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"Lost and Found" Erev Kol Nidre 5770 Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Temple Emanu-El of Tucson, AZ
G’mar
Chatimah Tovah,
my friends, and L’shana Tovah. The
wonderful poet Samuel Menashe wrote, Always When I was a boy I lost things— I am still Forgetful— Yet I daresay All will be found One day. This week an ad campaign run by the Jewish Agency
in partnership with the government of Israel was pulled off the air because
of harshly negative reactions from the Israeli progressive movement as well
as from America and elsewhere around the Jewish world.
The television ads featured eerie posters of young, attractive,
smiling faces with very Jewish names below them and the word “LOST” in
big letters printed at the top. As
we watched these posters change to new ones a voice told us that half the
Israeli young people who had moved to the Diaspora were being lost from the
Jewish people by assimilation. To be honest, everyone hated the ad: American Jews,
Canadian Jews, Australian Jews, progressive, liberal, moderate, and even
right-wing Jews here and in Israel all found it offensive, an archaic and
idiotic indictment of all Jews living in the Diaspora as somehow “Lost.”
Israel, a fabulous country that in recent years has had exactly no
idea how to market itself abroad, had managed to tick off Jews of every
persuasion. In one sense this was quite an accomplishment.
You know, it’s rare that you can unify so many Jews all at once,
and here the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government managed to do it in a
one-minute TV spot. Wow.
That takes true talent. But that failed commercial got me to thinking. What does it really mean to be lost as Jews?
How is that someone can be a lost Jews? The obvious answer—the one you would expect from
a rabbi on Yom Kippur—is that the Jews who are lost are those who aren’t
here in synagogue, or who are only here once or twice a year.
Nobody in this room tonight, of course, but we all know there are
some Jews like that. Jews who have lost their spiritual identity.
Jews who have lost their connection to God.
Jews who have lost their link to the Jewish people. Lost Jews. We all know the type—in fact, some of us are
the type, or rather types. Cardiac
Jews: I am Jewish in my heart. Gastronomic
Jews: I am Jewish because I eat bagels and lox.
Wallet Jews: I am Jewish because I give to Jewish causes.
Aerobic Jews: I am Jewish because I work out at the J.
Sensory Jews: I am Jewish because I feel Jewish.
Or Post-Facto Jews: I was very involved in Detroit or New Jersey or
Chicago but I already did that... Or even those Jews who, with names like Goldstein
or Weinstein with the map of Jerusalem spread across their faces who pretend
they really aren’t and never were Jewish. Aren’t these Lost Jews?
And shouldn’t we see what we can do about finding them and bringing
them back? Shouldn’t we,
ourselves, try to come back in just this sort of way?
Isn’t that what our Spirituality Initiative has been all about this
past year? Isn’t that why we
do outreach so successfully? Isn’t
that why our Adult Education Academy is the most extensive in the western
United States? Aren’t we
trying to reclaim the lost Jews, including ourselves? By now you have every reason to expect a sermon on
the topic of how you can be more authentically, more meaningfully Jewish by
doing more Jewish things, and better Jewish things, or of how important it
is to bring back and reclaim those Jews who have become lost. But the more I thought about it, the more it became
clear that what we really ought to be thinking about tonight is not the ways
in which we have become lost to the Jewish people or to Jewish religious
life, or to some ancestral code that we may never have bought into, or
understood, in the first place. No, on Yom Kippur we are all lost Jews in a very
different way than that. We are lost Jews because we have all lost something
precious this year. And tonight
we all have the opportunity to begin to look for it. There is a legend in the Talmud of a large stone
that was situated in the main courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem.
It was called even ha- to’in “the stone of losses.” The
Tractate Baba Metziah tells us “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 so reclaim it.” [Babylonian Talmud, Bava
Metzia 28B] This Stone of Losses was the one place in the world
where you could go to find something valuable that was lost.
For example, you could stand on one side and call out, “I have lost
my cloak,” or “My calf escaped and I am looking for it.”
And someone on the other side of the Stone of Losses would call out
that he had such an object; then you would say, “The cloak was grey with a
blue design on it” or “the calf had one white foreleg.”
And once identified properly, you would get your property back, and
so recover what you had lost. Different Jewish texts apply slightly differing
names to this stone: sometimes its even
hato’in, with a tet, “the error stone,” probably because the loss
was a mistake; or even hato’in
(with a taf), literally “the wanderers’ stone” – since stray animals
were often recovered there. While
commonly translated as “the stone of losses,” it was also known as its
opposite, “the finders’
stone,” for of course when you got your property back you were no longer a
loser, but a finder. The truth is that all of us have lost something
important this past year. Some of us have lost faith in the future.
Some of us have lost hope in our children, or our parents, or our
friends. Some of us have lost
trust in our spouses. Some of us
have lost our optimism in our society. Some
of us have lost the ability to believe in others. Some of us have lost
confidence in ourselves. Some of us have lost the ability to pray.
Some of us have lost the ability to care.
Some of us have lost touch with the most special parts of ourselves. Some of us have lost our connection to God.
Some of us have lost our connection to our family or friends. Some of us just feel lost… So what is it that you lost in the past year?
Or, perhaps, what is that you lost recently, or even years ago that
you would like to recover? What would you call out for if you came to
that Stone of Losses in the courtyard of the great Temple in Jerusalem? Would it be something concrete—say, that you lost
your 401K?—or would it be something quite different? So what is it that you have lost? There was a wonderful cartoon called Bloom County that ran for many
years, written and drawn by a talented man with the unlikely name of
Berkeley Breathed. In one strip
a leading character, Milo, comes up to the counter of a Lost-and-Found in a
Sears department store. “Excuse me,” he says, “I’ve lost my youthful
idealism.” “I beg your pardon?” says the bowtied clerk. “My youthful idealism,” Milo repeats, “I had it once but recently
I’ve lost sight of it. Now I
fear it’s been lost completely. I
thought you might have it.” [here
in the lost and found] “Oh, well, actually…” the man stutters. “And what about my sense of optimism?
Lately I’ve lost that too,” Milo continues. “Well, I’m afraid I’ve got neither of those things--” the clerk
starts to answer. “Oh, boy,” says Milo, getting huffy, “Now I’ve lost my
patience. I don’t suppose
you’ve found THAT either.” “Well, no…” mumbles the poor clerk. “That’s just great!” Milo is shouting now, “Now I’ve lost my
temper! So unless you’ve found
that I’ll be off you inept oaf! Good
day!!” The flummoxed clerk calls out plaintively, “P-please!
Hasn’t anybody lost something tangible?!” And another leading character, Opus, answers from the front of the line
“Excuse me. I’ve lost my
marbles.” Indeed. What they needed in that comic strip of yesteryear
was a kind of spiritual lost and found, a place to go to recover those
elusive, ethereal, indefinable things that we have lost but we just aren’t
going to find at the Sears’ Lost and Found. What they needed was a Stone of Losses. So what have you lost in the past year?
And where did you look for it? In truth, the right place to look for what you have
lost is right here, and right now—on Yom Kippur, at our own Stone of
Losses. When I was preparing for this sermon I thought of a
beautiful poem written by a teacher of mine, Tet Carmi, a great Israeli poet
and translator and man of letters. It
is called “The Stone of Losses” and comes from the book of the same
name. I have had this book for
some years, and love it, and looked for it in the place where I always keep
my favorite Jewish poetry collections. But
of course, when I looked for it and then searched for it and frantically
sought it I discovered it was not there; I had lost the book—that is, I
lost the book called the Stone of Losses.
How appropriate… Fortunately, our wonderful, dedicated
Rabbinic Assistant, Natalie Waxenberg, found it for me.
And it turns out that the poem retells the story of the Stone of
Losses in a somewhat different way. In the days when the great Temple stood,
there was a Stone of Losses in Jerusalem. Whoever found an object went
there, and whoever lost one did the same. The finder stood and
proclaimed [what he had found], and the other called out the identifying
marks and received it back. – Baba Metsia 28b I search for what I have not lost. For you, of course. I would stop if I knew how. I would stand at the Stone of Losses and proclaim, shouting: Forgive me. I’ve troubled you for nothing. All the identifying marks I gave you … were never mine. I swear by my life, by this stone in the heart of Jerusalem, I won’t do it
again. Be kind to me; I didn’t mean to mock you. I know there are people here --wretched, ill-fated— who have lost their worlds in moments of truth. And I search for what I have not lost… “At
the Stone of Losses”, by T. Carmi Kol Nidrei Eve marks the beginning of a quest, a
search for t’shuvah, repentance.
Most of all, tonight, we are
each looking for something precious that we have lost.
Only you know what it is that you lost and would like to
reclaim—what it is that you need to reclaim, in order to return to the
best that is within you, in order to make Teshuvah to the person you are
meant to be. The good news, as Thoreau once said, is that “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” What you have lost is not
far away across the sea, not high up on a mountain, not deep inside a cave.
What you have lost is actually within you.
It is your best, truest self, the part of you that you wish you could
be all the time. That is what we
seek to find on this Day of Atonement: that is the place we must look.
Yom Kippur is our even
ha’to’in, our own Stone of Losses, our Stone of Error, our Stone of
finding. It is our moral
lodestone, the magnetically charged rock that draws everything to it; the
rock of our return. This is the
time and place where we can begin to come back and find what we have lost.
The best in our value system; the best in ourselves; the best in our
hearts. As Carmi’s poem makes clear, what we have lost is not really lost.
It is close at hand, because it is within each of us.
It always was. We just
forgot how to find it. Now we know where to look. God, our own Rock, Tzur Yisrael, our Stone of Losses, tonight we seek to find those things we have lost in the past year. Help us to recover our optimism about life. Help us find our best selves. Help us reclaim our childlike wonder. Help us turn again to our spouses, our children, our parents, our siblings, our friends. Help us reignite our idealism. Help us rediscover what we once loved, and can love again. Help us return to what we are at heart: good, caring, loving, creative, generous. Help us find You. Tonight we begin by admitting what we have lost. If we can do that, honestly and completely, then I promise that over the next day we will find it. And our Stone of Losses will become a Stone of Finding. And our teshuvah will be complete. May you have an easy fast. And may your prayers be answered tonight, and in the day of return to come.
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