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Rosh HaShanah Eve 5768 Sitting Up Front Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Temple Emanu-El of Tucson, AZ
I don’t know how many of you saw the article on the wire services this past week, but apparently in Miami, Florida a congregation is auctioning off a lifetime pass to two front row seats on eBay. The starting bid is $1.8 million dollars. Oh, and by the way, you also receive free parking, two custom made tallises and two custom made yarmulkes—and the right to pass the seats on to your children. Only $1.8 million dollars—such a deal! Several thoughts come immediately to mind. First, since their shul is also called Temple Emanu-El—spelled the way we do—perhaps we should claim a piece of the action. After all, aren’t we part of the same franchise? And second, it’s nice to see Jewish organizations beginning to adopt some of the more clever methods of professional sports franchises. It wasn’t long ago that you could buy season tickets, and just go see your favorite team play. Nowadays getting a good seat requires purchasing a “Personal Seat License”, or PSL, that then gives you the special privilege of actually buying a ticket. So this approach in Florida to successfully marketing Judaism is both novel and intriguing. Why not create a kind of snob appeal interest in Jewish prayer by auctioning off seats for nearly a million dollars each, just so you could sit near the rabbi? And then I looked up the auction on ebay and found out that no one had met the starting bid of $1.8 million dollars. Hmmm… actually, perhaps what they are doing wrong is that they have this whole thing backwards. The idea is simply reversed. I’ve noticed over the years that the seats that are most in demand are not the ones in the front row. In fact, you could make a case that the seats that are the most popular are actually the ones in the back of the sanctuary. Perhaps the correct way for the auction to be run on ebay would be to list the seats in the back of the sanctuary for $1.8 million dollars; the ones in the front row could go for, oh, a dollar eighty. Lots of folks would pay extra to sit as far as possible from their rabbi… We could call it a PSL, using the same initials: a personal separation license, entitling the purchaser to the right to remain completely unengaged from services. Come in, make your appearance, sit in the back: a perfect trifecta of non-involvement. That would be worth paying for, no? Now, I’m not saying that this is what happens in our shul, of course. But I do have to note that it is clearly a different experience sitting in the back of the Sy Juster Auditorium than it is sitting up front in our Rubin Family Sanctuary. How do I know this, you ask? Well it’s like this. As
most of you are aware, tomorrow morning I will enter the service from the
back of the temple, from the western end of Sy Juster, chanting the Hineni
prayer. It’s a powerful
moment, a religious high point, the shliach
tzibur, the representative of the community in prayer on the holiest
days of the year, entering the house of worship in humility and penitence.
“Behold me, of little merit, come to seek forgiveness for Your
people of So last year as I entered chanting Hineni heiani mima’as—I saw many faces turned towards me; others were looking in the Machzor, the prayerbook, following the sacred words; and some were turned towards the holy ark. And many people—some of you here tonight—were instead looking down at your palm pilots, Blackberries, and Treos. You were text messaging, and reading and sending email. That’s the biggest advantage of sitting in the way back. You see, it’s harder to get away with that in the sanctuary… for some reason, people feel a bit constrained by the nearness of the bimah, and the Torah, and, well, the rabbis. But if you can get a valuable seat near the back of Sy Juster—not up on the stage, though, that’s a little too conspicuous—just near the back, well then you can probably set yourself up for a successful Rosh HaShanah experience of returning emails and text messages and working on your to-do list. You can manage to be at services but not much involved with them. And that’s why we should auction off the desirable seats in the back for serious money, not the ones in front. If we did that we could fund an entire capital campaign for our aging building just on the revenue of that auction… Now, for those of you who are busy putting away your Blackberries and Palm Pilots right now, thank you… Look, finish that last email first, if you must. We don’t want you to start the New Year by falling behind. On the other hand, if you were just playing a computer game, or checking the baseball scores, please turn your PDA over to an usher immediately… It kind of reminds me of a Seinfeld episode. You can just see Jason Alexander as George Costanza trying to impress his new girlfriend by attending Rosh HaShanah services with her family—and getting thrown out for cheering when he gets an instant message that the Yankees have scored in the ninth. Or maybe it’s more like Pardon the Interruption—Larry David quite reasonably trying to look up the name of the person in the next row so he could say good yomtov, and getting excoriated by everyone around him for ruining the sanctity of the High Holy Day prayers. It also reminds me of the days when we would smuggle transistor radios with little ear plugs into services so we could check on the World Series scores… Does anyone here remember transistor radios? But the point is a larger one. In our society, we are trained to show up, hopefully on time, and to remain, largely, uninvolved. Especially where spiritual matters are concerned. We Jews have a penchant—nearly a passion—for avoiding any emotional involvement with our own religious experience. Prayer? Meditation? Worship? Spirituality? That stuff is for non-Jews. It’s perfect, really. How to be present, but not really involved. We have a come a long way in Jewish life from the ways that our Eastern European grandparents thought about going to shul. For them, sitting close to the ark, up near the front, up where the rabbi and cantor were leading prayers, was a great honor—the kind of privilege worth competing for. It had the implication of greater holiness, an opportunity, symbolically, to nearly touch God’s tzitzit. Do you remember the line that Tevya sang in Fiddler on the Roof? “If I were rich I’d have the time that I lack, I’d sit in the synagogue and pray And maybe have a seat by the eastern wall?” That eastern wall—the wall that faced towards the holy city of Jerusalem, the wall towards which prayer was directed—that was the holy of holies for our grandparents. They came and prayed and shared their hearts with God. They opened themselves up to the emotional experience of feeling both their own unworthiness—after all, this time of year we remember all the sins of our past year, all of our failings and errors and mistakes and greed and jealousy, all the ways we aren’t who we should be, or pretend to be—but in spite of that, they felt close to God, a God who could forgive them their weaknesses, a God to whom they could kvetch and receive, if not solutions, then certainly solace. They wanted to sit up close. They wanted to feel a part of the intensity of holiness, of God’s forgiveness and mercy. Nowadays, when we come into a synagogue we try to sit as far back as we can from any potential contamination by prayer. And we insulate ourselves with objects that protect us and distance us from even the possibility of emotional and spiritual involvement. We are wired, alright, but not truly connected. And yet, not everyone feels this way. On our Temple Emanu-El Pilgrimage trip to Israel in June, we had a Shabbat morning of shul-hopping in Jerusalem. One of my favorite temples to visit is the Aleppo synagogue, a small, beautiful, Sephardic Beit Knesset in a quiet residential neighborhood. The layout of that little sanctuary is revealing: most of the congregants sit right up against the eastern wall, facing the congregation and taking turns leading the service in their unique eastern-style chant. There is a respectful urgency to their prayer, and a comfort that comes from feeling that they are doing something uniquely important, and to which they devote their full attention. It is prayer without distraction, without distance, without artifice or performance—Jewish prayer led very well indeed by people who are simply singing and talking to God, and doing so in community. They are serious about what they are doing, and they take both pride and pleasure in the experience of it. It is really what we should be doing here, tonight, tomorrow, next week, every week. But in a Jewish culture that emphasizes the desire for distance, do we even know how to pray anymore? This summer I taught a class in belief in God, called, “Do You Believe in God? Which version?” We anticipated a smaller turnout than we usually get for our “Hot Topics” classes in the summer, since it wasn’t a typically controversial subject like immigration or war, our usual choice to bring out the faithful. Interestingly, we had more students, and more active involvement, than we have had in any of our other summer courses in my 9 years here at Temple Emanu-El. And in our Adult Education Academy evaluation form the class that was most requested as a follow-up was a course on Jewish prayer. How to pray. Well, we will teach that class. But the truth is that we can’t really teach anyone how to pray; all we can do is teach you the prayers, and how they are chanted or sung or read, or how to meditate on them. In order to really pray, you need to do some things that no class can really teach you—but that will make a profound difference in your life. And tonight is the time to start. First, for the period of the prayer experience, you need to stop being connected to the world outside of your prayers. The process of clearing your mind of distractions is called kavanah, true concentration with your heart, focused attention on your own spirituality. When the cantor chants, or the choir sings, or a reader reads—or perhaps most, when there is silence—you need to be able to think not about work, or about your kid’s problems, or about the endless war in Iraq, or about the Arizona football team, such as it is. You need to be able to just stop. Shut down the steady drumbeat of the ordinary that rumbles in your mind. In other words, stop being wired, and try to become connected. Shut down the PDA’s, and the cellphones, and the pagers, and the enduring clutter of your life. Let it just stop. And secondly, in order to pray, you will need to be open to the possibility of holiness—real sacredness, in whatever form it takes. You will need to find your humility, your own zero point, close your eyes and open your ears and listen to what the service, or the universe, or God tells you. No one else can do it for you. Not the finest rabbi or cantor or choir or preacher or minister or motivational guru or inspirational speaker. No one can do it but you. And only after you stop the inside noise, and open yourselves to the possibility of real spirituality, only then can you really find your own voice in prayer. I don’t know what that voice will say; it might be please, God, heal me; it might be God, I have failed and seek your strength and guidance; it might be nothing more than the awareness that we are all connected, that we each have within us a small part of God, or of holiness. I don’t know what your true prayer will be—and until you stop, and cleanse yourself, and truly pray, you don’t know it either. But Rosh HaShanah is the right time to find out. Tonight, tomorrow, as we begin this new year, and over these High Holy Days—I invite you to try to truly pray. With your mind. But most of all with your heart. On this New Year, God, we pray for the ability to pray. Help us to connect to You, and so to connect to each other. Teach us to sit up front, close to the prayers of others, so we can try to reach You through our own prayers. Clear our minds of noise. Give us, instead, the music of your holiness. Help us find our voices, and express our needs, our gratitude, our love. And then we, too, may find that our lives truly connect—with You, and with all those we love. And then we can make this a truly good year of real holiness. Ken Yehi Ratson—May this be God’s will, and ours. Amein.
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