Kol Nidre Sermon - 2008
The Last Lecture - Your Last Lecture
Kol Nidre YK 5769/2008
Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch died this past summer after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He gave his “Last Lecture” at the university a year ago in Sept. 2007, before a packed auditorium. In his moving talk entitled, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. Many of you know about him and have seen the lecture on the web. As he said, it was a little strange for him to give The Last Lecture b/c while most lecturers are invited to deliver what they would write as their last lecture – summing up the most important lessons of their lives – for him it was REAL.
When he was diagnosed, both he and his wife were in shock. How could a young, vibrant husband and father in such good physical shape be dying? He had 11-12 tumors on his liver and his doctors gave him only 3-6 months to live. Or as Randy said, “3-6 months remaining in good health.” (Randy’s example) Like telling you the park is closing at Disney World by saying, “you still have 2 hours left for fun!”
If you haven’t seen the lecture, you can view it on You Tube, and I recommend it highly. Because it touched our lives. With his common, down to earth, sweet personality, and his incomparable courage, Dr. Pausch, “Randy” as he preferred, delivered a love letter for his kids, wife, family, colleagues and friends. Above all, it was a legacy for his kids.
Why did the lecture spread virally throughout the web? One passing it on to another and on and on. I think because of the way Prof. Pausch decided to live his life after he received the fatal prognosis. Rather than focusing on what he lost and what he was going to lose – his health, family, opportunities, and living for perhaps another 40+ years – he focused on what he had, and how he wanted to LIVE – really LIVE – for the last period of his life. He wanted nothing to do with mourning – that would eventually come. He chose rather to generate indelible memories for his family, especially his young children – and he DID. He was determined to leave his children, all under ~7, a legacy with a message: reach for your dreams, surround yourself with love, work at something you love, and live life to the fullest. Randy extended his life beyond that first “guess!” Probably because he was determined TO LIVE and not TO DIE before his time came.
What would your or my last lecture be? What would it include? How do you or I view life so that we can give a good message, a meaningful message to those who surround us – our family, loved ones, friends, co-workers, etc.? What would we say? How would we deliver it? What valuable life lessons would you or I teach? What few words would we wish to be most memorable and lasting?
This is the time to think about YOUR and my Last Lecture. This is the time for hesbon hanefesh. Internal accounting, re-evaluating, taking a look inward.
What would we say? We probably would talk about our dreams: what we wanted to do or be. What kind of life we expect(ed) to live. About adventures – and lessons learned. About enabling the dreams of others? How to live our lives.
Our sage, Hillel, taught “Repent one day before your death.” Question: How do we do that if we don’t know when we’re going to die? We don’t – so we are to repent every day!
The Netaneh Tokef prayer which we read on RH and YK, speaks about the Book of Life – opened on RH and sealed on YK. It poses the questions: who shall live, and who shall die. Who by water or who by fire, etc. The list is long. The prayer concludes with the phrase: “BUT, tefila, teshuva and tzedakah – prayer, repentance and charity – maarvin et ro’ah ha’gezeira – will avert the severe decree.” Prayer, repentance and [righteous] charity will avert the severe decree.
On a straightforward level, that is the rabbis answer as to how to avoid the punishments God may allot to us. It seems to say that if we actually do those 3 things: pray, repent and give tzedakah, then there is a direct cause and effect relationship: neither we nor our loved ones will suffer the evil decree!
Nice thought. But there’s probably no one here who buys it, including me. I’ve always had difficulty with that verse – because you and I know that as our teacher Rabbi Harold Kushner taught in, “When Bad things happen to Good People,” that at times (sometimes it appears more often than not), the world is not fair. Good people suffer. Deeply devout people get cancer. As do those doers of good deeds – the ones that give of their time to the temple, to a cause, to the community. They suffer too.
We don’t know who will be written in The Book of Life this year. We just don’t. We’d like to think that being written for a year of life is in our hands, but we know down deep that we’re not in total control. SOMEONE ELSE is. We don’t know why a friend this past year, who went to get a sandwich for his wife – a favor – was hit by a car going thru a red light, almost killed, and wound up in intensive care for months and is lucky to be alive today – thank God. We don’t know which infant or child or adult will be struck with disease.
Rabbi J.J. Schacter inspired this sermon and quotes a Professor [David Golinkin, of the Schechter Institute] of Jewish Studies, who addressed the theological issue of the Netaneh Tokef. He cites, for example, a family which offers prayers and gives tzedakah to heal a sick child who might die anyway. Or those struck by Hurricane after Hurricane last month (in August?) (and we in Miami praying NOT for it to strike someone else, but just to GO somewhere else). Were our prayers answered (and theirs not) because of some special holiness or innate goodness we have in South Florida – hardly! What about those in New Orleans who prayed “Please, not again”!
The prayer itself is unsatisfying. That is not reality as we know it! There must be a better explanation!
We all know about uncertainty in life. The old Yiddish proverb – “Man Plans and God Laughs” rings so true. We plan and organize, put down deposits; we live within the law and try not to cheat on our taxes; we give to good causes; and yet, bad things happen to us. We’re not immune to accidents or hurricanes or sickness or other tzurris (French for trouble).
A colleague suggests a different interpretation of the verse, “tefila, teshuva and tzedakah will avert the severe decree.”
Rabbi Marc Saperstein writes,
“Death, sickness, impoverishment, tragic as they may be, are not identical with evil. They do bear a potential for truly evil consequences [because] they can poison [us], embitter [us], fill us with self-pity, destroy a marriage, blind us to the needs of others, and turn us away from God. But the evil consequences of even the most fearsome decree are not inevitable.”
Rather, he continues, “If repentance, prayer and charity cannot change the external reality, if they cannot arrest the malignant cancer, they can indeed ensure that the evil potential in that reality will not become actual and enduring, but will pass. They can enable us to transcend the evil of the decree. This, I believe, is the simple meaning of the Hebrew words. And this is a meaning which I can, in good conscience, share with someone who just experienced a loss or received a terrible diagnosis.
Prayer or meditation, perhaps for those of us who can lean on a Higher Source or Higher Power – i.e., God, can help us “get there” sooner. Whether it’s participating in a minyan during shivah or Shloshim (7 or 30 day period), joining a synagogue community on Shabbat, or praying and meditating at home – it may help us. We can meditate on a world which is more than we can understand or comprehend. A world larger and more expansive. To see a flower, or a sunset, or a rainbow. To be on top of a mountain or a grand waterfall. Out in the wilderness and on the ocean. Those things may help us gain perspective, give us a new and wider viewpoint.
When we help others, we step beyond ourselves. Reaching out to feed the homeless – getting up extremely early on a Sunday morning allowed me and my family the honor of serving people in our community in need. Building a house with our community with Habitat gives a feeling that doesn’t go away upon leaving the site. Working with the elderly or the disabled is a gift for them and for yourself. And doing all of the hands-on work you each do at temple – fills your souls. That work, that HOLY work makes the severity of the decree pass away.
And giving of our substance, our earnings can also make an impression on our hearts. In the movie “The End,” Wendell Lawson (Burt Reynolds) has only 6 months to live. Not wanting to live his last few months of life waiting for the end, he decides to take his own life. He enlists the help of a humorously delusional mental patient, and the movie chronicles his many unsuccessful attempts to kill himself. You wonder whether he will he ever succeed. On his last attempt to do himself in, he decides to kill himself by drowning. So he runs into the ocean and starts swimming frantically. He reaches the deep water and tired from swimming, he yells goodbye, and begins to sink. Under the water, he finally realizes that after many unsuccessful attempts at suicide, that in fact he does not want to die – he wants to live.
So he makes a promise to God that if God rescues him, he will repay Him. And on the long swim back to shore, he is ever so thankful, shouting at each stroke. He promises God his earnings, but the closer he gets to shore; the negotiation begins to reduce his gift – finally down to 10% or so.
For him, giving hurt, for us it should be a holy experience – when done with proper intention.
So how do we live with the “severe decrees?” How can we shoulder them or manage to live through them. Our difficulties, illnesses, losses. Our failures, disappointments or letdowns. How can we ease the passing of the “severe decrees” that are a part of life? Yes, more than we would like, but a part of our world.
We turn the prayer on its head and say that while we know that repentance, prayer and tzedakah cannot annul or eliminate evil, by searching our souls through teshuva, praying to God (and leaning upon God) through tefila, and by helping others through tzedakah, we help ourselves and others cope with evil and “make the evil of the decree pass”.
If I care about someone else, it will be easier to help me transcend the evil of the decree and help it to pass. The Kaddish is said in a group, a minyan. When my dad died last year, I took comfort in praying in a minyan. Why? Because I as the mourner needed support. But Tefila is tied to others and to God. You and I live in a world of hugs – from the rabbi, from community and from God?! While I could not affect the evil of the decree – his death – I could figure out a way to help get through the pain and the loss. In part it was tefila – praying, and in part it was sharing my pain with others in the same place that helped the evil of the decree to pass.
Tzedakah is also tied to others. When we give to others, we often receive MORE than we give. Regardless of whether we give our time to the temple or to our community through personal effort – sweat equity – or monetary gifts, doing good makes us feel good. You’ve heard the phrase – “acts of random kindness”? try it. Randomly hold a door open for the customer following you into a store. Use your turn signal. Let someone in who is trying to enter the road. Pick up something someone dropped with or without knowing it. Fill in the list. Acts of random kindness could change our world.
There’s a website called: DoOneNiceThing.com. “It began in the simplest way. Over lunch with girlfriends, a California woman, Debbie Tenzer (probably Jewish) listened as they argued over the state of the world – war, crime, schools in Los Angeles – and how they felt helpless to change anything.”
“[She] found herself resisting that view – and began to think what she could do. "OK, I can't fix needy schools, but I could give them my children's old schoolbooks," the mother of three recalls telling herself. "I can't end the war, but I can send a phone card so a soldier can call home and feel comforted. I decided then I'd find a way to do one nice thing for someone every week."
“So she started with small gestures of kindness on Mondays, her own most difficult day. Friends soon suggested she post these activities on a website, and DoOneNiceThing.com was born.”
“This woman created DoOneNiceThing.com in 2005 to chronicle her efforts to do a good deed for someone once a week. Since then, she’s communicated with people in 53 countries about their own inspirations for making small gestures to lend a helping hand.” If you go to her website, you can set up your own weekly calendar to do nice things – of course on Mondays!
Friends, we live in a world of uncertainty. And while we cannot eliminate uncertainty, but we CAN fashion our lives to help us WEATHER the uncertainty.
Our Jewish tradition suggests that if we build our lives with those 3 aspects of the Netaneh Tokef, while we cannot effect bad things happening, perhaps we can help the severity of the decree to pass. If we fill our lives with prayer, with gratitude and reconciliation. If we fill our lives with helping others, and with tzedakah. THAT is a way to sustain ourselves, our community and our world for the New Year. AMEN