Facing Our Humanity

Some of you may recall Oscar Wilde’s classic The Picture of Dorian Gray from your high school reading list. Set in Victorian England, the story begins with young Dorian, a cultured, beautiful and vain man sitting for a portrait. At first enamored with his portrait, he soon comes to hate it, realizing that as he ages the picture of his youth will only serve to mock him – a reminder of the beauty he will inevitably lose. Distressed, Dorian utters a hasty vow: “if only it were the other way, that the picture would change and I would always appear the same.” And sure enough, as the novel progresses, the wish comes true. Dorian falls into a life of cruelty, hedonism and crime. With every unkind act, every misdeed, the portrait changes – a sneer, a look of scorn; with each day, the picture becomes more and more hideous. Dorian, however, remains the same – locked in his beauty at 20 years old. At first he is delighted, but he soon realizes that the portrait is the record of his conscience and so he has it hidden in the attic. Years pass, Dorian falls deeper into sin, his countenance remaining the same, the portrait increasingly gruesome. The story concludes with Dorian seeking to destroy the painting, so he can once and for all wipe away the only record of his sins. He runs up to the attic, picks up a knife and stabs the portrait. A loud crash is heard downstairs and the servants rush up to find a portrait of their master on the wall in all of his youth and beauty. “Lying on the floor,” the book concludes, “was a dead man…with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined his rings that they recognized who it was.”

It is a disturbing gothic tale, a well-trodden plot line, from Goethe’s Faust to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Damn Yankees – stories of men who sell their souls to achieve their improbable and ignoble dreams and desires. Many literary theorists understand Wilde’s story to be about beauty and aesthetics, a social comment about Victorian England. Most everyone agrees it is a tale about the dissonance between the lives we lead and the lives we admit to, the distance between our deeds and the degree to which those deeds register on ourselves. Rabbi Dr. Jacob Milgrom, one of the most prominent Biblical scholars of the past century, who passed away this summer in Jerusalem at age 87, saw in Wilde’s tale a means to explain how Israel, ancient and modern, understood sin. “Sin,” Milgrom explained, “may not leave its mark on the face of the sinner, but it is certain to mark the face of the sanctuary, and unless it is quickly expunged, God’s presence will depart.” By hiding from our sins, denying and disclaiming them, we are separated not only from those we have offended, not only from our true selves, but from the divine presence. Our task, both as ancients and moderns, is to resolve this dissonance between our conscience and ourselves, and in doing so, to bring God back from exile.

This evening begins Rosh Hashanah and with it the High Holiday Season. I want to wish each and every one of you a sweet, healthy and happy new year. As we arrive at these days of introspection and atonement, we know that there is hard work to do, for each of us individually and for our community as a whole. I used to until Yom Kippur wait to speak about human frailty and sin, and I still might again, but it struck me this year that by then it may be too late. The process of repentance, of t’shuvah, needs to be begin here and now – tonight. Our missteps may not be the stuff of novels, but we know that the portrait of our faulty humanity sits in the attic of our souls. Tonight we reach out to view it. Our faces may be only a year older, hopefully nothing for which our holiday finest can’t compensate, but we know that today is really about our moral condition, the act of heshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul. Today, and in the days ahead, we examine our humanity, we stand face to face with our faults, making this sanctuary a spiritual barometer for each of us.

It is not easy to turn the lens of our attention towards ourselves. Claude Lévi Strauss, the French Jewish anthropologist who died this past year, remarked that astronomy developed as the first science studied by human beings because the stars are very far away. Anthropology came much later. It is easy to study what is distant, far more difficult to study ourselves. Each of us wears so many masks. It seems altogether significant that the word “person” comes from the latin persona – referring to the mask worn by an actor, the masks that we wear sometimes in society. Alexander Pope was only half right when he said “to err is human.” To be human is not just to err, to be human is to err and then seek to distance ourselves from confronting our misdeeds.

We have so many tactics, so many strategies that we employ throughout the year to hide our sins from ourselves and from God. Most frequently we blame others for our misdeeds. Ever since Adam blamed Eve and then Eve blamed the snake in the Garden of Eden, men and women have sought to evade responsibility by thrusting it upon others. It wasn’t my fault! And if we do admit to it, someone else made us do it. Not long ago, one of my kids hit another one of my kids. The first child, of course, blurted: “Well she started it, she is wrong!” To which I responded “I don’t care who started it, the moment you hit her, you were wrong.” The hardest thing to do is to admit fault, for a child, but even more so for an adult. If today is about anything, it is about stopping looking for other people to blame. Today we allow for the possibility that “it was I” who was to blame.

Aside from blaming others, I think the most frequent way that we avoid accountability is by blaming habit. The rabbis of the Talmud describe sin as akin to a house guest, a modest traveler who soon takes over our home and makes itself master of the house. (I’m reminded of the story of Goldstein who opened his front door on Rosh Hashanah to his mother-in-law. He asked “How long are you staying?” I am staying until you get sick of me.” To which Goldstein replied, “Well I insist you at least stay for a cup of coffee.”) Ask anyone who has ever engaged in a pattern of self-destructive behavior, whether it is cheating on taxes or drug use. In each case, the alluring and slippery slope of habituation, of extenuating circumstances, is our downfall. As Louis Newman wrote in his recently released book on repentance: “The rabbis captured a deep psychological reality when they said “When a man has committed a transgression and repeated it, it has become permissible to him.” (BabylonianTalmud Kiddushin 40b). How many times in the past year have you allowed the prohibited to become permissible? How many times have you said “Just this once?” How many times have you blamed society for your own shortcomings? Tomorrow will we hear the shofar blasts, our wake up call, to the opportunity to rid ourselves of the moral cobwebs, the bad habits and the cycles of self-deception that inhibit our best selves from shining through.

Of course the best way to avoid confronting our true selves is not by blaming others, not by blaming society, but by blaming our own humanity. I am only human! Of course I am going to slip up - what do you want from me? I have always been struck by the fact that Rabbi Steinberg’s posthumously published collection of Shabbat sermons is titled after the first sermon in the book: Only Human, The Eternal Alibi. We forget that for Jews, an awareness of our humanity does not mean we avoid culpability; rather it is a call to action. To be human means the bar is high, we are, as the prayer book says, a little less than angels – created in the likeness of God’s image. Each one of us is extended the choice as to whether we consider ourselves spiritual paupers or aristocrats of the soul. Each one of us has the God-given potential for moral grandeur.

There is a beautiful rabbinic legend told in the Talmud. When a child is conceived, an angel brings the fetus before God. The angel asks, “Will this child be tall or short?” And God decrees its height. “Will this child be smart or not smart?” And God decrees its intellectual capacity. Then the angel asks, “Will this child be good or bad?” God is silent – because moral volition is not a matter of divine decree, not a matter of predestination, but of individual choice. (B. Sherwin, 52) As Cassius says to Brutus in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves.” Today we drop all our alibis and our excuses. Today we embrace our humanity and we know that we could have and should have known better. We had the choice, and we look back on this past year knowing that far too often we chose poorly.

So many tactics of blame, so many strategies to avoid facing sin. I could give you a million more, but they all boil down to the same point, the avoidance of moral agency, an inability to come face to face with the true nature of who we really are. This is why, long before any twelve-step program, the medieval sage Maimonides identified confession as the first step in any process of atonement. The very first thing the penitent must do, before seeking forgiveness, before working to make amends, is simply to confess. The great Jewish moralist Joseph Albo, in comparing physical and spiritual health, explained that awareness is the first step to the cure. “If a person does not recognize or know that he has sinned,” Albo wrote, “he will never regret doing the thing he does, as a sick person cannot be cured as long as he does not know or feel that he is sick.” (B. Sherwin p. 122)

This evening the process of confession begins. Over the next ten days, here in this sanctuary, in our homes, and in the sanctuaries of our own souls, we commit to taking a deep long look at our year gone by. We will beat our chests, we will recite our confessional prayers, we take responsibility for our actions, we confess. Our pride and our complacency have all been impediments to confession. Tonight we drop our excuses and we see ourselves as others see us, we see ourselves as God sees us, we see ourselves as we really are.

In the final years of his life, it is said that Renoir, the great French impressionist, was racked by rheumatoid arthritis. His fingers were distorted, so much so, that he needed an assistant to put a brush in his hand. He could not actually stand up while painting. He had a special chair created so he could move up and down to have access to the rest of the canvas. And yet, in spite of all the pain, he continued to paint, he continued to create masterpieces. Eventually, one day, his disciple Matisse asked him the obvious question: “Master, why do you torture yourself, why do you paint?” To which Renoir answered, “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

Friends, tonight begins Rosh Hashanah – at stake is a journey, seemingly short, but one that is both taxing and painful – the journey to reconcile our deeds of the past year with our conscience, to atone – to become “at-one” with ourselves. We can hide that portrait in the attic and the dissonance will continue unabated. Or we can do the right thing, the honest thing and yes, the most painful thing of all – we can confess, to our God, to our loved ones and most of all to ourselves. The pain will pass, but the beauty of the coming year will be ours. Each and every one of us can create masterpieces, portraits of our lives, altogether human, fashioned in the image of God and capable of greatness.

Shanah Tovah.