Hineni

Six long years the two of them worked closely together. She, the daughter of one of Baltimore’s great rabbis; he, the up-and-coming crown prince of Solomon Schechter’s recast faculty at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She had moved to 123rd Street with her mother following the death of her father, her exceptional talents enabling her to become the first and only woman enrolled in an otherwise all-male rabbinical school. As his student, translator and editor from 1903 – 1909, Henrietta Szold would collaborate with Louis Ginzburg in what was one of the most fruitful relationships of Jewish scholarship in the twentieth century. But in Henrietta’s heart there was much, much more to the relationship. The hours they spent together, the lunches, the dinners, the long walks along the Hudson; for Henrietta the possibility of a proposal from Louis remained a steady hope. And so when Louis Ginzburg returned from a European trip in the summer of 1908 with news of an engagement to another woman, the shock, betrayal and horror Henrietta Szold experienced was beyond description. “A Dark Chronicle of a Broken Heart,” is how the scholar Dr. Baila Shargel characterizes Szold’s writing from this period. One of Szold’s diary entries says it all: His voice was perfectly even, [as he said] [as he said] “And for that I must apologize to you,” as though he had stepped upon my dress instead of my heart. (Shargel, 233).

Soon thereafter, Henrietta, already a Zionist, set sail for Palestine. She saw first-hand the struggling agricultural settlements, the poor quarters of Jerusalem, the poverty and disease among Muslim, Christian and Jewish inhabitants, and she understood that in her heartbreak, her spirit remained unbroken. Over the next three years, enthused with Zionist idealism, she lectured widely on what she had witnessed in Palestine. The energy snowballed, until one night in 1912, in a meeting room of an Upper East Side synagogue, Henrietta Szold and a cadre of women established what would become the towering giant of American Zionism in the twentieth century – Hadassah.

When historians tell the story of Hadassah, they have reasons enough why the organization should never have gotten off the ground. Remember, in that day and age, American Zionism was by no means a foregone conclusion. Powerful philanthropists like Jacob Schiff were lukewarm if not downright hostile to the possibility that “The Promised Land” meant anything other than America. Then there was the not insignificant matter that these activists were women, a fact that only further rankled the ranks of a very male American Jewish leadership. As if that wasn’t enough, resistance came from within the organized Jewish world itself. Communal leaders like Louis Lipsky were highly critical of Hadassah’s insistence on autonomy, for resisting any affiliation with the centralized Federation system.

Szold’s story is courageous for so many reasons – and that is perhaps the point – the politics, the gender battles, the ideological chutzpah. But most of all, it is the story of one woman, one individual, saying “Here I am, I see the window of opportunity,” and – to paraphrase Camus – in the midst of her winter finding an invincible summer. The Kotsker Rebbe once described three rungs of sorrow. He who stands on a normal rung weeps; he who stands on a higher rung is silent; but the one who stands on the topmost rung converts their sorrow into song. No matter the hand Szold was dealt, she transformed her sorrow into song, and so much more. From those first two nurses funded to go to Palestine, to 10,000 members by 1920, to 35,000 in 1930, to 330,000 today; hundreds of millions of dollars in support of building up the land; two hospitals, Youth Aliyah, Young Judea – Szold and her ever-growing circle met and continue to meet the needs and aspirations of Jewry for a century.

Lou Holtz, the legendary football coach, once said that “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.” While I may quibble with the percentages, what the hardscrabble Holtz knew, what Szold knew, is that none of us choose the set of cards we are dealt. There is so much that is beyond our control. But what is in our control – and more importantly, what sets the course of our lives – is the degree to which we do or don’t call on our capacity for human agency. I love the story of Henrietta Szold, but I could give you so many others. 1911 – the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the founding of Jewish Labor. 1912 – Szold and Hadassah. 1913 – the founding of the Anti-Defamation League in the context of Leo Frank’s lynching, or if you like, Solomon Schechter’s establishment of the United Synagogue. 1914 - the founding of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Confronting anti-Semitism, relief and refuge, Zionism, synagogue life – each one, a response to the needs of world Jewry. Each story seeded by the passions of individuals who had every reason to shirk the calling, to pass the buck to the next generation or point the finger at the previous one. Many stories, collectively the story of twentieth-century Jewry. They are the stories of people who insisted on stepping up to their moment of destiny.

When we enter this room on the High Holidays, the stories we read, the themes to which we return again and again, are tales of human agency. Sarah in her barrenness, Hagar cast out in the wilderness, Hannah’s tears and Rachel’s weeping. It is not, incidentally, a coincidence that so many of the Torah readings have a woman as the central figure, women who, like Szold, faced the added task of surmounting adversity in a patriarchal setting. But whether it is a biblical matriarch, or Isaac on the altar or Ishmael in the wilderness, each one of these narratives is a tale of individuals facing conditions not of their own choosing, and in all their limited humanity transcending their circumstance beyond what seemed possible.

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the day the world was created. The wake-up call of the shofar reminds us that each of our worlds can be created anew. I am reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s comment that “Life is not about finding yourself, but about creating yourself anew.” The message of today can be summed up in one word – Hineni, “Here I am.” Hineni, “Here I am” said Abraham as he walked into an unknown future at God’s behest. Hineni, “Here I am,” he said to Isaac, as they marched fearfully up the mountain. Hineni, “Here I am,” as the angelic voice stayed Abraham’s hand. The theological significance of Hineni here and elsewhere, is that it signals a readiness to say not later, not tomorrow, but here and now – today! Abraham and Isaac, Jacob in his dreams, Moses at the Burning Bush, these are moments when one wants to turn away, to point the finger elsewhere, to say anything but Hineni. This is why the Cantor’s prayer begins with Hineni. We all arrive here sensing ourselves deficient in deeds, we are like a breath, a fleeting shadow. And yet we summon the strength of will and audacity to think that God will have regard for us. Each one of us, like our heroes of old, aspires to be the Hineni we know we can be.

Hineni is not an easy word to say. It goes against our more natural inclination, to leave it to the next guy, to deflect responsibility by proclaiming ourselves as innocents caught in circumstances beyond our control, not of our own doing and too overwhelming to resist. We see it all the time in public discourse; it is the pathology of our age. We point our fingers at the decisions made by our predecessors, insisting that our problems are their fault, not ours. As goes the classic quip: I had dinner with my father last night and I made a Freudian slip. I meant to say, “Please pass the salt,” but it came out, “You yutz, you ruined my childhood.” We sound like children: I didn’t make this mess, why should I clean it up? Or alternatively, we point to a glory day of yesteryear, and in doing so, reveal a toxic pessimism, as if our best days as Jews or Americans are behind us. Often we cynically invoke history, as if to say our lives are subject to a recurring cycle; we are bobbing on waves in the ocean, not responsible for the ups and downs of our existence.

It is not that prior generations do not bear responsibility for the circumstances of the present – of course they do. And it is not that history isn’t helpful in understanding the present – of course it is. But none of these tactics of deflecting agency bring us any closer to addressing the calling of our own day. They all function as alibis, excuses, tools of the timid by which we evade the Hineni’s, those things we know we need to do.

Our tradition is very clear that every generation is responsible itself. Our sins, our faults, our challenges, our opportunities belong to us. "Do not say,” writes Ecclesiastes, “how was it that the former days were better than these?” In the book of Exodus, the sins of one generation are delayed until a future generation, but over the course of the Bible and in the prayer book itself this theological doctrine is totally rejected. By the time you get to the prophet Ezekiel, the text explicitly states, “A child shall not bear the burden of a parent’s guilt, nor a parent the burden of a child’s guilt; the righteousness of the righteous is accounted to him alone and the wickedness of the wicked to him alone.” (Ezek 18:20) In other words, every generation – though shaped by the forces that preceded it and invested in that which follows – is ultimately responsible and measured by how it meets its obligations to the present.

So what are the challenges of the moment? First and foremost, this year my thoughts turn to the State of Israel. In our time there is a nation on the world stage that has repeatedly declared genocidal intent against our people with an ambition for developing the capacity to carry out such crimes. Whatever your politics may be – left, right, center, I don’t care – on this we can agree and we must agree: we dare not be too late. The twentieth-century philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel remembered being taught the story of Isaac's binding when he was a child. Heschel remembers that when he heard that the angel called out to Abraham not to kill Isaac, he began to weep. Despite his teacher's reassurance that Isaac was saved, the young Heschel was not consoled. He asked, “But rabbi, supposing the angel had come a second too late?” The rabbi explained that an angel can never come late. But Heschel concluded, “an angel cannot be late, but man, made of flesh and blood, may be.” There are more complexities to the challenges facing of Israel than I can list, that I know, and they are unfolding every day. But make no mistake, this is a Hineni moment. God forbid, it should come to it, but if it does, we need to be educated, engaged, informed citizens and Zionists ready to be responsive to the needs of the hour. It is not an option to arrive too late to this one.

However real the threats facing Israel may be, and they are, what is also clear to me is that when it comes to American Jewry, we are not the generation that sits under the knife, we are not the generation of persecution and suffering. As American Jews, we live in the most accepting and generous society where Jews have ever lived, having achieved status and influence far beyond what any other generation of Jews dreamed possible. The great historian of Columbia University Salo Baron inveighed against what he described as the lachrymose interpretation of Jewish history – that the Jewish experience is just a recurring story of persecution and suffering. Baron’s own parents were murdered in the Holocaust. He knew better than anyone the unspeakable agonies that had befallen our people, but he maintained it was not recurring oppression that would define our past and thereby our future, but the creative contributions to cultural, intellectual, and spiritual life incumbent upon every age to make. We are not the generation of Isaac; we are not even the generation of Szold. If anything, we are closest to – but actually better off than – the Biblical Esther, who arrived at a position of great prominence in the Diaspora, only to be asked for what reason had she arrived at this station in life if not to serve and strengthen her people.

My fear, in a sentence, is that when people look back at this moment in history, we will not be judged favorably. Had Szold or Sarah or Isaac not transcended their circumstances, sad as it would have been, it would not have been a tragedy in the sense that in retrospect, we can identify the tremendous hurdles they needed to overcome. But what would be tragic, what would be a downright shanda, would be if 100 years from now people were to look back at our moment – here, at us – and say that Jewish life was not rendered stronger for the decisions made in this generation.

Believe it or not, this is my fifth High Holidays at Park Avenue Synagogue. This hair is grayer, the kids are older, the team is assembling, and it is time to tell it like it is. I am reminded of the story of Sally and Steve, whose little baby Jake never said a word. Five years go by, not a peep. Every therapist, psychologist, doctor – nobody can figure out what is wrong with little Jake. One day, Aunt Sadie stops by and gives little Jake some of her famous kreplach. She puts it in his mouth. He spits it out and says, “Blech! This is the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten!” Sally and Steve are stunned – Jake has spoken! They turn to him, “Jake, Bubeleh, five years you don’t say anything and now you speak? What happened?” “To tell you the truth,” says Jake, “Up until now, things were going all right.”

Five years in, things here are all right, in fact things are much better than all right. Here at Park Avenue Synagogue, our problems are the kind of problems that most people would love to have. We need more space, more staff, more seats, more weekends in a year to fit in all our bnei mitzvah. Our strength, our numbers, our spirit, our lay leadership, our leadership in New York and national Jewish life – we are much better than all right. But living with that awareness only makes the question more acute, and makes me more panicked. Like being a parent aware of having only one opportunity to parent a child – one roll of the dice – being your rabbi is an honor driven by the desperate awareness of being granted only the smallest window to get it right.

Which is why we are turning the lens of the Hineni directly on ourselves this year. The theme of the year is “The Shifting Landscape of American Jewry.” Through the support of, well, someone sitting in this room, we will bring in the very best thinkers on outreach, on education, on synagogue life, denominations, philanthropy, Jewish memory, synagogue music and more. And yes, these events, under the cover of being chest clearing conversations about American Jewish life, will have implications for this institution in the years to come. It is not an option for us to invoke yesteryear as some sort of heyday never to be recaptured. It is not an option to give ourselves over to the mercy of forces not our own making. Proud as I am of our continued leadership in Hadassah, ADL, JDC and the other leading institutions of the Jewish world, woe unto the Jewish community that is not actively formulating a response to the needs of the coming generation. I believe, with a historic sensibility and absolutely no hyperbole, that decisions made by the people sitting in this room will shape the future of American Jewry. If there is a laboratory of American Jewish life, it is here, and if we can’t reinvent it here – with the opportunities, leadership and good will we have – it will not be done. Friends, we have been given the opportunity to do something, something extraordinary. We dare not let the moment pass us by.

It is, to say the very least, a jarring thought to realize that the only thing in our way is ourselves – our delays, our postponements, our unfulfilled promises. As Jews, as human beings, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, we have so many excuses at our disposal to avoid doing those things we know we must do. The great rabbi Hillel counseled, “Say not, ‘when I have opportunity – I will,’ lest you never have the opportunity.” It is a pointed warning that the tactics of delay may make a person altogether too late. Each and every one of us has pinned to our hearts a list of critical conversations we have avoided, momentous deeds – small or large, acts of personal transformation that have been delayed for no other reason than our pride, our inertia and our unwillingness to take ownership of our lives. As our own Rabbi Milton Steinberg once preached, “Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is not yet here and he who waits for the morrow will probably wait forever.”

Friends, you and I both know is that most significant Hineni of the entire holiday season is the Hineni of our own lives. “Who will live and who will die?” It is purposely phrased as a question. None of us knows the answer. What we do know, what only we know, are those deeds that lie within our own power to accomplish, whose performance depends on nobody else but ourselves. “Life,” wrote Hebbel, “is not anything; it is only the opportunity for something.”

A story is told of one of the great rabbis of the Belzer dynasty who died young – in the middle of his prime. His sons, two young men, were called on to eulogize their father. The first stood up and spoke, concluding his remarks by reflecting that his father had been blessed with orekh yamim – length of days. When he returned to his seat, his brother turned to him, and asked incredulously, how could the brother possibly say that their father was blessed with length of days? He had, after all, died a young man. To which the other sibling replied, “You did not listen carefully. I did not say that our father was blessed with orekh shanim, length of years, rather that he was blessed with orekh yamim, length of days. He made every day long, filling them with love, with learning and with deeds of kindness.”

If you have a duty to perform towards your family, your community, your people – do it now.

If you have the beauty of the world to enjoy in arts or music or literature, partake of them – now.

If there is someone waiting on you for an expression of love and affection, show that love and affection; put a ring on it – now.

If you live in this age, and have never been to the living, breathing miracle of the modern state of Israel, what are you waiting for? Buy a ticket – now!

If it is in your power to strengthen the Judaism of your home, your synagogue, your community, for yourself, your children and grandchildren – strengthen it now.

If you can pay your own rent, but are still sitting, literally or figuratively, in the seats of your parents, then it is time to step up – now.

If there are failures of your life due to a weakness of character or moral strength or will power – resolve to put them right now.

If there is reconciliation that you can be party to setting in motion, no matter how difficult the conversation, reach out, set it right – now.

If God is a stranger to you, resolve to seek God – now.

And if you owe gratitude and love, don’t delay. Show your gratitude and love now.

We pass through this world but once. Any good we can do, any kindness we can show, we must show now. We will not pass this way again. It is in our power to build a nobler, better life, suffused with the presence of God until the end of our days. The message of these holidays is that none of us know the length of our years, but each of us can control the length of our days. Will we fill them with love? Will we address those relationships most in need of repair? Will we use the opportunities extended to us to make our families, our community, our world stronger? These are the questions for which we gather. The answers, the opportunities, the Hineni’s are yours for the taking.