I remember when I first started working at Adas Israel. I can’t begin to describe the honor it was to be offered this job; what a joy and a thrill it was to come to work as the new Senior Rabbi of Adas Israel Congregation, one of the great flagship synagogues of American Judaism! The spiritual home of world leaders, thinkers, and influencers doing extraordinary things for this country and for the world.
My first year here was a dizzying array of Adas in Your Neighborhood receptions, meetings with leaders and minyanim and parents and countless interest groups. I recall realizing very early on that to be the rabbi of a synagogue like this is also to be part politician. I began to joke that at times, I felt like the mayor of a small city!
I distinctly remember concluding a meeting one morning, maybe a week into the job--the fifth of the day and it wasn’t even noon yet--and each meeting was more fraught and high stakes with synagogue and staff politics than the last. I looked at my computer screen and at least 75 emails came in for me from people who needed to talk to me as soon as possible. I checked my schedule, and I had back to back meetings that day, and I wouldn’t be done with work until after 9:00. Suddenly my phone rang, and there was Beryl, telling me that a long-time congregant was in hospice and the family needed me right away. It was late in the week. I had my sermon already written, but I was new and wanted more time to go over it. I had a class that night and I wanted time to review the texts. I remember that exact moment. Just before I threw on my jacket to run out the door to the hospice. I stopped in my tracks. I stared down at the floor. And all I could think was “How am I going to get through all of this?! And it’s going to be like this every day?! Oy vey!”
I took a deep breath. I sat in the nearest chair. I closed my eyes. And grounded myself. I sat there for not longer than 30 seconds. But in those moments, I went deep inside, past all the nightmare visions of myself being overwhelmed and failing. I found a place of stillness. Of peace deep in there that is always somehow there, behind the sturm and drang of my normal stressed out mind. And I just inhabited that place of stillness for a moment. And the most surprising, uncanny feeling lived in that stillness. It was a feeling of being free and even joyful. In that stillness, I felt an inchoate sense of goodness, and I was so grateful for this feeling. It was a sense of goodness that nothing could shake. I took a couple more breaths and opened my eyes. Nothing had changed. I was being pulled at in a million directions. And yet that feeling of connection to goodness was with me. I looked around my office. I realized how grateful I was for the opportunity to serve a community this way. How grateful I was for that life, that God, had brought this to me. And I was even grateful to have all these meetings and politics and emails and emergencies to tend to. Upon reflection, now that my tenure at Adas is over, I don’t think I could have made it through anything without being able to access that deep sense of life’s goodness that somehow always lived there in my heart, beneath the surface of whatever else was happening around me.
I want to talk about this capacity to feel the goodness on these High Holy Days. I want to talk about it because we all need to have such moments of accessing that place that lives, not just in me, but in all of us, beneath the surface of our crazy lives. I will talk about this feeling of being blessed, of sensing an inner kindness, because accessing this feeling leads to a life of gratitude. I will argue that accessing this goodness is an essential practice that we must bring to our lives and to our society during these times of desperate polarizations and hatreds. Ultimately I will show that without the practice of seeking the goodness in life, there can be no hope for our society or for humanity.
I was once counseling a woman who was struggling with deep depression. At one point, she was able to articulate perfectly what she was going through: she said “Depression is the inability to feel gratitude.” My heart went out to this woman, and she was right. When you can’t feel gratitude, you can’t find the goodness in yourself, and in life itself.
In Hebrew, the word for gratitude, in fact, is Hakarat HaTov, literally ‘Recognizing the Good.’ This definition is key in understanding why it is so important to our lives and to the world. When God created the world, he said “Hinei zeh tov me’od” “Behold it is very good.” I read that line not just as God patting himself on the back. I read that line as a command to each and every one of us: Behold, it is very good!
Look around at your life. Look around at the world--at everything. Behold, it is very good! Not so easy to do, is it? Not very easy to believe, is it? Bear with me. We need to understand how this practice of hakarat hatov, of recognizing the good, works.
We will begin with the most famous part of Jewish prayer: the Shema. After we say Shema, we say ‘You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.’ Even these lines suggest that loving God is not easy. It takes tremendous effort. When the Hebrew says “with all your heart”, the spelling of the word for heart is unusual. It says “b’chol levavcha”. It could just say ‘b’chol libcha,’ but it doubles the Hebrew letter Bet. In the Mishnah (Brakhot 9:5), the rabbis teach: A person must bless God for the bad just as one must bless God for the good. And as their proof, they explain that the double letter Bet means that you should love the Lord your God with both your “inclinations”--your “good inclination” and your “evil inclination”. In other words, don’t just love God out of the goodness of your heart. You must train even your errant desires and wayward heart--the part of ourselves that can only notice the bad, the evil--to submit to loving God, even if it doesn’t feel comfortable. Such is the great challenge of being a person of faith.
Now, as per usual, the rabbis of the Talmud (Brachot 54a) are confused and perplexed by this assertion. They don’t think that the Mishnah adequately explains the idea that you should bless God for the bad, just as for the good! They ask the question: how on earth can you bless God for the bad; are we supposed to bless somehow as if it were good?! We all know, say the rabbis, that there is a blessing you say upon hearing good news: Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech Ha’Olam, HaTov vehaMeitiv--Blessed are Your Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe: who is Good and who creates the good. So, ask the rabbis, should we say that same blessing about God’s goodness even when something terrible happens? Of course not, they say. When something bad happens we say Baruch Dayan haEmet, blessed be the Judge of Truth. That way, we’re indeed saying a blessing, but not blessing the bad thing as if it were good. Okay, so the rabbis seem to solve the problem: yes, you need to see the good in the world, but you don’t have label bad things as good. That would be crazy. To this, Rava adds a wrinkle and ends the conversation with one more provocative point: Even when we say the blessing on bad news, Dayan HaEmet, we must accept the bad news b’simchah, with joy!
What on earth does this mean? There’s an old legend of Rabbi Akiva that captures this idea. It is said that once Rabbi Akiva was riding on his donkey on his way to a certain town. The sun set before he could arrive, and he had to sleep that night in the woods. The only possessions he had with him, in addition to his donkey, was one candle and one rooster. At one point, a strong wind blew out his candle he was plunged into darkness. When this misfortune befell him, he said, "Kol man d'avid Rachmana l'tav avid," “All that God does is for the good.” Soon afterward, in the darkness of the wood, some hungry wolves came and snatched up his rooster. What did Akiva say? “All that God does is for the good.” Then some wild cougar or lion snatched up his donkey. At this eventuality, Akiva said, “All that God does is for the good.” The next morning, Akiva discovered that the previous night, a band of vicious marauders had past through the same woods, reached the town and brutally attacked and killed many inhabitants. Had those marauders encountered Akiva, they surely would have killed him. But, it was good that the light of his candle was not there to betray him. And it was good that the rooster was not there to crow and give away his location. And it was good that the donkey was not there to bray to similarly betray him. "Kol man d'avid Rachmana l'tav avid," “All that God does is for the good.” Now, it certainly would have been better if marauders hadn’t come and killed anyone at all, but you take the good where you can find it!
Last year, I extolled my favorite NPR show, Invisibilia, and Adas Israel’s own Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin who host the show. If you haven’t listened to it, please do. It’s a brilliant, insightful and entertaining show that explores the hidden dimensions of life that influence our world. This past season, among many other fascinating things, they explored the concept of “cognitive reframing”, a psychological technique that is proving to be critical to people’s ability to weather difficulties, survive trauma, and to thrive. Put simply, cognitive reframing is learning how to look at the bad things that have happened to you and reframe them--literally change the way you tell yourself the story about what happened, but most importantly, without changing any of the facts of what happened. So for example, if I were in a terrible car accident where a drunk driver plowed into me and made me into a paraplegic, I could live my life as telling myself that it was the worst thing that happened to me; I could live in rage at the drunk driver who hit me, and live miserably ever after feeling like the victim of an unfair universe. Conversely, I could remember exactly the same accident as a great blessing in my life. I could see my disability as a motivator to act on behalf of disabilities rights. I could reframe the drunk driver as an inspiration to do good works to prevent alcohol abuse and make the world a better place. In short, I could reframe the accident as the greatest thing that ever happened in my life, giving my life more meaning than it ever could have had without it.
So cognitive reframing, I believe, is what Rabbi Akiva was anticipating even as the bad things happened to him. It’s what Rava in the Talmud meant when he taught that we must receive even bad news ‘with joy.’ It’s what the Shema means when it says to love God even with your “evil inclination” -- we must transform the part of our mind that sees something as evil into something that was for the good. We even reference this reframing in our High Holy Day liturgy: we say ‘Avinu Malkenu, zachrenu b’zikaron tov lefanecha!’ ‘God remember us for the good before you’! I once heard an interpretation of this line claiming that this line is a prayer that we will be able, through God’s grace, to retell and reframe our past bad experiences and past sins as something that can transform us to the good before God.
But alas, we live in a world where the Holocaust happened. Where innocent and good people are not as lucky as Rabbi Akiva was. We live in a country where White Supremacists, the KKK and neo-Nazis are getting a moral pass even at the top echelons of our government. Obviously, reframing has its limits when we confront real evil in this world.
Nevertheless, our tradition, that has known centuries of persecution, insists on this practice. Reb Nachman of Bratzlav, a Hasidic master of the late 18th century, even taught the following incredibly challenging teaching: he said “even if you think a person is completely evil, it’s your job to look hard and seek out some bit of goodness, someplace in that person where he is not evil. When you find that bit of goodness and judge the person that way, you really may raise her up to goodness...As it says in the Psalms (37:10) ‘v’od me’at, v’ain rasha’ “Just a little bit more and there will be no wicked one; you will look at his place and he will not be there.”...by looking for that “little bit”, the place however small within them where there is no sin (and everyone, after all, has such a place) and by telling them, showing them, that THIS is who they are we can help them change their lives…”
In our post-holocaust world, can we really be expected to practice such an attitude toward others? All I can say is don’t feel bad if you can’t always rise to this level when confronted with all the emboldened haters of our time. All the same, even in a world where genocide is a reality and an ever-present possibility, our tradition challenges us to practice Hakarat HaTov, Recognizing the Good, whenever, however we humanly can. I believe that this is our greatest test of what it means to be human: how committed are we to finding the good, no matter how deeply we are challenged?
In the story of Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, in the book of Exodus, it says “‘Vayichad Yitro al kol hatovah” “Jethro rejoiced at all the good” that God did for Israel in rescuing them from Egypt. Responding to this line, Rebbe Nachman teaches the following: he says most of us don’t find joy in all things at once. Take a wedding, for example, he says. When you go to a wedding, some people are happy because of--what else?--the food! Others are only happy because of the musicians. Then there are the parents and close relatives and best friends: it’s not the food, it’s not the music that brings them joy: it’s the fact that these two wonderful people are getting married! (and then, Reb Nachman adds, there’s always one shlemiel at every wedding who isn’t happy about anything, but what can we do about him?).
And then, says Reb Nachman, there is the rare breed of tzadik: the person who not only can be happy about the food, the music, AND the kids getting married, but who can link together all the joy in the world. Such a tzadik, such a righteous one, is able--says Reb Nachman--to look to the shoresh, to the root of all joy “shemisham nimshachin kol hatovot”, “from that root all goodness emerges.” Jethro was a tzadik who could do this. “Vayichad Yitro” means Jethro rejoiced, but in Hebrew it also means Jethro “unified”--that is, he went to the root, the source of all the joy in the world, to the place of pure joy and goodness.
And where does that root of all goodness reside? Where can we find it? It lives in here. Inside. Within our heart of hearts. It’s what Reb Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, another Hasidic master, called the “nekudat Elohut”: a little piece, a spark of God that lives at all moments within us. It’s our truest selves, our purest nature. Even in a world where there was a Holocaust, where there are Nazis, even within the camps, there were endless stories of courage, bravery, dedication, nobility of spirit and and love that no Nazi or hater could ever snuff out.
We don’t have force ourselves to see Nazis (God forbid!) as “good”. No, but what we can do is to find the root of goodness that lives within us, that place that is always grateful for the miracle of life. And from that place, we can reframe our own life experiences: we can transform our worldviews from one defined by traumas and judgments, to one where we reframe our identities. We don’t need to see ourselves as victims or potential victims; instead we can come to understand ourselves as a strong and blessed people--a people who have defied the odds, who are lucky enough to be alive; a people who are here, now, to oppose genocides and support all vulnerable people.
On this Yom Kippur, we must look around at our world. Our society is getting torn apart. Almost all of us, in our current political climate, are guilty of judging and even dismissing whole swaths of humanity for their views and values. We must find a way to heal ourselves, each other, and the world. Today I assert that the only real healing that can happen must begin with a spiritual reckoning between ourselves and others. We must be the ones to struggle, with all our hearts, souls and might, against our yetzer hara, our inclination to notice only evil--and instead seek out the good--yes, even in those who oppose all the values we live by.
Lord knows, I personally am terrible at this practice! I am regularly living in a state of outrage and anger over those whom I believe are turning this country into a hateful and dangerous place. But in teaching the Jewish practice of Hakarat HaTov today, I remind myself and us all that our tradition calls us to a higher way of living our lives.
We begin by going inside, and looking--however hard it is to find--for the shoresh, the root, the nekudat Elohut, the point of goodness, joy and gratitude that is always there. And then, like Jethro, we must “veyached” we must unify: we must bring ourselves to the presence of mind to recognize that this very same point of goodness, peace, gratitude, kindness also lives in the heart of every human being in the world. There are no exceptions. In this, we are all equally in the image of God. Now, it’s true that there are truly evil people in this world. There are people who are so confused that they believe twisted ideas that lead them to violence against others.
Today, we even have world leaders who cannot recognize this point of goodness and kindness that lives within them. But not all their followers, however ignorant of the goodness in others they may be, are that twisted.
Only when we come to truly know that the same goodness that lives within us lives in the other, only then can we have the greatest strength and resolve to effect change for the better. When I know that you and I are made of the same stuff, and Hinei zeh tov me’od, and behold that stuff that unites our deepest essence is that Divine Goodness, only then can I protest, clamor for change, and speak truth to power. When there is no anger or hatred in my heart, only then can I remain poised, peaceful, impervious to the evil impulse to strike out in anger. Only when I practice Hakarat Hatov, and remain faithful to your inherent goodness, to your inherent potential to do good, only then will have the strength to carry on and persevere despite the madness that continually arises all around me.
Life is hard. When we were born, there was no guarantee that this was going to be easy. We are all being constantly challenged and tested. This is why religion and spiritual practices are essential to life. I once heard a spiritual teacher say that the way to know that you are getting it right in life--when your particular spiritual practice is working for you-- is when you feel grateful for the good that there is. In this New Year, at moments when we are feeling overwhelmed with dismay or anger, may we all have the presence of mind to sit down, close our eyes, and breathe. And in that moment of peace, may our hearts open enough to find the place within us where none of the world’s evil can taint us. That place, that Makom, is nothing other than the very Presence of God that is always with us.
As I take my leave of this congregation this year, I feel such gratitude for the good that was always there, in every dimension and aspect of this congregation--no matter how stressful or challenging. I feel grateful that I never lost touch with my own inner goodness that helped me inspire others to believe in the goodness and blessing that we were capable of achieving together.
May God similarly inspire us with the strength never to lose faith in the goodness of this world, and in the potential for justice that lives at all moments in our lives. And from that faith, from that place of strength and peace, may we stand tall, and make this world a sacred place of blessing for us, for our children, and for all peoples of this earth. Amen.
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