during the past year, for those who have lost our way or forgotten what is most important to us. We come back to this stone, year after year to find what we have lost – our passion, our desire to repair the world, our deep connections with people.

I invite you; I urge you; and though people aren't usually receptive to exhortation, I exhort you to take seriously this Commencement Day. Use this time during the High Holidays as a new beginning. Find your way to the Stone of Losses, the Stone of those who have gone astray. Come to the stone with an open heart, ready to reclaim your truest self, ready to recover your deepest passions, ready to accept the mission impossible.

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